My soul can reach,...... I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”
Returning to Florence in October, Browning soon began the preparation for his poem, “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” and Mrs. Browning arranged for a new one-volume edition of her poems, to include “The Seraphim,” and the poems that had appeared in the same volume, and also the poems appearing in 1844, many of them revised.
Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom the Brownings had heretofore known as Margaret Fuller, surprised them by appearing in Florence with her husband and child, the private marriage having taken place some two years before. The Greenoughs, the Storys, and Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Pearse Cranch were all in Florence, and were all habitués of Casa Guidi. Mr. Cranch, poet, painter, and musician, was the kindly friend of Longfellow and of Lowell in their Cambridge homes, and the Greenoughs and Storys were also of the Cambridge circle. To friends at home the Marchesa wrote of going to the opera with the Greenoughs, and that she saw the Brownings often, “and I love and admire them more and more,” she continued. “Mr. Browning enriches every hour passed with him, and he is a most true, cordial, and noble man.”
The Florentine days have left their picturings: Mr. Story opens a studio, and while he is modeling, Mrs. Story reads to him from Monckton Milnes’s Life of Keats, which Mr. Browning loaned them. Mrs. Story drives to Casa Guidi to carry Mrs. Browning her copy of “Jane Eyre,” and Mrs. Greenough takes both Mrs. Story and Mrs. Browning to drive in the Cascine. Two American painters, Frank Boott and Frank Heath, are in Florence, and are more or less caught up in the Casa Guidi life; and the coterie all go to Mrs. Trollope’s to see fancy costumes arranged for a ball to be given at Sir George Hamilton’s. In one of the three villas on Bellosguardo Miss Isa Blagden was now domiciled. For more than a quarter of a century Miss Blagden was a central figure in English society in Florence. She became Mrs. Browning’s nearest and most intimate friend, and she was the ardently prized friend of the Trollopes also, and of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who shared her villa during one spring when Florence was in her most radiant beauty. “Isa was a very bright, warm-hearted, clever little woman,” said Thomas Adolphus Trollope of her; “who knew everybody, and was, I think, more universally beloved among us than any other individual.” Miss Blagden had written one or two novels, of little claim, however, and after her death a small volume of her poems was published, but all these had no more than the mere succès d’estime, as apparently the pen was with her, as with Margaret Fuller, a non-conductor; but as a choice spirit, of the most beautiful and engaging qualities of companionship, “Isa,” as she was always caressingly called, is still held in memory. Madame Pasquale Villari, the wife of the great historian and the biographer of Machiavelli and of Savonarola, well remembers Miss Blagden, who died, indeed, in her arms in the summer of 1872.
The intimate friendship between Mrs. Browning and Miss Blagden was initiated in the early months of the residence of the Brownings in Florence; but it was in this winter of 1849-1850 that they began to see each other so constantly. The poems of Matthew Arnold were published that winter, among which Mrs. Browning especially liked “The Deserted Merman” and “The Sick King of Bokkara,” and about this time the authorship of “Jane Eyre” was revealed, and Charlotte Brontë discovered under the nom-de-plume of Currer Bell.
During the time that Mrs. Browning had passed at Torquay, before her marriage, she had met Theodosia Garrow, whose family were on intimate terms with Mr. Kenyon. Miss Barrett and Miss Garrow became friends, and when they met again it was in Florence, Miss Garrow having become the wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope. Hiram Powers in these days was domiciled in the Via dei Serragli, in close proximity to Casa Guidi, and he frequently dropped in to have his morning coffee with the Brownings.
The Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
Landor had been for some years in his villa on the Fiesolean slope, not far from Maiano, where Leigh Hunt had wandered, dreaming of Boccaccio. Two scenes of the “Decameron” were laid in this region, and the deep ravine at the foot of one of the neighboring hills was the original of the “Valley of the Ladies.” Not far away had been the house of Machiavelli; and nestling among the blue hills was the little white village of Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. Leigh Hunt had been on terms of the most cordial intimacy with Landor, whom he described as “living among his paintings and hospitalities”; and Landor had also been visited by Emerson, and by Lord and Lady Blessington, by Nathaniel Parker Willis (introduced by Lady Blessington), by Greenough, Francis and Julius Hare, and by that universal friend of every one, Mr. Kenyon, all before the arrival of the Brownings in Florence. Landor had, however, been again in England for several years, where Browning and Miss Barrett had both met and admired him, as has been recorded.
The Florence on which the Brownings had entered differed little from the Florence of to-day. The Palazzo Pitti, within a stone’s throw of Casa Guidi, stood in the same cyclopean massiveness as now; the piazza and church of San Miniato, cypress-shaded, rose from the sweep of the hills, and the miraculous crucifix of San Giovanni Gualberto was then, as now, an object of pilgrimage. The wonder of the Italian sunsets, that “perished silently of their own glory,” burned away over the far hills, and the strange, lofty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio caught the lingering rays. Beyond the Porta Romana, not far from Casa Guidi, was the road to the Val d’Emo, where the Certosa crowns an eminence. The stroll along the Arno at sunset was a favorite one with the poets, and in late afternoons they often climbed the slope to the Boboli Gardens for the view over Florence and the Val d’Arno. Nor did they ever tire of lingering in the Piazza della Signoria, before the marvelous palace with its medieval tower, and standing before the colossal fountain of Neptune, just behind the spot that is commemorated by a tablet in the pavement marking the martyrdom of Savonarola. The great equestrian statue of Cosimo I always engaged their attention in this historic piazza, which for four centuries had been the center of the political life of the Florentines. All these places, the churches, monuments, palaces, and the art of Florence, were fairly mirrored in the minds of the wedded poets, impressing their imagination with the fidelity of an image falling on a sensitized plate. To them, as to all who love and enter into the ineffable beauty of the City of Lilies, it was an atmosphere of enchantment.
CHAPTER VII
1850-1855
“I heard last night a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella!...” “But Easter-Day breaks! But Christ rises! Mercy every way Is infinite,—and who can say?”
“Casa Guidi Windows”—Society in Florence—Marchesa d’Ossoli—Browning’s Poetic Creed—Villeggiatura in Siena—Venice—Brilliant Life in London—Paris and Milsand—Browning on Shelley—In Florence—Idyllic Days in Bagni Di Lucca—Mrs. Browning’s Spiritual Outlook—Delightful Winter in Rome—A Poetic Pilgrimage—Harriet Hosmer—Characteristics of Mrs. Browning.
The Brownings were never for a moment caught up in the wave of popular enthusiasm for Pio Nono that swept over Italy. Yet Mrs. Browning confessed herself as having been fairly “taken in” by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Had Blackwood’s Magazine published Part I of her “Casa Guidi Windows” at the time that she sent it to this periodical,
