R. Browning (The Ring and the Book, X).
A young handsome priest, who had led a gay life, was moved by pure motives to rescue a beautiful young wife from a dreadful husband, and he travelled with her for three days to Rome. The husband was following with an armed band, the priest was risking disgrace, and the girl was risking death. The mutual danger would in itself tend to draw the fugitives too closely together; but also the girl had shown herself doubly lovable, for the strain and stress had revealed in her a very beautiful nature—just as a midnight thunder-storm opens and draws rich scent from
Some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness.
Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with rain”—(Allsop’s Letters, etc., of Coleridge). Coleridge died in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9: it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized. In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that electricity was of no benefit to the crops without rain or other moisture.
The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.