Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Born March 4, 1809. Died June 29, 1861.
here has lately been considerable controversy as to the date, and place of birth of Mrs. Browning.
Mrs. Richmond-Ritchie, in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” states that Mrs. Browning “was born at Burn Hall, Durham, on March 6, 1809,” whilst Mr. J. H. Ingram in a brief memoir prefixed to the “Poetical Works of E. B. Browning” (Ward, Lock and Co., London) asserts that Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was the eldest daughter of Edward Moulton Barrett, and was born in London on Saturday, March 4, 1809, as shown by an announcement in a contemporary newspaper.
Mr. Robert Browning contradicts both these statements, in a prefatory note to a small volume of his late wife’s poems, published by Smith Elder and Co. in 1887. He contends that she was born on March 6, 1806, at Carlton Hall, Durham, the residence of her father’s brother, and that she had an elder sister, who died in childhood. This statement is the more peculiar as Mr. Browning had previously written to Mr. Ingram (in 1886) “I engaged to verify any dates Mrs. Ritchie furnished, and I did so. Only those are to be depended upon.” Yet it is clearly impossible that both Mrs. Ritchie and Mr. Browning can be correct, and it seems very probable that both are mistaken. The Athenæum, February 4, 1888, published a letter from Mr. Ingram in answer to Mr. Browning’s Note, showing, firstly, that there is no such place as Carlton Hall, Durham, nor any record of Mrs. E. B. Browning’s birth in that city; secondly, that the newspaper announcement of the birth stated “London, March 4, 1809, the wife of Edward M. Barrett, Esq., of a daughter,” so that it was obviously impossible for that lady also to have given birth to a daughter at Burn Hall, Durham, on March 6, 1809, as stated by Mrs. Ritchie; and thirdly, that as in 1806 Mr. Barrett was a student in Cambridge, and only about twenty years of age, it was unlikely that he would then be the father of two children, (as Mr. Browning asserts), although it is admitted he married early. To this letter Mr. Browning briefly replied, disclaiming any “certitude in the matter from knowledge of his own,” which reads like a tacit admission of the accuracy of Mr. J. H. Ingram’s statements.
That there should be some doubt about an event which occurred eighty years ago can be readily understood, but it is difficult to explain the discrepancies which exist in several descriptions of Mrs. Browning’s personal appearance, thus Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote:—
“It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down on her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion.”
Two other observers give very different details:—
“But it was Mrs. Browning’s face upon which one loved to gaze—that face and head which almost lost themselves in the thick curls of her dark brown hair.... Her large, brown eyes were beautiful, and were, in truth, the windows of her soul. They combined the confidingness of a child with the poet-passion of heart and intellect; and in gazing into them it was easy to read why Mrs. Browning wrote.” Kate Field, 1861, “Letter from Florence.”—Atlantic Monthly, September.
“She was slight and fragile in appearance, with a pale, wasted face, shaded by masses of soft chestnut curls which fell on her cheeks, and serious eyes of bluish-gray. Her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul.”—Bayard Taylor, “At Home and Abroad.”
Mrs. Browning’s poetry, though highly praised by critics and literary men, has not yet attained that popularity which engenders many parodies, being, as Charlotte Brontë wrote, somewhat wordy, intricate and obscure.
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN.
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing t’wards the west:
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!—
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Do you question the young children in their sorrow
Why their tears are falling so?
The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in Long Ago.
The old tree is leafless in the forest,
The old year is ending in the frost,
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland?
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their looks are sad to see,
For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy.
“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary;”
“Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak!
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—
Our grave rest is very far to seek.
Ask the agéd why they weep, and not the children,
For the outside earth is cold,
And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old.
“True,” say the children, “it may happen
That we die before our time.
Little Alice died last year—the grave is shapen
Like a snowball in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her;
Was no room for any work in the close clay;
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,
Crying, ‘Get up, little Alice! it is day.’”
If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,
With your ear down, little Alice never cries!
Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,
For the smile has time for growing in her eyes!
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in
The shroud, by the kirk-chime!
“It is good when it happens,” say the children,
“That we die before our time.”
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 little thrushes do—
Pluck your handfuls of the meadow cow-slips pretty—
Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through!
But they answer are your cow-slips of the meadows
Like our weeds anear the mine?
Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,
From your pleasures fair and fine!
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot 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 heads 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!”
* * * * *
E. B. Browning.
The Wail of the Children.
“To look at these half-starved children in London Schools is to be ‘full of pity.’ Very touching is it to think of the quiet heroism with which, when hunger is gnawing within and the dull misery of want overflows them, they sit uncomplaining at their little desks, toiling at their allotted tasks, wondering, no doubt, sometimes what it all means, but bearing their burdens patiently.”—Dr. Crichton-Browne’s Report on Over Pressure.
Do you hear the Children wailing in the daytime,
And the watches of the night:
Far too sad are they for pleasure in their playtime,
Or for laughter and delight.
They are old before their age and worn and weary
And their little heads are bowed upon their books;
“For this life at school,” they say “is very dreary,”
And there’s listlessness and languor in their looks.
And all day, the Wheel of Education,
By the orders of the State,
Whirleth round in every school-room in the nation,
Like the direful Wheel of Fate.
It is hard to see the Children growing older,
With such heavy eyes and dim,
As you mark the pallid cheek and rounded shoulder,
From this stern pedantic whim.
They are suffering from a sempiternal dead ache
In the tortured brows that know so little rest,
And they fly to ease the constant “School-Board head-ache,”
On a mother’s or a sister’s kindly breast.
For all day they toil on in their classes,
With an earnestness too sad;
It is well that we should educate the masses,
But not drive the Children mad.
They come breakfastless from alleys in the city,
Undersized and underfed,
They are starving, and we give them—more’s the pity!
Education, and not bread.
And we work their brains through every changing season,
Till the ceaseless labour stupifies and numbs;
They are sleepless, and they give the childish reason—
“I can’t get to sleep for thinking of my sums!”
For all day the labour seems quite endless,
In this philanthropic land;
Oh, ye Women; are the wastrels then so friendless
That ye will not lend a hand?
* * * * *
It is well to praise the spread of education,
And the people need more light,
But the horror of each long examination
Haunts the little ones at night.
Here are Children born ’mid London’s toil and traffic,
They are bloodless and half-starving we can see;
And we feed them with statistics geographic,
And, in the place of bread, we give them “Rule of Three.”
How long then, we ask it in all sadness,
Can such laws be deemed the best;
While the Children, through brain-fever and through madness,
Seek the graveyard—and their rest!
Punch. October 25, 1884.
The Bitter Cry of Agriculture.
Do you hear the cry from Farmers, O my brothers,
As the toilsome years go by?
’Tis a cry that should be heard above all others
A continuous and bitter cry.
The shipping may be crying with its grievance,
The factory as each spindle slowly turns
Home competition with its dogged keen adherence
And labour for employment daily yearns;
But the cry from Agriculture, O my brothers,
Comes up from English Homesteads wearily
And affects the Nation far above all others
In this Country of the free.
If you question Farmers why this land depression,
Why this weary, bitter cry
You will hear their quick and ever sad expression,
We are being ruined, they reply.
We’ve toil’d against successive cloudy seasons
And competed with the trade of every clime,
Whilst Manufacture for her obvious reasons
And her labour market filled from time to time,
Cares naught for Agriculture, O my brothers,
Or if its Capital shall fall or stand,
But piles up wealth, and has no care for others,
In this our Fatherland.
They look on wasting stock from land and pocket
And the sight is sad to see
For the strain upon each Agricultural socket
Presses hard and heavily.
Landlords, they say, have met the question bravely
As the value of their land has slipp’d away,
And our diminished income presses gravely
This sad question “How long will depression stay?”
Can no Economist, Philanthropist or Statesman,
Solve this great problem, to our hopes forlorn,
Before our land becomes a hunting-field for great men
Dependent on foreign corn?
* * * * *
Our old Homesteads are as dear to us my brothers,
As your Factories are to you,
And we cannot starve our children with their mothers
For quack maxims preached as true;
Our pilgrim fathers left the land that bore them,
And their Agricultural sons must do the same,
And with a foreign banner waving o’er them
Forget the native land from whence they came.
But when war or trouble meets the English nation,
And the foreigner commands his price for corn,
You may wish you had given consolation,
And your help instead of scorn.
J. D. Beeston.
“Gus Harris has got Shuttleworth, or Pennington, or some other reverend gentleman, to write him a letter about the sad condition of the children of the poorer clergy, who are in worse plight than the thousands who recently attended Drury Lane from the national and orphan schools and asylums, seeing that they are never invited to witness a pantomime. Quite ready with his response was Gussy, who has now issued an invitation for Thursday morning next to ‘the families of curates and ministers of all denominations who are not in a position to pay for seats.’”
Church or Stage;
Or, the Cry of the Clergymen’s Children.
Do you hear those children weeping, O my brothers?
They’re poor parsons’ little dears!
They want to go to theatres, like the others,
And hence their trickling tears.
All the ragged-schools have seen the clown’s hot poker—
They have watched him steal the sausages with zest,
They have seen his face all bismuth and red ochre,
They have seen the fairies beautifully dressed.
But the children of our clergymen, my brothers,
Are “boo-hooing” bitterlee,
They want to see a panto, like the others,
And they want to go in free.
Did you read that parson’s letter—full of sorrow—
Which described these children’s woe?
Did you see who tried publicity to borrow
From that note—not long ago?
’Twas written by a well-known London preacher
(For parsons Harris seems to have a craze),
And that letter told of many a little creature
Whose pa is much too poor to go to plays.
That parson said his youngster—O my brothers!—
Had complained in accents grim
That, though he was as poor as lots of others,
No lessee invited him.
“We are worse off than the children from the alleys”
(Thus the parson’s weeping boy);
“They can go in free and see the ‘spills’ and ‘rallies,’
And the fairies—ah, what joy!
They give these children buns, and even verses,”
Said the parson’s child (or words to this effect),
“But our pa’s have little money in their purses”—
“Which, alas!” exclaims that parson, “is correct.
——Then have pity, Mr. Harris, on the children
Of all parsons short of cash.”
(Mrs. Browning for a rhyme here has “bewildering”
But for me that’s much too rash.)
Then lo! in striking “ads,” said Gus, “With pleasure!
Those servants of the Church—
Who have children thus lamenting beyond measure—
I will not leave in the lurch!
All ministers who’re not in a position
To pay for seats my pantomime to see,
Shall anon to Drury Lane have free admission,
If they send in full particulars to me.”
Such as (probably) their date of ordination,
And what their “plates” collect;
And if they have their bishop’s approbation;
And if “chapel,” of what sect?
Thus Harris, in a patronising fashion,
And all by way of trade,
On the offspring of the clergy takes compassion,
And essays the Church to aid.
Such a splendid chance was not to be rejected—
It would make a grand advertisement, forsooth!—
And probably young Harris recollected
That to parsons he owed puffs for “Pluck” and “Youth.”
But what about that clergyman’s suggestion
To the Lessee of the Lane?
Was it written (Gussy, please excuse the question)
By friend Pennington again?
Carados.
The Referee. February 24, 1884.
——:o:——
“Down East.”
Would you know the sin and crime, that your educated time
Endures within your clime unchecked, unceased?
Take an omnibus with me (’tis a shilling carries three),
And the scenes you shall see “Down East,” “Down East.”
Whitechapel has a road, where many a night has flowed
The blood from knife or goad of a goodly beast,
But down the alley’s gloom, in a miserable room,
A woman’s met her doom—“Down East,” “Down East.”
In a miserable shed, with an old rug for a bed,
As the dreary days on sped, her want increased,
And he who should have thought of the famine that he wrought,
Had just another “quartern” bought “Down East,” “Down East.”
He was of that wild drunken crew that prowl when the day is new,
With whom we know not what to do from gaol released;
One of a dogged sullen air, who beat his wife and tore her hair,
And taught his children how to swear, “Down East,” “Down East.”
One night—life’s longest needs but one—he struck his wife and all was done,
From sorrow, ere the rise of sun she was released;
Oh! you talk of distant lands, of savages on Afric’s sands,
Stretch forth in Town your soothing hands “Down East,” “Down East.”
Edmund H. Yates.
From “Our Miscellany” (which ought to have come out, but didn’t). London, G. Routledge and Co., 1856.
——:o:——
Gwendoline.
An Imitation.
’Twas not the brown of chestnut boughs
That shadowed her so finely;
It was the hair that swept her brows,
And framed her face divinely;
Her tawny hair, her purple eyes,
The spirit was ensphered in,
That took you with such swift surprise,
Provided you had peered in.
Her velvet foot amid the moss
And on the daisies patted,
As, querulous with sense of loss,
It tore the herbage matted;
“And come he early, come he late,”
She saith “it will undo me;
The sharp fore-speeded shaft of fate
Already quivers through me.
“When I beheld his red-roan steed,
I knew what aim impelled it;
And that dim scarf of silver brede,
I guessed for whom he held it;
I recked not, while he flaunted by,
Of Love’s relentless vi’lence,
Yet o’er me crashed the summer sky,
In thunders of blue silence.
“His hoof-prints crumbled down the vale,
But left behind their lava;
What should have been my woman’s mail,
Grew jellied as guava:
I looked him proud, but ’neath my pride
I felt a boneless tremor;
He was the Beër, I descried,
And I was but the Seemer!
“Ah, how to be what then I seemed,
And bid him seem that is so!
We always tangle threads we dreamed,
And contravene our bliss so.
I see the red-roan steed again!
He looks, as something sought he:
Why, hoity toity!—he is fain,
So I’ll be cold and haughty!”
From Diversions of the Echo Club, by Bayard Taylor.
——:o:——
A Tool of Trade.
(Imitated from Mrs. Browning’s “A Musical
Instrument.”) An Allegory on the Banks of
the—Pactolus, dedicated to the
London Water Companies.
What is he doing, the Middleman,
Down by Trade’s Golden River?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Grubbing up grain with the greed of a goat,
And swamping the tiny shallops afloat
On the golden flood of the River.
He tore up a reed, did the Middleman,
A flourishing reed, from that River.
The troubled water turbidly ran,
And the broken reed all helpless lay
In the cunning hand which tore it away
From its root in the Golden River.
High on the shore sate the Middleman,
While turbidly flowed the River,
And hacked and hewed, as your huckster can,
With his cruel steel, at the severed reed,
Till there was small sign of life indeed
To prove it fresh from the River.
He cut it short, did the Middleman,
(How big he swelled by the River!)
Then drew out the pith, on a patent plan
Devised by his like of the cruel Trade Ring,
And sucked through the poor dry empty thing
Deep draughts from the Golden River.
“This is the way,” laughed the Middleman
(Laughed as he sate by the River!),
“The only way, since Rings began
To suck Trade’s blood, they could fully succeed.”
Then popping his lips to the conduit-reed,
He drew, drew, drew, from the River.
Neat cheat, O Middleman!
Vampire-ghoul of the River!
Blind most neat, O Middleman!
You idly sit as the stream flows by,
And suck at ease whilst your victims die
For want of a draught from the River.
Yet a bloated brute is the Middleman
To laugh as he sits by the River,
Playing the leech on his patent plan,
Trade’s heart depleting, sucking its brain,
And bruising and breaking to plump his gain
The myriad reeds of the River!
Punch. April 23, 1887.
The Origin of Pan.
A Musical Instrument.
What is he doing, this crookshank’d Pan
Down in the reeds by the river?
You’re welcome the puzzle to solve—if you can.
Just fancy him stroke in an Oxford boat,
This mixture of athlete, and Pan-pipe, and goat,
What a charm he’d lend to the river!
He’s classic-contorted, this nondescript Pan,
In the startled reeds by the river;
And therefore he’s built on the neo-Greek plan.
An artist who’s bent on the mystical lay
Could hardly do better, at this time of day,
To give one the neo-Greek shiver.
“This is the way,” laughs the great god Pan
(Laughs as he sits by the river),
The only way, since renaissance began,
To prevent a poor god being left on the shelf:
How can one do better than “puffing one’s self?”
And he puffs, as he squats by the river.
From Harry Furniss’s Royal Academy; an Artistic Joke. London. 1887.
Unfortunately the humour of this parody greatly depended on Mr. Furniss’s funny illustration of the great god Pan, en deshabille, as an artist’s model.
——:o:——
A long and rather serious poem written in imitation of Mrs. Browning’s style, appears in The Book of Ballads, edited by Bon Gaultier, published by Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh. It commences thus:—
The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle.
A Legend of Glasgow.
There’s a pleasant place of rest, near a City of the West,
Where its bravest and its best find their grave.
Below the willows weep, and their hoary branches steep
In the waters still and deep,
Not a wave!
And the old cathedral wall, so scathed and grey, and tall,
Like a priest surveying all, stands beyond;
And the ringing of its bell, when the ringers ring it well,
Makes a kind of tidal swell
On the pond!
And there it was I lay, on a beauteous summer’s day,
With the odour of the hay floating by;
And I heard the blackbirds sing, and the bells demurely ring,
Chime by chime, ting by ting,
Droppingly.
* * * * *
