Angel—Casa Guidi—Birth of Robert Barrett Browning—Bagni di Lucca—“Sonnets from the Portuguese”—The Enchantment of Italy.
Paris, “and such a strange week it was,” wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford; “whether in the body, or out of the body, I can scarcely tell. Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my even thinking of him at all.” The journey from London to Paris was not then quite the swift and easy affair it now is, the railroad between Paris and Havre not being then completed beyond Rouen; still, such an elixir of life is happiness that Mrs. Browning arrived in the French Capital feeling much better than when she left London. Mrs. Jameson had only recently taken leave of Miss Barrett on her sofa, and sympathetically offered to take her to Italy herself for the winter with her niece; Miss Barrett had replied: “Not only am I grateful to you, but happy to be grateful to you,” but she had given no hint of the impending marriage. Mrs. Jameson’s surprise, on receiving a note from Mrs. Browning, saying she was in Paris, was so great that her niece, Geraldine Bate (afterward Mrs. MacPherson of Rome), asserted that her aunt’s amazement was “almost comical.” Mrs. Jameson lost no time in persuading the Brownings to join her and her niece at their quiet pension in the Rue Ville l’Eveque, where they remained for a week,—this “strange week” to Mrs. Browning.
In Paris they visited the galleries of the Louvre, but did little sight-seeing beyond, “being satisfied with the idea of Paris,” she said.
To a friend Mrs. Jameson wrote:
“I have also here a poet and a poetess—two celebrities who have run away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world.”
As for ways and means, however, the Brownings were sufficiently provided. He had a modest independence, and she also had in her own right a little fortune of some forty thousand pounds, yielding three or four hundred pounds a year; but in the July preceding their marriage Browning, with his sensitive honor, insisted upon her making a will bequeathing this capital to her own family. In a letter to him dated July 27 of that summer the story of his insistence on this is revealed in her own words: “I will write the paper as you bid me.... You are noble in all things ... but I will not discuss it so as to tease you.... I send you the paper therefore, to that end, and only to that end....” The “document,” by Browning’s insistence, gave her property to her two sisters, in equal division, or, in case of their death, to the surviving brothers. Nothing less than this would satisfy Robert Browning.
Meantime, there was the natural London comment. Wordsworth observed: “So Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! It is to be hoped they can understand each other, for no one else can.”
Mr. Kenyon wrote “the kindest letter” to them both, and pronounced them “justified to the uttermost,” and to Mrs. Browning he said: “I considered that you had imperiled your life upon this undertaking and I still thought you had done wisely!” But by that magic alchemy of love and happiness Mrs. Browning only gained constantly in strength, and Mrs. Jameson pronounced them “wise people, whether wild poets or not.”
Among the interesting comments on the marriage was Joseph Arnould’s letter to Alfred Domett, under date of November of that year. He wrote:
“... I think the last piece of news I told you of was Browning’s marriage to Miss Barrett. She is, you know, our present greatest living English poetess: ... she has been in the most absolute and enforced seclusion from society; cultivating her mind to a wonderful amount of accomplishment, instructing herself in all languages, reading Chrysostom in the original Greek, and publishing the best metrical translation that has yet appeared of the ‘Prometheus Bound’—having also found time to write three volumes of poetry, the last of which raised her name to a place second only to that of Browning and Tennyson, amongst all those who are not repelled by eccentricities of external form from penetrating into the soul and quintessential spirit of poetry that quickens the mould into which the poet has cast it. Well, this lady, so gifted, so secluded, so tyrannized over, fell in love with Browning in the spirit before ever she saw him in the flesh—in plain English, loved the writer, before she knew the man. Imagine, you who know him, the effect which his graceful bearing, high demeanor, and noble speech must have had on such a mind when first she saw the man of her visions in the twilight of her darkened room. She was at once in love as a poet-soul only can be; and Browning, as by contagion or electricity, was no less from the first interview wholly in love with her.... He is a glorious fellow! Oh, I forgot to say that the soi-disante invalid, once emancipated from the paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival, or rather, a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats, and drinks like a young and healthy woman,—in fact, is a healthy woman of, I believe, some five and thirty. But one word covers all; they are in Love, who lends his own youth to everything.”
The journey from Paris to Italy, if less comfortable and expeditious than now, was certainly more romantic, and the Brownings, in company with Mrs. Jameson and her niece, fared forth to Orleans, and thence to Avignon, where they rested for two days, making a poetic pilgrimage to Vaucluse, where Petrarca had sought solitude. “There at the very source of the ‘chiare, fresche e dolci acque,’” records Mrs. MacPherson in her biography of Mrs. Jameson, “Mr. Browning took his wife up in his arms, and carrying her across through the shallow, curling waters, seated her on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus Love and Poetry took a new possession of the spot immortalized by Petrarca’s fancy.”
From Marseilles they sailed to Livorno (Leghorn), the port only a few miles from Pisa. The voyage was a delight to Mrs. Browning. She was enchanted with the beautiful panorama of the Riviera as they sailed down the coast, where the terraces of mountains rise, with old castles and ruins often crowning their summits, and the white gleam of the hill-towns against a background of blue sky. All the Spezzia region was haunted by memories of Shelley; Lerici, where last he had lived, was plainly in view, and they gazed sadly at Viareggio, encircled by pine woods and mountains, where the body of the poet had been found. In Pisa they took rooms in the Collegio Fernandino, in the Piazza del Duomo, in that corner of Pisa wherein are grouped the Cathedral, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, all in this consummate beauty of silence and seclusion,—a splendor of abandoned glory. All the stir of life (if, indeed, one may dream of life in Pisa) is far away on the other side of the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where Byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the Arno. They quite preferred the Duomo and the Campo Santo to social festivities, and Professor Ferrucci offered them all the hospitalities of the University library. They had an apartment of four rooms, “matted and carpeted,” coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner at the Trattoria, “thrushes and chianti with a marvelous cheapness, no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet Elijah, or the lilies of the field, took as little thought for their dining,” writes Mrs. Browning, “and it exactly suits us. At nine we have our supper of roast chestnuts and grapes.... My head goes round sometimes. I was never happy before in my life.... And when I am so good as to let myself be carried up-stairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my duty is considered done to a perfection worthy all adoration.... Mrs. Jameson and Geraldine are staying in the hotel, and we manage to see them every day; so good and true and affectionate she is, and so much we shall miss her when she goes.... Our present residence we have taken for six months, but we have dreams, and we discuss them like soothsayers over the evening grapes and chestnuts.”
That in London Mrs. Jameson, on her first call on Miss Barrett, should have so winningly insisted on being admitted to her room as to be successful, almost to Miss Barrett’s own surprise, seems, when seen in connection with the way in which Fate was to throw them together afterward, in Italy, to have been
