E620412B. Last Poems (New York).
Boston Evening Transcript, 12 April 1862, p. 4.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
Reproached continually as we Americans are by the Press of England, as being an uncivilized, money-getting and riotous people, it is somewhat singular that the advent of a select intelligence—the influence of a gifted soul in England is first acknowledged and best appreciated here. That exclusiveness and bigotry which trammel and materialize the English mind is not the congenial soil wherein a new truth or an original mind can freely develope. The “Kings of thought” of English birth are apt to win their earliest fame afar. Macaulay’s essays, Carlyle’s criticisms, De Quincy’s writings, were first collected, and Herbert Spencer’s educational theories first heartily encouraged here. Shelley and Keats were slandered, Leigh Hunt imprisoned, and Wordsworth sneered at, at home, until success crowned their names. Charles Lamb and Tennyson have fifty sympathetic readers in America to one in England. There is an intellectual hospitality and a spiritual receptivity on this side of the water, not discoverable in England; a remarkable evidence whereof is to be found in the fact that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s genius was first clearly recognized in America; some of her most intimate friends and most congenial correspondents were Americans; her largest, most eager and loving circle of readers is to be found on this side of the water; and here she is most widely and tenderly mourned.
We have been led to dwell upon these facts by the appearance of her “Last Poems.” They are published in one small “blue and gold” volume, by James Millar [sic], successor to C.S. Francis & Co. of New York. Mr. Tilton, of the Independent, has prefixed a Memoir of Mrs. Browning; in which many well-known and some new circumstances of her beautiful life are recorded. The poems are doubly precious because they are her last; and some of them, for terse significance of expression, bold and original metaphor, earnest and noble sentiment, compare favorably with the gems of her previous volumes. The large sympathies and grand integrity of her muse are apparent, not less than her vigorous Saxon words and elevated yet meek tone of sentiment. “The Forced Recruit,” “Garibaldi,” “A View Across the Roman Campagna,” “Mother and Poet,” and “Only a Curl,” are full of power and pathos.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1862.
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