One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous tour de force. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the limæ labor, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.
Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese"—strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her—coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:
How dreary 'tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.
And again:
To sit alone
And think, for comfort, how that very night
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath
Are reading haply from some page of ours
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched
When such a stanza level to their mood
Seems floating their own thoughts out—"So I feel
For thee"—"And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is."
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love
While we sit loveless.
Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.
The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,—such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.
Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. 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." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."
This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain—even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country—
And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,
How I burn to you? Do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul.