“I have a name, a little name,
Uncadenced for the ear.”
Beside the Pratolina excursion, Mr. Lytton gave a little reception for them before the Florentine circle dissolved for the summer, asking a few friends to meet the Brownings at his villa on Bellosguardo, where they all sat out on the terrace, and Mrs. Browning made the tea, and they feasted on nectar and ambrosia in the guise of cream and strawberries.
“Such a view!” said Mrs. Browning of that evening. “Florence dissolving in the purple of the hills, and the stars looking on.” Mrs. Browning’s love for Florence grew stronger with every year. That it was her son’s native city was to her a deeply significant fact, for playfully as they called him the “young Florentine,” there was behind the light jest a profound recognition of the child’s claim to his native country. Still, with all this response to the enchantment of Florence, they were planning to live in Paris, after another winter (which they wished to pass in Rome), as the elder Browning and his daughter Sarianna were now to live in the French capital, and Robert Browning was enamored of the brilliant, abounding life, and the art, and splendor of privilege, and opportunity in Paris. “I think it too probable that I may not be able to bear two successive winters in the North,” said Mrs. Browning, “but in that case it will be easy to take a flight for a few winter months into Italy, and we shall regard Paris, where Robert’s father and sister are waiting for us, as our fixed place of residence.” This plan, however, was never carried out, as Italy came to lay over them a still deeper spell, which it was impossible to break. Mr. Lytton, with whom Mrs. Browning talked of all these plans and dreams that evening on his terrace, had just privately printed his drama, “Clytemnestra,” which Mrs. Browning found “full of promise,” although “too ambitious” because after Æschylus. But this young poet, afterward to be so widely known in the realm of poetry as “Owen Meredith,” and as Lord Lytton in the realm of diplomacy and statesmanship, impressed her at the time as possessing an incontestable “faculty” in poetry, that made her expect a great deal from him in the future. She invited him to visit them in their sylvan retreat that summer at Bagni di Lucca, an invitation that he joyously accepted. Some great savant, who was “strong in veritable Chinese,” found his way to Casa Guidi, as most of the wandering minstrels of the time did, and “nearly assassinated” the mistress of the ménage with an interminable analysis of a Japanese novel. Mr. Lytton, who was present, declared she grew paler and paler every moment, which she afterward asserted was not because of sympathy with the heroine of this complex tale! But this formidable scholar had a passport to Mrs. Browning’s consideration by bringing her a little black profile of her beloved Isa, which gave “the air of her head,” and then, said Mrs. Browning, laughingly, “how could I complain of a man who rather flattered me than otherwise, and compared me to Isaiah?”
But at last, after the middle of July, what with poets, and sunsets from terraces, and savants, and stars, they really left their Florence “dissolving in her purple hills” behind them, and bestowed themselves in Casa Tolomei, at the Baths, where a row of plane trees stood before the door, in which the cicale sang all day, and solemn, mysterious mountains kept watch all day and night. There was a garden, lighted by the fireflies at night, and Penini mistook the place for Eden. His happiness overflowed in his prayers, and he thriftily united the petition that God would “mate him dood” with the supplication that God would also “tate him on a dontey,” thus uniting all possible spiritual and temporal aspirations. The little fellow was wild with happiness in this enchanted glade, where the poets were “safe among mountains, shut in with a row of seven plane-trees joined at top.” Mr. Browning was still working on his lyrics, of which his wife had seen very few. “We neither of us show our work to the other till it is finished,” she said. She recognized that an artist must work in solitude until the actual result is achieved.
Casa Guidi
| “I heard last night a little child go singing ’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church.” |
| Casa Guidi Windows. |
It seems that Mr. Chorley in London had fallen into depressed spirits that summer, indulging in the melancholy meditations that none of his friends loved him, beyond seeing in him a “creature to be eaten,” and that, having furnished them with a banquet, their attentions to him were over (a most regrettable state of mind, one may observe, en passant, and one of those spiritual pitfalls which not only Mr. Chorley in particular, but all of us in general would do particularly well to avoid). The letter that Mrs. Browning wrote to him wonderfully reveals her all-comprehending sympathy and her spiritual buoyancy and intellectual poise. “You are very wrong,” she says to him, “and I am very right to upbraid you. I take the pen from Robert—he would take it if I did not. We scramble a little for the pen which is to tell you this, and be dull in the reiteration, rather than not to instruct you properly.... I quite understand how a whole life may seem rumpled and creased—torn for the moment; only you will live it smooth again, dear Mr. Chorley, take courage. You have time and strength and good aims; and human beings have been happy with much less.... I think we belied ourselves to you in England. If you knew how, at that time, Robert was vexed and worn! why, he was not the same, even to me!... But then and now believe that he loved and loves you. Set him down as a friend, as somebody to rest on, after all; and don’t fancy that because we are away here in the wilderness (which blossoms as the rose, to one of us, at least) we may not be full of affectionate thoughts and feelings toward you in your different sort of life in London.” The lovely spirit goes on to remind Mr. Chorley that they have a spare bedroom “which opens of itself at the thought of you,” and that if he can trust himself so far from home, she begs him to try it for their sakes. “Come and look in our faces, and learn us more by heart, and see whether we are not two friends?”
Surely, that life was rich, whatever else it might be denied, that had Elizabeth Browning for a friend. Her genius for friendship was not less marvelous, nor less to be considered, than her genius as a poet. Indeed, truly speaking, the one, in its ideal fullness and completeness, comprehends the other.
The summer days among the beautiful hills, and by the green, rushing river, were made aboundingly happy to the Brownings by the presence of their friends, the Storys, who shared these vast solitudes. The Storys had a villa perched on the top of the hill, just above the Brownings’, the terrace shaded with vines, and the great mountains towering all around them, while a swift mountain brook swept by under an arched bridge, its force turning picturesque mills far down the valley. Under the shadow of the chestnut trees fringing its banks, Shelley had once pushed his boat. “Of society,” wrote Story to Lowell, “there is none we care to meet but the Brownings, and with them we have constant and delightful intercourse, interchanging long evenings, two or three times a week, and driving and walking whenever we meet. They are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic. Both are busily engaged in writing, he on a volume of lyrics, and she on a tale or novel in verse.”