E610900A. General Review Essay.
The Ladies’ Repository (Cincinnati), September 1861, pp. 557–560.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 330–333.
The beautiful and expressive portrait which adorns this number is that of one of the most distinguished female poets of the age. [An engraving by J.C. Buttre of Thomas Buchanan Read’s 1853 oil portrait.] Her maiden name was Barrett. She was born in London in the year 1809, and was married in 1846 to Robert Browning, who was also a poet and dramatic writer of some note, though his fame seems to have been almost totally eclipsed by the superior endowments of his gifted wife. The circumstances of their marriage were quite poetic. In her poem—“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”—Miss Barrett paid a delicate compliment in this poem to Robert Browning. He called to thank his sister poet, and by the mistake of a new waiting-maid, was admitted directly into her sick room. She had been feeble from childhood and long sickness, from which her recovery was many times despaired of, followed upon the rupture of a blood-vessel. When Mr. Browning made his unexpected entry it was at once into her sick room and her life. His presence revived her as no physician had done; she grew daily better as he renewed his calls, and at length she received at once her discharge from the sick-list and the hand of Robert Browning.
Mrs. Browning is thoroughly versed in classical learning; her acquirements in science and literature are also large and varied. In fine, all her earlier years were devoted to the cultivation of her mind, that she might be thoroughly equipped for the use of those peculiar gifts with which God had endowed her. To the same end also have her later years been devoted.
In the dedication of the first volume of her poems to her father, there is delicate allusion to these early labors. It is coupled with a still more delicate expression of filial love and gratitude. Indeed, the whole dedication seems to unveil the entire character of the writer, and place it before us in a most charming light: “When your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time far off when I was a child and wrote verses, and when I dedicated them to you, who were my public and my critic. Of all that such a recollection implies of saddest and sweetest to both of us, it would become neither of us to speak before the world; nor would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another with voices that did not falter. Enough that what is in my heart when I write thus will be fully known to yours.
“And my desire is that you, who are a witness how, if this art of poetry had been a less earnest [p. 558→] object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day—that you, who have shared with me in things bitter and sweet, softening or enhancing them every day—that you, who hold with me over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one name—may accept from me the inscription of these volumes, the exponents of a few years of an existence which has been sustained and comforted by you as well as given. Somewhat more faint-hearted than I used to be, it is my fancy thus to seem to return to a visible personal dependence on you, as if, indeed, I were a child again, to conjure your beloved image between myself and the public, so as to be sure of one smile, and to satisfy my heart while I sanctify my ambition by associating with the great pursuit of my life its tenderest and holiest affection.”
There are few passages in our language of more exquisite delicacy, or which reveal a more genuine sensibility of heart.
A chastened melancholy pervades many of the poetic effusions of Mrs. Browning. This may have been occasioned by her own feeble and uncertain health, being compelled, on account of bursting of a bood-vessel, to seek the relief found only in a more genial clime. This deep, melancholy pathos finds expression in her poem on “Cowper’s Grave:”
It is a place where poets crown’d
May feel the heart’s decaying—
It is a place where happy saints
May weep amid their praying—
Yet let the grief and humbleness
As low as silence languish;
Earth surely now may give her calm
To whom she gave her anguish.
O, poets! from a maniac’s tongue
Was pour’d the deathless singing!
O, Christians! at your cross of hope
A hopeless hand was clinging!
O, men! this man in brotherhood,
Your weary paths beguiling,
Groan’d inly while he taught you peace,
And died while ye were smiling!
And now what time ye all may read
Through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell,
And darkness on the glory;
And how, when, one by one, sweet sounds
And wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face
Because so broken-hearted.
At the end comes in beautifully the strong relying faith of the Christian:
Deserted! who hath dreamt that when
The cross in darkness rested,
Upon the Victim’s hidden face
No love was manifested?
What frantic hands outstretched have e’er
Th’ atoning drops averted—
What tears have washed them from the soul—
That one should be deserted?
Deserted! God could separate
From his own essence rather,
And Adam’s sins have swept between
The righteous Son and Father;
Yea! once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry
His universe hath shaken—
Went up single, echoless,
‘My God, I am forsaken!’
It went up from the holy lips
Amid his lost creation,
That of the lost, no son should use
Those words of desolation;
That earth’s worst frenzies, marring hope,
Should mar not hope’s fruition;
And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see
His rapture, in a vision!
Professor Wilson once said that poetry was “intellect colored by the feelings.” This definition is no less beautiful than concise. The basis is found in the intellectual nature; the emotional is superadded; it comes in to give roundness and finish, to impenetrate and make fervid with life. It does not admit of the feelings preponderating over the intellect, for they are to be its adjunct. We know of no female poet who more truly answers to this definition than Mrs. Browning. Her early years for the most part were spent in a sick chamber. Here she was excluded from companions of her own sex. The Greek poets became her playmates, and her genius received much of its direction as well as development through their influence. Hence that peculiar masculine force in which strength claims precedence of polish.
From “The Drama of Exile” let us take a passage describing the effects of “the Fall:”
On a mountain peak
Half-sheathed in primal woods, and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion couched—part raised upon his paws,
With his calm, massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world—right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes—and roared so fierce—
Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast, keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately—that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges.
Take another passage from the same poem:
Eternity stands always fronting God;
A stern colossal image, with blind eyes [p. 558→]
And grand, dim lips that murmur evermore—
God, God, God! while the rush of life and death,
The roar of act and thought, of evil and good,
The avalanches of the ruining worlds
Tolling down space—the new world’s genesis
Budding in fire—the gradual humming growth
Of the ancient atoms and the first forms of earth—
The slow procession of the swathing seas
And firmamental waters—and the noise
Of the broad, fluent strata of the pure airs—
All these flow onward in the intervals
Of that reiterated sound of—God!
Which word, innumerable angels straightway lift
Wide on celestial altitudes of song
And choral adoration, and then drop
The burden softly, shutting the last notes
In silver wings. Howbeit in the noon of time
Eternity shall wax as dumb as death,
While a new voice beneath the spheres shall cry,
‘God! why hast thou forsaken me, my God?’
And not a voice in heaven shall answer it.
Had any of the above lines been found among the productions of the master poets of the English language they would not have seemed out of place. There is a strength and loftiness of imagination as well as a vivid picturesqueness in these descriptions unattained by any ordinary mind.
As a reflected image of her own genius and mission, or at least of what she would fain have that genius and mission, we cite her own views of the elevated and holy office of the true poet: “‘An irreligious poet,’ says Burns, meaning an undevotional one, ‘is a monster.’ An irreligious poet, he might have said, is no poet at all. The gravitation of poetry is upward. The poetic wing, if it move, ascends. What did even the heathen Greeks—Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Pindar? Sublimely, because born poets; darkly, because born of Adam and unrenewed in Christ, their spirits wandered like the rushing chariots and winged horses, black and white, of their brother-poet, Plato, through the universe of Deity, seeking if haply they might find Him; and as that universe closed around the seekers, not with the transparency in which it flowed first from his hand, but opaquely, as double-dyed with the transgression of its sons, they felt though they could not discern the God beyond, and used the gesture though ignorant of the language of worshiping. The blind eagle missed the sun, but soared toward its sphere. Shall the blind eagle soar, and the seeing eagle peck chaff? Surely it should be the gladness and the gratitude of such as are poets among us, that in turning toward the beautiful, they may behold the true face of God.”
The poems of Mrs. Browning demonstrate how constantly and how clearly she has kept this sublime ideal before her. In her strength of intellect, and a wide and varied knowledge acquired from classic models, are combined with a deep religious fervor and an abiding religious faith.
Her sympathies have always been on the side of popular liberty. This is illustrated not only in her noble words of sympathy for struggling Italy, but in numerous poems and in passages almost without number. The “Cry of the Children” is a forcible illustration of this. It purports to be the cry that comes up from the hearts of the children compelled to toil in the mines and factories of England. It is a sad picture, glowing alike with sympathy and with indignation. The stanzas annexed lose some of their force by being detached from their connection, yet they can not fail to touch the heart from which the last drop of human feeling has not been expressed by its flinty hardness:
Alas, alas, the children! they are seeking
Death in life as best to have;
They are binding up their hearts away from breaking
With a cerement from the grave.
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,
Sing out, children, as the thrushes do;
Pluck your handfuls of the meadow cowslips pretty,
Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them through!
But they answer, ‘Are your cowslips of the meadows
Like our meadows [sic, for weeds] anear the mine?
Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,
From your pleasures fair and fine.
‘For O,’ say the children, ‘we are weary,
And we can not run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
For all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark underground,
Or all day we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories round and round.
‘For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn—our head, with pulses, burning,
And the walls turn in their places;
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning all the day, and we with all;
And all day the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
“O, ye wheels,” (breaking out in a mad moaning,)
“Stop! be silent for to-day!”’
We can add only the last stanza:
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of their angels in high places
With eyes turned on Deity.
‘How long,’ they say, ‘how long, O, cruel nation, [p. 560→]
Will you stand to move the world or [sic, for on] a child’s heart,
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath.’
Alas, that those “child’s sobs” should still continue to go up from the deep, dark mines and the bustling manufactories of the mighty nation which claims a proud preëminence in civilization! Their cry is, “How long? how long?” It must penetrate the heart and stir the hand of the Omnipotent. The revelation of life in the coal mines of England is still a disgrace to humanity, notwithstanding the efforts to ameliorate it. Scarcely less sad is the story of life in her manufactories. But, thank God, there are hearts—noble, gifted hearts—that weary not in toil for their deliverance.
The sonnet is one of the most difficult kinds of metrical compositions, requiring the highest exercise of the poetic art. We conclude our selections with a quartette of the latter class of compositions:
The Seraph and Poet.
The seraph sings before the manifest
God-One, and in the burning of the seven,
And with the full life of consummate heaven
Heaving beneath him, like a mother’s breast
Warm with her first-born’s slumber in that nest,
The poet sings upon the earth grave-riven
Before the naughty world, soon self-forgiven
For wronging him, and in the darkness prest
From his own soul by worldly weights. Even so,
Sing, seraph, with the glory! heaven is high;
Sing, poet, with the sorrow! earth is low;
The universe’s inward voices cry
“Amen” to either song of joy and woe—
Sing, seraph—poet—sing on equally!
Bereavement.
When some beloveds, ’neath whose eyelids lay
The sweet lights of my childhood, one by one
Did leave me dark before the natural sun,
And I, astonied, fell, and could not pray—
A thought within me to myself did say,
“Is God less God, that thou art left undone?
Rise, worship, bless him in this sackcloth spun,
As in that purple!”—But I answered, Nay,
What child his filial heart in words can loose
If he behold his tender father raise
The hand that chastens sorely? can he choose
But sob in silence with an upward gaze?
And my great Father, thinking fit to bruise,
Discerns in speechless tears both prayer and praise.
Substitution.
When some beloved voice that was to you
Both sound and sweetness faileth suddenly,
And silence, against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new—
What hope? what help? what music will undo
That silence to your sense? Not friendship’s sigh,
Not reason’s subtile count. Not melody
Of viols, nor of pipes that Faunus blew.
Not songs of poets, nor of nightingales,
Whose hearts leap upward through the cypress trees
To the clear moon; nor yet the spheric laws
Self-chanted, nor the angel’s sweet All hails
Met in the smile of God. Nay, none of these.
Speak thou, availing Christ, and fill this pause.
Comfort.
Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low,
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so
Who art not missed by any that entreat.
Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet!
And if no precious gems my hands bestow,
Let my tears drop like amber, while I go
In reach of thy divinest voice complete
In humanest affection—thus, in sooth,
To lose the sense of losing. As a child,
Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore,
Is sung to in its stead by mother’s mouth,
Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,
He sleeps the faster that he wept before.
The longer poems of Mrs. Browning are, A Drama of Exile, The Seraphim, Prometheus Bound, A Vision of the Poets, The Poet’s Vow, Casa Guidi Windows, and Aurora Leigh. The best American edition of her poems was that issued by C. S. Francis, of New York, in 1857. It was printed under the sanction of the author in three beautiful “blue and gilt” volumes. Since then Mrs. Browning has sent forth fugitive pieces enough for a fourth volume, and we hope erelong to see it added to her collection. She is one of the few of whom much can be said in praise, but little in blame. A lack of finish, which the critic may discover in some of her verses, is amply atoned for by their royal strength. Her intensity of feeling is enriched with the acquisitions of great and varied knowledge, and regulated by a sound judgment and a strong will, while over all is spread the sunshine of a loving heart and a living faith.
Death of Mrs. Browning.
Since the foregoing was in type, the arrival of the foreign steamer brings the intelligence that this gifted poetess is no more. She died in Florence, June 29th, at the age of fifty-two. We have as yet no particulars of her death. In her death Italy has lost one of its most devoted, liberty-loving friends, and universal freedom its noblest poet-advocate. As a poet her sex has furnished none greater. True, noble, gifted, pure, the melodies to which she has given utterance are for the coming ages as well as for the present. “Daughter of Shakespeare,” farewell! Thy harp has been tuned anew in the paradise of God.
Davis Wasgatt Clark
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (EBB).
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