SD1359. Journal Entry of Christopher Pearse Cranch
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 362.
[Florence]
December 20, 1848
We called yesterday at the Casa Guidi to see Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Found her a small, delicate, not handsome invalid, who did not impress me at all at first as the poetess and woman of learning and genius she is, till she warmed into conversation on some interesting theme, such as Italy and the Pope and France. Then her eyes shone with a true inward lustre. Her enthusiasm in speaking of children and her general goodness of heart impressed me most. I thought her somewhat diffident, and like one who had lived in retirement most of her life.
Browning is very different; he seems a man who has lived in society—a true, social, healthy, open, frank nature, entering into life and associating with men, while inwardly delicate and poetic.
Just the man for a dramatist. There is something vigorous and terse and strong in his speech. I should judge him a truly warmhearted man, with a great deal of magnetism in his nature.
Text: Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston, 1917), p. 156.
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