A poem called “Confessions” is full of a mysterious power that haunts the reader in a series of pictures:
“Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her:
God and she and I only, there I sate down to draw her
Soul through the clefts of confession—‘Speak, I am holding thee fast,
As the angel of resurrection shall do at the last.’”
And what touching significance is in these lines:
“The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light.”
There were the “Crowned and Wedded” that celebrated the marriage of England’s beloved queen; “Bertha in the Lane,” which has been one of the most universal favorites of any of her lyrics; still later, “The Dead Pan,” which essentially embodies her highest convictions regarding the poetic art: that Poetry must be real, and, above all, true.
“O brave poets, keep back nothing,
Nor mix falsehood with the whole!
······
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!”
In such lines as these she expressed her deepest feeling.
Then appeared “Comfort,” “Futurity,” and “An Apprehension”; the dainty little picture of her childish days in “Hector in the Garden”; the sonnets to George Sand, on which the French biographer[3] of Mrs. Browning, in recent years, has commented, translating the first line,—
“Vrai genie, mais vraie femme!”
and adding that these words, addressed to George Sand, are illustrated by her own life.
The sonnet “Insufficiency,” of this period, closes with the lines,
“And what we best conceive we fail to speak.
Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,
And then resume thy broken strains, and seek
Fit peroration without let or thrall.”
In all this work that deep religious note, that exaltation of spirituality which so completely characterized Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is felt by the reader. Religion was always to her a life, not a litany. The Divine Love was as the breath of life to her, wherein she lived and moved, and on which she relied for her very being.
The poem called “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” though not often noted by the critical writers on Mrs. Browning, is one full of impressive lines, with that haunting refrain of every stanza,—
“O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!”
Albeit, a candid view must also recognize that this poem reveals those early faults, the redundancy, the almost recklessness of color and rhythm, that are much less frequently encountered in the poems of Mrs. Browning than they were in those of Miss Barrett. For poetic work is an art as well as a gift, and while “Poets are born, not made,” yet, being born, the poet must proceed also to make himself. In this “Rhapsody” occur the lines that are said to have thrown cultured Bostonians into a bewilderment exceptional; a baffled and despairing state not to be duplicated in all history, unless by that of the Greeks before the Eleusinian mysteries; the lines running,—
“Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men’s bones
To a pale unanimity.”
Polite circles in Boston pondered unavailingly upon this medley, and were apparently reduced to the same mental condition as was Mrs. Carlyle when she read “Sordello.” Unfortunately for Jane Carlyle there were in her day no Browning societies, with their all-embracing knowledge, to which Browning himself conveniently referred all persons who questioned him as to the meaning of certain passages. One Boston woman, not unknown to fame, recalls even now that she walked the Common, revolving these cryptic lines in her mind, and meeting Dr. Holmes, asked if he understood them, to which the Autocrat replied, “God forbid!”
This very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery, was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power of Miss Barrett later on. From her earliest childhood she had the scholar’s instinct and love of learning; she read fluently French, German, and Italian; she was well grounded in Latin, and for the Greek she had that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation rather than an acquirement. Its rich intellectual treasure entered into her inmost life. She also read Hebrew, and all her life kept with her a little Hebrew Bible, as well as a Greek Testament, the margins of both of which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic handwriting. Miss Barrett’s earliest work, published anonymously, at her father’s expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality, whatever its promise; but once in London, something in the very atmosphere seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. Poetry had always been to her “its own exceeding great reward,” but she was now conscious of a desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father’s home, there was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered.
“Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way,—
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards ... day!”
Miss Barrett finds London “wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist,” but she tries to like it, and “looks forward to seeing those here whom we might see nowhere else.” Her brother George, who had recently graduated from the University of Glasgow, was now a barrister student at the Inner Temple. Henrietta and Arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight in the new surroundings.
Retrospectively viewed, Mrs. Browning’s life falls easily into three periods, which seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a realization. She was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family came up to London, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams and visions for her company. These years were but the prelude, the preparatory period. She then entered on the experimental phase, the testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and later fulfillment. In her forty-first year came her marriage to Robert Browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous achievement, during which the incomparable “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and “Aurora Leigh” were written,—the period of realization.
Before the beginning of the London period Miss Barrett’s literary work had been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or less crude experimenter. For Poetry to Elizabeth Barrett was a divine commission no less than an inborn gift. Under any circumstances, she would have poured her life “with passion into music,” and with the utmost sincerity could she have said, with George Eliot’s “Armgart,”
“I am not glad with that mean vanity
Which knows no good beyond its appetite