E620503B. Last Poems (New York).
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 May 1862, p. [2].
Reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 3 (in part).
I am glad our brave-hearted, talented friend, Theodore Tilton, has presented the public with a collection of Mrs. Browning’s Last Poems, and that he has accompanied them with a Memorial of the author, written in a manner so worthy of its theme. Its loyal deference and whole-hearted admiration are such as an appreciative son might bestow on the genius and virtues of a highly endowed mother. Some will consider it too enthusiastic; and it might be open to that charge, were it not for the fact that it is hardly possible to overrate the intellectual and moral greatness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I have always thought the most perfect ideal of human character was a harmonious proportion of manly and womanly elements; and Mrs. Browning appears to have been preëminently a manifestation of this ideal. She was manly in her large, comprehensive views of things, womanly in her plentitude of love and sympathy.
The short poems collected in this volume were written for various periodicals, several of them for The Independent. Whatever their subject, whether love or grief, children or nations, they all bear the impress of her strong character; for even her “carving on cherry stones” always revealed “the mallet hand.” Every utterance is that of a full, deep soul. Yet her learning is incidentally betrayed, never with ostentation. Her mind was full of it, and it could not otherwise than run over whenever the waters were stirred, though it were only by the play of a gold-fish. A few weeks after her spirit had gone to a higher plane of existence, her husband reverently took up the books which had been her companions through years of physical debility; and, looking over the copious comments written on the margins of Greek and Hebrew volumes, he said with saddened tenderness, “And all this learning was borne so modestly!”
There is something peculiarly charming in the domestic history of this woman, whose thoughts dived so deep and soared so high. In all the “Loves of the Poets” there is nothing that approaches it in beauty and completeness. It is more elevated and inspiring than Petrarch’s graceful variations on the theme of downcast eyes and golden hair; it is more human and tender than Dante’s worship of his beatified Beatrice. The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Browning was a true union of hearts and minds; and the picture of their home, so English in its character, is all the more lovely for its external framework of Italy’s sun-lighted vines.
Mrs. Browning has left an unstained record in her life and her writings. All that she uttered tended to make the souls of men and women larger, nobler, and purer.
Lydia Maria Child
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1862.
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