"From Browning some 'Pomegranate'
Which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured,
Of a veined humanity."
They were married a year later. As exemplifying the condescension of their earlier contemporaries it is interesting to note Wordsworth's observation on the event—and Wordsworth had no humour—"So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! Well, I hope they may understand each other—nobody else could!" Lord Granville, who was staying in Florence when a son was born to the poets there in 1849, was still more amusing although equally uncritical. "Now there are not two incomprehensibles but three incomprehensibles," he said.
It cannot be charged against Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861 that she was in the least incomprehensible. Her "Cry of the Children," "Cowper's Grave," and "Aurora Leigh," have the note of extreme simplicity. Nor is obscurity a characteristic of "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which were not translations, but so named to disguise a wife's devotion to her husband. "Aurora Leigh" she styled a "novel in verse," and it was in fact a very readable romance, marked by that zest for social reform which characterised the period.[4] "The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered," she wrote of it.
After the marriage the pair lived principally at Florence. In their Florentine home—Casa Guidi—"Aurora Leigh," and "Casa Guidi Windows" were written, and here Mrs Browning died in June 1861. One may still see the house upon which the Florentine municipality has inscribed a tablet in gratitude for the "golden ring" of poetry with which the enthusiastic woman poet had attempted to unite England and Italy.
Another great Florentine by adoption, Walter Savage Landor 1775-1864, came to live near the Brownings. His rugged nature must have been not a little soothed by the gentle little woman with "a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." Landor was educated at Rugby, at Ashbourne, and at Trinity College, Oxford. From Rugby he was removed to avoid expulsion, and at Oxford he was rusticated. All this was the outcome of an excitable temperament, which led in later life to domestic complications, and to exile from his family in Florence. It found no reflection in his many beautiful works. As a poet, however, Landor holds no considerable rank, although here placed among them. "Gebir" was published in 1798 and "Count Julian" in 1812. Both these lengthy poems have received the rapturous praise of authoritative critics, De Quincey even declaring that Count Julian was a creation worthy to rank beside the Prometheus of Æschylus and Milton's Satan. Southey insisted indeed that Landor had written verses "of which he would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time." But Landor's poems, although obtainable in his collected works, and published in selections, command no audience to-day. With his prose the case is otherwise. There is little in the six volumes of "Imaginary Conversations," or in the two volumes of "Longer Prose Works," that does not merit attention alike for style and matter. "Give me," he says in one of his prefaces, "ten accomplished men for readers and I am content." Landor has all accomplished men for readers now. And all are at one with the critic who said that, "excepting Shakspere, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature." Mr Swinburne's expression of veneration is well known.
"I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before;