Life.—The long and peaceful lives of Browning and Tennyson, the two most eminent poets of the Victorian age, are in marked contrast to the short and troubled careers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Robert Browning's life was uneventful but happy. He inherited a magnificent physique and constitution from his father, who never knew a day's illness. With such health, Robert Browning felt a keen relish for physical existence and a robust joyousness in all kinds of activity. Late in life he wrote, in the poem At the Mermaid:—
"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
* * * * *
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."
Again, in Saul, he burst forth with the lines:—
"How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy?"
These lines, vibrant with life and joy, could not have been written by a man of failing vitality or physical weakness.
Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell, whose slopes overlook the smoky chimneys of London. In this beautiful suburb he spent his early years in the companionship of a brother and a sister. A highly gifted father and a musical mother assisted intelligently in the development of their children. Browning's education was conducted mainly under his father's eye. The boy attended neither a large school nor a college. After he had passed from the hands of tutors, he spent some time in travel, and was wont to call Italy his university. Although his training was received in an irregular way, his scholarship cannot be doubted by the student of his poetry.
He early determined to devote his life to poetry, and his father wisely refrained from interfering with his son's ambitions.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. From the painting by
Field Talfourd, National Portrait Gallery._]
Romantic Marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett,—Her Poetry.—In 1845, after Browning had published some ten volumes of verse, among which were Paracelsus (1835), Pippa Passes (1841), and Dramatic Lyrics (1842), he met Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), whose poetic reputation was then greater than his own. The publication in 1898 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett disclosed an unusual romance. When he first met her, she was an invalid in her father's London house, passing a large part of her time on the couch, scarcely able to see all the members of her own family at the same time. His magnetic influence helped her to make more frequent journeys from the sofa to an armchair, then to walk across the room, and soon to take drives.