Life and Letters of Robert Browning [95]
yet, if my fortune be such, and my survivors be not unduly troubled,
I should like them to lie in the place I have retained there.
It is no matter, however.'
==
The letter is dated October 19, 1866. He never saw Florence again.
Mr. Browning spent two months with his father and sister at St.-Enogat,
near Dinard, from which place the letter to Miss Blagden was written;
and then proceeded to London, where his wife's sister, Miss Arabel Barrett,
was living. He had declared in his first grief that he would
never keep house again, and he began his solitary life
in lodgings which at his request she had engaged for him;
but the discomfort of this arrangement soon wearied him of it;
and before many months had passed, he had sent to Florence for his furniture,
and settled himself in the house in Warwick Crescent, which possessed,
besides other advantages, that of being close to Delamere Terrace,
where Miss Barrett had taken up her abode.
This first period of Mr. Browning's widowed life was
one of unutterable dreariness, in which the smallest
and yet most unconquerable element was the prosaic ugliness of everything
which surrounded him. It was fifteen years since he had spent a winter
in England; he had never spent one in London. There had been nothing
to break for him the transition from the stately beauty of Florence
to the impressions and associations of the Harrow and Edgware Roads,
and of Paddington Green. He might have escaped this neighbourhood
by way of Westbourne Terrace; but his walks constantly led him
in an easterly direction; and whether in an unconscious hugging of his chains,
or, as was more probable, from the desire to save time, he would drag
his aching heart and reluctant body through the sordidness or the squalor
of this short cut, rather than seek the pleasanter thoroughfares
which were open to him. Even the prettiness of Warwick Crescent
was neutralized for him by the atmosphere of low or ugly life
which encompassed it on almost every side. His haunting dream
was one day to have done with it all; to have fulfilled his mission
with his son, educated him, launched him in a suitable career,
and to go back to sunshine and beauty again. He learned by degrees
to regard London as a home; as the only fitting centre
for the varied energies which were reviving in him;
to feel pride and pleasure in its increasingly picturesque character.
He even learned to appreciate the outlook from his house --
that `second from the bridge' of which so curious a presentment
had entered into one of the poems of the `Men and Women'* --
in spite of the refuse of humanity which would sometimes yell
at the street corner, or fling stones at his plate-glass.
But all this had to come; and it is only fair to admit
that twenty-nine years ago the beauties of which I have spoken
were in great measure to come also. He could not then in any mood
have exclaimed, as he did to a friend two or three years ago:
`Shall we not have a pretty London if things go on in this way?'
They were driving on the Kensington side of Hyde Park.
--
* `How it strikes a Contemporary'.
--
The paternal duty, which, so much against his inclination,
had established Mr. Browning in England, would in every case
have lain very near to his conscience and to his heart; but it especially
urged itself upon them through the absence of any injunction concerning it
on his wife's part. No farewell words of hers had commended their child
to his father's love and care; and though he may, for the moment,
have imputed this fact to unconsciousness of her approaching death,
his deeper insight soon construed the silence into an expression of trust,
more binding upon him than the most earnest exacted promise could have been.
The growing boy's education occupied a considerable part
of his time and thoughts, for he had determined not to send him to school,
but, as far as possible, himself prepare him for the University.
He must also, in some degree, have supervised his recreations.
He had therefore, for the present,