SD2039. Diary Entry of Robert Davidson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 266 (in part).
Florence
Jan. 18. 1857
The introduction, through the Kinneys, which I prized most of all, was to the Brownings, with whom I spent an evening until 11, at their residence. It was a memorable time. Mrs. Browning is an invalid, confined to the house, with a spinal disease.
She is not beautiful, though handsomer when young, but has an expressive countenance, almost hidden in a profusion of black curling hair. She is short of stature and owes nothing to shape or to dress. She is now able to sit up in an easy chair. Her voice is singularly soft and on the soprano register. Her manners are simple and unassuming. She is quiet and reserved, by no means talkative, though interesting when she speaks. She is versed in a variety of languages, especially the Greek, which she shows in her writings, as when she speaks of “The Panomphaen Jové,” “Nephelococcygia,” &c. Her new work, “Aurora Leigh,” is making a great sensation on the critical world, and is by many extolled to the skies, while others think of it differently. There was no allusion to this book all the evening.
Mr. Browning is totally different from his wife. He is not a large man, but well formed and well dressed, not at all slovenly. He is very impulsive and always in motion, as quick as a bird and as vivacious. He is quite talkative and full of striking observations. He was very much tickled at having learned that Cardinal Wiseman had reviewed his last work in “Men and Things” in a handsome manner, and had given him a polite invitation to follow the example of Schlegel and Cousin. He is diverted at this, as he piques himself on being very Protestant, and is an Elder in the Scotch Presbyterian Church here. He showed Mr. Kinney and myself the first printed editions of “Paradise Lost” and “Regained,” and professed to have made quite a discovery of the systematic use by Milton of capitals to mark a delicate emphasis in the shades of meaning, not an indiscriminate use, as among his contemporaries.
Mrs. Browning is not a convert to his theories, which are ingenious and plausible, and protests her inability to see the evidence of them. As he would be descanting on his theory from Chaucer, she would quietly exclaim: “O Robert!” Think of such an evening—“Noctes coenaque deorum!” Sitting on a sofa, with the author of Paracelsus on one side, and the authoress of the “Drama of Exile” on the other, looking over a black-letter volume of Chaucer together, and in Casa Guidi, too!
Text: The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, 22 January 1898, p. 59.
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