The Completed Cycle—Letters to Friends—Browning’s Devotion to his Son—Warwick Crescent—“Dramatis Personæ”—London Life—death of the Poet’s Father—Sarianna Browning—Oxford Honors the Poet—Death of Arabel Barrett—Audierne—“The Ring and the Book.”
“The cycle is complete,” said Browning to the Storys, as they all stood in those desolate rooms and gazed about. The salon was just as she had left it; the table covered with books and magazines, her little chair drawn up to it, the long windows open to the terrace, and the faint chant of nuns, “made for midsummer nights,” in San Felice, on the air. “Here we came fifteen years ago,” continued Mr. Browning; “here Ba wrote her poems for Italy; here Pen was born; here we used to walk up and down this terrace on summer evenings.” The poet lingered over many tender reminiscences, and after the Storys had taken leave, he and his son yielded to the entreaties of Isa Blagden to stay with her in her villa on Bellosguardo during the time that he was preparing to leave Florence, which he never looked upon again.
When all matters of detail were concluded, Miss Blagden, “perfect in all kindness,” accompanied them to Paris, continuing her own journey to England, while Browning with his son, his father, and sister, proceeded to St. Enogat, near St. Malo, on the Normandy coast. Before Mrs. Browning’s illness there had been a plan that all the Brownings and Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Stillman should pass the summer together at Fontainebleau.
There was something about St. Enogat singularly restful to Browning, the sea, the solitude, the “unspoiled, fresh, and picturesque place,” as he described it in a letter to Madame Du Quaire. The mystic enchantment of it wrought its spell, and Penini had his pony and was well and cheerful, and Browning realized too well that the change called death is but the passing through “the gates of new life,” to be despairing in his sorrow. The spirit of one
“... who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,”
breathes through all the letters that he wrote at this time to friends. “Don’t fancy I am prostrated,” he wrote to Leighton; “I have enough to do for myself and the boy, in carrying out her wishes.” Somewhat later he expressed his wish that Mr. (later Sir Frederick) Leighton should design the memorial tomb, in that little Florence cemetery, for his wife; and the marble with only “E. B. B.” inscribed on it, visited constantly by all travelers in Florence and rarely found without flowers, is the one Sir Frederick designed.
Tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery, Florence
Designed by Sir Frederick Leighton, R.A.
In a letter to his boyhood’s friend, Miss Haworth, Browning alluded to the future, when Penini would so need the help of “the wisdom, the genius, the piety” of his mother; and the poet adds: “I have had everything, and shall not forget.” In reply to a letter of sympathy from Kate Field, he wrote:
“Dear Friend,—God bless you for all your kindness which I shall never forget. I cannot write now except to say this, and beside, that I have had great comfort from the beginning.”