Reviews

E661227A.  Poems of Childhood (New York, 1867).

The Nation, 27 December, 1866, p. 517.

Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 391.

Every one who has wept with Isobel for her child, or whose heart has sunk at the “Cry of the Children,” will prize this selection from Mrs. Browning, which Mr. Miller has printed with much care and elegance and illustrated with designs from Hennessy and Thwaites, and a steel portrait of the lamented author. They are not all such mournful pieces as those whose titles we have given, and yet are mainly so, and one could hardly write “ Merry Christmas” on the fly-leaf of the volume. Solace, however, is more welcome than mirth, and many a mother’s heart will find it here. One almost misses, as appropriate to this collection, the stanza that forms so thrilling an introduction to the “Casa Guidi”—the prophet-cry of a babe from out the darkness that yet covered the uprising of a great people:

I heard last night a little child go singing,

Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,

“O bella Libertà! O bella.” . . . .

. . . . . . .

And still “O bella Libertà![”] he sang.

Reviewed:

Poems of Childhood (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1867.

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