My partiality for frenzies is not so absorbing, believe me, as to exclude very painful consideration on the dissolution of your great Union. But my serious fear has been, and is, not for the dissolution of the body but the death of the soul—not of a rupture of states and civil war, but at reconciliation and peace at the expense of a deadly compromise of principle. Nothing will destroy the Republic but what corrupts its conscience and disturbs its fame—for the stain upon the honor must come off upon the flag. If, on the other hand, the North stands fast on the moral ground, no glory will be like your glory.... What surprises me is that the slaves don't rise.
On this great subject Mrs. Browning found her husband in full sympathy with her. Browning himself declared in a letter to an American, September 11, 1861:
I have lost the explanation of American affairs, but I assure you of my belief in the justice and my confidence in the triumph of the great cause. For the righteousness of the principle I want no information. God prosper it and its defenders.[14]
Two poems by Mrs. Browning at least have to do directly with the Negro and American affairs. One was A Curse for a Nation contributed to the Poems before Congress volume. The poet begins somewhat self-consciously:
I heard an angel speak last night,
And he said "Write!
Write a Nation's curse for me,
And send it over the Western Sea."
She protests her unwillingness to execute such a commission, for, she says,
I am bound by gratitude
By love and blood,
To brothers of mine across the sea,
Who stretch out kindly hands to me.
The angel, however, beats down this unwillingness and the curse follows, the second stanza reading:
Because yourselves are standing straight
In the state
Of Freedom's foremost acolyte,
Yet keep calm footing all the time
On writhing bond-slaves,—for this crime
This is the curse. Write.