Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

Here Mrs. Browning held her small court, and here she entertained in the course of these years many of the most famous men and women of her time. Almost all visitors to Florence, especially English and American, sought her acquaintance, and all were kindly received by her. The conversation was always earnest there; she demanded a great deal of a person,—one felt it instinctively; and few came to waste her time upon trifles. Her own conversation was especially earnest, sometimes vivid, and lighted up by a humor peculiarly her own. She cared nothing for talk about people. Books and humanity, great deeds, and the great questions of the day, were the staple of her conversation. Religion, too, was an ever present topic. She was one of the most religious women of her day, and she interwove it in all her conversation, as she did in her writings. Indeed, her religion was a part of herself, and whoever knew her must know of this strong, deep feeling. One cannot conceive of Mrs. Browning apart from her religion. She would not have been herself, but another. It was a rare sight, indeed, to see this frail, spiritual-looking woman, when she talked upon some phase of her favorite theme, with her great expressive eyes fairly glowing with the intensity of her feeling, and a light shining through her face, as from the soul beyond. Her other great theme was Italy, and upon this she was always eloquent. Indeed, both Mr. and Mrs. Browning may almost be said to have adopted Italy for their home, and to have transferred their home affections to her soil. Many great Englishmen have loved Italy, but none more warmly than the Brownings. They suffered with her through all those dark hours which preceded her final emancipation from the foreign yoke, and they aided by their strong, brave words in bringing about that emancipation. Their pens were used in her behalf, perhaps too much for their own fame, because many of the subjects on which they wrote were of somewhat transient interest and more political than poetical. They were both friends and helpers to the great statesman Cavour in all his labors for the reconstruction of Italy, and one of the deepest interests of their lives was that reconstruction. Mrs. Browning's frail health was really injured at times by the serious grief she felt for temporary reverses, and by the absorbing interest she took in the cause.

The dream of her life, a free and united Italy, was fulfilled in Napoleon's formal recognition of Italian freedom and unity, the very week she died. It is given to few in this world thus to see the fruition of their fondest desires, and to pass away just as the clear morning light is dispelling the shadows of a long night of watching and waiting. The Napoleonic poems added nothing to her reputation as a poet, and were much regretted by some of her friends; but her literary reputation was nothing to her compared with her love for Italy, and she at least had faith in Napoleon's promises.

Mr. Hilliard, in his "Six Months in Italy," says of the home behind the Casa Guidi windows:—

"A happier home and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy to imagine; and this completeness arises not only from the rare qualities which each possesses, but from their perfect adaptation to each other. . . . As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. . . . I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl. . . . Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings singly and separately; but to see their powers quickened and their happiness rounded by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude."

The boy Browning was very beautiful in his childhood, and occupied a large place in the lives of his parents, who felt great pride in showing him to their visitors. It is a pleasant story told of the street beggars who walked through the Via Maggio in those days, under the windows of Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of Mrs. Browning, simply and touchingly, as "the mother of the beautiful child." But her love for this one beautiful darling taught her the whole possibility of motherhood. It made her heart go out in deepest sympathy to all mothers, as "to the friends unknown, and a land unvisited over the sea," to whom she writes:—

"Shall I speak like a poet, or run
Into weak woman's tears for relief?
Ah, children! I never lost one,—
Yet my arm's round my own little son,
And love knows the secret of grief."

In the Italian poem "Mother and Poet," she has expressed a mother's feelings as truthfully and vividly as any writer who has ever touched that great theme. She can describe, too, in language that almost blisters the page on which it is written, that other class of mothers which it is bitter to feel that the earth does contain,—the monsters who would sell their daughters for gold. In that most powerful story of Marian in "Aurora Leigh," she writes thus:—

"The child turned round
And looked up piteous in the mother's face
(Be sure that mother's death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look).
'Oh, mother!' then with desperate glance to heaven,
'God free me from my mother,' she shrieked out,
'These mothers are too dreadful.' And with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both, away if possible,
As far as God—away. They yelled at her
As famished hounds at a hare,
She heard them yell,
And felt her name hiss after her from the hills
Like shot from guns."

The whole of that wonderful poem of "Aurora Leigh" is full of such impassioned sympathy with womanhood, and shows the great heart of the poet as perhaps none of her other poems do. Written in the maturity of her powers, and after she had learned much of life in all its intricate depths, it contains perhaps more passion and power and fiery-burning eloquence than any other poem in the English language. Only an inspired womanly hand, which had sounded all the deeps of the world's scanty wisdom, could have penned it.

But Mrs. Browning shows great wealth of human sympathy in all her poems. Oppression and wrong sink into the very depths of her nature, and she cannot bear that they shall go unreproved in the universe while she exists. Her sympathy with our labors for the emancipation of the slaves was well known, in a time when little sympathy was to be found among the English, and her feeling for the poor and oppressed of her native land was always deep and strong. Her "Cry of the Children" will never be forgotten while there are suffering children in the world, and while there are human hearts to listen to their wail. It is as sacred a piece of inspiration as the Psalms of David; and the need for such an expression of the woe of the outcast poor of England is almost as great to-day as when the immortal poem was written. Still can we ask of the English people:—