The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume Ii Part 50

Tell Dall' Ongaro that his friend M. Carl Grun had enough of me in one visit. He never came again, though I prayed him to come. I have not been equal to receiving in the evening, and perhaps he expected an invitation. I go to bed at eight on most nights. I'm the rag of a Ba.

Yet I _am_ stronger, and look much so, it seems to me. Mr. Story is _doing_ Robert's bust, which is likely to be a success.[103] Hatty brought us a most charming design for a fountain for Lady Marion Alford.

The imagination is unfolding its wings in Hatty. She is quite of a mind to spend the summer with you at Florence or elsewhere. The Storys talk of Switzerland....

Andersen (the Dane) came to see me yesterday--kissed my hand, and seemed in a general _verve_ for embracing. He is very earnest, very simple, very childlike. I like him. Pen says of him, 'He is not really pretty.

He is rather like his own ugly duck, but his mind has _developed_ into a swan.'

That wasn't bad of Pen, was it? He gets on with his Latin too. And, Isa, he has fastened a half-franc to his b.u.t.ton-hole, for the sake of the beloved image, and no power on earth can persuade him out of being so ridiculous. I was base enough to say that it wouldn't please the Queen of Spain! And he responded, he 'chose her to know that he _did_ love Napoleon'!

Isa, I send these two last poems that Dall' Ongaro may be aware of my sympathy's comprehending more sides than one of Italian experience.

We have taken no apartment yet!!!

_To Miss Browning_

Florence: June 7, 1861 [postmark].

I can't let Robert's disagreeable letter go alone, dearest Sarianna, though my word will be as heavy as a stone at the bottom of it. I am deeply sorry you should have had the vain hope of seeing Robert and Pen.

As for me, I know my place; I am only good for a drag chain. But, dear, don't fancy it has been the fault of my _will_. In fact, I said almost too much at Rome to Robert, till he fancied I had set my selfwill on tossing myself up as a halfpenny, and coming down on the wrong side.

Now, in fact, it was not at all (nearly) for Arabel that I wished to go, only I did really wish and do my best to go. He, on the other hand, before we left Rome, had made up his mind (helped by a stray physician of mine, whom he met in the street) that it would be a great risk to carry me north. He (Robert) always a little exaggerates the difficulties of travelling, and there's no denying that I have less strength than is usual to me even at the present time. I touched the line of vexing him, with my resistance to the decision, but he is so convinced that repose is necessary for me, and that the lions in the path will be all asleep by this time next year, that I yielded. Certainly he has a right to command me away from giving him unnecessary anxieties. What does vex me is that the dearest nonno should not see his Peni this year, and that you, dear, should be disappointed, _on my account again_. That's hard on us all. We came home into a cloud here. I can scarcely command voice or hand to name _Cavour_.[104] That great soul, which meditated and made Italy, has gone to the Diviner country. If tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine. I feel yet as if I could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy. A hundred Garibaldis for such a man. There is a hope that certain solutions had been prepared between him and the Emperor, and that events will slide into their grooves. May G.o.d save Italy! Dear M. Milsand had pleased me so by his appreciation, but there _are_ great difficulties. The French press, tell him, has, on the whole, done great service, except that part of it under the influence of the ultramontane and dynastic opposition parties. And as to exaggerated statements, it is hard, even here, to get at the truth (with regard to the state of the south), and many Italian liberals have had hours of anxiety and even of despondency. English friends of ours, very candid and liberal, have gone to Naples full of hope, and returned hoping nothing--yet they are wrong, unless this bitter loss makes them right--

Your loving BA--

Robert tears me away--

With this letter the correspondence of Mrs. Browning, so far, at least, as it is extant or accessible, comes to an end. The journey to Paris had been abandoned, but it does not appear that there was any cause to apprehend that her life could now be reckoned only by days. Yet so it was. For the past three years, it is evident, her strength had been giving way. Attacks of physical illness weakened her, without being followed by any adequate rally; but more than all, the continuous stress and strain of mental anxiety wore her strength away. The war of 1859, the liberation of Sicily and Naples, the intense irritation of feeling in connection with English opinion of Louis Napoleon and his policy, the continual ebb and flow of rumours concerning Venetia and the Papal States, the illness and death of her sister Henrietta--all these sources of anxiety told terribly on her sensitive, emotional mind, and thereby on her enfeebled body. The fragility of her appearance had always struck strangers. So far back as 1851, Bayard Taylor remarked that 'her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul.' Her 'fiery soul'

did, indeed, with a far more literal truth than can often be the case, fret her 'puny body to decay, and o'er-informed its tenement of clay.'

Her last illness--or, it may more truly be said, the last phase of that illness which had been present with her for years--was neither long nor severe; but she had no more strength left to resist it. Shortly after her return to Casa Guidi another bronchial attack developed itself, to all appearance just like many others that she had had before; but this time there was no recovery.

Of the last scene no other account need be asked or wished for than that given by Mr. Browning himself in a letter to Miss Haworth, dated July 20, 1861.[105]

My dear Friend,--I well know you feel, as you say, for her once and for me now. Isa Blagden, perfect in all kindness to me, will have told you something, perhaps, and one day I shall see you and be able to tell you myself as much as I can. The main comfort is that she suffered very little pain, none beside that ordinarily attending the simple attacks of cold and cough she was subject to, had no presentiment of the result whatever, and was consequently spared the misery of knowing she was about to leave us: she was smilingly a.s.suring me that she was 'better,'

'quite comfortable, if I would but come to bed,' to within a few minutes of the last. I think I foreboded evil at Rome, certainly from the beginning of the week's illness, but when I reasoned about it, there was no justifying fear. She said on the last evening 'It is merely the old attack, not so severe a one as that of two years ago; there is no doubt I shall soon recover,' and we talked over plans for the summer and next year. I sent the servants away and her maid to bed, so little reason for disquietude did there seem. Through the night she slept heavily and brokenly--that was the bad sign; but then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me, and sleep again. At four o'clock there were symptoms that alarmed me; I called the maid and sent for the doctor. She smiled as I proposed to bathe her feet, 'Well, you _are_ determined to make an exaggerated case of it!' Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer--the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek. These incidents so sustain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their right: there was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but G.o.d took her to Himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light. Thank G.o.d! Annunziata thought, by her earnest ways with me, happy and smiling as they were, that she must have been aware of our parting's approach, but she was quite conscious, had words at command, and yet did not even speak of Peni, who was in the next room. The last word was, when I asked, 'How do you feel?' 'Beautiful.'...

So ended on earth the most perfect example of wedded happiness in the history of literature--perfect in the inner life and perfect in its poetical expression. It was on June 29, 1861, that Mrs. Browning died.

She was buried at Florence, where her body rests in a sarcophagus designed by her friend and her husband's friend, Frederic Leighton, the future President of the Royal Academy. At a later date, when her husband was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, her remains might have been transferred to England, to lie with his among the great company of English poets in which they had earned their places. But it was thought better, on the whole, to leave them undisturbed in the land and in the city which she had loved so well, and which had been her home so long.

In life and in death she had been made welcome in Florence. The Italians, as her husband said, seemed to have understood her by an instinct; and upon the walls of Casa Guidi is a marble slab, placed there by the munic.i.p.ality of Florence, and bearing an inscription from the pen of the Italian poet, Tommaseo:--

QUI SCRISSE E MOR ELISABETTA BARRETT BROWNING CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA SCIENZA DI DOTTO E SPIRITO DI POETA E FECE DEL SUO VERSO AUREO ANELLO FRA ITALIA E INGHILTERRA.

PONE QUESTA LAPIDE FIRENZE GRATA 1861.

It is with words adapted from this memorial that her husband, seven years later, closed his own great poem, praying that the 'ring,' to which he likens it, might but--

'Lie outside thine, Lyric Love, Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised), Linking our England to his Italy.'

FOOTNOTES:

[77] This refers to the 'Curse for a Nation.'

[78] See note on p. 387. [Transcriber's note: Reference is to Footnote [87].]

[79] Mrs. Jameson died on March 17, 1860.

[80] The surrender to France of Savoy and Nice, which, though propounded by Napoleon to Cavour before the war, was only definitely demanded at the end of February 1860.

[81] Rome, it will be remembered, was still under Papal government.

[82] The French general appointed by the Pope in April, 1860, to command the Papal army.

[83] The Italian poet.

[84] So in the original, but probably a slip for 'goes abroad.'

[85] The _Cornhill Magazine_, the first number of which was published, under Thackeray's editors.h.i.+p, in December 1859. Mrs. Browning's poem, 'A Musical Instrument' (_Poetical Works_, v. 10), was published in the number for July 1860.

[86] His 'Framley Parsonage' was then appearing in the _Cornhill_.

[87] The champions.h.i.+p trophy of the prize ring. The great fight between Sayers and Heenan had just taken place (April 17, 1860), and had engrossed the interest of all England, to say nothing of America.

[88] It is not clear what this can be. Browning published nothing between 1855 ('Men and Women') and 1864 ('Dramatis Personae'), and there is no long poem in the latter, unless 'A Death in the Desert' and 'Sludge the Medium' may be so described. The latter is not unlikely to have been written now, when Home's performances were rampant. His next really long poem was 'The Ring and the Book,' which certainly had not yet been begun.

[89] A novel by Miss Blagden.

[90] Garibaldi was now engaged in his Neapolitan campaign. Sicily (except Messina) had been cleared of the Neapolitan troops by the end of July, and on August 19 Garibaldi had landed in Calabria.

[91] Now in the National Portrait Gallery. A reproduction of it is given as the frontispiece to vol. v. of the _Poetical Works_.

[92] 'A Musical Instrument'; see p. 377, above.

[93] Gaeta, the last remaining stronghold of the Neapolitan Government, was besieged by the Italian forces from November to January. During the first two months of the siege the French fleet prevented the Italians from operating against it by sea, and it was ultimately through the intervention of the English Government that Napoleon was persuaded to withdraw his s.h.i.+ps.

[94] Viterbo had declared for the Italian government, but had been occupied by French troops on behalf of the Pope. Many of the inhabitants left it, and a body of Italian volunteers entered the country in support of them. It is presumably to this movement that the pa.s.sage in the text refers.

[95] _Poetical Works_, v. 3. The poem evidently refers to the loss of her brother Edward, but might be supposed (being published at this moment) to refer to the death of her sister Henrietta, shortly after which this letter was evidently written.

[96] Gaeta fell on January 15, 1861.

[97] Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A.

[98] Mrs. Orr's _Life_ shows that this was only a temporary phase. In later life, especially, he was very regular in his hours of poetical work.

[99] It is curious that these are the very words which (as a translation from the Greek) Robert Browning used ten years later as the motto of his study of Louis Napoleon in 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau'; but the 'crowning' was of a very different kind then.