Life and Letters of Robert Browning [9]
evening attended
the preaching of the Rev. Henry Melvill* (afterwards Canon of St. Paul's),
whose sermons Robert much admired.'**
--
* At Camden Chapel, Camberwell.
** Mr. Browning was much interested, in later years, in hearing Canon,
perhaps then already Archdeacon, Farrar extol his eloquence and ask
whether he had known him. Mr. Ruskin also spoke of him with admiration.
--
Little need be said about the poet's mother. She was spoken of by Carlyle
as `the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.' Mr. Kenyon declared
that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it
wherever they were. But her character was all resumed in her son's words,
spoken with the tremulous emotion which so often accompanied
his allusion to those he had loved and lost: `She was a divine woman.'
She was Scotch on the maternal side, and her kindly, gentle,
but distinctly evangelical Christianity must have been derived
from that source. Her father, William Wiedemann, a ship-owner,
was a Hamburg German settled in Dundee, and has been described by Mr. Browning
as an accomplished draughtsman and musician. She herself had nothing
of the artist about her, though we hear of her sometimes playing the piano;
in all her goodness and sweetness she seems to have been
somewhat matter-of-fact. But there is abundant indirect evidence
of Mr. Browning's love of music having come to him through her,
and we are certainly justified in holding the Scottish-German descent
as accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality
so early apparent in the poet's mind, and of which we find no evidence
in that of his father. His strong religious instincts must have been derived
from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by his mother.
There is yet another point on which Mrs. Browning must have influenced
the life and destinies of her son, that of physical health,
or, at least, nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman,
very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was
perhaps a symptom of this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself
in her daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution.
With the brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present,
if more difficult to trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him
as a brilliantly healthy man; he was healthy, even strong,
in many essential respects. Until past the age of seventy
he could take long walks without fatigue, and endure an amount
of social and general physical strain which would have tried many younger men.
He carried on until the last a large, if not always serious, correspondence,
and only within the latest months, perhaps weeks of his life,
did his letters even suggest that physical brain-power was failing him.
He had, within the limits which his death has assigned to it,
a considerable recuperative power. His consciousness of health was vivid,
so long as he was well; and it was only towards the end
that the faith in his probable length of days occasionally deserted him.
But he died of no acute disease, more than seven years younger
than his father, having long carried with him external marks of age
from which his father remained exempt. Till towards the age of forty
he suffered from attacks of sore-throat, not frequent, but of an angry kind.
He was constantly troubled by imperfect action of the liver,
though no doctor pronounced the evil serious. I have spoken of this
in reference to his complexion. During the last twenty years, if not
for longer, he rarely spent a winter without a suffocating cold and cough;
within the last five, asthmatic symptoms established themselves;
and when he sank under what was perhaps his first real attack of bronchitis
it was not because the attack was very severe, but because the heart
was exhausted. The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother;
and we might carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor,
and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him.
the preaching of the Rev. Henry Melvill* (afterwards Canon of St. Paul's),
whose sermons Robert much admired.'**
--
* At Camden Chapel, Camberwell.
** Mr. Browning was much interested, in later years, in hearing Canon,
perhaps then already Archdeacon, Farrar extol his eloquence and ask
whether he had known him. Mr. Ruskin also spoke of him with admiration.
--
Little need be said about the poet's mother. She was spoken of by Carlyle
as `the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.' Mr. Kenyon declared
that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made it
wherever they were. But her character was all resumed in her son's words,
spoken with the tremulous emotion which so often accompanied
his allusion to those he had loved and lost: `She was a divine woman.'
She was Scotch on the maternal side, and her kindly, gentle,
but distinctly evangelical Christianity must have been derived
from that source. Her father, William Wiedemann, a ship-owner,
was a Hamburg German settled in Dundee, and has been described by Mr. Browning
as an accomplished draughtsman and musician. She herself had nothing
of the artist about her, though we hear of her sometimes playing the piano;
in all her goodness and sweetness she seems to have been
somewhat matter-of-fact. But there is abundant indirect evidence
of Mr. Browning's love of music having come to him through her,
and we are certainly justified in holding the Scottish-German descent
as accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality
so early apparent in the poet's mind, and of which we find no evidence
in that of his father. His strong religious instincts must have been derived
from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by his mother.
There is yet another point on which Mrs. Browning must have influenced
the life and destinies of her son, that of physical health,
or, at least, nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman,
very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was
perhaps a symptom of this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself
in her daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution.
With the brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present,
if more difficult to trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him
as a brilliantly healthy man; he was healthy, even strong,
in many essential respects. Until past the age of seventy
he could take long walks without fatigue, and endure an amount
of social and general physical strain which would have tried many younger men.
He carried on until the last a large, if not always serious, correspondence,
and only within the latest months, perhaps weeks of his life,
did his letters even suggest that physical brain-power was failing him.
He had, within the limits which his death has assigned to it,
a considerable recuperative power. His consciousness of health was vivid,
so long as he was well; and it was only towards the end
that the faith in his probable length of days occasionally deserted him.
But he died of no acute disease, more than seven years younger
than his father, having long carried with him external marks of age
from which his father remained exempt. Till towards the age of forty
he suffered from attacks of sore-throat, not frequent, but of an angry kind.
He was constantly troubled by imperfect action of the liver,
though no doctor pronounced the evil serious. I have spoken of this
in reference to his complexion. During the last twenty years, if not
for longer, he rarely spent a winter without a suffocating cold and cough;
within the last five, asthmatic symptoms established themselves;
and when he sank under what was perhaps his first real attack of bronchitis
it was not because the attack was very severe, but because the heart
was exhausted. The circumstances of his death recalled that of his mother;
and we might carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor,
and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him.