E600407C. Napoleon III In Italy, and Other Poems.
Boston Evening Transcript, 7 April 1860, p. 1.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 379.
This thin duodecimo contains eight short poems relating to the ideas, the passions and the heroes of the late war in Italy. Louis Napoleon is throughout eulogized, and England throughout is condemned. Mrs. Browning’s fame as a poet is too well established to be injured by the publication of this volume, yet all her friends and admirers must regret that its high thoughts and noble sentiments were not expressed in good prose rather than in the harsh, stuttering and screechy rhyme in which they are here infelicitously embodied. Many of the poems affect us as we might be affected by a great singer, who insisted on singing with her mouth filled with rusty nails. Two of the poems, “A Court Lady,” and “A Tale of Villafranca,” have some pretensions to melody, but the larger portions of the others are singularly discordant. A woman of such might of genius as Mrs. Browning cannot of course write anything which is not worth reading. In this volume accordingly we find evidence of the depth, delicacy and power of her sensibility and imagination, but we still continually wish, as we read, that the thoughts and emotions were translated out of their crabbed verse into fluent prose. If Louis Napoleon understands that peculiar variety of the English language, the Browning-dialect, he will be immensely gratified by these poems, as the flattery of all the courtiers in the world is poor indeed compared with the praise of such a great-brained and great-souled woman as Elizabeth Barrett Browning; but we fear the Emperor will have to import one of his uncle’s hated and banished “Ideologists,” if he desires to comprehend the full significance of the eulogistic words. The French Academy contains no philologist capable of unfolding their meaning.
Reviewed:
Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1860.
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