This “tale” must have been “Aurora Leigh.” The wives of the poet and the sculptor held hilarious intercourse while going back and forth between each other’s houses on donkey-back, with an enjoyment hardly eclipsed by that of Penini himself, whose prayer that God would let him ride on “dontey-back” was so aboundingly granted that the child might well believe in the lavishness of divine mercies. Browning and Story walked beside and obediently held the reins of their wives’ steeds, that no mishap might occur. How the picture of these Arcadian days, in those vast leafy solitudes, peopled only by gods and muses, the attendant “elementals” of these choice spirits, flashes out through more than the half century that has passed since those days of their joyous intercourse. There was a night when Story went alone to take tea with the Brownings, staying till nearly midnight, and Browning accompanied him home in the mystic moonlight. Mrs. Browning, who apparently shared her little son’s predilections for the donkey as a means of transportation, would go for a morning ride, Browning walking beside her as slowly as possible, to keep pace with the donkey’s degree of speed.
Into this Arcady came, by some untraced dispensation of the gods, a French master of recitations, who had taught Rachel, and had otherwise allied himself with the great. M. Alexandre brought his welcome with him, in his delightful recitations from the poets. Mr. Lytton, having accepted Mrs. Browning’s invitation given to him on his Bellosguardo terrace, now appeared; and the Storys and the Brownings organized a festa, in true Italian spirit, in an excursion they should all make to Prato Fiortito.
Prato Fiortito is six miles from Bagni di Lucca, perpendicularly up and down, “but such a vision of divine scenery,” said Mrs. Browning. High among the mountains, Bagni di Lucca is yet surrounded by higher peaks of the Apennines. The journey to Prato Fiortito is like going up and down a wall, the only path for the donkeys being in the beds of the torrents that cut their way down in the spring.
Here, after “glorious climbing,” in which Mrs. Browning distinguished herself no less than the others, they arrived at the little old church, set amid majestic limestone mountains and embowered in purple shade. Here they feasted, Penini overcome with delight, and on shawls spread under the great chestnut trees Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Story were made luxuriously comfortable, while they all talked and read, M. Alexandre reciting from the French dramatists, and Lytton reading from his “Clytemnestra.” The luncheon was adorned by a mass of wild strawberries, picked on the spot, by Browning, Story, Lytton, and Alexandre, while the ladies co-operated in the industry at this honestly earned feast by assisting to hull the berries. The bottle of cream and package of sugar tucked away in the picnic basket added all that heart could desire to this ambrosial luncheon. Mrs. Story, whom Mrs. Browning described as “a sympathetic, graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought,” was a most agreeable companion; and she and Mrs. Browning frequently exchanged feminine gossip over basins of strawberries and milk in each other’s houses, for strawberries abounded in these hills. “If a tree is felled in the forests,” said Mrs. Browning, “strawberries spring up just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing.”
One night when the Brownings were having tea with the Storys, the talk turned on Hawthorne. Story, of course, knew the great romancer, whom the Brownings had not then met and about whom they were curious. “Hawthorne is a man who talks with a pen,” said Story; “he does not open socially to his intimate friends any more than he does to strangers. It isn’t his way to converse.” Mrs. Browning had then just been reading the “Blithedale Romance,” in which she had sought unavailingly, it seems, for some more personal clue to the inner life of its author.
On a brilliant August day the Brownings and the Storys fared forth on a grand excursion on donkey-back, to Benabbia, a hilltown, perched on one of the peaks. Above it on the rocks is a colossal cross, traced by some thunder-bolt of the gods, cut in the solid stone. From this excursion they all returned after dark, in terror of their lives lest the donkeys slip down the sheer precipices; but the scenery was “exquisite, past all beauty.” Mrs. Browning was spell-bound with its marvelous sublimity, as they looked around “on the world of innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a human habitation.”
Mrs. Browning was then reading the poems of Coventry Patmore, just published, of which Browning had read the manuscript in London in the previous year. The poems of Alexander Smith had also appeared at this time, and in him Mrs. Browning found “an opulence of imagery,” but a defect as to the intellectual part of poetry. With her characteristic tolerance, she instanced his youth in plea of this defect, and said that his images were “flowers thrown to him by the gods, gods beautiful and fragrant, but having no root either in Etna or Olympus.” Enamored, as ever, of novels, she was also reading “Vilette,” which she thought a strong story, though lacking charm, and Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth,” which pleased her greatly.
With no dread of death, Mrs. Browning had a horror of the “rust of age,” the touch of age “which is the thickening of the mortal mask between souls. Why talk of age,” she would say, “when we are all young in soul and heart?... Be sure that it’s highly moral to be young as long as possible. Women who dress ‘suitably to their years’ (that is, as hideously as possible) are a disgrace to their sex, aren’t they now?” she would laughingly declare.
This summer in the Apennines at Bagni di Lucca had been a fruitful one to Browning in his poetic work. It became one of constant development, and, as Edmund Gosse points out, “of clarification and increasing selection.” He had already written many of his finest lyrics, “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “Saul”; and in these and succeeding months he produced that miracle of beauty, the poem called “The Flight of the Duchess”; and “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “The Statue and the Bust,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Andrea del Sarto.” To Milsand, Browning wrote that he was at work on lyrics “with more music and painting than before.”
The idyllic summer among the grand chestnut trees came to an end, as summers always do, and October found the Brownings again in Casa Guidi, though preparing to pass the winter in Rome. Verdi had just completed his opera of “Trovatore,” which was performed at the Pergola in Florence, and the poets found it “very passionate and dramatic.”