E611200A. General Review Essay.
Southern Literary Messenger, December 1861, pp. 412–417.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 367.
Death of Mrs. Browning
And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let one, most loving of you all,
Say, “Not a tear must o’er her fall;
He giveth his beloved sleep.”
[Mrs. Browning.
The English muse has recently sustained a sad and irremediable loss. A voice of most musical tones—“beautiful exceedingly”—that sang many immortal strains on earth, now joins, we trust, in the celestial symphonies of the seraphic choir—a bright star that shed beams of superlative loveliness over the world has faded into Heaven: one of God’s prophets of the beautiful” has been cut off in the midst of her divine mission. And never did funeral knell sweep more dismally over the choicest minds of the literary world than when it was announced that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had put off the robes of mortality. It seems scarcely fitting that the grave should close over the remains of one whose productions entitle her to be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age, without eliciting in the pages of the Messenger some passing tribute to her memory beyond the simple paragraph that chronicled her death. Many a critic’s pen, no doubt, is busy reviewing her life, and passing judgment on her deathless works. From every country where poetry is read and appreciated, the scattered hands of friends and disciples now fling roses upon her grave; for Mrs. Browning had acquired that happy fame which amounts to personal affection and gratitude with her readers. We propose, while her grave is yet green, throwing a frail chaplet upon it, which, though intrinsically of little value, is an offering of reverence and love. Every pure and holy feeling that ever responded from within us to the sweetness of her lofty inspirations—every remembered moment of profound admiration and enthusiasm, comes back to us at the melancholy tidings that this high-souled and gifted woman has shared the lot of humanity.
“The Heaven is jealous of the earth, and calls
Its favourites from the stormy waves of time.”
It is not strange that the poet should excite in our hearts feelings of sympathy and love towards himself which are never inspired by the philosopher, the statesman, or the man of science. They may inspire us with the fullest measure of respect, admiration, and even reverence; but the sentiment never kindles into one of personal affection. We acknowledge their claims upon our gratitude, but we are not willing to admit them into the penetralia of our hearts—that sacred region of love and trembling hope. Not so with the poet, who has “touched the finer issues of our being.” We may never have seen his face, but we attend his steps, while living, with tender thought, and our eyes moisten with tears at the tidings of his death. How poor, barren, and unsufficing to a fervid spirit seems this human life unless idealized by the magic of the mighty poets. They open to us new heavens of imagination, give us “nobler loves and nobler cares,” multiply and refine our enjoyments, and throw o’er life’s checkered scene the “soft shadow of an angel’s wing.” Poetry is an infinite subject, and an infinite number of clever things, true and false, have been said about it. Whether we regard it as “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” or “the expression of the imagination,” or “truth in rhythmical motion,” or “high thoughts voluntarily moving harmonious numbers,” or “tuned philosophy”—whatever may be our political creed, there can be but one opinion as to the exalted pleasures which Poetry gives; of its magic power to “unbind the serpent of care from the heart,” and to sustain the weary [p. 413→] soul amidst the storms and surges of this tempestuous world. This assertion is not intended to apply to those ribald productions of perverted genius, which scoff at the sanctities of humanity, and in which the degradation of poetry is perfect. We speak of that genuine, elevating, pure poetry, which, being impregnated with high spiritual truth, rises into the raptures of worship. Poetry is indeed something divine; it “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” “It is the record,” says Shelley, “of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” “Poetry,” says Coleridge, “has been to me its own ‘exceeding great reward;’ it has soothed my afflictions; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.” Gentle Sir Philip Sidney quaintly calls it “the quintessence, or rather the luxury of all learning.” Poetry turns all things to loveliness. “It lays us,” as Hazlitt beautifully says, “in the lap of a lovelier nature, by stiller streams and fairer meadows;” it scatters flowers along the path of toilsome duty, and lifts our gaze to the stars; it soothes our worldly passions and inspires us with a love of Heaven and virtue; it can exalt the reverie of the philosopher and glorify the lover’s dreams. Passing from such preliminary remarks, we proceed to say a few words about Mrs. Browning, whom we look upon as one of the greatest poets of our century, and one of the very noblest that ever lived.
Mrs. Browning possessed, in a high degree, the loftiest merits and qualities of the greatest poets—the creative power,
“The vision and the faculty divine.”
An imagination, radiant and vigorous; a sustained ideality; a fancy, delicate and ethereal; and an original perception of the beautiful in man and in nature. Lord Macaulay’s characterization of the genius of Shelley is most felicitously appropriate when applied to the genius of Mrs. Browning. The words bard and inspiration, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to her. She is not an author, but a bard. Her poetry from the efflux of her soul, even as the bird sings and the waters roll, and the wind blows, careless to know the wherefore, or analyze the law that inspired. She was a born poet of the most poetical kind. Leigh Hunt happily says of Keats, that he never saw an oak tree without seeing the Dryad. It might be said of Mrs. Browning, that she never beheld one of God’s creatures without seeing, in poetic vision, the transfiguration of a child of earth into an angel of Heaven. To a quick and sympathetic eye for all forms of human joy, and sorrow, and grandeur, she added a reverent sense of the mystery, the infinitude, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things. But we do not design, in this paper, making an elaborate critical analysis of Mrs. Browning’s idiosyncratic merits and foibles as a poet. Nor shall we discuss the stock objections which the critics find with her poetry. We have read a great deal about Mrs. Browning’s transcendental metaphysics, her obscurities, affectations, and mannerisms. To a certain extent, we admit the truth of these charges. Her poems unquestionably abound in affectations and mannerisms, the result, we think, of her esoteric culture and rare classical scholarship, which often caused her to play sad tricks with her own magnificent and original genius. As to the charge of obscurity, perhaps (it is barely possible,) the understandings of the critics, who ring the charges upon that word, may be slightly “obscure.” It was a profound saying of Gœthe’s, and worthy of universal acceptation, that the eyes can see only just so much as they bring with them the faculty of seeing. It would be well for the occupants of the Zoilus throne to bear this in mind when they approach the immoral creations of a great poet.
We mean, first, to glance at Mrs. [p. 414→] Browning’s womanly character as exhibited in her writings; to briefly consider the moral tendency of those writings, and cull some specimen flowers for the admiration of our readers. In the entire range of female poetry, there is absolutely nothing which deserves to be compared for a moment with the marvellous effusions of this poetess. She is truly the Shakspeare among her sex; and yet, no woman has written in a spirit of such genuine, intense, and pathetic womanliness. She is without a rival as an interpreter of the loftiness and the dignity of the female sex. Listen to this beautiful passage, embodying a sentiment which will find an echo in the heart of every true woman. It is from the “Crowned and Wedded:”
And since, Prince Albert, men have called thy spirit high and rare,
And true to truth, and brave for truth, as some at Augsburg were,
We charge thee by thy lofty thoughts and by thy poet-mind
Which not by glory and degree takes measure of mankind,
Esteem that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring,
And hold her uncrowned womanhood to be the royal thing!
What an elevating thought to think over and to dote upon! Mrs. Browning has dramatized passion (we use the word in its noblest sense) with a force and energy that recall the greatest masters of tragedy. For her, love was the element of life; her soul was pure and chaste as fire; but the wondrous music of this immeasurable passion penetrated her whole being, and kindled it into an ardent and beautiful flame. In her poems, the passion of love in the maiden heart, the devotion of the wife and the affection of the mother, are severally and fully portrayed. Charles Lamb, with his fine poetical taste, beautifully observes, that Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. The following sonnet ought only to be read in our purest moods, in the solitude of our chamber, or by the side of those we love:
I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
Take it; my day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more. It only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified;
Take it thou, * * finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.
Here is another sonnet, so exquisitely beautiful that we must ask leave to quote it, also:
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day;”
For these things in themselves, belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee, and love so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry;
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love there’y!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.
In the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” a poem glowing and gorgeous with the colors of romance, is a picture of wifely devotion which we consider totally unrivalled in poetical literature. Let the reader peruse the poem, and we think [p. 415→] he, or particularly she will agree with us. There are scattered through Mrs. Browning’s writings, especially in “Aurora Leigh,” many tender and tear-moving things about children and childhood. In “Isobel’s Child,” the maternal instinct is fully and beautifully portrayed. We do not envy the man who can read that touching delineation of a mother’s love and anguish with dry eyes.
No poet with whom we are acquainted, has entered so deeply and tenderly into the very heart of childhood. The spirit of the Saviour’s sympathy with this beautiful era of life seemed to possess her muse. Here is a lovely thought:
A man on earth He wandered once,
All meek and undefiled,
And those who loved Him said “He wept;”
None ever said He smiled;
Yet there might have been a smile unseen,
When He bowed His holy face, I ween,
To bless that happy child.
Thus it is that poetry throws back upon the New Testament the light she has borrowed from it.
Mrs. Browning manifests a beautiful regard for the sanctities that enshrine the poor man’s hearth:
The peasant’s wife hath looked without
Her cottage door and smiled,
For there the peasant drops his spade
To clasp his youngest child,
Which hath no speech, but its hand can reach
And stroke his forehead mild.
In her deep, noble heart, vibrated every outrage which has been inflicted on humanity; and although her works are singularly free from that spirit of scorn which debases the noblest faculties, yet they overflow with a beautiful scorn and hatred of sin and injustice. The voice of duty is always heard amidst the seductive melodies of her song.
It is easy to detect in some of Mrs. Browning’s poems vestiges of a wounded spirit, and of an intellect that has wrestled with doubt, unhappiness, and disease. Many of her smaller effusions are manifestly transcripts from the “red-leaved tablets of the heart.” She was often driven, if we may so speak, by ill-health, to take up her mental abode upon the perilous verge of the unseen world. She was often inspired by the genius of suffering.
I have known some bitter things—
Anguish, anger, solitude;
Year by year an evil brings,
Year by year denies a good:
March winds violate my springs.
I have known how sickness bends,
I have known how sorrow breaks—
How quick hopes have sudden ends,
How the heart thinks till it aches,
Of the smile of buried friends.
Yet, “angelic patience” is the lessen she teaches. She would have the soul ever “nobler than its mood.”
Oh you,
Earth’s tender and impassioned few,
Take courage to entrust your love
To Him so Named, who guards above
Its ends and shall fulfil!
Breaking the narrow prayers that may
Befit your narrow hearts away
In His broad, loving will.
In a sketch of Mrs. Browning’s last days, extracted from the Atlantic Monthly, which appeared in the October number of the Messenger, occurs this sentence: “Her Christianity was not confined to church and rubric—it meant civilization.” Now this is extremely vague, unsatisfactory, Emersonian kind of talk, quite in the style of the Boston transcendentalists, but conveying an altogether false impression of Mrs. Browning’s religious sentiments. Nothing better, however, could have been expected from the Atlantic Monthly, which is an avowedly pantheistic publication. We rejoice to be able to assert, most distinctly, that Mrs. Browning, though no sectarian, is eminently a Christian poetess. Her poetry is not religious in the sense of Watts, or Montgomery, or the common generation of hymn writers. But like Alfred Tennyson, the greatest living poet, Mrs. Brown- [p. 416→] ing adhered zealously to the great central truths of the Christian Religion. Like Tennyson, she was perfectly familiar with all that the most modern science has to teach; had gone through all that German speculation has to offer; had pondered the deep controversies of the age; and yet, in her fearless strains, the eternal divinity and paramount power of Christianity is reverently confessed. She felt experimentally that there were links of sympathy and of live binding her soul to the Great Father. The recognition of a Divine Creator of all things, a Being of perfect love and wisdom, who is to each and all of His numberless creatures really and truly a Heavenly Father and personal protector, broods like an ever-present spirit over the pages of Mrs. Browning. Wonder and awe for the greatness of God; gratitude and love for his goodness, are everywhere visible in her work. The atheist, the mere scientific deist, the sensualist, and the cold intellectualist, can find in her lofty and saintly thoughts no pernicious nutriment for their own falses. But there are a multitude of young hearts which have not only been enriched, but renovated by her poetry—which it has expanded, purified, and exalted—and to which it has given the means of high communion with the good and pure throughout the universe. The Scotch writer, Bayne, a critic of much acuteness and originality, in his finely appreciative essay on Mrs. Browning, has some admirable remarks on the subject of her Christianity, which we beg leave to quote. “Over all the domain of her poetry, over its central ranges, its quiet gardened valleys, its tinkling rills, falls a radiance of gospel light. Ever, as her music rises to its noblest cadence, it seems taken up by an angel harp: the highest tone is as the voice of spirits. It would, I cannot doubt, be to their own sincere enjoyment and real profit if the Christian public pressed boldly into the temple of Mrs. Browning’s song. She is a Christian poetess, not in the sense of appreciating, like Carlyle, the loftiness of the Christian type of character; not in the sense of adopting, like Goethe, a Christian machinery for artistic self-worship; not even in the sense of preaching, like Wordsworth, an august but abstract morality; but in the sense of finding, like Cowper, the whole hope of humanity bound up in Christ, and taking all the children of her mind to him, that he may lay his hand on them and bless them.”
We fully intend making numerous extracts from Mrs. Browning; though, by no individual stars could we present the constellatory radiance of her poems. But our space is exhausted, and we forbear, quoting only this one sonnet, which with the exception, perhaps, of one or two of Milton and of Wordsworth, is, we think, the finest in the English language.
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old and young;
And, as I mused it, in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair,
And a voice said in mastery while I strove, . . .
“Guess now who holds thee?” “Death!” I said. But there,
The silver answer rang—“Not Death, but Love.”
This article is already too long, and yet, how little have we said, how much remains to be written! we have said nothing of that noble-production, “Aurora Leigh”—a poem longer than “Paradise Lost,” and containing, in our opinion, quite as many beauties, and a great deal more soul. We have made no mention of the rich inwoven music of “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” The thesis of this beautiful poem is particularly fine. It is, that Genius is lord of the world. Rank, birth, wealth, and all “social fictions,” must gracefully do homage to the omnipotence and supreme regality of [p. 417→] Genius. We have said nothing of the glorious, radiant, superlatively lovely imagination, which pervades “The Lost Bower”—“The House of Clouds”—and “The Lay of the Brown Rosarie:”—nor that remarkable gallery of critical portraits—“A Vision of Poets”—which contains, in small compass, masses of thought, results of long processes. What a vivid description of Coleridge!—
And visionary Coleridge, who
Did sweep his thoughts as angels do
Their wings, with cadence up the Blue.
And of Byron;
And poor, proud Byron,—sad as grave,
And salt as life; forlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
And of Petrarch;
Who from his brain-lit heart hath thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
All perfumed with the name of one.
To do even approximate justice to these poems, would demand a separate critique. “Bertha in the Lane,” an exquisite little ballad, contains a most touching delineation of disappointed affection, and the workings of that feeling.
“The Cry of the Children,” piercing almost to anguish, is a poem, the tear-moving pathos of which has never been surpassed, and only equaled by Hood, in that irrepressible outburst of noble emotion and indignation, the “Song of the Shirt.”
“Cowper’s Grave”—“The Sleep”—“The Prisoner”—“The Mournful Mother”—“The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus”—“Tears”—“A Portrait”—“The Poet”—“Crowned and Wedded”—“A Child’s Thought of God”—“A Valediction”—“The Lady’s Yes”—“A Child’s Grave at Florence”—“Catarina to Camoens”—are all tender and beautiful effusions, deserving the most enthusiastic commendation. Many of Mrs. Browning’s smaller poems are consecrated and sacred to sorrow,—and sorrow is either a frequent visitor, or a domesticated inmate, in every household. We have endeavored, and we hope not unsuccessfully, to show that Mrs. Browning’s works are adapted to foster and cultivate in us those eternal sentiments of Justice, Love, and Gratitude, which constitute the essence of the Life of our common Humanity as it sweeps onward through the Ages to the realization of its destiny. Mrs. Browning has planted her feet on the mountains of Immortality, and stands glorified with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Shelley,—that august circle of laurelled bards, whose names will go down in music through the echoing aisles of the future. While belonging emphatically to her own age, while giving a voice to the struggles and the far reading thoughts of this nineteenth century, Mrs. Browning possessed those supreme artistic qualities, that wondrous dower of the “vision and the faculty divine,” which must make her a poet for all ages.
The premature death of Keats is represented by Shelley, in the “Adonais,” as exciting the sympathy of Nature herself,—the joyous Spring, the pathless Ocean, the Sky, “whose unwithered countenance is young as on Creation’s day,” the musical Winds, the rosy Dawn, the eternal Mountains, the venerable Forests, the beautiful Flowers,—all, lament the removal of the Poet in “life’s green spring.” Our imagination pictures the “beloved brotherhood” again mourning at the tomb of a nobler minstrel than the inspired author of “Hyperion.” For she, too, received into her inmost soul their selectest influences, and celebrated their enchantments in the lofty measures of immortal song. But a more majestic and lovely group than these poetic personifications of the material universe may appropriately be pictures hovering, with tender ministrations, around the dying couch of the peerless Daughter of Poesy. The spirits of Beauty, of Love, of Purity, of Virtue, not mystical abstractions, but intelligible forms, “apparelled in celestial light,” appear at the closing scene of earthly life, commissioned to convey the soul of their faithful priestess and interpreter into a sphere of being better adapted to her inexpressible tenderness, her generous sympathies, and her richly-gifted mind.
Samuel B. Holcombe
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (EBB).
___________________
