Life of Robert Browning [57]
a poetical pilgrimage, was made to Vaucluse,
sacred to the memory of Petrarch and Laura. There, as Mrs. Macpherson
has told us, at the very source of the "chiare, fresche e dolce acque,"
Browning took his wife up in his arms, and, carrying her across
through the shallow curling waters, seated her on a rock
that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus, indeed,
did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot immortalised
by Petrarch's loving fancy.
Three weeks passed happily before Pisa, the Brownings' destination,
was reached. But even then the friends were unwilling to part,
and Mrs. Jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city
for a score of days longer. So wonderful was the change
wrought in Mrs. Browning by happiness, and by all the enfranchisement
her marriage meant for her, that, as her friend wrote to Miss Mitford,
"she is not merely improved but transformed." In the new sunshine
which had come into her life, she blossomed like a flower-bud
long delayed by gloom and chill. Her heart, in truth, was like a lark
when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind.
At last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed for,
and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius "like an Arab bird
slept floating in the wind," it was with that restful hush
which precedes the creative storm. There is something deeply pathetic
in her conscious joy. So little actual experience of life had been hers that
in many respects she was as a child: and she had all the child's yearning
for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed.
But it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and brain
that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted,
how supreme a thing mere life is. It was in some such mood
that she wrote the lovely forty-second of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese",
closing thus --
"Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved, -- where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it."
As for Browning's love towards his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous
has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance.
It is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it
to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either.
That love knew no soilure in the passage of the years.
Like the flame of oriental legend, it was perennially incandescent
though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine.
If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either
into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as the uttered song
fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams star-like down the centuries
from the high steep of Leucadoe.
It was here, in Pisa, I have been told on indubitable authority,
that Browning first saw in manuscript those "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
which no poet of Portugal had ever written, which no man could have written,
which no other woman than his wife could have composed.
From the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers,
and that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal,
she had found expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems,
which she thinly disguised from `inner publicity' when she issued them
as "from the Portuguese".
It is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate,
flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan evenings --
with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara,
or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno
along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays -- showed her love-poems
to her husband. With what love and pride he must have read
those outpourings of the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met,
vials of lovely thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against
the coming of a golden day.
"How do I love
sacred to the memory of Petrarch and Laura. There, as Mrs. Macpherson
has told us, at the very source of the "chiare, fresche e dolce acque,"
Browning took his wife up in his arms, and, carrying her across
through the shallow curling waters, seated her on a rock
that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus, indeed,
did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot immortalised
by Petrarch's loving fancy.
Three weeks passed happily before Pisa, the Brownings' destination,
was reached. But even then the friends were unwilling to part,
and Mrs. Jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city
for a score of days longer. So wonderful was the change
wrought in Mrs. Browning by happiness, and by all the enfranchisement
her marriage meant for her, that, as her friend wrote to Miss Mitford,
"she is not merely improved but transformed." In the new sunshine
which had come into her life, she blossomed like a flower-bud
long delayed by gloom and chill. Her heart, in truth, was like a lark
when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind.
At last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed for,
and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius "like an Arab bird
slept floating in the wind," it was with that restful hush
which precedes the creative storm. There is something deeply pathetic
in her conscious joy. So little actual experience of life had been hers that
in many respects she was as a child: and she had all the child's yearning
for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed.
But it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and brain
that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted,
how supreme a thing mere life is. It was in some such mood
that she wrote the lovely forty-second of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese",
closing thus --
"Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved, -- where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it."
As for Browning's love towards his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous
has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance.
It is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it
to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either.
That love knew no soilure in the passage of the years.
Like the flame of oriental legend, it was perennially incandescent
though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine.
If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either
into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as the uttered song
fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams star-like down the centuries
from the high steep of Leucadoe.
It was here, in Pisa, I have been told on indubitable authority,
that Browning first saw in manuscript those "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
which no poet of Portugal had ever written, which no man could have written,
which no other woman than his wife could have composed.
From the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers,
and that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal,
she had found expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems,
which she thinly disguised from `inner publicity' when she issued them
as "from the Portuguese".
It is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate,
flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan evenings --
with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara,
or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno
along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays -- showed her love-poems
to her husband. With what love and pride he must have read
those outpourings of the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met,
vials of lovely thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against
the coming of a golden day.
"How do I love