CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FROM 
 
 3 . S.ilonroe 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 PR 463.R59 1892a 
 
 Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning 
 
 3 1924 012 981 365 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924012981365 
 
RECORDS 
 
 OF 
 
 TENNYSON, RUSKIN, & BROWNING 
 
RECORDS 
 
 OF 
 
 TENNYSON, RUSKIN 
 
 AND 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNE RITCHIE 
 
 HonBon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1892 
 
 A II rights reserved 
 T 
 
 Hi'lVt^Rf-fTY 
 
" Mind that there is always a certain cadiet about great men 
 — they speak of common life more largely and generously than 
 common men do — they regard the world with a manlier countenance, 
 and see its real features more fairly than the timid shufflers who 
 only dare to look up at life through blinkers, or to have an opinion 
 when there is a crowd to back it." — English Humourists. 
 
 '•'■ ' I remember poor Byron, Hobhouse, Trelawney, and myself, 
 dining with Cardinal Mezzocaldo at Rome,' Captain Sumph began, 
 'and we had some Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very 
 much. And I remember how the Cardinal regretted that he was a 
 single man. We went to Civita Vecchia two days afterwards where 
 Byron's yacht was — and, by Jove, the Cardinal died within three 
 weeks, and Byron was very sorry for he rather liked him.' 
 
 "'A devilish interesting story, indeed,' Wagg said. 'You should 
 publish some of these stories, Captain Sumph, you really should,' 
 Shandon said." — Petidennis. 
 
TO 
 
 HELENA FJUCIT, LADY MARTIN 
 
 AND TO 
 
 SIR THEODORE MARTIN, K.C.B. 
 
 DEDICATED JVITH OLD AFFECTION 
 AND REMEMBRANCE 
 
 11th May 189Z. 
 
 Imogen. " 'Mongst Friends ! " 
 
 Cytnieline, III. vi. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON i 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 6i 
 
 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING . . .157 
 
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 ■' A footfall there 
 Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
 Half germinating spices ; mere decay 
 Produces richer life ; and day by day 
 New pollen on the lily-petal grows 
 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose." 
 
 Sordello. 
 
 I 
 
 There is a place called Somersby in Lincoln- 
 shire, where an old white rectory stands on the 
 slope of a hill, and the winding lanes are 
 shadowed by tall ashes and elm - trees, and 
 where two brooks meet at the bottom of the 
 glebe field. It is a place far away from us in 
 silence and in distance, lying upon the " ridged 
 wolds." They bound the horizon of the 
 rectory garden, whence they are to be seen 
 flowing to meet the sky. I have never known 
 
2 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 Somersby, but I have often heard it described, 
 and the pastoral country all about, and the 
 quiet scattered homes. One can picture the 
 rectory to one's self with something of a 
 monastic sweetness and quiet ; an ancient Nor- 
 man cross is standing in the churchyard, and 
 perhaps there is still a sound in the air of the 
 bleating of flocks. It all comes before one as 
 one reads the sketch of Tennyson's native place, ^ 
 of the village not far from the fens, " in a pretty 
 pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large 
 ash-trees. . . . The little glen in the neigh- 
 bourhood is called by the old monkish name 
 of Holywell." Lord Tennyson sometimes 
 speaks of this glen, which he remembers white 
 with snowdrops in their season ; and who will 
 not recall the exquisite invocation — 
 
 "Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, 
 The seven elms, the poplars four 
 That stand beside my father's door. 
 And chiefly from the brook that loves 
 To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand. 
 Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves. . . . 
 
 ^ In the Homes and Haunts oftlie British Poets, 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 O ! hither lead thy feet ! 
 Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat 
 Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds. 
 
 Upon the ridged wolds." 
 
 The wind that goes blowing where it 
 listeth, once, in the early beginning of this 
 century, came sweeping through the garden of 
 this old Lincolnshire rectory, and, as the wind 
 blew, a sturdy child of five years old with 
 shining locks stood opening his arms upon the 
 blast and letting himself be blown along ; and 
 as he travelled on he made his first line of 
 poetry and said, " I hear a voice that's speaking 
 in the wind," and he tossed his arms, and the 
 gust whirled on, sweeping into the great abyss 
 of winds. One might perhaps still trace in 
 the noble familiar face of our Poet Laureate 
 the features of this child, one of many deep- 
 eyed sons and daughters born in the quiet 
 rectory among the elm-trees. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of 
 August 1809. He has heard many and many 
 a voice calling to him since the time when he 
 
4 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 listened to the wind as he played alone in his 
 father's garden, or joined the other children at 
 their games and jousts. They were a noble 
 little clan of poets and of knights, coming of 
 a knightly race, with castles to defend, with 
 mimic tournaments to fight. Somersby was so 
 far away from the world, so behindhand in its 
 echoes (which must have come there softened 
 through all manner of green and tranquil 
 things, and as it were hushed into pastoral 
 silence), that though the early part of the 
 century was stirring with the clang of legions, 
 few of its rumours seem to have reached the 
 children. They never heard at the time of the 
 battle of Waterloo. They grew up together 
 playing their own games, living their own 
 life ; and where is such life to be found as that 
 of a happy, eager family of boys and girls 
 before Doubt, the steps of Time, the shocks 
 of Chance, the blows of Death, have come to 
 dim their creed ? 
 
 These handsome children had beyond most 
 children that wondrous toy at their command 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 5 
 
 which some people call imagination. The boys 
 played great games like Arthur's knights ; 
 they were champions and warriors defending 
 a stone heap, or again they would set up oppos- 
 ing camps with a king in the midst of each. 
 The king was a willow wand stuck into the 
 ground, with an outer circle of immortals to 
 defend him of firmer, stifFer sticks. Then 
 each party would come with stones, hurling at 
 each other's king, and trying to overthrow 
 him. Perhaps as the day wore on they became 
 romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When 
 dinner-time came, and they all sat round the 
 table, each in turn put a chapter of his story 
 underneath the potato bowl — long, endless 
 stories, chapter after chapter diffuse, absorbing, 
 unending, as are the histories of real life ; 
 some of these romances were in letters, like 
 Clarissa Harlowe. Alfred used to tell a story 
 which lasted for months, and which was called 
 " The Old Horse." 
 
 The Laureate's first verses, so I once heard 
 him say, were written upon a slate which his 
 
6 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 brother Charles put into his hand one Sunday 
 at Louth, when all the elders of the party were 
 going into church, and the child was left alone. 
 Charles gave him a subject — the flowers in 
 the garden — and when he came back from 
 church little Alfred brought the slate to his 
 brother all covered with written lines of blank 
 verse. They were made on the model of 
 Thomson's Seasons, the only poetry he had 
 ever read. One can picture it all to one's self, 
 the flowers in the garden, the verses, the little 
 poet with waiting eyes, and the young brother 
 scanning the lines. " Yes, you can write," said 
 Charles, and he gave Alfred back the slate. 
 
 I have also heard another story of his grand- 
 father, later on, asking him to write an elegy 
 on his grandmother, who had recently died, 
 and when it was written, putting ten shillings 
 into his hands and saying, " There, that is the 
 first money you have ever earned by your poetry, 
 and, take my word for it, it will be the last." 
 
 The Tennysons are a striking example of 
 the theory of family gifts and tendencies. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 7 
 
 Alfred was one of twelve children, of whom 
 the eldest, Frederick, who was educated at 
 Eton, is known as the author of very imagina- 
 tive poems. Charles, the author of the lovely 
 sonnets, was the second son, and Alfred was 
 the third. Charles and little Alfred were sent 
 for a few years to the Grammar School at 
 Louth, where the Laureate was not happy, 
 although he still remembers walking ad.orned 
 with blue ribbons in a procession for the pro- 
 clamation of the coronation of George IV. 
 The old wives said at the time that the boys 
 made the prettiest part of the show. 
 
 Charles Tennyson — Charles Turner he was 
 afterwards called^ for he took the name with a 
 property which he inherited — was Alfred's 
 special friend and brother. In his own most 
 sweet degree, Charles Tennyson too was a true 
 ppet. Who that has ever read his sonnets 
 will cease to love them ? His brother loves 
 and quotes them with affection. Coleridge 
 loved them ; James Spedding, wise critic, life- 
 long friend, read them with, unaltered delight 
 
8 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 from his youth to his much-honoured age. In 
 an introductory essay to a volume of the col- 
 lected sonnets, published after Charles Turner's 
 death, Mr. Spedding quotes the picture of a 
 summer's daybreak : 
 
 " But one sole star, none other anywhere ; 
 A wild-rose odour from the fields was borne ; 
 The lark's mysterious joy filled earth and air, 
 And from the wind's top met the hunter's horn ; 
 The aspen trembled wildly ; and the morn 
 Breathed up in rosy clouds divinely fair." 
 
 Charles Tennyson was in looks not unlike 
 his younger brother. He was stately, too, 
 though shorter in stature, gentle, spiritual, very 
 noble, simple. I once saw him kneeling in a 
 church, and only once again. He was like 
 something out of some other world more holy, 
 more silent than that in which most of us are 
 living ; there is a picture in the National 
 Gallery of St. Jerome which always recalls him 
 to me. The sons must have inherited their 
 poetic gifts from their father, the Rev. George 
 Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., a tall, striking, and 
 impressive man, full of accomplishments and 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 9 
 
 parts, a strong nature, high - souled, high - 
 tempered. He was the head of the old family ; 
 but his own elder -brother share of its good 
 things had passed by will into the hands of 
 another branch, which is still represented by 
 the Tennysons d'Eyncourt. Perhaps before 
 he died he may have realised that to one of his 
 had come possessions greater than any ever yet 
 entailed by lawyer's deeds — an inheritance, a 
 priceless Benjamin's portion, not to be measured 
 or defined. 
 
 II 
 
 Alfi-ed Tennyson, as he grew up toward 
 manhood, found other and stronger inspirations 
 than Thomson's gentle Seasons. Byron's spell 
 had fallen on his generation, and for a boy of 
 genius it must have been absolute and over- 
 mastering. Tennyson was soon to find his 
 own voice, but meanwhile he began to write 
 like Byron. He produced poems and verses in 
 endless abundance : trying his wings, as people 
 say, before starting on his own strong flight. 
 
lo ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 One day the news came to the village — the 
 dire news which spread across the land, filling 
 men's hearts with consternation — that Byron 
 was dead. Alfred was then a boy about 
 fifteen. 
 
 " Byron was dead ! I thought the whole 
 world was at an end," he once said, speaking 
 of these bygone days. "I thought everything 
 was over and finished for every one — that 
 nothing else mattered. I remember I walked 
 out alone, and carved ' Byron is dead ' into the 
 sandstone." 
 
 I have spoken of Tennyson from the ac- 
 count of an old friend, whose recollections go 
 back to those days, which seem perhaps more 
 distant to us than others of even earlier date 
 but later fashion. Mrs. Tennyson, the mother 
 of the family, so this same friend tells me, 
 was a sweet and gentle and most imaginative 
 woman ; so kind - hearted that it had passed 
 into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of 
 a neighbouring village used to bring their dogs 
 to her windows and beat them in order to be 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON ii 
 
 bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to 
 
 make advantageous bargains by selling her the 
 
 worthless curs. She was intensely, fervently 
 
 religious, as a poet's mother should be. After 
 
 her husband's death (he had added to the 
 
 rectory, and made it suitable for his large 
 
 family) she still lived on at Somersby with her 
 
 children and their friends. The daughters 
 
 were growing up, the elder sons were going to 
 
 college. Frederick, the eldest, went first to 
 
 Trinity, Cambridge, and his brothers followed 
 
 him there in turn. Life was opening for them 
 
 all, they were seeing new aspects and places, 
 
 making new friends, and bringing them home to 
 
 their Lincolnshire rectory. "In Memoriam " 
 
 gives many a glimpse of the old home, of which 
 
 the echoes still reach us across half a century — 
 
 " O sound to rout the brood of cares. 
 
 The sweep of scythe in morning dew. 
 The gust that round the garden flew, 
 And tumbled half the mellowing pears ! 
 
 " O bliss, when all in circle drawn 
 About him, heart and ear were fed 
 To hear him, as he lay and read 
 The Tuscan poets on the lawn : 
 
12 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 " Or in the all-golden afternoon 
 A guest, or happy sister, sung, 
 Or here she brought the harp and flung 
 A ballad to the brightening moon." 
 
 Dean Garden was one of those guests here 
 spoken of, who, with Arthur Hallam, the 
 reader of the Tuscan poets, and James Spedding 
 and others, used to gather upon the lawn at 
 Somersby — the young men and women in the 
 light of their youth and high spirits, the widowed 
 mother spending out her quiet life within the 
 rectory walls. Was it not a happy sister her- 
 self who, in after -days, once described how, 
 on a lovely summer night, they had all sat up 
 so late talking in the starlight that the dawn 
 came shining unawares ; but the young men, 
 instead of going to bed, then and there set off 
 for a long walk across the hills in the sunrise .'' 
 
 " And suck'd from out the distant gloom 
 A breeze began to tremble o'er 
 The large leaves of the sycamore,^ 
 And fluctuate all the still perfume. 
 
 ' I am told that the sycamore has been cut down, and the lawn is 
 altered to another shape. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 13 
 
 " And gathering freshlier overhead, 
 
 Rock'd the full-foHaged elms, and swung 
 The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
 The lilies to and fro, and said 
 
 " ' The dawn, the dawn,' and died away ; 
 And East and West, without a breath, 
 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 Ill 
 
 One thing which cannot fail to strike us 
 when we are looking over the records of these 
 earlier days is the remarkable influence which 
 Alfred Tennyson seems to have had from the 
 very first upon his contemporaries, even before 
 his genius had been recognised by the rest of 
 the world. Not only those of his own genera- 
 tion, but his elders and masters seem to have 
 felt something of this. I remember hearing 
 one of Tennyson's oldest friends. Dr. Thomp- 
 son, the late Master of Trinity, say that 
 " Whewell, who was a man himself, and who 
 knew a man when he saw him," used to pass 
 over in Alfred Tennyson certain informalities 
 
14 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 and forgetfulness of combinations as to gowns, 
 and places, and times, which in another he 
 would never have overlooked. 
 
 Whewell ruled a noble generation — a race 
 of men born in the beginning of the century, 
 whose praise and loyal friendship were indeed 
 worth having, and whose good opinion Tenny- 
 son himself may have been proud to possess. 
 Wise, sincere, and witty, these contemporaries 
 spoke with authority, with the moderation of 
 conscious strength.^ Any of this race that I 
 have known in later days — for they were many 
 of them my father's friends also — have all been 
 men of unmistakable stamp, of great culture, 
 of a certain dignified bearing, and of inde- 
 pendence of mind and of nature. 
 
 Most of them have succeeded in life as men 
 do who are possessed of intellect and high 
 character. Some have not made the less mark 
 
 ■*"...! could scarcely accept it, being, I fancy, a modest man, and 
 always more or less doubtful of my own efforts in any line j but I may 
 tell you that your note gave me more pleasure than all the journals and 
 monthlies and quarterlies which have come across me : not so much 
 from your being the great novelist, I hope, as from your being my good 
 old friend, or perhaps from your being both of these in one. Well — let 
 it be." — Lord Tennyson to W. M. T. about praise. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 15 
 
 upon their time because their names are less 
 widely known ; but each name is a memorable 
 chapter in life to one and another of us who 
 remember them. One of these old friends, 
 who also loved my father, and whom he loved, 
 who has himself just passed away, one who saw 
 life with his own eyes, and spoke with his own 
 words, has described Tennyson in his youth, 
 in a fragment, which is a remembrance, a 
 sort of waking dream, of some bygone days 
 and talks. How many of us might have been 
 glad to listen to our poet, and to the poet who 
 has made the philosophy of Omar Khayyam 
 known to the world, as they discoursed to- 
 gether of life, of boyish memories, of books, 
 and again more books, of chivalry — mainly 
 but another name for youth — of a possible old 
 age so thoroughly seasoned with its spirit that 
 all the experience of the world should serve 
 not to freeze but to direct the genial current 
 of the soul ! and who that has known them 
 both will not recognise the truth of this de- 
 scription of Alfred in early days ? 
 
1 6 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 " A man at all points, of grand proportion 
 and feature significant of that inward chivalry 
 becoming his ancient and honourable race ; 
 when himself a ' Yonge Squire,' like him in 
 Chaucer, ' of grete strength,' that could hurl 
 the crowbar farther than any of the neighbour- 
 ing clowns, whose humours, as well as of their 
 betters — knight, squire, landlord, and lieu- 
 tenant — he took quiet note of, like Chaucer 
 himself; like Wordsworth on the mountain, 
 he too when a lad abroad on the world, some- 
 times of a night with the shepherd, watching 
 not only the flock on the greensward, but also 
 
 " ' The fleecy star that bears 
 Andromeda far off Atlantic seas,' 
 
 along with those other Zodiacal constellations 
 which Aries, I think, leads over the fieldof heaven." 
 Arthur Hallam has also written of Tenny- 
 son in some lines to R. J. Tennant — 
 
 " A friend, a rare one, 
 A noble being full of clearest insight, 
 . Whose fame 
 Is couching now with pantherised intent, 
 As who shall say, I'll spring to him anon, 
 And have him for my own." 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 17 
 
 All these men could understand each other, 
 although they had not then told the world 
 their secrets. Poets, critics, men of learning 
 — such names as Trench, and Monckton 
 Milnes, George Stovin Venables, the Lushing- 
 tons, and Kinglake, need no comment ; many 
 more there are, and deans and canons, a youthful 
 band in those days — 
 
 " Meeting to hold debate on mind and art. 
 And labour, and the changing mart, 
 And all the frame-work of the land ; 
 When one would aim an arrow fair, 
 But send it slackly from the string ; 
 And one would pierce an outer ring, 
 And one an inner, here and there : 
 And last the master-bowman, he 
 Would cleave the mark." 
 
 The lines to J. S. were written to one of 
 those earlier associates. 
 
 " And gently comes the world to those 
 That are cast in gentle mould." 
 
 It was the prophecy of a whole lifetime. 
 There were but few signs of age in James 
 Spedding's looks, none in his charming com- 
 
1 8 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 panionship, when the accident befell him which 
 took him away from those who loved him. 
 To another old companion, the Rev. W. H. 
 Brookfield, is dedicated that sonnet which 
 flows like an echo of Cambridge chimes on a 
 Sabbath morning. It is in this sonnet to Mr. 
 Brookfield that Tennyson writes of Arthur 
 Hallam as " Him, the lost light of those dawn- 
 golden times." 
 
 IV 
 
 Arthur Hallam was the same age as my own 
 father, and was born in 1 8 1 1 . When he died 
 he was but twenty-three ; but he had lived long 
 enough to show what his life might have been. 
 
 In the preface to a little volume of his 
 collected poems and essays, published some 
 time after his death, there is a pathetic intro- 
 duction. "He seemed to tread the earth as a 
 spirit from some better world," writes his father. 
 A correspondent — who is, so I have been told, 
 Arthur Hallam's and Tennyson's common 
 friendj Mr. Gladstone — says with deep feeling : 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 19 
 
 " It has pleased God that in his death, as well 
 as in his life and nature, he should be marked 
 beyond ordinary men. When much time has 
 elapsed, when most bereavements will be for- 
 gotten, he will still be remembered, and his place, 
 I fear, will be felt to be still vacant ; singularly as 
 his mind was calculated by its native tendencies 
 to work powerfully and for good, in an age foil 
 of import to the nature and destinies of man." 
 
 How completely these words (which seem 
 so familiar in their unmistakable tones) have 
 been carried out ! The father lived to see the 
 young man's unconscious influence working 
 through his friend's genius, and reaching whole 
 generations unborn at the time of his death. 
 A lady, speaking of Arthur Hallam long after, 
 said with emotion to Lord Tennyson, " I think 
 he was perfect." — " And so he was," said Lord 
 Tennyson, " as near perfection as a mortal 
 man can be." Arthur Hallam was a man of 
 remarkable intellect. He could take in the 
 most difficult and abstruse ideas with an 
 extraordinary rapidity and insight. On one 
 
20 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 occasion he began to work one afternoon, and 
 mastered a difficult book of Descartes at a 
 single sitting. In the preface to the Memorials 
 Mr. Hallam speaks of this peculiar clearness 
 of perception and facility for acquiring know- 
 ledge ; but, above all, the father dwells on his 
 son's undeviating sweetness of disposition and 
 adherence to his sense of what was right. In 
 the Quarterlies and Reviews of the time, his 
 opinion is quoted here and there with a respect 
 which shows in what esteem it was already held. 
 At the time when Arthur Hallam died, he 
 was engaged to be married to a sister of the 
 poet. She was scarcely seventeen at the time. 
 One of the sonnets, addressed by Arthur 
 Hallam to his betrothed, was written when he 
 began to teach her Italian. 
 
 " Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, 
 
 Ringing with echoes of Italian song ; 
 
 Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong, 
 And all the pleasant place is like a home. 
 Hark, on the right, with full piano tone, 
 
 Old Dante's voice encircles all the air ; 
 
 Hark yet again, like flute-tones mingling rare 
 Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON zi 
 
 Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear , 
 Feast on the music. I do better know thee 
 Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me 
 
 Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear 
 That element whence thou must draw thy life — 
 An English maiden and an English wife." 
 
 As we read the pages of his little book of 
 poems we come upon more than one happy 
 moment saved out of the past : hours of delight 
 and peaceful friendship, saddened by no fore- 
 boding, and complete in themselves. 
 
 " Alfred, I would that you beheld me now. 
 Sitting beneath an ivied, mossy wall. 
 
 . . . Above my head 
 Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves, 
 Seeming received into the blue expanse 
 That vaults the summer noon." 
 
 There is something touching in the tranquil 
 ring of the voice calling out in the summer 
 noontide with all a young man's expansion. 
 
 It seemed to be but the beginning of a 
 beautiful, happy life, when suddenly the end 
 came. Arthur Hallam was travelling with his 
 father in Austria when he died very suddenly. 
 
22 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 with scarce a warning sign of illness. Mr. 
 Hallam had come home and found his son, 
 as he supposed, sleeping upon a couch ; but 
 it was death, not sleep. " Those whose eyes 
 must long be dim with tears" — so writes the 
 heart-stricken father — " brought him home to 
 rest among his kindred and in his own country." 
 They chose his resting-place in a tranquil spot 
 on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel. 
 He was buried in the chancel of Clevedon Church, 
 in Somerset, by Clevedon Court, which had been 
 the early home of his mother, who was an Elton 
 by birth. 
 
 In all England there is not a sweeter place 
 than the sunny old Court upon the hill, with 
 its wide prospects and grassy terraces, where 
 Arthur Hallam must have played in his child- 
 hood, whence others of his kindred, touched 
 with his own bright and beautiful spirit, have 
 come forth. When Mr. Hallam, after a life 
 of repeated sorrows, at last went to his rest 
 with his wife and his children, it was Alfred 
 Tennyson who wrote his epitaph, which may 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 23 
 
 Still be read in the chancel of the old Clevedon 
 Church. 
 
 V 
 
 Once in their early youth we hear of the 
 two friends, Tennyson and Hallam, travelling 
 in the Pyrenees. This was at the time of 
 the war of Spanish independence, when many 
 generous young men went over with funds 
 and good energie's to help the cause of liberty. 
 These two were taking money, and letters 
 written in invisible ink, to certain conspirators 
 who were then revolting against the intolerable 
 tyranny of Ferdinand, and who were chiefly 
 hiding in the Pyrenees. The young men met, 
 among others, a Senor Ojeda, who confided to 
 Tennyson his intentions, which were to couper 
 la gorge a tous les cures. Senor Ojeda could 
 not talk English or flilly explain all his aspira- 
 tions. " Mais vous connaissez mon coeur," 
 said he efftisively. " And a pretty black one 
 it is," thought the poet. I have heard Tenny- 
 son described in those days as " straight and 
 
24 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 with a broad breast," and when he had crossed 
 over from the Continent and was coming back, 
 walking through Wales, he went one day into 
 a little wayside inn, where an old man sat by 
 the fire, who looked up and asked many 
 questions. "Are you from the army? Not 
 from the army? Then where do you come 
 from ? " said the old man. " I am just come 
 from the Pyrenees," said Alfred. " Ah, I 
 knew there was a something," said the wise old 
 man. 
 
 John Kemble was among those who had 
 gone over to Spain, and one day a rumour 
 came to distant Somersby that he was to be 
 tried for his life by the Spanish authorities. 
 No one else knew much about him except 
 Alfred Tennyson, who started before dawn to 
 drive across the country in search of some 
 person of authority who knew the consul at 
 Cadiz, and who could send letters of protection 
 to the poor prisoner. 
 
 It was a false alarm. John Kemble came 
 home to make a name for himself in other 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 25 
 
 fields. Meanwhile Alfred Tennyson's own 
 reputation was growing, and when the first 
 two volumes of his collected poems were pub- 
 lished in 1842, followed by "The Princess" in 
 1847, his fame spread throughout the land. 
 
 Some of the reviews were violent and 
 antagonistic at first. One in particular had 
 tasted blood, and the " Hang, draw, and 
 quarterly," as it has been called, of those days, 
 having lately cut up Endymion, now proceeded 
 to demolish Tennyson. 
 
 But this was a passing phase. It is curious 
 to note the sudden change in the tone of the 
 criticisms — the absolute surrender of these 
 knights of the pen to the irresistible and 
 brilliant advance of the unknown and visored 
 warrior. The visor is raised now, the face is 
 familiar to us all, and the arms, though tested 
 in a hundred fights, are shining and uncon- 
 quered still. 
 
 William Howitt, whom we have already 
 quoted, has written an article upon the Tenny- 
 son of these earlier days. It is fanciful, suggestive. 
 
26 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 full of interest, with a gentle, mysterious play 
 and tender appreciation. Speaking of the poet 
 himself, he asks, with the rest of the world 
 of that time, " You may hear his voices but 
 where is the man ? He is wandering in 
 some dreamland, beneath the shade of old 
 and charmed forests, by far-ofF shores, where 
 
 " ' All night 
 The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-led waters white' ; 
 
 by the old mill-dam, thinking of the merry 
 miller and his pretty daughter ; or wandering 
 over the open wolds where 
 
 " ' Norland whirlwinds blow.' 
 
 From all these places — from the silent corridor 
 of an ancient convent, from some shrine where 
 a devoted knight recites his vows, from the 
 drear monotony of ' the moated grange,' or the 
 forest beneath the ' talking oak '■ — comes the 
 voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate, 
 yet not impatient, musical with the airs of 
 chivalrous ages, yet mingling in his song the 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 27 
 
 theme and the spirit of those that are yet to 
 come." 
 
 This article was written many years ago, 
 when but the first chords had sounded, before 
 the glorious Muse, passing beyond her morning 
 joy, had met with the sorrow of life. But it is 
 well that as we travel on through later, sadder 
 scenes we should still carry in our hearts this 
 romantic music. One must be English-born, 
 I think, to know how English is the spell 
 which this great enchanter casts over us ; 
 the very spirit of the land falls upon us as 
 the visions he evokes come closing round. 
 Whether it is the moated grange he shows 
 us, or Locksley Hall that in the distance over- 
 looks the sandy tracts, or Dora standing in 
 the corn, or the light of the brimming wave 
 that swings through the quiet meadows round 
 about the mill, it is all home in its broadest, 
 sweetest aspect. 
 
 It would not be easy for a generation that 
 has grown up to the music of Tennyson, that 
 has in a manner beaten time to it with the pulse 
 
28 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 of its life, to imagine what the world would 
 be without it. Even the most original amongst 
 us must needs think of things more or less in 
 the shape in which they come before us. The 
 mystery of the charm of words is as great as 
 that by which a wonder of natural beauty 
 comes around us, and lays hold of our imagina- 
 tion. It may be fancy, but I for one feel as if 
 summer-time could scarcely be summer without 
 the song of the familiar green books. 
 
 VI 
 
 " In Memoriam," with music in its cantos, 
 belonging to the school of all men's sad hearts, 
 rings the awfiil De Profundis of death, faced 
 and realised as far as may be by a human soul. 
 It came striking suddenly into all the sweet 
 ideal beauty and lovely wealth which had gone 
 before, with a revelation of that secret of life 
 which is told to each of us in turn by the 
 sorrow of its own soul. Nothing can be more 
 simple than the form of the poem as it flows. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 29 
 
 " Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
 Their wings in tears, and skim away," 
 
 as the poet says himself, but it is something 
 else besides — something which has given words 
 and ease to many of those who in their lonely 
 frozen grief perhaps feel that they are no 
 longer quite alone, when such a voice as this 
 can reach them — 
 
 " Peace ; come away : the song of woe 
 Is after all an earthly song : 
 Peace ; come away : we do him wrong 
 To sing so wildly : let us go." 
 
 And as the cry passes away, come signs of peace 
 and dawning light — 
 
 " Be neither song, nor game, nor feast ; 
 
 Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown ; 
 No dance, no motion, save alone 
 What lightens in the lucid east 
 
 " Of rising worlds by yonder wood. 
 
 Long' sleeps the summer in the seed ; 
 Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
 The closing cycle rich in good." 
 
 And the teacher who can read the great book 
 of nature interprets for us as he turns the page. 
 
30 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 With " In Memorlam," which was not 
 published till 1850, Alfred Tennyson's fame 
 was firmly established ; and when Wordsworth 
 died, on Shakespeare's day in that same year, 
 its author was appointed by the Queen Poet- 
 Laureate. There is a story ^ that, a kw years 
 before this, when Sir Robert Peel was consulted 
 about a pension, he had never known any of 
 Tennyson's writings, but he read " Ulysses " at 
 Lord Houghton's suggestion and kindled up, and 
 acknowledged the right of this new-come poet. 
 
 The home at Somersby was broken up by 
 this time, by marriages and other family events. 
 Alfred Tennyson had come to live in London. 
 He was poor; he had in turn to meet that 
 struggle with wholesome poverty which brings 
 the vagueness of genius into contact with 
 reality, and teaches, better, perhaps, than any 
 other science, the patience, the forbearance, and 
 knowledge of life which belong to it. 
 
 " The Princess," with all her lovely court 
 and glowing harmonies, was created in London, 
 
 ^ See Lord Houghton's Memoirs, 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 31 
 
 among the fogs and smuts of Lincoln's Inn, 
 although, like all works of true art, this poem 
 must have grown by degrees in other times and 
 places, as the poet came and went, free, un- 
 shackled, meditating, inditing. He says that 
 " Tears, idle Tears," was suggested by Tintern 
 Abbey — who shall define by what mysteri- 
 ous wonder of beauty and regret, by what 
 sense of the " transient with the abiding " ? 
 
 " In Memoriam " was followed by the first part 
 of the " Idylls," by the record of the court King 
 Arthur held at Camelot, and at " old Caerleon 
 upon Usk " on that eventfiil Whitsuntide when 
 Prince Geraint came quickly flashing through 
 the shallow ford to the little knoll where the 
 queen stood with her maiden, and 
 
 "... listen'd for the distant hunt. 
 And chiefly for the baying of Cavall." 
 
 If " In Memoriam " is the record of a human 
 soul, the " Idylls " mean the history, not of one 
 man or of one generation, but of a whole 
 cycle, of the faith of a nation failing and 
 
32 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 falling away into darkness. The first Idyll 
 and the last, I have heard Lord Tennyson say, 
 are intentionally more archaic than the others. 
 " The whole is the dream of man coming into 
 practical life, and ruined by one sin. Birth 
 is a mystery, and death is a mystery, and in 
 the midst lies the table - land of life, and its 
 struggle and performance." 
 
 The poet once told us that the song of the 
 knights marching past the king at the marriage 
 of Arthur was made one spring afternoon on 
 Clapham Common as he walked along. 
 
 " Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May ; 
 Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away ! 
 Blow thro' the living world — ' Let the King reign.' " 
 
 So sang the young knights in the first bright 
 days of early chivalry. 
 
 " Clang battleaxe, and clash brand ! Let the King reign. 
 The King will follow Christ, and we the King." 
 
 And then when the doom of evil spread, 
 bringing not sorrow alone, but destruction in 
 its train, not death only, but hopelessness and 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 33 
 
 consternation, the song is finally changed into 
 an echo of strange woe ; we hear no shout of 
 triumph, but the dim shocks of battle — 
 
 " The crash 
 Of battleaxe on shatter'd helms, and shrieks 
 After the Christ, of those who falling down 
 Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist." 
 
 All is over with the fair court ; Guinevere's 
 golden head is low ; she has fled to Almesbury — 
 
 "Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, 
 And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald 
 Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan : 
 And in herself she moan'd, ' Too late, too" late !' 
 Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, 
 A blot in heaven, the Raven, flying high, 
 Croak'd, and she thought, ' He spies a field of death.' " 
 
 And finally comes the conclusion, and the 
 " Passing of Arthur," and he vanishes as he 
 came, in mystery, silently floating away upon 
 the barge toward the East, whence all religions 
 are sa,id to come. As the writer notes down 
 these various fragments, and compiles this 
 sketch of remembered and of present things, she 
 cannot but feel how much of the past it all 
 
34 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 means to her, and how very much her own 
 feeling is an inheritance which has gathered 
 interest during a lifetime, so that the chief 
 claim of her words to be regarded, is that they 
 are those of an old friend. Her father's 
 warmth of admiration comes back to her vividly 
 as she writes, all his pleasure when he secured 
 " Tithonus " for one of the early numbers of 
 the Cornhill Magazine, his immense outspoken 
 admiration for the " Idylls of the King." 
 
 I have heard them all speak of these London 
 days when Alfred Tennyson lived in poverty 
 with his friends and his golden dreams. He 
 lived in the Temple, at 58 Lincoln's Inn 
 Fields, and elsewhere. 
 
 It was about this time that Carlyle intro- 
 duced Sir John Simeon to Tennyson one night 
 at Bath House, and made the often - quoted 
 speech, " There he sits upon a dung - heap 
 surrounded by innumerable dead dogs"; by 
 which dead dogs he meant " CEnone " and other 
 Greek versions and adaptations. He had said 
 the same thing of Landor and his Hellenics. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 35 
 
 " I was told of this," said Lord Tennyson, 
 " and some time afterward I repeated it to 
 Carlyle : ' I'm told that is what you say of 
 me.' He gave a kind of guffaw. ' Eh, that 
 wasn't a very luminous description of you,' 
 he answered." 
 
 The story is well worth retelling, so com- 
 pletely does it illustrate the grim humour and 
 unaffected candour of a dyspeptic man of 
 genius, who flung words and epithets without 
 malice, who neither realised the pain his chance 
 sallies might give, nor the indelible flash which 
 branded them upon people's memories. 
 
 The world has pointed its moral finger of 
 late at the old man in his great old'f'ge, accusing 
 himself in the face of all, and confessing the 
 overpowering irritations which the suffering of**' 
 a lifetime had laid upon him and upon her whom 
 he loved. That old caustic man of deepest feel- 
 ing, with an ill temper and a tender heart and a 
 racking imagination, speaking from the grave, 
 and bearing unto it that cross of passionate 
 remorse which few among us dare to carry. 
 
36 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 seems to some of us now a figure nobler and 
 truer, a teacher greater far, than in the days 
 when his pain and love and remorse were still 
 hidden from us all. 
 
 Carlyle and Mr. Fitzgerald used to be often 
 with Tennyson at that time. They used to 
 dine together at the " Cock " tavern in the 
 Strand, among other places ; sometimes Tenny- 
 son and Carlyle took long solitary walks late 
 into the night. 
 
 Here is Carlyle's description of the poet 
 written to Emerson in America : — 
 
 " Tennyson came in to us on Sunday evening 
 — a truly interesting son of earth and son of 
 heaven. . . . One of the finest-looking men in 
 the world. His voice is musical, metallic, fit 
 for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that 
 may lie between ; speech and speculation fi-ee 
 and plenteous. I do not meet in these late 
 decades such company over a pipe. ... A 
 true human soul, or some authentic approxima- 
 tion thereto, to whom your soul can say 
 Brother ; a man solitary and sad as certain 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 37 
 
 men are, dwelling in an atmosphere of gloom 
 — carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, 
 which he is manufacturing into Cosmos." I 
 have ventured to put the italics ; had I letters 
 of gold to write with I would set them to the 
 stately words. 
 
 I heard a lady describing a feast given about 
 this time by the poet to Lady DufF Gordon 
 and to another young and beautiful lady, a 
 niece of Mr. Hallam. Harry Hallam, the 
 younger, was also invited. Tennyson, in his 
 hospitality, had sent for a carpenter to change 
 the whole furniture of his bedroom in order to 
 prepare a proper drawing-room for the ladies. 
 Mr. Brookfield, coming in, was in time to 
 suggest some compromise, to which' the host 
 reluctantly 'Agreed. One can imagine that it 
 was a delightful feast, but indeed it is always 
 a feast-day when one breaks bread with those 
 one loves ; and the writer is glad to think that 
 she too has been among those to sit at the 
 kind board where the salt has not lost its 
 savour in the years that have passed, and where 
 
38 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 the guests can say their grace not for bread and 
 wine alone. May she add that the first occa- 
 sion of her having the honour of breaking 
 bread in company with Lord Tennyson was 
 in her father's house, when she was propped 
 up in a tall chair between her parents ? 
 
 VII 
 
 Some of the writer's earliest recollections are 
 of days now long gone by, when many of these 
 young men of whom she has been speaking, 
 grown to be middle-aged, used to 'come from 
 time to time to her father's house, and smoke 
 with him, and talk and laugh quietly, taking 
 life seriously, but humorously too, with a 
 certain loyalty to others and self-respect which 
 was their characteristic. They were somewhat 
 melancholy men at soul, but for that very 
 reason, perhaps, the humours of life may have 
 struck them more especially. It is no less 
 possible that our children will think of us 
 as cheerful folks upon the whole, with no 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 39 
 
 little affectation of melancholy and all the 
 graces. 
 
 I can remember on one occasion, through a 
 cloud of smoke, looking across a darkening 
 room at the noble, grave head of the Poet- 
 Laureate. He was sitting with my father in 
 the twilight, after some family meal, in the old 
 house in Kensington. It is Lord Tennyson 
 himself who has reminded me how upon this 
 occasion, while my father was speaking to me, 
 my little sister looked up suddenly from the 
 book in which she had been absorbed, saying, 
 in her soft childish voice, " Papa, why do 
 you not write books like Nicholas Nickleby ? " 
 Then again I seem to hear, across that same 
 familiar table, voices without shape or name, 
 talking and telling each other that Lord 
 Tennyson was married — that he and his 
 wife had been met walking on the terrace at 
 Clevedon Court ; and then the clouds descend 
 again, except, indeed, that I can see my father 
 riding off on his brown cob to the Tennysons' 
 house at Twickenham (Chapel House, with its 
 
40 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 oak staircase, whence the carved figure of a 
 bishop used to bless the passers-by) to attend 
 the christening of Hallam, their eldest son. 
 
 In after-days we were shown the old ivy- 
 grown church and the rectory at Shiplake, by 
 the deep bend of the Thames, where their 
 marriage had taken place, after long years 
 of faithful constancy. It was at Somersby 
 that Alfred Tennyson first became acquainted 
 with his wife. She was the eldest daughter of 
 Henry Selwood, the last but one of a family of 
 country gentlemen settled in Berkshire in the 
 time of Charles I., and before that, in Saxon 
 times, — so it is said, — more important people 
 in the forest of that name. Lady Tennyson's 
 mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin. 
 
 Not many years after their marriage the 
 poet and his wife settled at Freshwater, in 
 the Isle of Wight. There is a photograph I 
 have always liked, in which it seems to me the 
 history of this home is written, as such his- 
 tories should be written, in sunlight, in the 
 flashing of a beam, in an instant, and for ever. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 41 
 
 It was taken in the green glade at Farringford. 
 Hallam and Lionel Tennyson stand on either 
 side of their parents. The father and mother 
 and children come advancing towards us. 
 Who does not know the beautiful lines to the 
 mother ? — 
 
 " Dear, near, and true — no truer Time himself 
 Can prove you, though he make you evermore 
 Dearer and nearer." 
 
 And though the years have passed in which 
 the boys with their wind-blown locks grew up 
 to man's estate, so that it is now their boys 
 who are in turn picking the daffodils under the 
 Farringford hedge, yet the old picture remains 
 in which that one dear remembered figure, so 
 early carried by the flood, far " from out our 
 bourne of Time and Space," only seems to 
 shine brighter than the rest. 
 
 VIII 
 
 One autumn, when everything seemed happy 
 at home, Mrs. Cameron took me with her to 
 
42 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 Freshwater for a few delightful weeks, and 
 then, for the first time, I lived with them all, 
 and with kind Mrs. Cameron, in her ivy-grown 
 house near the gates of Farringford. For the 
 first time I stayed in the island, and with the 
 people who were dwelling there, and walked 
 with Tennyson along High Down, treading 
 the turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls 
 came sideways, flashing their white breasts 
 against the edge of the cliffs, and the poet's 
 cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west 
 wind. 
 
 The house at Farringford itself seemed like 
 a charmed palace, with green walls without, 
 and speaking walls within. There hung Dante 
 with his solemn nose and wreath ; Italy gleamed 
 over the doorways ; friends' faces lined the 
 passages, books filled the shelves, and a glow 
 of crimson was everywhere ; the great oriel 
 drawing-room window was full of green and 
 golden leaves, of the sounds of birds and of the 
 distant sea. 
 
 The very names of the people who have 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 43 
 
 stood upon the lawn at Farringford would be 
 an interesting study for some future biographer 
 — Longfellow, Maurice, Kingsley, the Duke of 
 Argyll, Locker, Dean Stanley, the Prince Con- 
 sort. Good Garibaldi once planted a tree there, 
 off which some too ardent republican broke a 
 branch before twenty-four hours had passed. 
 Here came Clough in the last year of his life. 
 Here Mrs. Cameron fixed her lens, marking 
 the well-known faces as they passed — Darwin, 
 Browning, and Henry Taylor, Watts and 
 Aubrey de Vere, Lecky and Jowett, and a 
 score of others. 
 
 I first knew the place in the autumn, but 
 perhaps it is even more beautifial in spring- 
 time, when all day the lark trills high over- 
 head, and then when the lark has flown out of 
 hearing the thrushes begin, and the air is sweet 
 with scents from the many fragrant shrubs. 
 The woods are full of anemones and primroses ; 
 narcissus grows wild in the lower fields ; a 
 lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along 
 the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels ; 
 
4+ ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 hyacinth pools of blue shine in the woods ; 
 and then with a later burst of glory comes 
 the gorse, lighting up the country round 
 about, and blazing round about the beacon 
 hill. The little sketch here given ^ was made 
 early one morning by Frederick Walker, who 
 had come over to see us at Freshwater. The 
 beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you 
 cross the little wood of nightingales and 
 thrushes, and follow the lane where the black- 
 thorn hedges shine in spring-time (lovely dials 
 that illuminate to shovv^ the hour), you come 
 to the downs, and climbing their smooth steeps 
 you reach "High Down," where the beacon- 
 staff stands firm upon the mound. Then, 
 following the line of the cliffs, you come at 
 last to the Needles, and may look down upon 
 the ridge of rocks that rise crisp, sharp, shining, 
 out of the blue wash of fierce delicious waters. 
 
 The lovely places and sweet country all 
 about Farringford are not among the least of 
 its charms. Beyond the Primrose Island itself 
 
 ^ In the American edition. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 4; 
 
 and the blue Solent, the New Forest spreads 
 its shades, and its green depths reach to the 
 very shores. Have we not all read of the 
 forest where Merlin was becharmed, where the 
 winds were still in the wild woods of Broce- 
 liande ? The forest of Brockenhurst, in Hamp- 
 shire, waves no less green, its ferns and depths 
 are no less sweet and sylvan, than those of 
 Brittany. 
 
 " Before an oak, so hollow, huge and old 
 It look'd a tower of ivied masonwork. 
 At Merlin's feet the wily Vivien lay." 
 
 Some people camping in the New Forest 
 once told me of a mysterious figure in a cloak 
 coming suddenly upon them out of a deep 
 glade, passing straight on, looking neither to 
 the right nor the left. " It was either a ghost 
 or it was Tennyson," said they. 
 
 In Sir John Simeon's lifetime there was a 
 constant intercourse between Farringford and 
 Swainston. Sir John was one of Tennyson's 
 most constant companions — a knight of courtesy 
 
46 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 he calls him in the sad lines written in the 
 
 garden at Swainston. 
 
 " Maud " grew out of a remark of Sir John 
 
 Simeon, to whom Tennyson had read the lines — 
 
 " O that 'twere possible 
 After long grief and pain," 
 
 which lines were, so to speak, the heart of 
 Maud. Sir John said that it seemed to him as 
 if something were wanting to explain the story 
 of his poem, and so by degrees it all grew. 
 One little story was told me, and is here given on 
 the authority of Mr. Henry Sidgwick, who was 
 perhaps present on that occasion. Tennyson 
 was reading the poem to a silent company 
 assembled in the twilight, and when he came 
 to the birds in the high Hall -garden calling 
 Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, he stopped short, 
 and asked an authoress who happened to be 
 present what birds these were. The authoress, 
 much alarmed, and feeling that she must speak, 
 and that the eyes of the company were upon 
 her, faltered out, "Nightingales." — "Pooh," 
 said Tennyson, " what a cockney you are ! 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 47 
 
 Nightingales don't say Maud. Rooks do, or 
 something like it. Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, 
 caw." Then he went on reading. 
 
 Reading, is it ? One can hardly describe it. 
 It is a sort of mystical incantation, a chant in 
 which every note rises and falls and reverberates 
 again. As we sit around the twilight room at 
 Farringford, with its great oriel-window looking 
 to the garden, across fields of hyacinth and 
 self-sowed daffodils toward the sea, where the 
 waves wash against the rock, we seem carried 
 by a tide not unlike the ocean's sound ; it fills 
 the room, it ebbs and flows away ; and when 
 we leave, it is with a strange music in our 
 ears, feeling that we have for the first time, 
 perhaps, heard what we may have read a 
 hundred times before. 
 
 Let me here note a fact whether a tort or 
 a propos of nightingales. Once when Alfred 
 Tennyson was in Yorkshire, so he told me, as 
 he was walking at night in a friend's garden, 
 he heard a nightingale singing with such a 
 frenzy of passion that it was unconscious of 
 
48 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 everything else, and not frightened though he 
 came and stood quite close beside it ; he could 
 see its eye flashing, and feel the air bubble in 
 his ear through the vibration. Our poet, with 
 his shortsighted eyes, can see farther than most 
 people. Almost the first time I ever walked 
 out with him, he told me to look and tell him 
 if the field-lark did not come down sideways 
 upon its wing. 
 
 Nature in its various aspects makes up a 
 larger part of this man's life than it does for 
 other people. He goes his way unconsciously 
 absorbing life, and its lights and sounds, and 
 teaching us to do the same as far as may 
 be. There is an instance of this given by 
 Edward Fitzgerald in the pamphlet already 
 quoted from, where the two friends talk on 
 of one theme and another, from Kenelm Digby 
 to Aristophanes, and the poet is described as 
 saying, among other things, that he knows 
 of no human outlook so solemn as that 
 from an infant's eyes, and that it was from 
 those of his own he learned that those of the 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 49 
 
 Divine Child in RafFaello's " Sistine Madonna " 
 were not overcharged with expression. 
 
 Here is a reminiscence of Tennyson's about 
 the echo at Killarney, where he said to the 
 boatman, " When I last was here I heard eight 
 echoes, and now I only hear one." To which 
 the man, who had heard people quoting the 
 bugle song, replied, "Why, you must be the 
 gentleman that brought all the money to the 
 place." 
 
 People have different ideas of poets. Mrs. 
 B , of Totland Bay, once asked a Fresh- 
 water boy, who was driving her, "if he knew 
 Mr. Tennyson." — "He makes poets for the 
 Queen," said the boy. " What do you mean .'' " 
 said the lady, amused. " I don't know what 
 they means," said the boy, " but p'liceman often 
 see him walking about a-making of 'em under 
 the stars." 
 
 The author of Euphranor has his own 
 definition of a poet : — " The only living 
 — and like to live — poet I have known, 
 when he found himself beside the ' bonnie 
 
50 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 Doon/ whether it were from recollection of 
 poor Burns, or of ' the days that are no more,' 
 which haunt us all, I know not — I think he 
 did not know — ' broke into a passion of tears ' 
 (as he told me). Of tears, which during 
 a pretty long and intimate intercourse I had 
 never seen glistening in his eyes but once, 
 when reading Virgil — ' dear old Virgil ' as he 
 called him — together; and then — oh, not of 
 Queen Dido, nor of young Marcellus even, but 
 of the burning of Troy, in the second Mneid 
 — whether moved by the catastrophe itself, or 
 the majesty of the verse it is told in, or as 
 before, scarce knowing why. For as King 
 Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin 
 he, though, as a great poet, comprehending all 
 the softer stops of human emotion in that dia- 
 pason where the intellectual, no less than what 
 is called the poetical faculty predominated." 
 
 " You will last," Douglas Jerrold said. 
 And there was Carlyle's " Eh ! he has got the 
 grip of it," when Tennyson read him " The 
 Revenge." But perhaps the best compliment 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 51 
 
 that Tennyson ever received was one day walk- 
 ing in Covent Garden, when he was suddenly 
 stopped by a rough - looking man, who held 
 out his hand, and said : "You're Mr. Tenny- 
 son. Look here, sir, here am I. I've been 
 drunk for six days out of the seven, but if you 
 
 will shake me by the hand, I'm d d if I 
 
 ever get drunk again." 
 
 IX 
 
 Aldworth was built some twenty years ago, 
 when Lady Tennyson had been ordered change, 
 and Freshwater was found to be unbearable 
 and overcrowded during the summer months. 
 It must be borne in mind that to hospitable 
 people there are dangers from friendly inroads 
 as well as from the attacks of enemies. The 
 new house, where for many years past the 
 family has spent its summers, stands on the 
 summit of a high lonely hill in Surrey, and yet 
 it is not quite out of reach of London life. 
 It is a white stone house, with many broad 
 
52 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 windows facing a great view and a long 
 terrace, like some one of those at Siena or 
 Perugia, with a low parapet of stone, where 
 ivies and roses are trained, making a fore- 
 ground to the lovely haze of the distance. 
 Sometimes at Aldworth, when the summer 
 days are at their brightest, and Blackdown top 
 has been well warmed and sunned, I have seen 
 a little procession coming along the terrace 
 walk, and proceeding by its green boundary 
 into a garden, where the sun shines its hottest 
 upon a sheltered lawn, and where standard 
 rose-trees burn their flames. Lord Tennyson 
 in his cloak used to go first, dragging the 
 garden -chair in which Lady Tennyson was 
 lying, Hallam Tennyson following with rugs 
 and cushions for the rest of the party, and 
 Lionel Tennyson's boys absorbed in their books 
 of adventure. If the little grandsons and their 
 mother, in her white dress and broad shady 
 hat, are there, the family group is complete. 
 One special day I remember when we all sat 
 for an hour round about the homely chair and 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 53 
 
 its gentle occupant. It seemed not unlike a 
 realisation of some Italian picture that I had 
 somewhere seen — the tranquil eyes, the peaceful 
 heights, the glorious summer day, some sense 
 of lasting calm, of beauty beyond the present 
 hour. 
 
 Lord Tennyson works alone in the early 
 hours of the morning, and comes down long 
 after his own frugal meal is over to find his 
 guests assembling round the social breakfast- 
 table. He generally goes out for a walk before 
 luncheon, with his son, or a friend perhaps, 
 and followed by a couple of dogs. Most of 
 us know the look of the stately figure and the 
 hanging cloak and broad felt hat. 
 
 There used to be one little ceremony peculiar 
 to the Tennyson family, and reminding one of 
 some college custom, which continued for many 
 years : when dinner was over the guests used 
 to be brought away into a second room, where 
 stood a white table upon which fruit and wine 
 were set, and where a fire burned bright, and a 
 pleasant hour went by, while the master of the 
 
54 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 house sat in his carved chair and discoursed upon 
 any topic suggested by his guests. He would 
 talk of books, or reminiscences of early Lincoln- 
 shire days, or of facts belonging to the lives of 
 the men and women who have been his friends. 
 There was Rogers, among the rest, for whom 
 he had a great affection, with whom he con- 
 stantly lived during that lonely time in London. 
 " I have dined alone with him," I heard Lord 
 Tennyson say, " and we have talked about 
 death till the tears rolled down his face." 
 
 Tennyson met Tom Moore at Rogers's, and 
 there, too, he first met Mr. Gladstone. John 
 Forster, Leigh Hunt, and Landor were also as- 
 sociates of that time. One of Tennyson's often 
 companions in those days was Mr. Hallam, 
 whose opinion he once asked of Carlyle's 
 French Revolution. Mr. Hallam replied, in 
 his quick, rapid way, " Upon my word, I 
 once opened the book, and read four or five 
 pages. The style is so abominable I could not 
 get on with it." Whereas Carlyle's own 
 criticism upon the History of the Middle 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 55 
 
 Ages was, " Eh ! the poor, miserable skeleton 
 of a book. ! " 
 
 Was it not Charles Lamb who wanted to 
 return grace after reading Shakespeaire, little 
 deeming in humble simplicity that many of us 
 yet to come would be glad to return thanks 
 for a jest of Charles Lamb's ? The difference 
 between those who speak with natural reality, 
 and those who go through life fitting their 
 second-hand ideas to other people's words, is 
 one so marked that even a child may tell 
 .it. When the Laureate speaks, every word 
 comes wise, racy, absolutely natural, and 
 sincere; and how gladly do. we listen to his 
 delightful stories, flail of odd humours and 
 knowledge of life, of things and people, or to 
 his graver talk ! I remember thinking how 
 true was a phrase of Lionel Tennyson's con- 
 cerning his father. " When a man has read so 
 much and thought so much, it is an epitome 
 of the knowledge of to-day we find in him " 
 — an epitome, indeed, touched by the solemn 
 strain of the poet's own gift. I once heard 
 
56 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 Lord Tennyson talking to some actors, to no 
 less a person indeed than to Hamlet himself, 
 for after the curtain fell, the whole play seemed 
 to flow from off the - stage into the box where 
 we had been sitting, and where Mr. Irving 
 was now established, and I could scarcely tell 
 at last where reality began and Shakespeare 
 ended. The play was over, and we ourselves 
 seemed a part of it still : here were the players, 
 and our own prince poet, in that familiar simple 
 voice we all know, explaining the art, going 
 straight to the point in his own downright 
 fashion, criticising with delicate appreciation, 
 by the irresistible force of truth and true 
 instinct carrying all before him. " You are 
 a good actor lost," one of these, the real actors, 
 said to him, laughing as he spoke. 
 
 It is a gain to the world when people are 
 content to be themselves, not chipped to the 
 smooth pattern of the times, but simple, origi- 
 nal, and unaffected in ways and words. Here 
 is a poet leading a poet's life ; where he goes 
 there goes the spirit of his home, whether in 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 57 
 
 London among the crowds, or at Aldworth 
 on the lonely height, or at Farringford in that 
 beautifol bay. The last time I went to see him 
 in London he was smoking in a top room in 
 Eaton Square. It may interest an American 
 public to be told that it was Durham tobacco 
 from North Carolina, which Mr. Lowell had 
 given him. I could not but feel how little 
 even circumstance itself can contribute to that 
 mysterious essence of individuality which we 
 all recognise and love. In this commonplace 
 London room, with all the stucco of Belgravia 
 round about, I found the old dream realised, 
 the old charm of youthful impression. There 
 sat my friend as I had first seen him years ago 
 among the clouds. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
 That mind and soul, according well, 
 iVlay make one music as before." 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 " The music was 
 Of divine stature, strong to pass, 
 And those who heard it understood 
 Something of life in spirit and blood." 
 
 Vhkn of Poets, E. B. B. 
 
 I 
 
 When the writer of this essay tries to go back 
 to her first impressions of John Ruskin, she 
 finds that they must date from the round table 
 in the middle of her father's drawing-room in 
 Kensington — the little drawing-room in Young 
 Street, with the bow windows, the oak-leaved 
 carpet, the polished bookcase with its glass 
 doors, and the aforesaid round table, with its 
 
62 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 dial of books arranged in a circle, and faithfiilly 
 marking the march of time. For, looking at a 
 list of Mr. Ruskin's works, I find that the 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture was published in 
 1849, soon after we came to live in England in 
 our father's house. And in this year there 
 appeared among the Punches and the lovely 
 red silk Annuals and Keepsakes that illuminated 
 the bow-windowed room, a volume bound (so 
 it seemed to us children) in moulded slabs of 
 pure chocolate. I can still recall the look of 
 the broad margins, the pictures, and noble- 
 looking printed pages ; and although the Annuals 
 with the fascinating brides and veiled ladies, 
 and the ghosts and guitars and brigands, were 
 perhaps more to our childish tastes, even then 
 we realised in some indefinite way the import- 
 ance of the big brown book which opened like 
 a casket, and we gathered some impressions of 
 palace windows and of carved shadows from 
 its pages — impressions to be afterwards turned 
 into actual stone and sunlight. 
 
 As time went on the Stones of Venice in due 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 63 
 
 course took their place upon our dial, and 
 meanwhile the name of the writer of the 
 beautiful authoritative books is among those 
 other echoes, which are so familiar that one 
 can scarcely tell when they begin to sound. 
 
 In the first page of the eleventh chapter of 
 Vraeterita occurs the name of " Mrs. John 
 Simon, who," says Ruskin, " in my mother's 
 old age was her most deeply trusted friend." 
 It was at this lady's house, sitting by the kind 
 hostess of many a year to be, that the writer 
 first saw the author of Modern Painters, while 
 at the other end of the table Mr. Simon, now 
 Sir John (" Brother John " Ruskin dubbed him 
 long since), sat carving, as was his wont, roast 
 mutton — "be it tender and smoking and juicy " 
 — and dispensing, as is still his wont, trimmings 
 and oracles and epigrams with every platefial. 
 
 I could even now quote some of the words 
 Ruskin spoke on that summer's evening in 
 Great Cumberland Street, and I can see him 
 as he was then almost as plainly as on the last 
 time that we met. His mood on that first 
 
64- JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 occasion was one of deep depression, and I can 
 remember being frightened as well as absorbed 
 by his talk. Was he joking? was he serious? 
 I could hardly follow what he said then, though 
 now it all seems simple enough. But good 
 company is like good wine, and improves by 
 keeping; and let us hope that this applies to 
 the recipients as well as to the feast itself. 
 
 Ruskin seems to me less picturesque as a 
 young man than now in his later days. Per- 
 haps gray waving hair may be more becoming 
 than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes 
 must have been the same, as well as the tones 
 of that delightful voice, with its slightly foreign 
 pronunciation of the " r," which seemed so 
 familiar again when it welcomed us to Coniston 
 long, long after. Meeting thus after fifteen 
 years I was struck by the change for the better 
 in him ; by the bright, radiant, sylvan look 
 which a man gains by living' among woods 
 and hills and pure breezes. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 65 
 
 II 
 
 The road to Brantwood^ runs beneath the 
 old trees which shade the head of Coniston 
 Water, and you leave the village and the inn 
 behind, and the Thwaite, with its pretty old 
 gardens and peacocks, and skirt the beautifial 
 grounds of Monk Coniston ; you pass the ivy 
 tower where the lords of the manor keep their 
 boats, and the reeds among which the swallows 
 and dragon-flies are darting ; and as you ad- 
 vance, if you look back across the green hay- 
 fields and wooded slopes of Monk Coniston, 
 you can see Weatherlam and Ravenscrag, with 
 Yewdale for a background, while Coniston Old 
 Man on the opposite side of the lake rises like 
 
 ^ Ruskin, writing of his earliest recollections of Coniston in Prae- 
 tertta, says : " The inn at Coniston was then actually at the upper end 
 of the lake, the road from Ambleside to the village passing just between 
 it and the water, and the view of the long reach of lake, with its softly 
 wooded lateral hills, had for my father a tender charm which excited the 
 same feeling as that with which he afterward regarded the lakes of Italy. 
 Lowwood Inn also was then little more than a country cottage, and 
 Ambleside a rural village, and the absolute peace and bliss which any 
 one who cared for grassy hills and for sweet waters might find at every 
 footstep and at every turn of crag or bend of bog was totally unlike 
 anything I ever saw or read of elsewhere." 
 
 F 
 
66 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 a Pilatus above the village, and soars into 
 changing lights and clouds. Then, as you 
 walk still farther along the road, leaving all 
 these things behind, you pass into a sweet 
 Arcadia, in which, indeed, one loses one's self 
 again in after-times. You go by Tent Lodge, 
 where Tennyson once dwelt, where the beauti- 
 ful Romneys are hanging on the walls; you 
 pass the cottage with roses for bricks, and 
 with jasmines and honeysuckles for thatch, 
 and the farm where the pet lamb used to 
 dwell, to the terror of the children (it seemed 
 appropriate enough to Wordsworth country, but 
 I can remember a little baby girl wild with 
 terror and flying from its gambols) ; then, still 
 following the road, you reach a delightful 
 cackling colony of poultry and ducks, where 
 certain hospitable ladies used to experiment- 
 alise, and prove to us whether or no eggs are 
 eggs (as these ladies have determined eggs 
 should be) ; then comes Low Bank Ground, 
 our own little farm, wedging among the 
 chestnut-trees and meadows full of flowers. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 67 
 
 It had been the site of a priory once, and on 
 this slope and in the shade of the chestnut- 
 trees, where monks once dwelt, the writer met 
 Ruskin again after many years. He, the 
 master of Brantwood, came, as I remember, 
 dressed with some ceremony, meeting us with 
 a certain old-fashioned courtesy and mannef; 
 but he spoke with his heart, of which the 
 fashion doesn't change happily from one decade 
 to another; and as he stood in his tall hat 
 and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and 
 drifts came blowing up from every quarter of 
 heaven, and I can almost see him still, and hear 
 the tones of his voice as he struck the turf with 
 his foot, speaking with emphasis and true and 
 hospitable kindness. Low Bank Ground is but 
 a very little way from Brantwood ; you can go 
 there by land or by water. If you walk, the road 
 climbs the spur of the hill, and runs below moors 
 along a wood where squirrels sit under the oak- 
 trees and honeysuckles drop from the branches ; 
 or, if you like to go by the lake, you can get 
 Timothy from the farm to row you. " A dash 
 
68 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of the oars and you are there," as Ruskin said, 
 and accordingly we started in the old punt for 
 our return visit to Brantwood. 
 
 The sun came out between rain-clouds as 
 the boat struck with a hollow crunch against 
 the stones of the tiny landing-pier. Timothy 
 from the farm, who had come to pilot us, told 
 us, with a sympathetic grin, that Mr. Ruskin 
 — " Rooskin," I think he called him — " had 
 built t' pier, and set t' stoans himsel' wi' the 
 other gentlemen, but they had to send for t' 
 smith from the village to make the bolts 
 fawster." The pier is fast enough, running 
 out into the lake, with a little fleet safely 
 anchored behind it, while Brantwood stands 
 high up on the slope, with square windows 
 looking across the waters. Just on the other 
 side of the lake, wrapped in mysterious ivy 
 wreaths, where the cows are whisking their 
 tails beneath the elms, rise the gables of the 
 old farm, once the manor-house where " Sid- 
 ney's sister, Pembroke's mother," once dwelt. 
 Sir Philip Sidney used to come riding across 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 69 
 
 the distant hills to visit her there — so tradition 
 says. The mere thought of Coniston Water 
 brings back the peaceful legends and sounds 
 all about Ruskin's home — the wash of the lake, 
 the rustle of the leaves and rushes, the beat of 
 birds on their whirring wings, the flop of the 
 water-rats, the many buzzing and splashing 
 and delicious things. A path up a garden of 
 fruit and flowers, of carnations and straw- 
 berries, leads with gay zigzags to the lawn in 
 firont of the Brantwood windows. 
 
 The house is white, plain, and comfortable, 
 absolutely unpretending. I remember noticing 
 with a thrill the umbrella-stand in the glass 
 door. So Mr. Ruskin had an umbrella just 
 like other people ! It seemed to me to be a 
 dwelling planned for sunshine, and sunshine on 
 the lakes is of a quality so sweet and rare that 
 it counts for more than in any other place. 
 The brightness of Brantwood, the squareness, 
 and its unaff^ected comfortableness, were, I 
 think, the chief characteristics. You had a 
 general impression of solid, old-fashioned fur- 
 
70 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 niture, of amber-coloured damask curtains and 
 coverings ; there were Turners and other water- 
 colour pictures in curly frames upon the draw- 
 ing-room walls — a Prout, I think, among them ; 
 there was a noble Titian in the dining-room, 
 and the full-length portrait of a child in a blue 
 sash over the sideboard has become familiar 
 since then to the readers of Praeterita ; and 
 most certainly was there an absence of any of 
 the art-diphthongs and peculiarities of modern 
 taste : only the simplest and most natural 
 arrangements for the comfort of the inmates 
 and their guests, — Turkey carpets, steady 
 round tables, and above all a sense of cheer- 
 ful, hospitable kindness, which seems to be 
 traditional at Brantwood. For many years 
 past Mrs. Severn has kept her cousin's house, 
 and welcomed his guests with her own.^ 
 
 That evening, the first we ever spent at 
 Brantwood, the rooms were lighted by slow 
 sunset cross-lights from the lake without. 
 
 ^ As I write I have before my eyes one of Mr. Arthur Severn's 
 delightful sketches of the hills and shady trees round about Brantwood. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 71 
 
 Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver 
 urn, while the master of the house, with his 
 back to the window, was dispensing such 
 cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those who 
 have been his guests will best realise, — fine 
 wheaten bread and Scotch cakes in many a 
 crisp circlet and crescent, and trout from the 
 lake, and strawberries such as grow only on 
 the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of 
 tea only, or cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration .'' 
 And as we crunched and quaffed we listened 
 to a certain strain not easily to be described, 
 changing from its graver first notes to the 
 sweetest and most charming vibrations. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Who can ever recall a good talk that is 
 over .'' You can remember the room in which 
 it was held, the look of the chairs, but the 
 actual talk takes wings and flies away. A dull 
 talk has no wings, and is remembered more 
 easily ; so are those tiresome conversations 
 
72 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 which consist of sentences which we all repeat 
 by rote — sentences which have bored us a 
 hundred times before, and which do not lose 
 this property by long use. But a real talk 
 leaps into life ; it is there almost before we 
 are conscious of its existence. What system 
 of notation can mark it down as it flows, 
 modulating from its opening chords to those 
 delightful exhilarating strains which are gone 
 again almost before we have realised them .'' 
 
 Ruskin was explaining his views in his own 
 words as we sat there. I should do him ill 
 justice if I tried to transcribe his sermon. The 
 text was that strawberries should be ripe and 
 sweet, and we munched and marked it then 
 and there ; that there should be a standard of 
 fitness applied to every detail of life ; and this 
 standard, with a certain gracious malice, wit, 
 hospitality, and remorselessness, he began to 
 apply to one thing and another, to one person 
 and another, to dress, to food, to books. I 
 remember his describing to my brother-in-law, 
 Leslie Stephen, the shabby print and paper 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 73 
 
 that people were content to live with, and con- 
 trasting with these the books he himself was 
 then printing for the use of the shepherds round 
 about. And among the rest he showed us Sir 
 Philip Sidney's paraphrase of the Psalms, which 
 he has long since given to the world in the Biblio- 
 theca Pastorum. Let us trust these fortunate 
 shepherds are worthy of their print and margins. 
 If, as I have already said, we compare the 
 talk of great men and women " who will cause 
 this age to be remembered," one element is to 
 be found in them all — a certain directness, 
 simplicity, and vivid reality ; a gift for reach- 
 ing their hearers at once, giving straight from 
 themselves, and not in reflections from other 
 minds ; sunshine, in short, not ^ moonshine. 
 Perhaps something of this may be due to the 
 habit of self-respect and self-reliance which 
 success and strength of purpose naturally create. 
 Many uncelebrated people have the grace of 
 convincing simplicity, but 1 have never met a 
 really great man without it. As one thinks of 
 it one recognises that a great man is greater 
 
74 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 than we are, because his aim (consciously or 
 unconsciously) is juster, his strength stronger 
 and less strained ; his right is more right than 
 ours, his certainty more certain ; he shows us 
 the best of that which concerns him, and the 
 best of ourselves too in that which concerns us 
 in his work or his teaching. 
 
 If we look at the Elgin marbles, for instance, 
 we feel that the standard of human attainment 
 is for ever raised by those broken lines in eternal 
 harmony, and we also indefinitely realise that 
 while looking at them we ourselves are at our 
 best in sculpture ; and so listening back to the 
 echoes of a lifetime we can most of us still hear 
 some strains very clear, very real and distinct, 
 out of all the confusion of past noise and chatter ; 
 and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must 
 ever count the magic of the music of Brantwood 
 oratory among such strains. Music, oratory — I 
 know not what to call that wondrous gift which 
 subjugates all who come within its reach. 
 
 " God uses us to help each other so, lending our 
 minds out." 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 75 
 
 If ever a man lent out his mind to help 
 others, Ruskin is the man. From country to 
 country, from age to age, from element to 
 element, he leads the way ; while his audience, 
 laughing, delighted, follows with scrambling 
 thoughts and apprehensions and flying leaps, 
 he meanwhile illustrating each delightful, fanci- 
 ful, dictatorial sentence with pictures by the 
 way — things, facts, objects interwoven, book- 
 cases opening wide, sliding drawers unlocked 
 with his own marvellous keys — and lo ! . . . 
 We are perhaps down in the centre of the earth, 
 far below Brantwood and its surrounding hills, 
 among specimens, minerals, and precious stones, 
 Ruskin still going ahead, and crying " sesame " 
 and " sesame," and revealing each secret recess 
 of his king's treasury in turn, pointing to each 
 tiny point of light and rainbow veiled in marble, 
 gold and opal, crystal and emerald. Then, 
 again, while we are wondering, and barely 
 beginning to apprehend his delightfial illustra- 
 tions, the lecturer changes from natural things 
 to those of art, from veins of gold meandering 
 
76 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 in the marble, and speaking of past ages, to 
 coins marking the history of man. I was speci- 
 ally struck by some lovely old Holbein pieces 
 of Henry VIII. which he brought out. I can 
 still see Ruskin's hand holding the broad gold 
 mark in its palm. Who could help speculat- 
 ing at such a moment ? Whence had it come, 
 that golden token, since Holbein laid his chisel 
 down ? From what other hands had it reached 
 this one .-' Had Shakespeare once had the 
 spending of it ? had Bacon clutched at it ? or 
 had Buckingham flung it to the wind .'' or had 
 Milton owned it perhaps before Cromwell called 
 the king's money back into his own treasury .'' 
 Anyhow this golden piece has escaped the 
 Puritan's crucibles, and here it is still to show 
 us what a golden coin may be, lying safe in 
 the Brantwood treasury. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is now several years since we were at 
 Coniston, and I may have perhaps somewhat 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 77 
 
 confused the various occasions when we went 
 to Brantwood. One year the family was 
 absent during our stay, but tokens of present 
 kindness came day after day — basketfuls brought 
 up by the gardener, roses and the afore-men- 
 tioned strawberries, and other ripe things that 
 had coloured in its sunshine. 
 
 Another year when we were staying at the 
 farm, Ruskin was at Brantwood, alone with a 
 young relative, and he asked us to go up and 
 see him. Again I remember one of those long 
 monologues, varied, absorbing, combining pic- 
 tures and metaphors into one delightful whole, 
 while the talker, carried along by his own 
 interest in his subject, would be starting to his 
 feetj bringing down one and another volume 
 from the shelf, opening the page between his 
 hands, and beginning to read the passage appro- 
 priate to his theme. It was some book of 
 Indian warfare that he brought down from its 
 place, and as he opened it he then and there 
 began his sermon ; spoke of the example which 
 good Christian men and women might set in 
 
78 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 any part of the world ; quoted Sir Herbert 
 Edwardes, whom he loved and admired, as an 
 example of what a true man should be. He 
 spoke of him with kindling eyes, warming as 
 he went on to tell, as only a Ruskin could tell 
 it, the heroic history of the first Sikh war. 
 What happened in India yesterday he did not 
 know; he said he sometimes spent months 
 without once looking at the papers, and in 
 deliberate ignorance of what was happening 
 and not happening in their columns. 
 
 There is a story told of Ruskin receiving a 
 telegram not long ago from some member oP 
 the royal family, of which he could not con- 
 strue the meaning, until he called in the tele- 
 graph boy, who then informed him of an event 
 with which the country had been ringing for 
 weeks past, and to which the telegram related. 
 
 I further remember, among other things, 
 after his little lecture upon " True Knights," 
 a delightful description of what a true lady 
 should be. " A princess, a washerwoman," he 
 said — " yes, a washerwoman ! To see that all 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 79 
 
 is fair and clean, to wash with water, to cleanse 
 and purify wherever she goes, to set disordered 
 things in orderly array — this was a woman's 
 mission." Which sentence has often occurred 
 to me since then at irritating moments of 
 household administration. Ruskin has written 
 something not unlike it in his lecture upon 
 " Queen's Gardens " ; but how different is the 
 impression left, even by such printers' type as 
 his, from that of the words and the voice 
 flowing on in its measure ! 
 
 The writer, speaking to one of Ruskin's 
 most constant and faithful readers, once com- 
 pared him to a Prospero, thinking of this 
 strange power of his over the minds of those 
 who are in his company, of the sweet harmonies 
 he can raise at will, of the wanderings he can 
 impose upon his subjects, and of his playful 
 humours and fanciful experiments upon the 
 audience, " be it to fly, to swim, to dive into 
 the fire, to ride on the curl'd cloud." Mrs. 
 Fanny Kemble, who was the lady in question 
 (she sat with a volume of Modern Painters 
 
8o JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 open before her), said : " No; I myself see no 
 resemblance whatever between the two : Pros- 
 pero dealt with magic and unreality; the power 
 of Ruskin lies in the extraordinary reality of 
 his teaching. Think what a vision of beauty 
 lies spread before that man." And this is 
 certainly high and worthy praise, coming from 
 one who herself belongs to the noble race of 
 spiritual pastors and masters. Mrs. Kemble 
 concluded by quoting Ruskin's account of a 
 heap of slime by the roadside, which she had 
 just been reading, and which she said had struck 
 her as one of the most remarkable descriptions 
 ever written in the English language. 
 
 Ruskin has said somewhere that his three 
 great masters have been Tintoret, Carlyle, and 
 Turner. When John Ruskin, the son of John 
 Ruskin, was born in 1819, Tintoret had been 
 dead nearly two hundred years ; Carlyle, be- 
 ginning life, was living in Edinburgh, where 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 8 1 
 
 he was supporting himself by literature and by 
 articles in Dr. Brewster's Encyclopaedia ; Turner 
 was a man of forty-four, already well advanced 
 in life ; he had published his Liber Studiorum, 
 painted many noble pictures ; he had built his 
 house in Queen Anne Street, and was then 
 starting for Italy. 
 
 It was a dull and unromantic time in the 
 history of England, a time reaching beyond the 
 fifty years' radius of our recent Jubilee. Men, 
 weary of war, were resting and counting its 
 cost; the poor were suffering, the rich were 
 bankrupt ; the old King was dying. Princess 
 Charlotte was dead; the Regent was absorbed 
 in his schemes and selfish ends ; corn was at 
 starvation prices; mobs were breaking out in 
 discontent and riot ; and yet no less than in 
 more propitious hours were the divine sparks 
 falling firom heaven — upon children at their 
 play, upon infants in their cradles, who were 
 to grow up with hearts kindled by that 
 sacred flame which, refi-acted from generation 
 to generation, keeps the world alive. 
 
8z JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " See a disenchanted nation 
 Spring like day from desolation ; 
 To Truth its state is dedicate, 
 And Freedom leads it forth." 
 
 So wrote Shelley, at that time looking his 
 last at the Bay of Naples, and completing the 
 first act of his Prometheus, while Browning 
 and Tennyson were children at play in their 
 fathers' gardens — Tennyson hidden far away 
 among Lincolnshire wolds and levels. Brown- 
 ing plucking his own brand of Promethean fire 
 somewhere on the heights that encircle the 
 great city, where Ruskin, still lying in his 
 cradle, had not as yet found a miraculous 
 voice to cry out with, and to protest that 
 though love of Truth and of Justice might be 
 the same for both, Shelley's Freedom and John 
 Ruskin's Freedom were as unlike as night and 
 day.' 
 
 " I am, and my father was before me, a violent 
 
 1 " My own teaching has been and is that Liberty, whether in the 
 body, soul, or political estate of men. Is only another word for Death, 
 and the final issue of Death — Putrefaction j the body, spirit, and political 
 estate being healthy only by their bonds and laws." — 1875, Fori, Letter 
 411. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 83 
 
 Tory of the old school, Walter Scott's school, 
 that is to say, and Homer's," says Ruskin in 
 the first lines of Praeterita, going back to those 
 early days when his lately-married father and 
 mother had settled down in Bloomsbury, and 
 when he himself first comes upon the scene, 
 " a child with yellow hair, dressed in a white 
 frock like a girl, with a broad light blue sash 
 and blue shoes to match," standing at a window 
 and watching the events of the street. 
 
 As one reads Praeterita it seems as if John 
 Ruskin wrote his history not with ink, but 
 painted it down with light and colour ; he 
 brings the very atmosphere of his life and its 
 phases before us with such an instantaneous 
 mastery as few besides have ever reached — the 
 life within, the sweet eternal horizons (even 
 though they be but Norwood hills and ridges), 
 the living and delightful figures in the fore- 
 ground. 
 
 Its author has chosen to christen the story 
 Praeterita, but was ever a book less belonging 
 to the past and more entirely present to our 
 
84 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 mood than this one ? Not Goethe's own auto- 
 biography, not even Carlyle's passionate remi- 
 niscences, come up to it in vividness. There 
 are so few words, such limpid images are 
 brought flashing before our secret consciousness 
 that we seem to remember as we read. Or are 
 we actually living in its pages, in the dawning 
 light of that austere yet glorious childhood.'' 
 Half a century rolls back, and we see the baby 
 up above at the drawing-room windows, stand- 
 ing absorbed, watching the water - carts, and 
 that wondrous turncock, " who turns and turns 
 till a fountain springs up in the middle of the 
 street " ; and as we still watch the child, gazing 
 out with his blue, deep-set eyes, the brown 
 brick walls somehow become transparent as 
 they did for Ebenezer Scrooge, and we are in 
 the same mysterious fashion absorbed into the 
 quiet home and silent life. We get to know 
 the inmates with some immaterial friendship 
 and intimacy. The father, "that entirely 
 honest merchant " of rare gifts and refinement, 
 going and coming to his wine - merchant's 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 85 
 
 office in Billiter Street; the mother, combining 
 the spirit of Martha and of Mary, unflinching, 
 orderly, living for her husband and her son, 
 not rejecting the better part, but forcing every 
 member of her household to conform to her 
 views of both worlds, and binding down their 
 lives by some emphatic and restraining power. 
 But how soon the child born to such liberty 
 of thought, to such absolute obedience of will, 
 learns to escape from his bonds, to create his 
 own life and world ! His very playthings (all 
 others being denied to him) he makes for him- 
 self out of the elements ; the air above, the 
 waters beneath, the craters of the coal-heavers 
 as they empty the sacks at the door. " My 
 mother's general principles of the first treat- 
 ment were to guard me with steady watchful- 
 ness from all avoidable pain or danger ; and 
 for the rest to let me amuse myself; but the 
 law was I should find my own amusement. 
 No toys of any kind were at first allowed, and 
 the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic 
 poverty in this respect was boundless. On one 
 
86 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my 
 mother's resolution by splendour of tempta- 
 tion, she bought the most radiant Punch and 
 Judy she could find in all the Soho Bazaar, as 
 big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in 
 scarlet and gold, and that would dance. . . . 
 My mother was obliged to accept them, but 
 afterward quietly told me it was not right I 
 should have them, and I never saw them 
 again." 
 
 This Croydon aunt must have been a good 
 and loving aunt to little John. " Whenever 
 my father was ill," he says, — " and hard work 
 and sorrow had already set their mark on him 
 — we all went down to Croydon to be petted 
 by my homely aunt, and walked on Duppas 
 Hill and on the heather of Addington." He 
 dwells with affectionate remembrance upon the 
 house and its gables and early fascinations for 
 him. " My chosen domain being the shop, the 
 back room, and the stones round the spring of 
 crystal water at the back door (long since let 
 down into the modern sewer), and my chief 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 87 
 
 companion my aunt's dog Towser, whom she 
 had taken pity on when he was a snappish 
 starved vagrant, and made a brave and affec- 
 tionate dog of, which was the kind of thing 
 she did for every living creature that came in 
 her way all her life long." 
 
 Mrs. Ruskin, with all her passionate devo- 
 tion to her son, seems to have had no idea 
 whatever of making a little child happy. The 
 baby's education was terribly consistent ; he 
 was steadily whipped when he was troublesome 
 or when he tumbled downstairs. " We seldom 
 had company even on week-days, and I was 
 never allowed to come down to dessert until 
 much later in life, when I was able to crack 
 other people's nuts for them, but never to have 
 any myself, nor anything else of a dainty kind. 
 Once at Hunter Street I recollect my mother 
 giving me three raisins in the forenoon out of 
 the store cabinet." But not all the rules and 
 rails and restrictions of Hunter Street and 
 Brunswick Square could prevent the child from 
 finding out for himself that brick walls do not 
 
88 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. He 
 stands in the light of the window, in his silent, 
 thoughtflil fashion, creating his own existence 
 for himself, and just as the turncock turned 
 and turned until a fountain sprang from the 
 pavement, so even in baby life does Ruskin 
 lay his master-hand upon the stones, and lo ! 
 the stream of life begins to flow. In later 
 days he smites tne rock, and bids the children 
 drink living waters from the spring of life 
 eternal, — sometimes also to be mingled with 
 those waters of strife " called Meribah " ! ^ 
 
 VI 
 
 It was up on the summit of Heme Hill 
 that John Ruskin the elder (when he felt that 
 his affairs justified him in so doing) bought 
 the semi - detached house standing among the 
 almond blossoms, from whence Ruskin dates 
 the preface to Praeterita. " I write these few 
 
 ^ See the first volume of Modern Painters and certain numbers of 
 Deucalion^ etc. etc. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 89 
 
 prefatory words on my father's birthday," says 
 Ruskin, in the year 1886, "in what was once 
 my nursery in his old house, to which he 
 brought my mother and me sixty -two years 
 since, I being then four years old." 
 
 We have good reason to be grateful to 
 a writer who sets down for our happy read- 
 ing such remembrances, such silence, as this. 
 Almost every child has some natural glamour 
 and instinct of its own by which the glare of 
 life is softened, and the first steep ways gar- 
 landed and eased and charmed. We call those 
 men poets who retain this divine faculty all 
 their lives, and who are able to continue look- 
 ing at the world with the clear gaze of child- 
 hood, discerning the unchanging natural things 
 and beauties in the midst of all the wanderings 
 of disappointment and confusion. Such a poet 
 is Ruskin, if ever a man was one. Take the 
 story of little John at play in his childish 
 garden, where the mulberry-tree and the white- 
 heart cherry-tree are growing. "The ground 
 was absolutely beneficent with magical splendour 
 
90 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of abundant fruit, fresh green, soft amber, 
 and rough bristled crimson, bending the 
 spinous branches, clustered pearl and pendent 
 ruby, joyfiilly discoverable under the large 
 leaves that looked like vine. . . . The differ- 
 ences of primal importance which I observed," 
 he says, " between the nature of this garden 
 and that of Eden, as I imagined it, were that 
 in this one all the fruit was forbidden, and 
 there were no companionable beasts." Then 
 follows a touch of which many a parent will 
 ruefully acknowledge the truth : " My mother, 
 finding her chief personal pleasure in her 
 flowers, was often planting or pruning beside 
 me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. . . . 
 Her presence was no restraint to me, and also 
 no particular pleasure, for, from having always 
 been left so much alone, I had generally my 
 own little affairs to see to, and by the time I 
 was seven years old I was already independent 
 mentally both of my father and mother, and 
 having nobody else to be dependent upon, 
 began to lead a very small, poky, contented, 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 91 
 
 conceited, Cock - Robinson - Crusoe sort ot 
 life." 
 
 How these words set one to the measure and 
 the feeling of that isolated mystical little life in 
 the central point of the universe, as he says it 
 appeared to him, as it must generally appear to 
 geometrical animals ! 
 
 When little John grew older he learned to 
 read and to spell with what seems absolutely 
 wonderful quickness. Every morning after 
 breakfast he sat down with his mother to read 
 the Bible. " My mother never gave me more 
 to learn than she knew I could easily get 
 learned, if I set myself honestly to work, by 
 twelve o'clock. She never allowed anything to 
 disturb me when my task was set ; and in 
 general, even when Latin grammar came to 
 supplement the Psalms, I was my own master 
 for at least half an hour before the half-past 
 one dinner." The list of those portions of the 
 Psalms and chapters of the Bible which little 
 John Ruskin had to learn by heart is conscien- 
 tiously given, and might seem to some of us 
 
92 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 an appalling list. But upon this he comments 
 as follows: "Truly, though I have picked up 
 the elements of a little further knowledge, and 
 owe not a little to the teaching of many people, 
 this maternal installation of my mind in that 
 property of chapters I count very confidently 
 the most precious, and on the whole the one 
 essential, part of my education." " Peace, 
 Obedience, Faith," were the three great boons 
 of his early life, he says, and "the habit of 
 fixed attention." The defects of it are told 
 very forcibly in language which is pathetic in 
 its directness. " I had nothing to love. My 
 parents were, in a sort, visible powers of nature 
 to me ; no more loved than the sun and 
 moon." And thus he sums it up. His 
 life was too formal and too luxurious — "by 
 protection innocent, instead of by practice 
 virtuous." 
 
 Ruskin should have been a novelist. It 
 is true he says he never knew a child 
 more incapable than himself of telling a 
 tale, but when he chooses to describe a 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 93 
 
 man or a woman, there stands the figure 
 before us ; ^ when he tells a story, we live it. 
 His is rather the descriptive than the con- 
 structive faculty ; his mastery is over detail 
 and quality rather than over form. How de- 
 lightfiilly he remembers ! How one loves his 
 journeys in Mr. Telford's post-chaise, where 
 he sits propped upon his own little trunk 
 between father and mother, looking out at the 
 country through the glass windows. Mr, 
 Ruskin the elder is travelling for orders, and 
 he brings his family north, arid finally to his 
 sister's home in Perth, where we read of the 
 Scottish aunt and the playfellow cousins, of the 
 dark pools of Tay, of the path above them, 
 " being seldom traversed by us children, except 
 at harvest-time, when we used to go gleaning 
 in the fields beyond." " I hesitate in recording 
 as a constant truth for the world the impression 
 left: on me, when I went gleaning with Jessie, 
 tha!t Scottish sheaves are more golden than are 
 
 ^ Take these few lines descriptive of Severn: "Lightly, sagacious, 
 lovingly humorous, daintily sentimental, as if life were but for him the 
 rippling chant of his favourite song, ' Gente ! e qui I'uccellatore.' " 
 
94 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 found in other lands, and that no harvests 
 elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like 
 the corn of heaven ^ as those of Strath Tay and 
 Strath Earn." 
 
 Was ever story more simple, more pathetic, 
 than the story of little Peter and his mother? 
 " My aunt, a pure dove-priestess, if ever there 
 was one, of Highland Dodona, was of a far 
 gentler temper, but still to me remained at a 
 wistful distance. She had been much saddened 
 by the loss of three of her children before her 
 husband's death. Little Peter especially had 
 been the corner-stone of her love's building ; 
 and it was thrown down swiftly. White- 
 swelling came in the knee ; he suffered much, 
 and grew weaker gradually, dutifiil always, and 
 loving and wholly patient. She wanted him 
 one day to take half a glass of port-wine, and 
 took him on her knee and put it to his lips. 
 ' Not now, mamma ; in a minute,' said he, and 
 put his head on her shoulder, and gave one 
 long, low sigh, and died." 
 
 ^ Psalms Ixxviii. 24.. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 95 
 
 Little Peter's mother followed him before 
 many years, and the rest of her children having 
 passed one by one through the dark river, 
 Mary, the only survivor, comes to live in the 
 Ruskin household, " a serene, additional neutral 
 tint " in the home. 
 
 The two children read the Bible together, 
 write abstracts of the sermons in the chapel at 
 Walworth, which they attend. On the Sundays, 
 when the family remain at home, the father 
 reads Blair's Sermons aloud, or if a clerk or 
 customer dines with them, "the conversation 
 in mere necessary courtesy would take the 
 direction of sherry" (Dickens himself might 
 have envied this touch), while the two children 
 sit silent in their corner with the Pilgrim's 
 Progress and Quarles's Emblems and Fox's Book 
 of Martyrs to pass the time. 
 
 On week-days John, who is now ten years 
 old, is learning Greek with Dr. Andrews, copying 
 Cruikshank's illustrations, and writing English 
 doggerel. 
 
 When Ruskin was turned twelve his mother 
 
96 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 had taken him six times through the Bible ; 
 he had had various classical masters, drawing- 
 masters, and other teachers; he had begun to 
 study mineralogy, was allowed to taste wine, 
 to go to a theatre, and on festive days to dine 
 with his father and mother, and to listen to 
 his father's reading of the Noctes Ambrosianae 
 and of Byron. On Ruskin's thirteenth birth- 
 day his father's partner, Mr. Henry Telford, 
 gives him Rogers's Italy, with its illustrations, 
 and, so he says, determined the main tenor of 
 his life. " The drawing-master had vaguely 
 stated that the world had been greatly dazzled 
 and led away by some splendid ideas thrown 
 out by Turner, but until then Turner had not 
 existed for the quiet family on Heme Hill." 
 
 Besides all these rising interests there are 
 also the descriptions of the people (not very 
 numerous) who begin to cross the stage ; we 
 get glimpses of the neighbours, and we seem 
 to know them as we know the people out of 
 Vanity Fair, or out of Miss Austen's novels 
 — Mr. Telford, the owner of the travelling 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 97 
 
 carriage and the giver of illustrated books ; the 
 two clerks at their work — Henry Ritchie, who 
 loves Margate (" If you want to be happy get 
 a wife and come to Margate," he writes), and 
 Henry Watson and his musical sisters. Then 
 there is Miss Andrews, who sang " Tambourgi, 
 Tambourgi " ; old Mrs. Munroe, with Petite, 
 her white poodle, and her daughter, Mrs. 
 Richard Gray, "entirely simple, meek, loving, 
 and serious, saved from being stupid by a vivid 
 nature full of enthusiasm, like her husband's." 
 It is English middle -class life for the most 
 part, described with something of George Eliot's 
 racy reality. 
 
 VII 
 
 In the early chapters of Praeterita there 
 is the story of Ruskin's first acquaintance 
 with the enchanting Domecq family, which 
 played so important a part in his young life — 
 the four girls who, arriving unexpectedly, re- 
 duced him " to a heap of white ashes," which 
 mercredi des cendres, we read, lasted four years. 
 
 H 
 
98 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 We are not exactly told which of the sisters — 
 whether Adele,-' the graceful blonde of fifteen, 
 Cecile, the dark -eyed, finely -browed girl of 
 thirteen, or Elsie, or little Caroline of eleven, 
 was the chief favourite. They had all been 
 born abroad ; they spoke Spanish and French 
 with perfect grace, English with broken pre- 
 cision ; he describes " a Southern Cross of un- 
 conceived stars floating on a sudden into my 
 obscure firmament of a London suburb." 
 
 The writer can picture to herself something 
 of the charm of these most charming sisters, 
 for once by chance, travelling on Lake Leman, 
 she found herself watching a lady who sat at 
 the steamer's end, a beautiful young woman, all 
 dressed in pale gray, with a long veil floating 
 on the wind, who sat motionless and absorbed, 
 looking toward the distant hills ; not unlike the 
 vision of some guiding, wistful Ariel at the 
 prow, while the steamer sped its way between 
 the banks. The story of the French sisters 
 
 1 A friendly, correspondent refers me to the sonnets in Friendi/iif's 
 Offering. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 99 
 
 had gained an added interest from the remem- 
 brance of those dark lovely eyes, that charming 
 countenance, for afterward, when I knew her 
 better, the lady told me that her mother had 
 been a Domecq, and had once lived with her 
 three sisters in Ruskin's home. Circumstances 
 had divided them in after days, but all the 
 children of the family in turn had been brought 
 up to know Mr. Ruskin by name, and to love 
 and appreciate his books. The lady sent him 
 many messages by me, which I delivered in after 
 days, when, alas ! it was from Mr. Ruskin himself 
 I learned that the beautiful traveller — Isabelle, 
 he called her — had passed away before her time 
 to those distant hills where all our journeys end. 
 Ruskin's jubilee should be counted from the 
 year 1833^ when he tells us he went with his 
 father to a shop to enter their names as sub- 
 scribers to Pr out's Sketches in Flanders and 
 Italy, and they were shown the specimen print 
 of the turreted window over the Moselle at 
 Coblentz. " We got the book home to Heme 
 Hill before the time of our usual annual tour. 
 
100 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 and as my mother watched my father's pleasure 
 and mine in looking at the wonderful places, 
 she said, Why should not we go and see some 
 of them in reality ? My father hesitated a 
 little, and then, with glittering eyes, said, Why 
 not ? " How plainly one can see the picture ! 
 The little family assembled in its quiet after- 
 dinner conclave, the boy turning over the pages 
 of his book, the father opening the big map, 
 the practical mother transforming dreams into 
 reality. Quiet and monotonous lives lend 
 themselves more readily than more brilliant 
 existences to possibilities, to immense events, 
 and this was an event for all the world as well 
 as for the Ruskin family. 
 
 Was there ever, will there ever be such a 
 journey again, such a combination of comfort, 
 of dawning genius, of actual dignity and leisure, 
 of eyes to see, of wheels to roll smoothly along 
 the broad roads ? The child no longer sits 
 perched on his improvised little bracket-seat, but 
 is one of a dignified family, with a maid and 
 a courier, travelling as quickly as four horses 
 
JOHN RUSKIN loi 
 
 and postilions in huge boots can carry them 
 toward the wonderland beyond the horizon — 
 that country of vines, of distant Alpine ranges, 
 of cloud and sky and mountain pass, of fair 
 city and glorious art. 
 
 He says : " We found our pleasant rooms 
 always ready, our good horses always waiting ; 
 everybody took their hats off when we arrived 
 and when we departed ; Salvador presented his 
 accounts weekly, and they were settled without 
 a word of demur. To all these conditions of 
 luxury and felicity can the modern steam-puffed 
 tourist conceive the added and culminating one 
 that we were never in a hurry ? " 
 
 The story of Ruskin's first sight of the Alps 
 is one that no one who has ever seen a snowy 
 range will pass over or forget. 
 
 " We dined at four as usual, and the evening 
 being entirely fine, went out to walk, all of us — 
 my father and mother and Mary and I. 
 
 "We must have still spent some time in 
 town-seeing, for it was drawing toward sunset 
 when we got up to some garden promenade. 
 
102 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 west of the town, I believcy and high above 
 the Rhone, so as to command the open country 
 across it to the south and west, when suddenly 
 — behold — beyond. There was no thought in 
 any of us for a moment of their being clouds. 
 They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure 
 horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by 
 the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we 
 had ever thought or dreamed, the seen walls 
 of Eden could not have been more beautiful to 
 us ; not more awful round heaven the walls of 
 sacred Death. . . . Thus in perfect health of 
 life and fire of heart, not wanting to have 
 anything more than I had, knowing of sorrow 
 only just so much as to>make life serious to me, 
 not enough to slacken in the least its sinews, 
 and with so much of science mixed with feeling 
 as to make the sight of the Alps not only the 
 revelation of the beauty of the earth, but the 
 opening of the first page of its volume, I went 
 down that evening from the garden terrace of 
 SchafFhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it 
 that was to be most sacred and usefiil. To 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 103 
 
 that terrace and to the shore of the Lake of 
 Geneva my heart and faith return to this day in 
 every impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, 
 and every thought that has in it help or peace." 
 
 It would be too long to transcribe at length, 
 as one would like to do, the pages of P raster ita, 
 which take us from one lovely height to another, 
 from summer to summer, from SchafFhausen to 
 Milan, to the " encompassing Alps, the perfect- 
 ness and purity of the sweet, stately, stainless 
 marble against the sky." 
 
 We all build tabernacles here and there in 
 life. It was on the Col de la Faucille that 
 John Ruskin erected his in 1835. 
 
 " The Col de la Faucille on that day opened 
 to me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my 
 future work and true home in this world," he 
 says. " Far as the eye could reach — that land 
 and its moving or pausing waters ; Arve, and 
 his gates of Cluse,^ and his glacier fountains ; 
 
 ' The following facsimile note in allusion to the above was written 
 long after : — 
 
 " I was looking myself this moriiing at some bits about the Valley of 
 Cluse and the Lake of Thun in the first two numbers of Deucalion, 
 
104 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Rhone, and the infinitude of his sapphire lake, 
 his peace beneath the narcissus meads of Vevay, 
 his cruelty beneath the promontories of Sierre. 
 And all that rose against and melted into the 
 sky, of mountain and mountain snow ; and all 
 that living plain, burning with human gladness, 
 studded with white houses, a Milky Way of 
 star dwellings cast across its sunlit blue." 
 
 And so we are able to follow the child year 
 by year ; we see little John grow from out his 
 blue shoes and ribbons, via frilled collars and 
 boyish buttons, to rustling dignities of silken 
 robe and tasselled cap, and promoted from his 
 niche behind the drawing-room chimney-piece 
 to the run of all the cloisters of Oxford. His 
 father meanwhile returns contentedly to his 
 desk opposite the brick wall, where he sits 
 quietly amassing the fortune he spends so 
 generously and in so liberal a spirit. 
 
 The history of the Turners is also to be 
 noted — of the collection gradually increasing ; 
 
 which I like better myself than Frondes. I have sent them, thinking 
 they may possibly interest Mr. Stephen also in some of their mountain 
 talk. — Ever yours and his, affectionately, J. Ruskin." 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 105 
 
 of the father's pleasure, of the son's delight, in 
 the pictures of Richmond Bridge and Gosport ; 
 in the drawing of Winchelsea, "the chief re- 
 creation of my fatigued hours." There is the 
 record of the paternal gift of ;£200 a year in 
 the funds upon the son's coming of age, out of 
 which another Turner is bought for ^^70. " It 
 was not a piece of painted paper, but a Welsh 
 castle and village and Snowdon in blue cloud 
 that I bought for my seventy pounds." 
 
 Sir John Simon tells a story of a visit 
 Ruskin once paid to a sale of pictures, and of 
 his return home dispirited, saying, " There was 
 but one picture he had wanted in the whole 
 collection, and that one was already sold." And 
 there it was before him. It was his father who 
 had bought it, thinking it was one his son would 
 be sure to delight in. Ruskin the elder must 
 have had a most unerring and remarkable 
 critical faculty, and it was undoubtedly from 
 him that John Ruskin inherited his own genius 
 for art. 
 
io6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 VIII 
 
 Ruskin was entered as gentleman-commoner 
 at Christ Church, Oxford, and came up in 
 January 1837. "I was entered as gentleman- 
 commoner without further debate, and remem- 
 ber still, as if it were yesterday, the pride of 
 walking out of the Angel Hotel and past 
 University College, holding my father's arm, 
 in my velvet cap and silk gown." 
 
 The father and mother had set their hearts 
 on his going into the Church. He would have 
 made a bishop, said his father long years after, 
 with tears in his eyes ; and we may read now, 
 indeed, of the first sermon Ruskin ever preached, 
 a baby one, in which he describes himself as a 
 little boy standing up with a red cushion before 
 him, and thumping and preaching, " People, be 
 good." ^ 
 
 Ruskin remained at Oxford until 1840. 
 
 1 Nor, intleeH, has he happily ceased to preach this sermon, the 
 text of which brings back to one's mind the touching words of dying 
 Scott. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 107 
 
 The story of his stay there, of his work, of 
 his friends, is most delightfiil reading ; not the 
 least touching part of it all is the account of 
 his mother (with his father's entire acquies- 
 cence) leaving her home, her daily habits, and 
 establishing herself in lodgings in the Oxford 
 High Street, so as to be at hand in case of 
 need. Ruskin's own filial devotion is also to 
 be admired. He tells us that his wishes and 
 his happiness were the chief preoccupations of 
 their lives, and he accepts the loving tie 
 generously, as all sons do not. Speaking of 
 his degree, Ruskin says : " When I was sure I 
 had got through, I went out fqr a walk in the 
 fields north of New College (since turned into 
 the Parks), happy in the sense of recovered 
 freedom, but extremely doubtful to what use 
 I should put it. There I was at two-and- 
 twenty, with such and such powers, all second- 
 rate except the analytical ones, which were as 
 much in embryo as the rest, and which I had 
 no means of measuring ; such and such likings 
 hitherto indulged rather against conscience, and 
 
io8 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 a dim sense of duty to myself, my parents, and 
 a daily more vague shadow of Eternal Law. 
 "What should I be or do ? " This question 
 was to be answered very shortly by publication 
 of the first volume of Modern Painters. Before 
 coming away from Oxford I must not omit 
 to quote a curious passage concerning Dean 
 Liddell, " one of the rarest types of nobly 
 presenced Englishmen, the only man in Oxford 
 in his day who cared about art, and whose 
 ' keen ' saying concerning Turner, ' that he 
 had got hold of a false ideal,' " is here noted 
 (curiously enough) by Ruskin as one which 
 would have been eminently helpful to him at 
 the time, had it been then impressed upon him. 
 After this we come to the history of that ill- 
 ness after overwork which sent Ruskin and his 
 parents abroad again for an indefinite period, 
 travelling away by Rouen and Tours, by the 
 Rhone to Avignon, thence by the Riviera to 
 Florence and the South, in search of health. 
 There is also this epitaph upon Oxford : 
 " Oxford taught me as much Greek as she 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 109 
 
 could, and though I think she might have 
 also told me that fritillaries grew in Iffley 
 meadow, it was better that she left me to 
 find them for myself. I must get on," he 
 continues, " to the days of opening sight and 
 effective labour, and to the scenes of nobler 
 education, which all men who keep their hearts 
 open receive in the end of days." 
 
 It is always interesting to ascertain when 
 a great man begins his life's work ; but, after 
 all, it is scarcely the printing of the book or 
 the framing of the picture which puts a date 
 to the hour in which the mind ripens or carries 
 out its conceptions ; and the casual mention 
 in Praeterita of the publication of Modern 
 Painters shows how much of thought and 
 feeling had already gone toward the book, of 
 which the actual publishing seemed the least 
 memorable part to the author. Speaking of 
 the first volume of Modern Painters, he only 
 says, " It took the best part of the winter's 
 leisure," and dismisses the subject with, "The 
 said first volume must have been out by my 
 
no JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 father's birthday; its success was assured by 
 the end of the year." 
 
 The book made its mark then and there. 
 Those qualities which Ruskin prefers to call 
 his analytical qualities seem to others to be a 
 happy combination of intuition, of industry, 
 and vivid imagination. Though the graduate's 
 principles and teachings were variously esteemed, 
 every one acknowledged their importance, and 
 it seems but justice to Mr. Ruskin to suggest 
 that he was not altogether accountable for 
 the seriousness with which his admirers have 
 sometimes accepted his eloquent paradoxes and 
 humours. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to look 
 back at the bygone criticisms of this startling 
 and eloquent publication. Reviewers writing 
 long after, with experience and knowledge of 
 the road, can drive their teams steadily, crack- 
 ing their long whips with a sense ©f dignity 
 and final authority which is admirable for re- 
 trospective commonplace ; but how are they 
 to rein in a Pegasus who has inadvertently 
 found himself harnessed to the old coach, and 
 
JOHN RUSKIN III 
 
 who puts out his wings and flies straight up 
 into the air? Pegasus in his flight does not 
 hesitate to kick out right and left:, overturning 
 as he goes the various "Van Somethings and 
 Bac Somethings," with other shrines that we 
 would more gladly sacrifice. Blackwood of those 
 days took up the battle in an overbearing and 
 angry spirit. The reviewer comes to the de- 
 fence of the giants and windmills this new Don 
 Quixote is attacking right and left — Claude, 
 Salvator, Cuyp, Berghem, Ruysdael, etc. " You 
 cannot judge with judgment if you have not 
 the sun in your spirit and passion in your 
 heart," cries the young champion, dealing his 
 thrusts. But this is not language to be applied 
 to such authorities as those of Blackwood then, 
 or perhaps of the Edinburgh nowadays ; and 
 the critics in return strike at the graduate with 
 the sun in their eyes, and with passion in their 
 words if not in their hearts. 
 
 A second article which appeared in Black- 
 wood, some years later was far more within the 
 limist of fair and measured criticism, allowing 
 
112 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 the book to be the work of a man of power, 
 thinking independently, feeling strongly, and 
 with " a mortal aversion to be in a crowd." 
 Meanwhile Fraser, in its article on the second 
 edition, declares that " the Oxford graduate 
 has sought a reputation even in the cannon's 
 mouth, has scaled the wall of the Castle of 
 Prejudice, and from its embattled parapet 
 waves us to follow." The graduate's volume 
 " prompts us to leave the conventional for the 
 true, and quitting the cant of gallery connois- 
 seurship, to find tongues in trees, books in the 
 running brooks, sermons in stones, and good 
 in everything." From the Ethics of the Dust 
 to the Stones of Venice, from the Spring of 
 Wandel to Deucalion, there is nothing which 
 has once attracted him which he does not study 
 with love and intuition, nothing he does not 
 use with admiration. This applies most especi- 
 ally to his love for Nature. For the more 
 human part in art his feeling is different alto- 
 gether, and there his instinct for destruction 
 is often as fierce as his gift for construction 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 113 
 
 IS exquisite when he treats of Nature and her 
 silent belongings. 
 
 IX 
 
 The writer of this little essay certainly 
 cannot pretend either to the knowledge or to 
 the infallibility of an art critic, and she has 
 therefore ventured to take Ruskin from her 
 own point of view only, as a teacher, as a 
 writer of the English language, as a poet in his 
 own measure. How is it possible to a man 
 writing, as he says, — with passion, — with all 
 the vibrating chords of a thousand interests 
 and revelations, to be the temperate and dis- 
 passionate awarder of that bare justice which is 
 all an orthodox critic should bestow .'' Many 
 things, indeed, leave him altogether silent and 
 apparently irresponsive ; he does not always 
 contradict the verdict of generations, but he 
 accepts it without enthusiasm. The instinct- 
 ive form which beauty takes for him is that 
 of Nature and her direct influence upon him- 
 
114 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 self. His attitude toward Greek art is curiously 
 characteristic of this ; so were his first impres- 
 sions of Rome. 
 
 Very long afterward Ruskin said of his 
 mother's house - keeping arrangements : " I 
 don't think the reader has yet been informed 
 that I inherited to the full my mother's love 
 of tidiness and cleanliness, and that in Switzer- 
 land, next to her eternal snows, what I most 
 admired was her white sleeves." 
 
 Was it Ruskin's love of order, then, which 
 caused him to suffer so much in Rome, when 
 he waywardly painted the rags fluttering in a 
 by-street, and would not give a thought to 
 the ancient churches and statues and pictures 
 and ruins .'' Was it his love of tidiness or his 
 sincerity which made him at first write almost 
 cruelly of Italy, of Florence, and of the Uffizi, 
 of Siena and its cathedral, " costly confec- 
 tionery, faithless vanity " .'' The first sight of 
 St. Peter's, he tells us, was to him little more 
 than a gray milestone, announcing twenty miles 
 yet of stony road. He ascertained that the 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 115 
 
 Stanze could not give him any pleasure. " What 
 the Forum or the Capitol had been he did not in 
 the least care. Raphael's ' Transfiguration ' and 
 Domenichino's 'St. Jerome' he pronounced, 
 without the smallest hesitation — Domenichino's 
 a bad picture, and Raphael's an ugly one " — 
 (which verdict I can remember my own father 
 endorsing, as far as the Raphael was concerned). 
 I ought also in fairness to add that, later on, 
 many of Ruskin's unqualified early criticisnis 
 are entirely modified and swept away. 
 
 For the second volume of Modern Painters, 
 " not meant to be in the least like what it is," 
 Ruskin wanted " more Chamouni " ; and farther 
 on, feeling that he must know ' more of Italy, 
 see Pau and Florence again before writing 
 another word, he tells his indulgent parents 
 of his wish. Turner, of all people, strongly 
 opposed the journey, the Continent being then 
 in an angry and disturbed condition ; but papa 
 and mamma seem to have agreed. And so the 
 new life began for him as we read in the 
 chapters headed Campo Santo and Macugnaga. 
 
ii6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " Serious, enthusiastic, worship and wonder 
 and work ; up at six, drawing, studying, think- 
 ing ; breaking bread and drinking wine at 
 intervals ; homeward the moment the sun went 
 down." " The days that began in the cloister 
 of the Campo Santo at Pisa usually ended by 
 my getting upon the roof of Santa Maria della 
 Spina, and sitting in the sunlight that transfused 
 the warm marble of its pinnacles till the un- 
 abated brightness went down beyond the arches 
 of the Ponte a Mare, the few footsteps and 
 voices of the twilight silent in the streets, and 
 the city and her mountains stood mute as a 
 dream beyond the soft eddying of Arno." We 
 may judge by these illustrations to his life what 
 sort of material it was that Ruskin himself put 
 into his noble books. 
 
 It was between the publication of the first 
 and second volumes of Modern Painters that 
 Ruskin came under Carlyle's influence. Long 
 years afterward Carlyle himself, writing to 
 Emerson, says : " There is nothing going on 
 among us as notable to me as those fierce 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 117 
 
 lightning bolts Ruskin is copiously and desper- 
 ately pouring into the black world of Anarchy 
 all around him. No other man in England 
 that I meet has in him the divine rage against 
 iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, 
 and that every man ought to have. Unhappily 
 he is not a strong man — one might say a weak 
 man rather — and has not the least prudence of 
 management, though if he can hold out for 
 another fifteen years or so, he may produce, 
 even in this way, a great effect or so. God 
 grant it, say I." 
 
 I heard a pretty account once from Mr. 
 Alfred Lyttelton of a visit paid by Ruskin 
 to Carlyle in the familiar room in Cheyne 
 Walk, with the old picture of Cromwell on the 
 wall, and Mrs. Carlyle's little tables and pretty 
 knick-knacks still in their quiet order. Mr. 
 Ruskin had been ill not long before, and as he 
 talked on of something he cared about, Mr. 
 Lyttelton said his eyes lighted up, and he 
 seemed agitated and moved. Carlyle stopped 
 him short, saying the subject was too interesting. 
 
n8 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " You must take care," he said, with that 
 infinite kindness which Carlyle could show; 
 " you will be making yourself ill once more." 
 And Ruskin, quite simply, like a child, stopped 
 short. " You are right," he said, calling 
 Carlyle " master," and then went on to talk of 
 something else, as dull, no doubt, as anything 
 could be that Ruskin and Carlyle could talk 
 about together. 
 
 In the first volume of Praeterita there is one 
 particular passage about Carlyle to which many 
 of us will demur. 
 
 Ruskin himself is now quoting from the 
 Emerson correspondence, and he says : " I find 
 at page 1 8 the, to me, entirely disputable, and 
 to my thought, so far as undisputed, much 
 blamable and pitiable exclamation of my 
 master's : ' Not till we can think that here and 
 there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, 
 does this waste earth become a peopled garden.' 
 My training, as the reader has perhaps enough 
 perceived, produced in me the precisely opposite 
 sentiment. My times of happiness had always 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 119 
 
 been when nobody was thinking of me. . . . 
 The garden at home was no waste place to me, 
 because I did not suppose myself an object of 
 interest either to the ants or the butterflies, and 
 the only qualification of the delight of my 
 evening walk at Champagnole was the sense 
 that my father and mother were thinking of 
 me, and would be frightened if I was ten 
 minutes late for tea. . . . 
 
 " I don't mean in the least that I could have 
 done without them. They were to me much 
 more than Carlyle's wife to him. . . . But that 
 the rest of the world was waste to him unless 
 he had admirers in it is a sorry state of senti- 
 ment enough, and I am somewhat tempted for 
 once to admire the exactly opposite temper of 
 my own solitude. My entire delight was in 
 observing without being observed ; if I could 
 have been invisible all the better. I was abso- 
 lutely interested in men and in their ways as I 
 was interested in marmots and chamois and in 
 trouts. . . . The living habitation of the world, 
 the grazing and nesting in it, the spiritual power 
 
120 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of the air, the rocks, the waters — to be in the 
 midst of it, and rejoice, and wonder at it ; . . . 
 this was the essential love of nature in me, 
 this the root of all that I have usefully 
 become." 
 
 As I have already said, this peculiar sense of 
 solemn responsibility to Nature and to mankind, 
 and irresponsibility to individuals, is most speci- 
 ally to be noted in Ruskin ; more especially in 
 the young Ruskin, who writes as people of 
 strong imagination write when the impulse is 
 on them, realising at the moment but one 
 aspect of a feeling. But though he writes in 
 this detached and lofty fashion, every page of 
 his memoir vibrates with the warm light of a 
 united home, where exist mutual love, con- 
 fidence, sympathy, without which half the 
 charm of the whole picture would be gone. 
 
 X 
 
 At Macugnaga, Ruskin, maturing his second 
 volume, seems to have lived in good company. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 121 
 
 with a couple of Shakespeare's plays and his 
 own thoughts, but not to have enjoyed his 
 solitude so much as might have been expected 
 from his theories. Mr. Boxall and Mr. 
 Hardinge presently joined him for a time, 
 and then came another serious illness, after 
 which the second volume of Modern Painters 
 was published in 1846. 
 
 This second volume concerns the schools of 
 Italy and its histories of art, and raised as much 
 indignation as the first had done, though less 
 irritation. Critics thanked heaven openly that 
 they were publicans and still able to admire, 
 not Pharisees rejecting right and left. Then 
 followed another beautiful sermon and more 
 parables. " The book I called The Seven 
 Lamps was to show that certain right states 
 of temper and moral feeling were the magic 
 powers by which all good architecture, without 
 exception, had been produced." The Stones of 
 Venice appeared between the years 1851 and 
 1853, and had from beginning to end no other 
 aim than to show that the Gothic architecture 
 
1 22 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in 
 all its features, a state of pure national faith 
 and of domestic virtue, and that its Renaissance 
 architecture had arisen out of, and indicated in 
 all its features, a state of concealed national 
 infidelity and of domestic corruption. 
 
 Again and again, as we read our Ruskin, 
 the truth of his father's saying occurs to one, 
 "He should have been a bishop!" Every- 
 thing has a moral to him and a meaning. 
 " In these books of mine, their distinctive 
 character as essays on art is their bringing 
 everything to a root in human passion or in 
 human hope," he says in Modern Painters 
 (vol. V.) The law of perfectness is one of 
 his favourite texts, one that he would have 
 us all pursue. He culls and he chooses at 
 will, dwelling upon each detail which illus- 
 trates his own vast and lovely conception of 
 things as they should be — as they might be 
 for us if we were all Ruskins ; and the chief 
 danger for his disciples is that of seeing details 
 too vividly, and missing the whole. There is 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 123 
 
 also all the extraordinary influence of his per- 
 sonality in his teaching. Oracles such as Mill 
 and Spencer veil their faces when they utter. 
 Poets and orators like Ruskin uncover their 
 heads as they address their congregations. 
 
 Ruskin has not only words at his command, 
 but delicate hands. Look at the sketches and 
 drawings in the later volumes of Modern 
 Painters. How eloquent and graceful they 
 are, whether it is indicated motion or shadow, 
 whether clouds or spiral leaf and up-springing 
 branch ! 
 
 When Ruskin records his past, it is as often 
 as not by the sketches he has taken along the 
 way that he marks his progress. And how 
 true the saying is that nothing else — no descrip- 
 tions — ever brings back a former state of mind 
 and being as an old sketch will do ! Some- 
 times one's old self actually seems to come up 
 and take it out of one's hand. Apropos of 
 these sketches of Ruskin's, and of a new port- 
 folio of them lately published, I heard no 
 less an authority than the Slade Professor 
 
124- JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 at Cambridge saying that, with all the credit 
 Professor Ruskin has justly won as a master of 
 English diction, he has scarcely gained as much 
 as he deserved for the exquisite character of his 
 actual drawing. As one looks down the list of 
 Ruskin's writings one can roughly read the 
 story of his life. In the early numbers of the 
 Cornhill Magazine his papers on political 
 economy appeared, and it must have been 
 about that time that he entered into his 
 partnership with Miss Octavia Hill, resulting 
 in one of the most important and interesting 
 movements of the day. 
 
 There is a short article by Miss Hill in 
 a bygone Fortnightly Review, describing the 
 beginning of what has led to so much. The 
 article is called " Cottage Property in London." 
 The said cottages, begrimed, and overcrowded 
 by the dreary London peasantry, were white- 
 washed and drained with the help of Mr. 
 Ruskin's ;r700, and relet again by Miss Hill 
 to the poor people themselves, of whom she 
 always writes with admirable discernment and 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 125 
 
 sympathy. As she tells of her tenants, of their 
 fortitude, their power of hope, their simple, 
 entire confidence, their extraordinary patience. 
 Miss Hill speaks with the knowledge that 
 people bring whose genius belongs to the 
 work into which they throw their hearts, 
 and Mr. Ruskin was the first to recognise her 
 gift. 
 
 " I had not great ideas of what must be 
 done," she says. " My strongest endeavours 
 were to be used to rouse habits of industry and 
 effort. The plan was one which depended on 
 just governing more than on helping. The first 
 point was to secure such power as would enable 
 me to insist on some essential sanitary arrange- 
 ments. I laid the scheme before Mr. Ruskin, 
 who entered into it most warmly. He at once 
 came forward with all the money necessary, and 
 took the whole risk of the undertaking upon 
 himself. He showed me, however, that it 
 would be far more useful if it could be made 
 to pay — that a working-man ought to be able 
 to pay for his own house. . . ." 
 
126 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 I found a letter among my father's papers 
 the other day which must have been written 
 by Mr. Ruskin about this time, and as it bears 
 upon one of his many theories, and is interest- 
 ing and characteristic, I will insert it here. It 
 concerned an old friend of my father's, Mon- 
 sieur Louis Marvy, who spent one winter in 
 Young Street. He was an engraver by pro- 
 fession ; he had, as I believe, been mixed up 
 in some of the revolutionary episodes of 1848. 
 He was a very charming and gentle person, in 
 delicate health. He used to work hour after 
 hour at his plates. He lived quietly in our 
 house, chiefly absorbed by his work. He died 
 quite young, not long after his return to France. 
 Mr. Ruskin's letter refers in a measure to this 
 bygone episode, and I have his permission to 
 transcribe it. 
 
 "Denmark Hill, 215/ December i860. 
 
 " Dear Mr. Thackeray — I think (or should think if I 
 did not know) that you are quite right in this general law 
 about lecturing, though, until I knew it, I did not feel able 
 to refuse the letter of request asked of me. 
 
 " The mode in which you direct your charity puts me 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 127 
 
 in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though 
 I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. 
 
 " In somebody's drawing-room ages ago you were speak- 
 ing accidentally of M. de Marvy. I expressed my great 
 obligation to him, on which you said that I could now 
 prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow, which 
 choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered 
 the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as 
 it went, to the general impression on your mind of the 
 hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. 
 
 " The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite 
 way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve 
 hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch, 
 and when I have choice I nearly always give where I think 
 the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I 
 would lecture for a school when I would not for a dis- 
 tressed author, and would have helped De Marvy to perfect 
 his invention, but not — unless I had no other object — his 
 widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the 
 falling more than to feed the fallen. This, if you ever 
 lind out anything of my private life, you will know to be 
 true ; but I shall never feel comfortable, nevertheless, 
 about that Marvy business unless you send to me for ten 
 pounds for the next author, or artist, or widow of either, 
 whom you want to help. 
 
 " And with this weight at last off my mind, I pray you 
 to believe me always faithfully, respectfully yours, 
 
 " J. RUSKIN. 
 
 "All best wishes of the season to you and your 
 daughters." 
 
 And my father's daughter may be perhaps 
 forgiven for adding that there are few among 
 
128 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 us who will not sympathise as much with Mr. 
 Ruskin when he breaks his theories as when he 
 keeps to them. I don't know if it is fair to 
 quote the story I heard at Coniston, long after, 
 of the man who had grossly lied and cheated at 
 Brantwood for years, and whose wages Mr. 
 Ruskin went on paying, because he could not 
 give him a character, and could not let him 
 and his children starve. 
 
 XI 
 
 It may be here as well to say a few words of 
 Mr. Ruskin's public work. In the statement 
 of the purposes of St. George's Guild pub- 
 lished by him he explains the two chief objects 
 of the society — firstly, agricultural work, re- 
 claiming waste lands, and the encouragement of 
 manual labour without the help of steam (" a 
 cruel and furious waste of fuel to do what 
 every stream and breeze are ready to do ") ; 
 secondly, the building of museums and schools 
 of art and study. " I continually see subscrip- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 129 
 
 tions of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand pounds 
 for new churches. Now a good clergyman 
 never wants a church. He can say all his 
 parishioners essentially need to hear in any of 
 his parishioners' best parlours or upper cham- 
 bers, or, if these are not large enough, in the 
 market-place or harvest-field. What does he 
 want with altars — was the Lord's Supper eaten 
 on one ? what with pews ? — useless rents for the 
 pride of them ; what with font and pulpit that 
 the next wayside brook or mossy bank cannot 
 give him .'' " Then he goes on to say that in 
 order to form wholesome habits they (the young) 
 must be placed under wholesome conditions. 
 For the pursuit of any intellectual inquiry to 
 advantage not only leisure must be granted them, 
 but quiet. The words " school," " college," 
 " university," rightly understood, imply the 
 leisure necessary for learning, the companion- 
 ship necessary for sympathy, and wilfulness 
 restrained by the daily vigilance and firmness 
 of tutors and masters. 
 
 The writer has not seen the museum at 
 
 K 
 
130 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Sheffield, but happening to admire the work 
 of a young water - colour painter not long 
 ago, and to ask where he had studied, she was 
 told that he had studied with Nature for a 
 teacher ; but that besides working in this 
 great academy he had also greatly profited by 
 Mr. Ruskin's museum at Sheffield, where the 
 most interesting and valuable art treasures are 
 to be found in a couple of rooms opening on 
 each side of the door of a roadside cottage. 
 At one time Mr. Ruskin intended to build an 
 art museum for Sheffield, and commissioned Mr. 
 William Marshall to prepare the plans. I do 
 not know why this scheme was never carried 
 beyond the designs. Oxford first appointed 
 Ruskin to the Slade Professorship. Cambridge 
 also made signals of respect and admiration, 
 and he was elected Rede Lecturer in 1867. 
 But it is difficult to imagine Ruskin at Cam- 
 bridge ; Oxford seems to belong far more to 
 his genius, to his emotional gifts, his playful 
 mediaeval and romantic views of life. I have 
 heard of him entertaining his guests as hospit- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 131 
 
 ably in his rooms at All-Souls' as at Brantwood 
 by the waters of the lake. A friend described 
 to us the well-served breakfast, ample beyond 
 all appetite of host or guest, and Ruskin, 
 fearing to disappoint the cook, sending friendly 
 and appreciative messages. " A very nice relish 
 for breakfast, sir," says the scout, offering some 
 particular dish. " A very nice relish at any 
 time," says Ruskin kindly, refusing ; " and tell 
 the cook I said so." 
 
 The following note of welcome shows what 
 trouble Brantwood takes for its friends ; — 
 
 " King's Arms, Lancaster, Saturday. 
 
 "Dear Mr. 1 have left orders to make you 
 
 comfortable ; it is just possible, after these two days of 
 darkness, you may even have a gleam of sun on Monday 
 morning. 
 
 " Eleven train to Carnforth Junction, where change 
 carriages for Ulverstone, where getting out, you will, I 
 doubt not, see a dark post-chaise, into which getting, an 
 hour and a half's pleasant drive brings you to Brantwood, 
 where I hope you may not be uncomfortable whatever the 
 weather. — Yours faithfully, J. Ruskin." 
 
 Not the least among Ruskin's gifts to his 
 fellow-men are the beautiful copies of beautiful 
 
132 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 pictures which he has had executed for the 
 students at Sheffield and elsewhere : the best 
 copies that the best talent, art, and knowledge 
 could produce, bestowed with like liberality and 
 sympathy upon those who have no means of 
 reaching the originals. The following letters 
 relating to this work will be found interesting. 
 One is struck by the care for the work and 
 the interest in the worker, to whose great 
 kindness I owe this record : — 
 
 "Oxford, zoth May 1873. 
 
 " My dear 1 have your interesting letter, with 
 
 the (to me very charming) little sketch of ' The Peace.' 
 By the Virtues on the left I meant what perhaps my 
 memory fails in placing there — on the left-hand wall, 
 standing with your back to the window. ' The Peace' is 
 opposite window, isn't it ? I can only say, do any face 
 that strikes you. In this composition I care more for com- 
 pleteness of record than for accurate copying. There' is 
 nothing in it that I esteem exquisite as painting ; but all 
 is invaluable as design and emotion. Do it as thoroughly 
 as you can pleasantly to yourself For me, the Justice and 
 Concord are the importantest. As you have got to work 
 comfortably on it, don't hurry. Do it satisfactorily ; and 
 then to Assisi, where quite possibly I may join you, though 
 not for a month or six weeks. 
 
 " Keep me well in knowledge of your health and move- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 133 
 
 merits (writing now to Coniston), and believe me, very 
 faithfully yours, J. Ruskin." 
 
 "... 1 shall soon be writing to the good monks at 
 Assisi ; give them my love always. 
 
 " Do not spare fees to custodes, and put them down 
 separately to me. 
 
 " People talk so absurdly about bribing. An Italian 
 cannot know at first anything about an Englishman but 
 that he is either stingy or generous. The money gift 
 really opens his heart, if he has one. You can do it in that 
 case without money, indeed, eventually, but it is amazing 
 how many people can have good (as well as bad) brought 
 out of them by gifts, and no otherwise.'' 
 
 " London, 15M yune 1873. 
 
 " My dear 1 am very glad to have your letters, 
 
 and to see that you are on the whole well, and happy in 
 your work. One's friends never do write to one when 
 one's at Siena ; somehow it is impossible to suppose a letter 
 ever gets there. 
 
 " You may stay at your work there as long as you find 
 necessary for easy completion. It will be long before I 
 get to Assisi. 
 
 " I don't care about anything in the Villa Spanocchi. 
 All my pleasant thoughts of it — or any other place nearly 
 — are gone. Do ' The Peace ' as thoroughly as possible, 
 now you are at it. 
 
 " I have intense sympathy with you about Sunday, but 
 fancy my conscience was unusually morbid. I am never 
 comfortable on the day. Of course the general shop- 
 shutting and dismalness in England adds to the effect of it. 
 
 " Your day is admirably laid out, except that in your 
 walk after four you go to look at pictures. You ought to 
 
134 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 rest in changed thoughts as much as possible, to get out 
 on the green banks and brows, and think of nothing but 
 what the leaves and winds say. 
 
 " I have nothing to tell you of myself that is pleasant ; 
 not much that is specially otherwise. The weather has 
 been frightful in London. It was better at Coniston, but 
 it appals me ; it is a plague of darkness such as I never 
 believed nature could inflict or suffer. — Always affection- 
 ately yours, J. RusKiN." 
 
 " Herne Hill, z^^d April 1882. 
 
 "... That is a good passage of Leonardo's, but if 
 you had read my Oxford lectures you would find their 
 whole initiatory line and shade practice is (with distinct 
 announcement of his authority) based on his book. I had 
 read every word of it with care before I finished Mod. P." 
 
 XII 
 
 Sir Charles Newton writes on one occasion : 
 " I spent last night with Ruskin, and very 
 delightful it was. He is now taking that 
 larger view of art which I always expected he 
 would, and begins to regard Greek art from the 
 point of view in which it ought to be looked at, 
 and was regarded by the Greeks themselves." 
 This letter was shown me by the kindest 
 of friends, whose own noble inspirations are 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 135 
 
 a blessing and a light to the age. Mr. 
 Watts has often described his discussions with 
 Ruskin during their long and intimate com- 
 panionship. That Ruskin Is remorseless all 
 his friends must allow, but he is remorseless 
 to himself as soon as a conviction is borne in 
 upon him. 
 
 Here is a charming example of a recantation 
 in a letter to Mr. Burne-Jones : — 
 
 "Venice, lyh May 1869. 
 
 "My dearest Ned — There's nothing here like Car- 
 paccio ! There's a little bit of humble-pie for you ! 
 
 " Well, the fact was, I had never once looked at him, 
 having classed him in glance and thought with Gentile 
 Bellini and other men of the more or less incipient and 
 hard schools, and Tintoret went better with clouds and 
 hills. But this Carpaccib is a new world to me. . . . I've 
 only seen the Academy ones yet, and am going this morn- 
 ing (cloudless light) to your St. George of the Schiavoni ; 
 but I must send this word first to catch post. — From your 
 loving J. R. 
 
 "I don't give up my Tintoret, but his dissolution of 
 expression into drapery and shadow is too licentious for 
 me now." 
 
 It is to Watts I also owe the following 
 letters, which are so interesting in themselves, 
 
136 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 and do such honour to the candour and love of 
 truth of the recipients, that I will set them down 
 without comment. The letters recall that past 
 vision of Little Holland House and its gardens, 
 where for so many years the Tintoret of our 
 own times, "the Signer," as his friends all 
 call him, lived on ; recording the generation 
 of noble people passing by, as well as the 
 beautiful ideals of his own mind, working 
 day after day quietly from dawn of light to 
 afternoon in that home of so much vivid life 
 and original colour, which still leaves the re- 
 membrance of kind deeds and happy, gracious 
 ways shining like a track on the waters. 
 
 ^'■Saturday E-uemng^ 2()t/i September i860. 
 
 " Dear Watts — I am very glad to have your letter 
 to-night, having been downhearted lately and unable to 
 v^rite to my friends, yet glad of being remembered by 
 them. I have kept a kind letter of Mrs. Prinsep's by me 
 ever so long. It came too late to be answered before the 
 birthday of which it told me. 
 
 " I will come and sit whenever and wherever and as 
 long as you like. I have nothing whatever to do, and 
 don't mean to have. I hope to be at National Gallery 
 on Tuesday [erased], Wednesday [erased, see end of note], 
 and Thursday afternoons, two to four, not exactly work- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 137 
 
 ing, but wondering. I entirely feel with you that there is 
 no dodge in Titian. It is simply right doing with a care 
 and dexterity alike unpractised among us nowadays. It is 
 drawing with paint as tenderly as you do with chalk. . . . 
 I suspect that Titian depended on states and times in 
 colouring more than we do ; that he left such and such 
 colours for such and such times always before retouching, 
 and so on ; but this you would not call dodge — would 
 you ? — but merely perfect knowledge of means. It struck 
 me in looking at your group with child in the Academy 
 that you depended too much on blending and too little on 
 handling colour ; that you were not simple enough nor 
 quick enough to do all you felt ; nevertheless it was very 
 beautiful. I should think you were tormented a little by 
 having too much feeling. 
 
 " If it is fine to-morrow I have promised to take a drive, 
 but the second fine day, whatever that may be this week, 
 I shall be at Trafalgar Square." 
 
 "5M February 1861. 
 
 " My dear Watts — Kind thanks for writing to ask for 
 me. I am not unwell materially, but furiously sulky and 
 very quiet over my work, and mean to be so, and having 
 been hitherto a rather voluble and demonstrative person, 
 people think I'm ill. I'm not cheerful, certainly, and 
 don't see how anybody in their senses can be. 
 
 " I did not say — did I ? — that you were not to aim at 
 all qualities ; but not all at once. Titian was born of 
 strong race, and with every conceivable human advantage, 
 and probably before he was twelve years old knew all that 
 could be done with oil-painting. We are under every 
 conceivable human disadvantage, and we must be content 
 to go slowly. If you try at present to get all Titian's 
 qualities, you will assuredly get none. You not only have 
 
138 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 seen Titians and Correggios which united all, but I don't 
 suppose you ever saw a true Titian or Correggio which did 
 not unite all. But that does not in the least warrant you 
 in trying at once to do the same ; you have many things to 
 discover which they learned with their alphabet, many 
 things to cure yourself of which their master never allowed 
 them to fall into habit of For instance, from long draw- 
 ing with chalk point you have got a mottled and broken 
 execution, and have no power of properly modulating the 
 brush. Well, the way to cure yourself of that is not by 
 trying for Titian or Correggio, whose modulations are so 
 exquisite that they perpetually blend invisibly with the 
 point-work, but take a piece of absolute modulation — the 
 head of the kneeling figure in Sir Joshua's ' Three Graces ' 
 at Kensington, for instance — and do it twenty times over 
 and over again, restricting yourself wholly to his number 
 of touches and thereabouts. Then you will feel exactly 
 where you are, and what is the obstacle in that direction 
 to be vanquished ; you will feel progress every day, and be 
 happy in it ; while when you try for everything, you never 
 know what is stopping you. Again, the chalk drawing 
 has materially damaged your perception of the subtlest 
 qualities of local colour. When a form is shown by a 
 light of one colour and a reflex of another, both equal in 
 depth, if we are drawing in chalk we must exaggerate either 
 one or the other, or the form must be invisible. The habit 
 of exaggeration is fatal to the colour vision ; to conquer it 
 you should paint the purest and subtlest coloured objects 
 on a small scale till you can realise them thoroughly. 1 
 say on a small scale ; otherwise the eye does not come 
 to feel the value of points of hue. This exercise, nearly 
 the reverse of the modulation exercise, could not be 
 healthily carried on together with it. And so on with 
 others. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 139 
 
 " I write with an apparently presumptuous positiveness, 
 but my own personal experience of every sort of feebleness 
 is so great that I have a right to do so on points connected 
 with it. 
 
 " Sincere regards to all friends. — Ever affectionately 
 yours, J. R." 
 
 " Denmark Hill, S., 
 " Wednesday, ze,th July 1866. 
 
 " My dear Watts — I heard to-day from Edward 1 that 
 he thought you would like to come and see me — or me to 
 come to you. 
 
 " You have not been here for ever so long. Can you 
 come out any day to breakfast ? — and we'll have a nice 
 talk — or would you rather I should come in the after- 
 noon ? I rarely stir in the morning. I want to see you. 
 I've been very ill and sad lately, or should have managed it. 
 
 " Send me just a line to say what day you could come, 
 or see me. — Ever yours affectionately, J. Ruskin. 
 
 " G. F. Watts, Esq. — Ned says you have been doing 
 beautiful things. And therefore I should like to come, as 
 you won't exhibit and leave Maclise's ' Death of Nelson ' 
 to edify the public.'' . . . 
 
 And so, as one thinks of it all, of the people 
 living round about us shaping their own and 
 other people's lives, one admires and wonders 
 at this unending variety of understanding, of 
 teaching, of writing, of opinion. Few things 
 
 ^ Mr. E. Burne- Jones. 
 
14° JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Strike one more among the chief men who come 
 to the front — not by chance, but by force of 
 hard work and natural right — than their good- 
 fellowship, their trust in one another, and their 
 genuine appreciation of each other, whatever 
 their opinions may be. It is more commonly 
 the second-rate among us who are critical and 
 impatient. And this is indeed the secret of 
 the rule of those Captains of our race who are 
 Captains by reason of their swifter knowledge 
 and insight, their greater courage and fairness. 
 
 We have all been reading lately of generous 
 Darwin and his friends. Genuine excellence is 
 distinguished by this mark, that it belongs to 
 all mankind, says Goethe, writing to Carlyle. 
 Carlyle himself, with his flashing wit and his 
 passionate flashing words, ever discriminates 
 even while he grumbles. 
 
 XII 
 
 Ruskin has phases of impression, but his 
 noble instinct is for the truth, although the 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 141 
 
 examples he gives at times seem so change- 
 able, and his systems of instruction so hope- 
 less for students who have to live during 
 their short lives after all — to pay their way 
 and their long bills, as well as to study their 
 art. Ruskin's own peculiar system is in reality 
 almost more of a trial of patience than of 
 skill ; he has a series of pitfalls for unwary 
 students, among which the white jam-pots he 
 used to prescribe to those of Oxford may be 
 counted. But though his practice may be 
 fanciful, his light is a beacon indeed — steadily 
 flashing from the rock upon which it is set. 
 The rays fall upon uncertain waves, change 
 their colour, turn and return, dazzle or escape 
 you altogether ; but the longer you look at 
 them, the more you realise their truth and their 
 beauty. You cannot take up a book with any 
 one of the fanciful charming names, whether 
 the Queen of the Air, or Sesame and Lilies, or 
 the Crown of Wild Olive, without finding 
 conscience and good common-sense wrapped up 
 and hidden among the flowers. The shrewd- 
 
142 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 ness, the wisdom of it all, strikes us as much 
 as the variety of his interests. 
 
 " A few words," he says somewhere, " well 
 chosen and well distinguished, will do work 
 that a thousand cannot, when every one is 
 acting equivocally in the function of another. 
 Yes ; and words, if they are not watched, will 
 do deadly work sometimes, masked words — 
 unjust stewards of men's ideas." 
 
 How true is this sentence concerning the 
 idle and the busy : " All rich people are not 
 idle. There are the idle rich and the idle poor, 
 as there are the busy rich and the busy poor. 
 Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten 
 thousand a year ; many a man of fortune is 
 busier than his errand-boy." 
 
 Here is his definition of a true church : 
 " Wherever one hand meets another helpfully — 
 that is the Holy or Mother Church which ever 
 is or ever shall be." 
 
 About books : " Will you go and gossip 
 with your housemaid or your stable-boy when 
 you may talk with queens and kings ? But we 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 143 
 
 cannot read unless our minds are fit. Avarice, 
 injustice, vulgarity, base excitement, all unfit 
 us. Beware of reading in order to say, ' Thus 
 Milton thought,' rather than * Thus I thought 
 in misreading Milton.' " 
 
 Here is another hint respecting books for 
 women : " Whether novels or history or poetry 
 be read, they should be chosen not for what is 
 out of them, but for what is in them. The 
 chance and scattered evil that may here and 
 there haunt and hide itself in a powerful book 
 never does any harm to a noble girl, but the 
 emptiness of an author oppresses her and his 
 amiable folly degrades her." On education, as 
 on the relations between men and women, he 
 has a thousand delightful things to say. " Keep 
 a fairy or two for your children," says kind 
 Ruskin ; and doubtless acting upon this friendly 
 hint, the School Board has adopted that charm- 
 ing history of the King of the Golden River as 
 a standard prize book. 
 
 It is pretty also to read of the way in which 
 Ruskin adjusts the different offices of the 
 
144 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 husband and the wife — the woman a guiding, 
 not a determining function ; the man the 
 doer, the creator : while the woman's power 
 should be for rule and not for battle. Her 
 great function is praise ; she enters into no 
 contest, but adjudges the crown. 
 
 I am told by Mr. Allen that Mr. Ruskin 
 thinks that the book which will stand the 
 longest is the Crown of Wild Olive. Sesame 
 and Lilies is, and most deservedly so, a 
 favourite book with the public. Who can 
 ever forget those closing passages, in which 
 the poet, looking round about, seeing the need 
 of the children even greater than that of their 
 elders, bids women go forth into the garden 
 and tend the flowerets lying broken, with their 
 fresh leaves torn ; set them in order in their 
 little beds, fence them from the fierce wind 
 — " flowers with eyes like yours, with thoughts 
 like yours." Was ever a lesson more tenderly 
 given ? 
 
 How true is his description of Holman 
 Hunt : " To Rossetti the Old and New Testa- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 145 
 
 ments were only the greatest poems he knew. 
 But to Holman Hunt the story of the New 
 Testament, when once his mind entirely fastened 
 on it, became what it was to an old Puritan, 
 . . . not merely a Reality, not merely the 
 greatest of Realities, but the only Reality." 
 
 I have perhaps quoted too much already, 
 but I cannot help giving a passage from the 
 Stones of Venice, which is written in a different 
 key, a very grave and noble one. He says : 
 " The passions of mankind are partly protective, 
 partly beneficent, like the chaff and grain of the 
 corn, but none without their use, none without 
 nobleness when seen in balanced unity with the 
 rest of the spirit they are charged to defend. 
 The passions of which the end is the continu- 
 ance of the race, the indignation which is to 
 arm it against injustice or strengthen it to resist 
 wanton injury, and the fear which lies at the 
 root of prudence, reverence, and awe, are all 
 honourable and beautiflal so long as man is 
 regarded in his relations to the existing world." 
 
 Another lesson which Ruskin would impress 
 
1+6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 upon us all is one more easy to grasp, and it 
 applies to the whole conduct of life, whether in 
 art or in nature and natural phenomena. " The 
 seed the sower sows grows up according to its 
 kind : let us sow good seed with care and liber- 
 ality." When Ruskin tells us that modesty, 
 piety, humility, and a number of somewhat un- 
 expected attributes are to be found in the curl of 
 a leaf, in the painted background of a picture, 
 in the arch of a window, a moment's thought 
 will show how true his words are. Qualities 
 take different forms in their exercise : Modesty 
 in design would mean care and accuracy ; 
 Humility would mean interest in the object 
 copied, not a vulgar desire for self-glorification 
 and for rapid effect ; Piety represents that sweet 
 sense which some call sentiment. 
 
 Then again listen to Ruskin writing upon a 
 different theme, that of Shakespeare's chivalry. 
 " Note broadly in the outset that Shakespeare 
 has no heroes, whereas there is hardly a play 
 that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in 
 grave hope and errorless purpose. Cordelia, 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 147 
 
 Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen 
 Katharine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, 
 Helena, and last and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, 
 are all faultless, conceived in the highest heroic 
 type of humanity. Then observe, secondly, the 
 catastrophe of every play is caused always by 
 the folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if 
 there be any, is by the wisdom or virtue of a 
 woman." 
 
 One of Shakespeare's heroines (a Helen 
 happily belonging to our own time) has dedi- 
 cated to Ruskin one of her charming renderings 
 of her not forgotten parts. " She " (Lady 
 Martin) " has shown her beautiful sympathy 
 with character in choosing Beatrice," Ruskin 
 writes in return to Sir Theodore Martin, " and 
 she may be assured that I am indeed listening 
 with all my heart to every word she will say." 
 And then again to Lady Martin herself : " I 
 thought I knew Beatrice of any lady by heart, 
 but you have made her still more real and dear 
 to me, especially by the little sentences in which 
 you speak of your own feelings in certain 
 
148 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 moments in acting her. You have made me 
 wretched because Beatrice is not at Brantwood. 
 ... I should like a pomegranate or two in 
 Juliet's balcony," he adds. I take up another 
 letter to Sir Theodore Martin at hazard, and 
 read : " You are happy at Llangollen in this 
 season. The ferns and grass of its hills are far 
 more beautifully and softly opposed than on 
 ours." How few of us know how to think 
 with such vividness ! We think of a valley, of 
 a mountain, of the skies beyond it, but we 
 do not instinctively see the details ; we do not 
 contrast the hue of the ferns and of the turf 
 of Cumberland and of Wales, perceiving it all 
 with that instantaneous conception which is 
 genius, in short. 
 
 I once heard a well-known man of science 
 speaking of Ruskin : some one had asked him 
 whether Ruskin or Goethe had done most for 
 science. Sir John Lubbock replied that Ruskin 
 undoubtedly had done very much more valu- 
 able work than Goethe ; and that without any 
 pretensions to profound scientific knowledge. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 149 
 
 he had an extraordinary natural gift for obser- 
 vation, and seemed to know by instinct what 
 to observe, what was important amidst so much 
 that was fanciful and poetical ; and then he 
 went on to quote the description of the swallow 
 from Loves Meinie, one of the loveliest things 
 imaginable, and which it would not be difficult 
 to apply to Ruskin's own genius — so swift, so 
 unerring in its flight, so incalculable, so har- 
 monious and fascinating always. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin is a figure standing out dis- 
 tinguished among the many figures and char- 
 acters which make up the dramatis personae of 
 our time ; and this being so, legends gather 
 round him as clouds gather round the peak of 
 his own Coniston Old Man. One story I have 
 vaguely heard which describes a Haroun-al- 
 Raschid expedition of his through the streets 
 of London, a flight from the mosque to the 
 jeweller's store, where the loveliest gems are 
 heaped before him, of which he can best tell 
 the secrets. Then from the jeweller's store to 
 the pastry-cook's, where in an inner room a 
 
ISO JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 table is spread, not with the cream tarts of 
 fiction, but with the British fare of roast 
 mutton and potatoes, and where, as the poet 
 lunches, salting his food meanwhile with his 
 enchanting talk, little by little all the people 
 already in the shop, leaving their buns and 
 sandwiches, gather round to listen. Another 
 legend, which I cannot vouch for either, but 
 which seems suitable somehow, begins with a 
 dream, in which Ruskin dreamt himself a 
 Franciscan friar. Now I am told that when 
 he was at Rome there was a beggar on the 
 steps of the Pincio who begged of Mr. Ruskin 
 every day as he passed, and who always received 
 something. On one occasion the grateful 
 beggar suddenly caught the outstretched hand 
 and kissed it. Mr. Ruskin stopped short, 
 drew his hand hastily away, and then, with a 
 sudden impulse, bending forward, kissed the 
 beggar's cheek. The next day the man came 
 to Mr. Ruskin's lodging to find him, bringing 
 a gift, which he offered with tears in his eyes. 
 It was a relic, he said, a shred of brown cloth 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 151 
 
 which had once formed part of the robe of St. 
 Francis. Mr. Ruskin remembered his dream 
 when the poor beggar brought forth his relic, 
 and thence, so I am told, came his pilgrimage 
 to the convent of St. Francis of Assisi, where 
 he beheld those frescoes by Giotto which seemed 
 to him more lovely than anything Tintoret 
 himself had ever produced. I personally should 
 like to believe that the mendicant was himself 
 St. Francis appearing in the garb of a beggar to 
 his great disciple, to whom also has been granted 
 the gift of interpreting the voices of Nature. 
 
 We are all apt to feel at times that meat is 
 more than life, and the raiment more than the 
 soul : at such times let us turn to Ruskin. He 
 sees the glorious world as we have never known 
 it, or have perhaps forgotten to look upon it. 
 He takes the first example to hand — the stones, 
 which he makes into bread ; the dust and 
 scraps and dry sticks and moss which are lying 
 to his hand : he is so penetrated with the glory 
 and beauty of it all, of the harmony into which 
 we are set, that it signifies little to him upon 
 
152 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 what subject he preaches, and by what examples 
 he illustrates his meaning ; there is a blessing 
 upon his words, and surely the fragments which 
 remain are worthy of the twelve baskets of the 
 Apostles. 
 
 It seemed to me one day last summer as if 
 in truth Ruskin's actual page was shining before 
 me as I waited on the slope of Blackdown 
 Moor in Surrey. It was the day of the Naval 
 Review, and as I rested in a blackberry-bordered 
 field, I could see the tossing land-waves alive 
 with summer and summer toil, the labourers 
 patiently pacing and repacing the furrows, the 
 hay-carts unloading ; other hedges again divid- 
 ing harvest from harvest, labour from labour ; 
 and in the far distance a dazzling plain with 
 gleams of white like the breakers of the sea, 
 and overhead a midsummer vault of blue, 
 across which a hawk was darting in glorious 
 serenity. One of Ruskin's books was lying 
 open on the grass, and the very page seemed to 
 slide forth to fill the air ; now and then a faint 
 breeze would shake the leaves and the count- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 153 
 
 Jess points and blossoms upon the trees and 
 hedges still in my Ruskin land round about ; 
 while from time to time could be heard the 
 distant echo of the Portsmouth guns saluting 
 the Queen as she passed aniong her ships. 
 
ROBERT & ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
ROBERT & ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 " I do not know, and much wiser people than I do not know, what 
 writings are inspired and which are not, but I do know of those I have 
 read which are classical belonging to the Eternal Senate," 
 
 RusKiN, Preface to Bibliotheca Pastorum. 
 
 I 
 
 The sons and daughters of men and women 
 eminent in their generation are from circum- 
 stances fortunate in their opportunities. From 
 childhood they know their parents' friends and 
 contemporaries, the remarkable men and women 
 who are the makers of the age, quite naturally 
 and without excitement. At the same time, 
 this facility may perhaps detract in some degree 
 from the undeniable glamour of the Unknown, 
 and, indeed, it is not till much later in life that 
 the time comes to appreciate. 
 
 B and C and D are great men ; we know it 
 
158 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 because our fathers have told us, but the 
 moment when we feel it for ourselves comes 
 suddenly and mysteriously. My own experi- 
 ence certainly is this: the friends existed first, 
 then, long afterwards, they became to me the 
 notabilities, the interesting people as well, and 
 these two impressions were oddly combined in 
 my mind. 
 
 When we were children living in Paris, we 
 used to look with a certain mingled terror and 
 fascination at various pages of grim heads 
 drawn in black and red chalk, something in the 
 manner of Fuseli. Masks and faces were 
 depicted, crowding together with malevolent or 
 agonised or terrific expressions. There were 
 the suggestions of a hundred weird stories on 
 the pages at which one gazed with creeping 
 alarm. These pictures were all drawn by a 
 kind and most gentle neighbour of ours, whom 
 we all often met and visited, and of whom we 
 were not in the very least afraid. His name 
 was Mr. Robert Browning. He was the father 
 of the poet, and he lived with his daughter in 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 159 
 
 calm and pleasant retreat in those Champs 
 Elysees, to which so many people used to come 
 at that time seeking well-earned repose from 
 their labours by crossing the Channel instead of 
 the Styx. I do not know whether Mr. and Miss 
 Browning always lived in Paris ; they are cer- 
 tainly among the people I can longest recall 
 there. But one day I found myself listening 
 with some interest to a conversation which had 
 been going on for some time between my grand- 
 parents and Miss Browning — a long matter- 
 of-fact talk about houses, travellers, furnished 
 apartments, sunshine, south aspects, etc. — and 
 on asking who were the travellers coming to 
 inhabit the apartments, I was told that our 
 Mr. Browning had a son who lived abroad, and 
 who was expected shortly with his wife from 
 Italy, and that the rooms were to be engaged 
 for them ; and I was also told that they were 
 very gifted and celebrated people ; and I further 
 remember that very afternoon being taken over 
 various vacant houses and lodgings by my 
 grandmother. Mrs. Browning was an invalid. 
 
i6o ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 my grandmother told me, who could not 
 possibly live without light and warmth. So 
 that by the time the travellers had really 
 arrived, and were definitely installed, we were 
 all greatly excited and interested in their 
 whereabouts, and well convinced that wherever 
 else the sun might or might not fall, it must 
 shine upon them. In this homely fashion the 
 shell of the future — the four walls of a friend- 
 ship — began to exist before the friends them- 
 selves walked into it. We were taken to call 
 very soon after they arrived. Mr. Browning 
 was not there, but Mrs. Browning received us 
 in a low room with Napoleonic chairs and 
 tables, and a wood - fire burning on the 
 hearth. 
 
 I do not think any girl who had once experi- 
 enced it could fail to respond to Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's motherly advance. There was something 
 more than kindness in it ; there was an implied 
 interest, equality, and understanding which is 
 very difficult to describe and impossible to 
 forget. This generous humility of nature was 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING i6i 
 
 also to the last one special attribute of Robert 
 Browning himself, translated by him into cheer- 
 ful and vigorous good-will and utter absence' of 
 affectation. But, again and again one is struck 
 by that form of greatness which consists in 
 reaching the reality in all things, instead of 
 keeping to the formalities and the affectations 
 of life. The free-and-easiness of the small is < 
 a very different thing from this. It may be as 
 false in its way as formality itself, if it is 
 founded on conditions which do not and can 
 never exist. 
 
 To the writer's own particular taste there 
 never will be any more delightful person than 
 the simple-minded woman of the world, who 
 has seen enough to know what its praise is all 
 worth, who is sure enough of her own position 
 to take it for granted, who is interested in the 
 person she is talking to, and unconscious of 
 anything but a wish to give kindness and 
 attention. This is the impression Mrs. Brown- 
 ing made upon me from the first moment I 
 ever saw her to the last. Alas ! the moments 
 
 M 
 
1 62 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 were not so very many when we were together. 
 Perhaps all the more vivid is the recollection 
 of the peaceful home, of the fireside where 
 the logs are burning, while the lady of that 
 kind hearth is established in her safe corner, 
 with her little boy curled up by her side, the 
 door opening and shutting meanwhile to the 
 quick step of the master of the house, to the 
 life of the world without as it came to find 
 her in her quiet nook. The hours seemed to 
 my sister and to me warmer, more full of 
 interest and peace, in her sitting-room than 
 elsewhere. Whether at Florence, at Rome, at 
 Paris, or in London once more, she seemed to 
 carry her own atmosphere always, something 
 serious, motherly, absolutely artless, and yet 
 impassioned, noble, and sincere. I can recall 
 the slight figure in its thin black dress, the 
 writing apparatus by the sofa, the tiny inkstand, 
 the quill -nibbed pen — the unpretentious im- 
 plements of her magic. " She was a little 
 woman ; she liked little things," Mr. Browning 
 used to say. Her miniature editions of the 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 163 
 
 classics are still carefully preserved, with her 
 name written in each in her delicate, sensitive 
 handwriting, and always with her husband's 
 name above her own, for she dedicated all her 
 books to him ; "it was a fancy that she had. 
 Nor must his presence in the home be for- 
 gotten any more than in the books — the 
 spirited domination and inspired common- 
 sense, which seemed to give a certain life to 
 her vaguer visions. But of these visions Mrs. 
 Browning rarely spoke ; she was too simple and 
 practical to indulge in many apostrophes. 
 
 II 
 
 To all of us who have only known Mrs. 
 Browning in her own home as a wife and a mother, 
 it seems almost impossible to realise the time 
 before her home existed — when Mrs. Browning 
 was not, and Elizabeth Barrett, dwelling apart, 
 was weaving her spells like the Lady of Shalott, 
 and subject, like the lady herself, to the visions 
 in her mirror. 
 
1 64 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 Mrs. Browning ^ was born in the county of 
 Durham, on the 6th of March 1809. It was 
 a golden year for poets, for it was also that of 
 Tennyson's birth. She was the eldest daughter 
 of Edward Moulton, and was christened by 
 the names of Elizabeth Barrett. Not long 
 after her birth Mr. Moulton succeeded to some 
 property, and took the name of Barrett, so that 
 in after -times, when Mrs. Browning signed 
 herself at length as Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
 ing, it was her own Christian name that she 
 used without any further literary assumptions. 
 Her mother was Mary Graham, the daughter 
 of a Mr. Graham, afterwards known as Mr. 
 Graham Clark, of Northumberland. Soon 
 after the child's birth her parents brought her 
 southward, to Hope End, near Ledbury, in 
 Herefordshire, where Mr. Barrett possessed a 
 considerable estate, and had built himself a 
 country house. The house is now pulled down, 
 
 ' The passages relating to Mrs. Browning's life are taken (by the 
 permission of the proprietor and editor) from an article contributed by 
 the present writer to the Biographical Dictionary^ published by Messrs. 
 Smith, Elder, & Co. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 165 
 
 but it is described by Lady Carmichael, one of 
 the family, as " a luxurious home standing in 
 a lovely park, among trees and sloping hills 
 all sprinkled with sheep " ; and this same lady 
 remembers the great hall, with the great organ 
 in it, and more especially Elizabeth's room, a 
 lofty chamber, with a stained - glass window 
 casting lights across the floor, and little Eliza- 
 beth as she used to sit propped against the 
 wall, with her hair falling all about her face. 
 There were gardens round about the house 
 leading to the park. • Most of the children 
 had their own plots to cultivate, and Elizabeth 
 was famed among them all for success with her 
 white roses. She had a bower of her own all 
 overgrown with them ; it is still blooming for 
 the readers of the lost bower " as once beneath 
 the sunshine." Another favourite device with 
 the child was that of a man of flowers, laid out 
 in beds upon the lawn — a huge giant wrought 
 of blossom. " Eyes of gentianella azure, 
 staring, winking at the skies." 
 
 Mr. Barrett was a rich man, and his 
 
1 66 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 daughter's life was that of a rich man's child, 
 far removed from the stress and also from the 
 variety and experience of humbler life ; but 
 her eager spirit found adventure for itself. Her 
 gift for learning was extraordinary. At eight 
 years old little Elizabeth had a tutor and could 
 read Homer in the original, holding her book 
 in one hand and nursing her doll on the other 
 arm. She has said herself that in those days 
 " the Greeks were her demi-gods ; she dreamed 
 more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her black 
 pony." At the same small age she began to 
 try her childish powers. When she was about 
 eleven or twelve, her great epic of the Battle 
 of Marathon was written in four books, and 
 her proud father had it printed. " Papa was 
 bent upon spoiling me," she writes. Her 
 cousin remembers a certain ode the little girl 
 recited to her father on his birthday ; as he 
 listened, shading his eyes, the young cousin 
 was wondering why the tears came falling along 
 his cheek. It seems right to add on this same 
 authority that their common grandmother, who 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 167 
 
 used to stay at the house, did not approve of 
 these readings and writings, and said she had 
 far rather see Elizabeth's hemming more care- 
 fully finished off than hear of all this Greek, 
 
 Elizabeth was growing up meanwhile under 
 happy influences ; she had brothers and sisters 
 in her home ; her life was not all study ; she 
 had the best of company — that of happy 
 children as well as of natural things ; she loved 
 her hills, her gardens, her woodland play- 
 ground. As she grew older she used to drive 
 a pony and go farther afield. There is a story 
 still told of a little child, flying in terror along 
 one of the steep Herefordshire . lanes, perhaps 
 frightened by a cow's horn beyond the hedge, 
 who was overtaken by a young girl with a 
 pale spiritual face and a profusion of dark 
 curls driving a pony - carriage, and suddenly 
 caught up into safety and driven rapidly away. 
 But, alas; ! it was very early in her life that Eliza- 
 beth's happy drives and rides were discontinued, 
 and the sad apprenticeship to suffering began. 
 Was it Moses, the black pony, who was so 
 
1 68 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 nearly the cause of her death. One day, when 
 she was about fifteen, the young girl, impatient 
 for her ride, tried to saddle her pony in a field 
 alone, and fell, with the saddle upon her, in 
 some way injuring her spine so seriously that 
 she lay for years upon her back. 
 
 She was about twenty when her mother's 
 last illness began, and at the same time some 
 money catastrophe, the result of other people's 
 misdeeds, overtook Mr. Barrett. He would 
 not allow his wife to be troubled or to be told 
 of this crisis in his affairs, and he compounded 
 with his creditors at an enormous cost, materi- 
 ally diminishing his income for life, so as to put 
 off any change in the ways at Hope End until 
 change could trouble the sick lady no more. 
 After her death, when Elizabeth was a little 
 over twenty, they came away, leaving Hope 
 End among the hills for ever. " Beautiful, 
 beautiful hills ! " Miss Barrett wrote long after 
 from her closed sick - room in London, " and 
 yet not for the whole world's beauty would I 
 stand among the sunshine and shadow of them 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 169 
 
 any more. It would be a mockery, like the 
 taking back a broken flower to its stalk." 
 
 The family spent two years at Sidmouth, 
 and then came to London, where Mr. Barrett 
 first bought a house in Gloucester Place, 
 and then removed to Wimpole Street. His 
 daughter's continued delicacy and failure of 
 health kept her for months at a time a prisoner 
 to her room, but did not prevent her from 
 living her own life of eager and beautiful 
 aspiration. She was becoming known to the 
 world. Her " Prometheus," which was published 
 when she was twenty-six years old, was reviewed 
 in the (Quarterly Review for 1840, and there 
 Miss Barrett's name comes second among a 
 list of the most accomplished women of those 
 days, whose little tinkling guitars are scarcely 
 audible now, while this one voice vibrates only 
 more clearly as the echoes of her time die 
 away. 
 
 Her noble poem on " Cowper's Grave " was 
 republished with the "Seraphim," by which 
 (whatever her later opinion may have been) 
 
-170 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 she seems to have set small count at the time, 
 " all the remaining copies of the book ^ being 
 locked away in the wardrobe in her father's bed- 
 room, entombed as safely as GEdipus among 
 the Olives." 
 
 From Wimpole Street Miss Barrett went, 
 an unwilling exile for her health's sake, to 
 Torquay, where the tragedy occurred which, as 
 she writes to Mr. Home, " gave a nightmare 
 to her life forever." Her companion-brother 
 had come to see her and to be with her and to 
 be comforted by her for some trouble of his 
 own, when he was accidentally drowned, under 
 circumstances of suspense which added to the 
 shock. All that year the sea beating upon the 
 shore sounded to her as a dirge, she says in a 
 letter to Miss Mitford. It was long before 
 Miss Barrett's health was sufficiently restored to 
 allow of her being brought home to Wimpole 
 Street, where many years passed away in con- 
 finement to a sick-room, to which few besides 
 
 ^ In a surviving copy of the book belonging to Mr. Dykes Campbell 
 there is an added stanza " to the image of God " never yet printed, and 
 also many corrections in her delicate handwriting. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 171 
 
 members of her own family were admitted. 
 Among these- exceptions was her devoted Miss 
 Mitford, who would " travel forty miles to see 
 her for an hour." Besides Miss Mitford, Mrs. 
 Jameson also came, and, above all, Mr. Kenyon, 
 the friend and dearest cousin to whom Mrs. 
 Browning afterwards dedicated " Aurora Leigh." 
 Mr. Kenyon had an almost fatherly affection 
 for her, and from the first recognised his young 
 relative's genius. He was a constant visitor 
 and her link with the outside world, and he 
 never failed to urge her to write, and to live 
 out and beyond the walls of her chamber. 
 
 Miss Barrett lay on her couch with her dog 
 Flush at her feet, and Miss Mitford describes 
 her reading every book, in almost every lan- 
 guage, and giving herself heart and soul to 
 poetry. She also occupied herself with prose 
 — writing literary articles for the Athenaeum, 
 and contributing to a modern rendering of 
 Chaucer which was then being edited by her 
 unknown friend, Mr. R. H. Home, from whose 
 correspondence with her I have already quoted. 
 
172 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 and whose interest in literature and occupation 
 with literary things must have brought whole- 
 some distractions to the monotonies of her life. 
 
 But such a woman, though living so quietly 
 and thus secluded from the world, could not 
 have been altogether out of touch with its 
 changing Impressions. The early letters of 
 Mrs. Browning to Mr. Home, written before 
 her marriage, and published with her husband's 
 sanction after her death, are full of the sug- 
 gestions of her delightful fancy. Take, for 
 instance, "Sappho, who broke off a fragment 
 of her soul for us to guess at." Of herself 
 she says (apparently in answer to some ques- 
 tions), " My story amounts to the knife- 
 grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe ! 
 A bird in a cage would have as good a story ; 
 most of my events and nearly all my intense 
 pleasures have passed in my thoughts." Here 
 is an instance of her unconscious presence in 
 the minds of others : "I remember all those 
 sad circumstances connected with the last doings 
 of poor Haydon." Mr. Browning writes to 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 173 
 
 Professor Knight in 1882 : "He never saw my 
 wife, but interchanged letters with her occasion- 
 ally. On visiting her, the day before the 
 painter's death, I found her room occupied by 
 a quantity of studies — sketches and portraits — 
 which, together with paints, palettes, and 
 brushes, he had chosen to send, in apprehen- 
 sion of an arrest or, at all events, an ' execu- 
 tion' in his own house. The letter which 
 apprised her of this step said, in excuse of it, 
 ' They may have a right to my goods ; they 
 can have none to my mere work-tools and 
 necessaries of existence,' or words to that eiFect. 
 The next morning I read the account in the 
 Times, and myself hastened to break the news 
 at Wimpole Street, but had been anticipated. 
 Every article was at once sent back, no doubt. 
 I do not remember noticing Wordsworth's 
 portrait — it never belonged to my wife, cer- 
 tainly, at any time. She possessed an engraving 
 of the head — I suppose a gift from poor 
 Haydon. . . ." 
 
174 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 III 
 
 When Mrs. Orr's authoritative history of 
 Robert Browning appeared, the writer felt that 
 it was but waste of time to attempt anything 
 like a biographical record — hers is but a per- 
 sonal record of impressions and rememberings. 
 Others, with more knowledge of his early days, 
 have described Robert Browning as a child, as 
 a boy, and a very young man. How interest- 
 ing among other things is the account of the 
 little child among his animals and pets ; and of 
 the tender mother taking so much pains to find 
 the original editions of Shelley and of Keats, 
 and giving them to her boy at a time when 
 their works were scarcely to be bought. There 
 is a little story in Mrs. Orr's book which Mr. 
 Browning himself once told some of the children 
 of our family, how, when he was a small boy 
 at school, there was one solemn day in the week 
 when all the little scholars' hairs were brushed 
 and rubbed with oil, which was the fashion in 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 175 
 
 those days, while their mistress chanted Watts's 
 hymns to them, especially that one which begins 
 " Anoint with heavenly grace." Browning was 
 a year younger than my own father, and was 
 born at Camberwell in May 1812. He went 
 to Italy when he was twenty years of age, and 
 there he studied hard, laying in a noble treasury 
 of facts and fancies to be dealt out in after-life, 
 when the time comes to draw upon the past, 
 upon that youth which age spends so liberally, 
 and which is "the background of pale gold," 
 upon which all our lives are painted. 
 
 Browning's first published poem was " Paul- 
 ine," coming out in 1833, the same year as 
 " The Miller's Daughter," and the " Dream of 
 Fair Women." And we are also told that 
 Dante Rossetti, then a very young man, admired 
 " Pauline " so much that he copied ^ the whole 
 poem out from the book in the British 
 Museum. 
 
 In 1834 Robert Browning went to Russia, 
 
 ■^ The writer has in her possession a book in which her own father, 
 somewhere about those same years, copied out Tennyson's " Day Dream " 
 verse by verse. 
 
176 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 and there wrote " Porphyria's Lover," published 
 by Mr. Fox in a Unitarian magazine, where 
 the poem must have looked somewhat out of 
 place. It was at Mr. Fox's house that Browning 
 first met Macready. 
 
 Notwithstanding many differences and con- 
 sequent estrangements, I have often heard Mr. 
 Browning speak of the great actor with interest 
 and sympathy ; the last time being when Recol- 
 lections of Macready, a book by Lady Pollock, 
 had just come out. She had sent Mr. Browning 
 a copy, with which he was delighted. He said 
 he had stopped at home all that winter's day 
 reading it by the fire, and now that dinner-time 
 was come he could quote page after page from 
 memory. His memory was to the last most 
 remarkable. 
 
 There is a touching passage in Mrs. Orr's 
 book describing the meeting of Browning and 
 Macready after their long years of estrange- 
 ment. Both had seen their homes wrecked and 
 desolate, both had passed through deep waters. 
 They met unexpectedly, and grasped each 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 177 
 
 Other's hands again. " Oh, Macready ! " said 
 Browning. And neither of them could speak 
 another word. 
 
 I have been fortunate for years past in being 
 able to count upon the help of a recording 
 friend and neighbour, to whom I sometimes go 
 for the magic of a suggestive touch when 
 together we conjure up things out of the past. 
 I wrote to ask Lady Martin about the pro- 
 duction of Mr. Browning's plays upon the 
 stage, and she sent me the following account 
 of her recollections of Strafford; nor can I 
 do better than insert her answer here at length, 
 for to cut out any word is to destroy the 
 impression which it gives : — 
 
 " Brighton, ^oth April 1891. 
 
 " The production of Browning's Strafford, which you 
 ask me about, occurred so early in my career, that any- 
 thing I could say about it would be, I fear, of little use to 
 you. I was so young then, and just a mere novice in my 
 art, so that my first feeling, when I heard the play read, 
 was one of wonder that such a weighty character as Lucy, 
 Countess of Carlisle, should be intrusted to my hands. I 
 was told that Mr. Browning had particularly wished me to 
 undertake it. I naturally felt the compliment implied in 
 
 N 
 
178 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 the wish, but this only increased my surprise, which did 
 not diminish as I advanced in the study of the character. 
 
 " Lady Carlisle, as drawn by Mr. Browning, a woman 
 versed in all the political struggles and intrigues of the 
 times, did not move me. The only interest she awoke in 
 me was due to her silent love for Strafford and devotion 
 to his cause ; and I wondered why, depending so absolutely 
 as he did upon her sympathy, her intelligence, her com- 
 plete self-abnegation, he should only have, in the early part, 
 a common expression of gratitude to give her in return. 
 
 " This made the treatment of Lucy's character, as you 
 will readily see, all the more difficult in the necessity it 
 imposed upon me of letting her feeling be seen by the 
 audience, without its being perceptible to Strafford. 
 
 " Of course I did my best to carry out what I conceived 
 was Mr. Browning's view ; and he, at all events, I had 
 reason to know, was well satisfied with my efforts. I had 
 met him at ,Mr. and Mrs. Macready's house previously, 
 so that at the rehearsals we renewed our acquaintance. 
 
 " I suppose he was nervous, for I remember Mr. 
 Macready read the play to us in the greenroom. And 
 how finely he read ! He made the smallest part distinct 
 and prominent. He was accused of under-reading his 
 own part. But I do not think this was so. 
 
 " At the rehearsals, when Mr. Browning was intro- 
 duced to those ladies and gentlemen whom he did not 
 know, his demeanour was so kind, considerate, and 
 courteous, so grateful for the attention shown to his 
 wishes, that he won directly the warm interest of all 
 engaged in the play. So it was that although many 
 doubtful forecasts were made in the greenroom as to the 
 ultimate attraction of a play so entirely turning on politics, 
 yet all were determined to do their very best to insure its 
 success. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 179 
 
 " In the play Lucy has only to meet Strafford, King 
 Charles, and Henrietta. It seemed to me that Mr. 
 Macread/s Strafford was a fine performance. The 
 character fitted in with his restless, nervous, changeable, 
 impetuous, and emphatic style. He looked the very man 
 as we knew him in Vandyck's famous picture. The royal 
 personages were very feebly represented. I could not 
 help feeling in the scenes with them that my earnestness 
 was overdone, and that I had no business to appear to 
 dominate and sway and direct opinions while they stood 
 nerveless by. 
 
 " There were some fine moments in the play. The 
 last scene must have been very exciting and touching. 
 Lucy believes that by her means Strafford's escape is 
 certain ; but when the water-gates open, with the boat 
 ready to receive him, Pym steps out of it ! This effect 
 was most powerful. 
 
 " It was a dreadful moment. My heart seemed to 
 cease to beat. I sank on my knees, burying my head in 
 my bosom, and stopping my ears with my hands while the 
 death-bell tolled for Strafford. 
 
 " I can remember nothing more than that I went home 
 very sad ; for although the play was considered a success, 
 yet, somehow, even my small experience seemed to tell me 
 it would not be a very long life, and that perhaps kind Mr. 
 Browning would think we had not done our best for 
 him. 
 
 " The play was mounted in all matters with great care. 
 Modern critics seem to have little knowledge of the infinite 
 pains bestowed in all respects before their day upon the 
 representation of historical and Shakespearian plays and 
 noteworthy people in romance or history. 
 
 " I can see my gown now in Lucy Percy, made from a 
 Vandyck picture, and remember the thought bestowed even 
 
i8o ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 upon the kind of fur with which the gown was trimmed. 
 The same minute attention to accuracy of costume pre- 
 vailed in all the characters produced. The scenery was 
 alike accurate, if not so full of small details as at present. 
 The human beings dominated all." 
 
 I need scarcely add that I have heard from 
 others of Miss Helen Faucit's perfect rendering 
 of the part of Lucy Carlisle. Browning himself 
 spoke of Miss Faucit's " playing as an actress, 
 and her perfect behaviour as a woman." 
 
 IV 
 
 My friend, Professor Knight, has kindly 
 given me leave to quote from some of his in- 
 teresting letters from Robert Browning. One 
 most interesting record describes the poet's own 
 first acquaintance with Mr. Kenyon. The 
 letter is dated loth January 1884; but the 
 events relate, of course, to some forty years 
 before. 
 
 " With respect to the information you desire about Mr. 
 Kenyon, all that I do ' know of him — better than any- 
 body,' perhaps — is his great goodness to myself. Singularly 
 little respecting his early life came to my knowledge. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING i8i 
 
 He was the cousin of Mr. Barrett ; second cousin, there- 
 fore, of my wife, to whom he was ever deeply attached. 
 I first met him at a dinner of Serjeant Talfourd's, after 
 which he drew his chair by mine, and inquired whether 
 my father had been his old schoolfellow and friend at 
 Cheshunt ; adding that, in a poem just printed, he had 
 been commemorating their playground fights, armed with 
 sword and shield, as Achilles and Hector, some half 
 century before. On telling this to my father at breakfast 
 next morning he at once with a pencil sketched me the 
 boy's handsome face, still distinguishable in the elderly 
 gentleman's I had made acquaintance with. Mr. Kenyon 
 at once renewed his own acquaintance with my father, and 
 became my fast friend ; hence my introduction to Miss 
 Barrett. 
 
 " He was one of the best of human beings, with a 
 general sympathy for excellence of every kind. He 
 enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, of Southey, of 
 Landor ; and in later days was intimate with most of my 
 own contemporaries of eminence. I believe that he was 
 born in the West Indies, whence his property was derived, 
 as was that of Mr. Barrett, persistently styled a ' merchant ' 
 by biographers, who will not take the pains to do more 
 than copy the blunders of their forerunners in the, business 
 of article-mongery. He was twice married, but left no 
 family. I should suggest Mr. Scharf (of the National 
 Portrait Gallery) as a far more qualified informant on all 
 such matters ; my own concern having mainly been with 
 his exceeding goodness to me and mine." 
 
 Mr. Kenyon has sometimes dined with my 
 father. I can remember him, and also a smooth, 
 fair, printed book of his poems, with broad 
 
1 82 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 margins, and some odd suggestive look of its 
 author. For many years he lived in the 
 Regent's Park. After his death Mrs. Bayne, 
 a kind and hospitable cousin of my father, 
 dwelt in the house with her daughter, who still 
 resides there. My father used to say that the 
 dining-room was the prettiest room in all London. 
 It has wide green windows looking across the 
 Park ; there were graceful pillars to support 
 the bay, and as I sat at the round table I used 
 to hear of Mr. Kenyon's gatherings, and the 
 friends who met in the pretty sunny room, 
 where his picture still hangs, and where so 
 many of his guests returned at the summons 
 of their kind hostess. I remember my father 
 sitting there and talking of the past with 
 affectionate words of remembrance, and Mr. 
 Browning used to be often present with another 
 of Mrs. Bayne's old friends. Dr. Connop Thirl- 
 wall ; and as one thinks of it all, one feels 
 perhaps that to remember old friends in peace- 
 ful festive hours is better for our souls than all 
 the memento mori that ever were set up by 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 183 
 
 perverse mortals struggling in vain against the 
 repeated benedictions of Providence. 
 
 As we all know, it was Mr. Kenyon who 
 had first introduced Robert Browning to his 
 future wife ; and the story, as told by Mrs. 
 Orr, is most romantic. The poet was about 
 thirty-two years of age at this time, in the 
 fulness of his powers. She was supposed to be 
 a confiritied invalid, confined to her own room 
 and to her couch, seeing no one, living her own 
 spiritual life indeed, but looking for none other, 
 when her cousin first brought Mr. Browning to 
 the house. Miss Barrett's reputation was well 
 established by this time. " Lady Geraldine's 
 Courtship " was already published, in which the 
 author had written of Browning, among other 
 poets, as of " some pomegranate, which if cut 
 deep down in the middle, shows a heart within 
 blood-tinctured of a veined humanity " ; and 
 one can well believe that this present meeting 
 must have been but a phase in an old and 
 long-existing sympathy between kindred spirits. 
 Very soon afterwards the two became engaged, 
 
1 84 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 and they were married at Mary-le-Bone parish 
 church in the autumn of the year 1846. 
 
 Who does not know the story of this mar- 
 riage of true souls ? Has not Mrs. Browning 
 herself spoken of it in words indelible and 
 never to be quoted without sympathy by all 
 women ? while he from his own fireside has 
 struck chord after chord of manly feeling 
 than which this life contains nothing deeper 
 or more true. 
 
 The " Sonnets from the Portuguese " were 
 written by Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Browning 
 before her marriage, although she never even 
 showed them to him till some years after they 
 were man and wife. They were sonnets such 
 as no Portuguese ever wrote before, or ever 
 will write again. There is a quality in them 
 which is beyond words, that echo which belongs 
 to the highest human expression of feeling. 
 But such a love to such a woman comes with 
 its own testament. 
 
 Some years before her marriage the doctors 
 had positively declared that Miss Barrett's life 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 185 • 
 
 depended upon her leaving England for the 
 winter, and immediately after their marriage 
 Mr. Browning took his wife abroad. 
 
 Mrs. Jameson was at Paris when Mr. and 
 Mrs. Browning arrived there. There is an 
 interesting account ^ of the meeting, and of their 
 all journeying together southward by Avignon 
 and Vaucluse. Can this be the lifelong invalid 
 of whom we read, perching out-of-doors upon a 
 rock, among the shallow, curling waters of a 
 stream ? They come to a rest at Pisa, whence 
 Mrs. Browning writes to her old friend, Mr. 
 Home, to tell him of her marriage, adding 
 that Mrs. Jameson calls her, notwithstanding 
 all the emotion and fatigue of the last six 
 weeks, rather "transformed" than improved. 
 From Pisa the new -married pair went to 
 Florence, where they finally settled, and where 
 their boy was born in 1849. 
 
 Poets are painters in words, and the colour 
 and the atmosphere of the country to which 
 they belong seem to be repeated almost uncon- 
 
 1 Life of Mrs. Jameson, by Mrs. Macpherson. 
 
1 86 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 sciously in their work and its setting. Mrs. 
 Browning was an Englishwoman ; though she 
 Hved in Italy, though she died in Florence, 
 though she loved the land of her adoption, 
 yet she never, for all that, ceased to breathe 
 her native air as she sat by the Casa Guidi 
 windows ; and though Italian sunshine dazzled 
 her dark eyes, and Italian voices echoed in the 
 streets, though her very ink was mixed with 
 the waters of the Arno, she still wrote of Here- 
 fordshire lakes and hills, of the green land 
 where "jocund childhood" played "dimpled 
 close with hills and valley, dappled very close 
 with shade." Now that the writer has seen 
 the first home and the last home of that kind 
 friend of her girlhood, it seems to her as if she 
 could better listen to that poet's song growing 
 sweeter, as all true music does, with years. 
 
 We had been spending an autumn month 
 in Mrs. Browning's country when we drove to 
 visit the scene of her early youth, and it seemed 
 to me as if an echo of her melody was still 
 vibrating from hedgerow to hedgerow, even 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 187 
 
 though the birds were silent, and though 
 summer and singing -time were over. We 
 drove along, my little son and I, towards Hope 
 End, by a road descending gradually from the 
 range of the Malvern Hills into the valley — it 
 ran across commons sprinkled with geese and 
 with lively donkeys, and skirted by the cottages 
 still alight with sunflowers and nasturtium beds, 
 for they were sheltered from the cold wind by 
 the range of purple hills " looming a-row," — 
 then we dipped into lanes between high banks 
 heaped with ferns and leaves of every shade of 
 burnished gold and brown, fenced up by the 
 twisting roots of the chestnuts and oak-trees ; 
 and all along the way, as our old white horse 
 jogged steadily on, we could see the briers and 
 the blackberry sprays travelling too, advancing 
 from tree to tree, and from hedge to hedge, 
 flashing their long flaming brands, and warn- 
 ing tokens of winter's approaching armies. 
 The wind was cold and in the north, the sky 
 overhead was broken and stormy. Sometimes we 
 dived into sudden glooms among rocks overhung 
 
1 88 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 with ivy and thick brushwood ; then we came out 
 into the open again, and caught sight of vast skies 
 dashed with strange lights, a wonderful cloud- 
 capped country up above where the storm-clouds 
 reared their vast piles out of sapphire depths — 
 
 "... A boundless depth 
 Far sinking into splendour without end." 
 
 Our adventures were not along the road, but 
 chiefly overhead. My boy amused himself by 
 counting the broken rainbows and the hail- 
 storms falling in the distance ; and then at last, 
 just as we were getting cold and tired, we 
 turned into the lodge gates of Hope End. 
 
 I do not know how the park strikes other 
 people ; to me, who paid this one short visit, 
 it seemed a sort of enchanted garden revealed 
 for an hour, and I almost expected that it 
 would then vanish away : ^ everything was 
 
 1 " Here's the garden she walked across . , . 
 Down this side of the gravel walk 
 She went while her robe's edge brushed the box : 
 And here she paused in her gracious talk 
 To point me a moth on the milk-white flox. 
 Roses ranged in valiant row 
 I will never think she passed you by ! . . ." 
 
 R. B., Garden Fancies. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 189 
 
 wild, abrupt, and yet suddenly harmonious. 
 We passed an unsuspected lake covered 
 with water-lilies. A flock of sheep at full 
 gallop plunged across the road ; then came 
 ponies with long manes and round wondering 
 eyes trotting after us. Sometimes in the 
 Alps one has met such herds, wild creatures, 
 sympathetic, not yet afraid ! Finally we 
 caught sight of the river, where a couple of 
 water-fowl were flying into the sedges. But 
 where was the wild swan's nest, and why was 
 not the great god Pan there blowing upon his 
 reed .'' It all seemed so natural and so vivid 
 that I should not have been startled to see him 
 sitting quietly by the side of the river. 
 
 V 
 
 The only memoranda I ever made of Mrs. 
 Browning's talk were when I was quite a 
 young girl keeping a diary, and I heard her 
 saying that Tennyson's "Maud " was " splendid," 
 and also " that without illness, she saw no 
 
I go ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 reason why the mind should ever fail." The 
 visitor to whom she expressed this opinion 
 seems to have come away with me complaining 
 that the conversation had been too matter-of- 
 fact, too much to the point ; nothing romantic, 
 nothing poetic, such as one might expect from 
 a poet ! Another person also present had 
 answered that was just the reason of Mrs. 
 Browning's power — she kept her poetry for her 
 poetry, and didn't scatter it about in conversa- 
 tion where it was not wanted ; and then follows 
 a girlish note in the old diary : " I think Mrs. 
 Browning is the greatest woman I ever saw in 
 all my life. She is very small, she is brown, 
 with dark eyes and dead brown hair ; she 
 has white teeth, and a low, curious voice ; 
 she has a manner full of charm and kind- 
 ness ; she rarely laughs, but is always cheer- 
 ful and smiling ; her eyes are very bright. 
 Her husband is not unlike her. He is 
 short ; he is dark, with a frank, open coun- 
 tenance, long hair, streaked with gray; he, 
 opens his mouth wide when he speaks ; 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 191 
 
 he has white teeth." And there the diary 
 wanders off. 
 
 When I first remember Mr. Browning he 
 was a comparatively young man — though, for 
 the matter of that, he was always young, as his 
 father had been before him ; and he was also 
 happy in this, that the length of his life can 
 best be measured by his work. In those days 
 I had not read one single word of his poetry, 
 but somehow one realised that it was there. 
 Almost the first time I ever really recall 
 Mr. Browning, he and my father and Mrs. 
 Browning^ were discussing spiritualism in a 
 very human and material fashion, each holding 
 to their own point of view, and my sister and 
 I sat by listening and silent. My father was 
 always immensely interested by the stories told 
 of spiritualism and table-turning, though he 
 certainly scarcely believed half of them. Mrs. 
 Browning believed, and Mr. Browning was 
 always irritated beyond patience by the subject. 
 
 ^ An ambiguous extract In Mrs. Orr's Life of Brcnuning has only 
 recalled my own most vivid impression of the happy relations between 
 my father and Mrs. Browning. 
 
192 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 I can remember her voice, a sort of faint minor 
 chord, as she, lisping the " r " a little, uttered 
 her remonstrating " Robert ! " and his loud, 
 dominant baritone sweeping away every possible 
 plea she and my father could make ; and 
 then came my father's deliberate notes, which 
 seemed to fall a little sadly — his voice always 
 sounded a little sad — upon the rising waves of 
 the discussion. I think this must have been 
 just before we all went to Rome — it was in 
 the morning, in some foreign city. I can see 
 Mr. and Mrs. Browning, with their faces turned 
 towards the window, and my father with his 
 back to it, and all of us assembled in a little 
 high-up room. Mr. Browning was dressed in 
 a rough brown suit, and his hair was black hair 
 then ; and she, as far as I can remember, was, 
 as usual, in soft falling flounces of black silk, 
 and with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin 
 gold chain hanging round her neck. 
 
 In the winter of 1853-54 we lived in Rome, 
 in the Via della Croce, and the Brownings lived 
 in the Bocca di Leone hard by. The evenings 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 193 
 
 our father dined away from home our old donna 
 (so I think cooks used to be called) would 
 conduct us to our tranquil dissipations, through 
 the dark streets, past the swinging lamps, up 
 and down the black stone staircases ; and very 
 frequently we spent an evening with Mrs. 
 Browning in her quiet room, while Mr. Brown- 
 ing was out visiting some of the many friends 
 who were assembled in Rome that year. At 
 ten o'clock came our father's servant to fetch 
 us back, with the huge key of our own some- 
 what imposing palazzo. It was a happy and 
 an eventful time, all the more eventful and 
 happy to us for the presence of the two kind 
 ladies, Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Sartoris, who 
 befriended us. 
 
 I can also remember one special evening at 
 Mrs. Sartoris's, when a certain number of people 
 were sitting just before dinner-time in one of 
 those lofty Roman drawing-rooms which be- 
 come so delightful when they are inhabited by 
 English people — which look so chill and formal 
 
 in their natural condition. This saloon was on 
 
 o 
 
194 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 the first floor, with great windows at the farther 
 end. It was all full of a certain mingled atmo- 
 sphere, of flowers and light, and comfort and 
 colour. It was in contrast but not out of 
 harmony with Mrs. Browning's quiet room ; 
 in both places existed the individuality which 
 real home-makers know how to give to their 
 homes. Here swinging lamps were lighted up, 
 beautiful things hung on the wall, the music 
 came and went as it listed, a great piano was 
 drawn out and open^ the tables were piled with 
 books and flowers. Mrs. Sartoris, the lady of 
 the shrine, dressed in some flowing pearly satin 
 tea-gown, was sitting by a round table reading 
 to some other women who had come to see her. 
 She was reading from a book of Mr. Browning's 
 poems which had lately appeared ; and as she 
 read in her wonderful muse-like way she paused, 
 she re-read the words, and she emphasised the 
 lines, then stopped short, the others exclaiming, 
 half laughing, half protesting. It was a lively 
 excitable party, outstaying the usual hour of a 
 visit ; questioning, puzzling, and discursive — a 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 195 
 
 Browning society of the past, into the midst of 
 which a door opens (and it is this fact which 
 recalls it to my mind) and Mr. Browning him- 
 self walks in, and the burst of voices is suddenly 
 reduced to one single voice, that of the hostess, 
 calling him to her side, and asking him to define 
 his meaning. But he evaded the question, 
 began to talk of something else — he never much 
 cared to talk of his own poetry — and the Brown- 
 ing society dispersed. 
 
 Mrs. Sartoris used to like to speak of a 
 certain luncheon to which Mr. and Mrs. Brown- 
 ing once invited them when they were all stay- 
 ing in some country place in Italy, and which, 
 so she always said, was one of the most delight- 
 ful entertainments she could remember in all 
 her life. One wonders whether the guests or 
 the hosts contributed most. Each one had been 
 happy, and talked his or her best, and when the 
 Sartorises got up reluctantly to go, saying, 
 " How delightful it had been," Mr. Browning 
 cried, " Come back to sup with us, do ; " and 
 Mrs. Browning exclaimed, " Oh, Robert, how 
 
196 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 can you ask them ! There is no supper, nothing 
 but the remains of the pie." And then, cries 
 Robert Browning, " Well, come back and finish 
 the pie." 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette of 9th April 1891 
 contains an amusing account of a journey from 
 London to Paris, taken forty years ago by 
 Mr. and Mrs. Browning. The companion 
 they carried with them writes of the expe- 
 dition : — 
 
 " The day before yesterday, near midnight, I returned 
 from a very short and very insignificant excursion to Paris, 
 vyhich, after a month at Malvern water-cure, and then a 
 ten days at Scotsbrig, concludes my travels for this year. 
 Miserable puddle and tumult all my travels are ; of no 
 use to me except to bring agitation, sleeplessness, sorrow, 
 and distress. Better not to travel at all unless when I am 
 bound to do it. But this tour to Paris was a promised 
 one. I had engaged to meet the Ashburtons (Lord and 
 Lady) there, on their return from Switzerland and Ham- 
 burg, before either party left London. The time at last 
 suited ; all was ready except will on my part ; so, after 
 hesitation and painful indecision enough, I did resolve, 
 packed my baggage again, and did the little tour I stood 
 engaged for.'' 
 
 The chronicle begins on Monday, 21st 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 197 
 
 September, when "Brother John" and Carlyle 
 go to Chorley to consult about passports, routes, 
 and conditions. 
 
 "At Chapman's shop I learned that Robert Brown- 
 ing (poet) and his wife were just about setting out for 
 Paris. I walked to their place ; had, during that day 
 and the following, consultations with these fellow -pil- 
 grims, and decided to go with them via Dieppe on 
 Thursday. . . . 
 
 " Up, accordingly, on Thursday morriing in unutter- 
 able flurry and tumult — phenomena on the Thames all 
 dream -like, one spectralism chasing another — to the 
 station in good time ; found the Brownings just arriving, 
 which seemed a good omen. Browning, with wife and 
 child and maid, then an empty seat for cloaks and baskets ; 
 lastly, at the opposite end from me, a hard-faced, honest 
 Englishman or Scotsman, all in gray with a gray cap, 
 who looked rather ostrich-like, but proved very harmless 
 and quiet — this was the loading of our carriage ; and 
 so away we went. Browning talking very loud and 
 with vivacity, I silent rather, tending towards many 
 thoughts. . . . 
 
 " Our friends, especially our French friends, were full 
 of bustle, full of noise, at starting ; but so soon as we had 
 cleared the little channel of Newhaven, and got into the 
 sea or British Channel, all this abated, sank into the 
 general sordid torpor of seasickness, with its miserable 
 noises — 'houhah, hoh ! ' — and hardly any other, amid 
 the rattling of the wind and sea. A sorry phasis of 
 humanity ! Browning was sick — lay in one of the bench 
 tents horizontal, his wife below. I was not absolutely 
 
198 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 sick, but had to be quite quiet and without comfort, save 
 in one cigar, for seven or eight hours of blistering, spray- 
 ing, and occasional rain." 
 
 And so with mention of prostration into 
 doleful silence, of evanition into utter darkness, 
 of the poor Frenchman who was so lively at 
 starting, the story continues : — 
 
 " At Dieppe, while the others were in the hotel having 
 some very bad cold tea and colder coffee. Browning was 
 passing our luggage, brought it all in safe about half-past 
 ten o'clock, and we could address ourselves to repose. 
 So to bed in my upper room, bemoaned by the sea and 
 small incidental noises of the harbour. Next morning 
 Browning, as before, did everything. I sat out-of-doors 
 on some logs at my case, and smoked, looking at the 
 population and their ways. Browning fought for us, and 
 we — that is, the Woman, the child, and I — had only to 
 wait and be silent. ... At Paris the travellers came into 
 a crowding, jingling, vociferous tumult, in which the 
 brave Browning fought for us, leaving me to sit beside 
 the woman." 
 
 Mr. Browning once told us a little anecdote 
 of the Carlyles at tea in Cheyne Row, and of 
 Mrs. Carlyle pouring out the tea, while a brass 
 kettle was boiling on the hob, and Mr. Brown- 
 ing presently seeing that the kettle was needed, 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 199 
 
 and that Carlyle was not disposed to move, 
 rose from his own chair, and filled the teapot 
 for his hostess, and then stood by her tea-table 
 still talking, and absently holding the smoking 
 kettle in his hand. 
 
 " Can't you put it down ? " said Mrs. Car- 
 lyle suddenly; and Mr. Browning, confused 
 and somewhat absent, immediately popped the 
 kettle down upon the carpet, which was a new 
 one. 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle exclaimed in horror — I have 
 no doubt she was half laughing — " See how fine 
 he has grown ! He does not any longer know 
 what to do with the kettle." 
 
 And sure enough, when Mr. Browning 
 penitently took it up again, a brown oval 
 mark was to be seen clearly stamped and 
 burned upon the new carpet. " You can 
 imagine what I felt," said Mr. Browning. 
 " Carlyle came to my rescue. ' Ye should 
 have been more explicit,' said he to his wife." 
 
200 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 VI 
 
 When my father went for the second time 
 to America, in 1856, my sister and I remained 
 behind, and for a couple of days we stayed on 
 in our home before going to Paris. Those 
 days of parting are always sad ones, and we 
 were dismally moping about the house and 
 preparing for our own journey when we were 
 immensely cheered by a visitor. It was Mr. 
 Browning, who came in to see us, and who 
 brought us an affectionate little note from his 
 wife. We were to go and spend the evening 
 with them, the kind people said. They had 
 Mr. Kenyon's brougham at their disposal, and 
 it would come and fetch us and take us back at 
 night, and so the first sad evening passed far 
 more happily than we could ever have imagined 
 possible. I remember feeling, as young people 
 do, utterly, hopelessly miserable, and then sud- 
 denly very cheerful every now and then. I 
 believe my father had planned it all with them 
 before he went away. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 201 
 
 This was in the autumn of 1856, and 
 " Aurora Leigh " was published in 1 857. It was 
 on this occasion during their journey home to 
 England that the MS. of the poem was lost 
 in a box at Marseilles. In this same box were 
 also carefully put away certain velvet suits and 
 lace collars, in which the little son was to make 
 his appearance among his English relatives. 
 (Who shall blame Mrs. Browning if her taste 
 in boys' costume was somewhat too fanciful 
 and poetic for the days in which she lived.'') 
 At any rate her chief concern was not for 
 her MS., but for the loss of her little boy's 
 wardrobe which had been devised with so much 
 mbtherly pride. 
 
 Happily for the world at large, one of Mrs. 
 Browning's brothers chanced to pass through 
 Marseilles, and the box was discovered by him 
 stowed away in a cellar at the customs. 
 
 We must have met again in Paris later in 
 this same year. The Brownings had an apart- 
 ment near the Rond-Point, and we were living 
 close by with our grandparents during my 
 
202 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 father's absence. We used frequently to go 
 and see them, only to find again the same warm 
 and tranquil atmosphere that we used to breathe 
 at Rome — the sofa drawn out, the tiny lady in 
 the corner, the sun dazzling in at the window. 
 On one occasion Mr. Hamilton Aide was 
 paying a visit. He had been talking about 
 books, and, half laughing, he turned to a 
 young woman who had just come in, and 
 asked her when her forthcoming work would 
 be ready. Young persons are ashamed, and 
 very properly so, of their early failures, of their 
 pattes-de-mouches and wild attempts at author- 
 ship, and this one was no exception to the 
 common law, and answered, " Never," some- 
 what too emphatically. And then it was that 
 Mr. Browning spoke one of those chance say- 
 ings which make headings to the chapters of 
 one's life. " All in good time," he said, and 
 he went on to ask us if we remembered the 
 epitaph on the Roman lady who sat at home, 
 who span wool. "You must spin your wool 
 some day," he said kindly to the would-be 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 203 
 
 authoress ; " every woman has wool to spin of 
 some sort or another ; isn't it so ? " he asked, 
 and he turned to his wife. 
 
 I went home feeling quite impressed by the 
 little speech — it had been so gravely and kindly 
 made. My blurred pages looked altogether 
 different somehow. It was spinning wool — it 
 was not wasting one's time, one's temper — it 
 was something more than spoiling paper and 
 pens. And this much I may perhaps add for 
 the comfort of the future race of authoresses 
 who are now twisting the cocoons, from which 
 the fluttering butterflies and Psyches yet to be 
 will emerge some day upon their wings : never 
 has anything given more trouble or seemed 
 more painfully hopeless than those early inco- 
 herent pages, so full of meaning to one's self, 
 so absolutely idiotic in expression. In later life 
 the words come easily, only too readily ; but 
 then it is the meaning which lags behind. 
 
 It was in that same apartment that I re- 
 member hearing Mr. Browning say (across all 
 these long years) : "It may seem to you 
 
204 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 strange that such a thing as poetry should be 
 written with regularity at the same hour in 
 every day. But, nevertheless, I do assure you 
 it is a fact that my wife and I sit down every 
 morning after breakfast to our separate work ; 
 she writes in the drawing-room and I write 
 in here," he said, opening a door into a little 
 empty back room with a window over a court. 
 And then he added, " I never read a word of 
 hers until I see it all finished and ready for 
 publication." 
 
 Among the people who belong to these 
 old Paris days there is one friend of very early 
 date whom we used to meet from time to time 
 with Mr. and Miss Browning at the house of 
 Mrs. Corkran and elsewhere ; this was Mr. 
 Milsand, a man to whom every one turned with 
 instinctive trust and sympathy, a slight body, 
 a great and generous nature. Mr. Browning 
 has described him in " Red Cotton Nightcap 
 Country." " A man of men," he calls him, 
 " talk to him for five minutes, nonsense, sense, 
 no matter what — 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 205 
 
 " ' There he stands, reads an English newspaper. 
 Stock still and now again upon the move. 
 Paces the beach, to taste the spring like you 
 (Since both are human beings in God's eyes) ; 
 That man will read you rightly head to foot.' " 
 
 A little farther on follows a touching out- 
 spoken expression of true feeling — 
 
 " He knows more and loves better than the world 
 That never heard his name and never may. . . . 
 What hinders that my heart relieve itself 
 O friend ! who makest warm my wintry world. 
 And wise my heaven, if there we consort too." 
 
 To Mr. Milsand, Browning has dedicated one 
 of the later editions of " Sordello," and others 
 of his poems. 
 
 By the kindness of Madame Milsand I am 
 able to give some passages of Mr. Browning's 
 correspondence with his friend. She has sent 
 me the letters from her home at Dijon, and 
 with the letters comes a little humorous sketch 
 by the poet. 
 
 " Florence, zph February 1858, 
 
 " It is far too many weeks now, my dear Milsand, since 
 we got your letter — and certainly it has never been out of 
 sight any more than out of mind, for I put it over the fire- 
 
2o6 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 place where we both sit these long winter evenings, and 
 often, indeed, a glance at it has brought you beside us 
 again, as on those pleasant Paris evenings. We English 
 have a superstition that when people talk of us our ears 
 burn — have yours caused you any serious inconvenience 
 that way ? You know we three have long since passed 
 the stage in friendship when assurances are necessary to 
 any one of us. For us two here, we gained nothing by our 
 sojourn in Paris like the knowledge and love of you, and 
 yet Paris gave us many valuable things. One day, in all 
 probability, we shall come together again, and meantime 
 the news of you, though never so slight, will be a delight 
 to us, yet your letter has been all this time unanswered ; 
 but one reason was that only in the last day or two have I 
 been able to get the review with your article in ; it is here 
 on the table at last. In what is it obscure ? Strong, con- 
 densed, and direct it is, and no doubt the common readers 
 of easy writing feel oppressed by twenty pages of such 
 masculine stuff. . . . My wife will write a few lines about 
 ourselves ; she is suffering a little from the cold which has 
 come late nor very severely either, but enough to influenec 
 her more than I could wish. We live wholly alone here ; 
 I have not left the house one evening since our return. I 
 am writing — a first step towards popularity for me — lyrics 
 with more music and painting than before, so as to get 
 people to hear and see . . . something to follow if I can 
 compass it. . 
 
 " I have a new acquaintance here, much to my taste — 
 Tennyson's eldest brother, who has long been settled here, 
 with many of his brother's qualities : a very earnest, simple, 
 and truthful man, with many admirable talents and acquire- 
 ments, the whole sicklied o'er by an inordinate dose of our 
 English disease, shyness ; he sees next to no company, but 
 comes here and we walk together. ... I knew too little 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 207 
 
 of Mr. Darley.i Will he keep the slender memory of me 
 he may have, and do you, dear Milsand, ever know me for 
 yours affectionately, R. B." 
 
 In this same letter there is a paragraph which 
 runs as follows : — 
 
 " Helen Faucit is going to produce an old play of 
 mine never acted, at the Haymarket, Colombe's Birthday ; 
 look out for it in April, keeping in mind the proverbial 
 uncertainty of things theatrical. My main hope of its 
 success lies in its being vyholly an actor's and manager's 
 speculation, not the writer's.'' 
 
 VII 
 
 It was in Florence Mrs. Browning wrote 
 " Casa Guidi Windows," containing the wonder- 
 ful description of the procession passing by, and 
 that noble apostrophe to freedom beginning, 
 " O ! magi from the East and from the West." 
 " Aurora Leigh " was also written here, which 
 the author herself calls "the most mature of 
 
 1 The writer has left the little message to Mr. Darley, which com- 
 memorates another very early recollection ; that of a gentle, handsome 
 painter, whom she as a child remembers. His paintings made no par- 
 ticular impression upon us all, but his kind tranquillity of manner and 
 courteous ways are not to be forgotten. 
 
2o8 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 her works," the one into which her highest con- 
 victions have entered. The poem is full of 
 beauty from the first page to the last, and 
 beats time to a noble human heart. The open- 
 ing scenes in Italy ; the impression of light, of 
 silence ; the beautiful Italian mother, the austere 
 father, with his open books ; the death of the 
 mother, who lies laid out for burial in her red 
 silk dress; the epitaph "Weep for an infant 
 too young to weep much, when Death removed 
 this mother " ; Aurora's journey to her father's 
 old home ; her lonely terror of England ; her 
 slow yielding to its silent beauty ; her friend- 
 ship with her cousin Romney Leigh ; their 
 saddening, widening knowledge of the burden 
 and sorrow of life and the way this know- 
 ledge influences both their fates ; — all is de- 
 scribed with that irresistible fervour which 
 is the translation of the essence of things into 
 words. 
 
 Mrs. Browning was a great writer ; but I 
 think she was even more a wife and a mother 
 than a writer, and any account of her would be 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 209 
 
 incomplete which did , not put these facts first 
 and foremost in her history. 
 
 The author of " Aurora Leigh " once added 
 a characteristic page to one of her husband's 
 letters to Leigh Hunt. She has been telling 
 him of her little boy's illness. " You are aware 
 that of that child I am more proud than of 
 twenty Auroras, even after Leigh Hunt has 
 praised them. When he was ill he said to me, 
 ' You pet, don't be unhappy about me ; think 
 it's only a boy in the street, and be a little 
 sorry, but not unhappy.' Who could not be 
 unhappy, I wonder? ... I never saw your 
 book called The Religion of the Heart. I 
 receive more dogmas, perhaps (my 'perhaps' 
 being in the dark rather), than you do." 
 
 She says in conclusion, " Churches do all of 
 them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow 
 and low to hold true Christianity in its proxi- 
 mate development — I, at least, cannot help be- 
 lieving them so." 
 
 She seemed, even in her life, something of a 
 spirit, as her friend has said, and her view of 
 
2 10 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 life's sorrow and shame, of its beauty and eternal 
 hope, is not unlike that which one might 
 imagine a spirit's to be. She died at Florence 
 in 1 86 1. It is impossible to read without 
 emotion the account of her last hours as given 
 in Robert Browning's Life, of her tender, nay, 
 playful courage and sweetness, of his passion of 
 grief. 
 
 A tablet has been placed on Casa Guidi, 
 voted by the municipality of Florence, and 
 written by Tommaseo : — 
 
 " Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
 whose woman's heart combined the wisdom of a wise man 
 with the genius of ^ poet, and whose poems form a golden 
 ring which joins Italy to England. The town of Florence, 
 ever grateful to her, has placed this epitaph to her 
 memory." 
 
 There was a woman living in Florence, an 
 old friend — clever, warm-hearted Miss Isa 
 Blagden, herself a writer — who went to Mr. 
 Browning and his little boy in their terrible 
 desolation, and who did what little a friend 
 could do to help them. Day after day, and 
 for two or three nights, she watched by the 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING zn 
 
 stricken pair until she was relieved ; then the 
 father and the Httle son came back to England. 
 They settled near Miss Barrett, Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's sister, who was living in Delamere Ter- 
 race, and upon her own father's death Miss 
 Browning came to be friend, comforter, home- 
 maker, for her brother. 
 
 I can remember walking with my father 
 under the trees in Kensington Gardens, when 
 we met Mr. Browning just after his return to 
 England. He was coming towards us along 
 the broad walk in his blackness through the 
 sunshine. We were then living in Palace Green, 
 close by, and he came to see us very soon after. 
 But he was in a jarred and troubled state, and 
 not himself as yet, although I remember his 
 speaking of the house he had just taken for 
 himself and his boy. This was only a short 
 time before my father's death. In 1864 my 
 sister and I left our home and went abroad, 
 nor did we all meet again for a long time. 
 
 It was a mere chance, so Mr. Browning once 
 said, whether he should live in this London 
 
212 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 house that he had taken, and join in social life, 
 or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen 
 no more ; but for great poets, as for small ones, 
 events shape themselves by degrees, and after 
 the first hard years of his return, a new and 
 gentler day began to dawn for him. Miss 
 Browning came to them, new interests arose, 
 acquaintances ripened to friends (this blessed 
 human fruit takes time to mature), his work 
 and his influence spread. 
 
 He published some of his finest work about 
 this time. " Dramatis Personas," a great part 
 of which had been written before, came out in 
 1 864 ; then followed " The Ring and the Book," 
 published by his good friend and ours, Mr. 
 George Murray Smith ; and " Balaustion," that 
 exquisite poem, in 1871. Recognition, popu- 
 larity, honorary degrees, all the tokens of appre- 
 ciation, which should have come sooner, now 
 began to crowd in upon " our great Commoner," 
 as some one called Mr. Browning when Lord 
 Tennyson accepted his peerage. Lord Rector- 
 ships and Fellowships and dignities of every 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 213 
 
 sort came in due course. He went his own 
 way through it all, cordially accepted the recog- 
 nition, but chiefly avoided the dignities, and 
 kept his two lives distinct. He had his public 
 life and his own private life, with its natural 
 interests and outcoming friendships, and con- 
 stant alternate pulse of work and play. 
 
 Browning has been described as looking 
 something like a hale naval officer ; but in 
 later life, when his hair turned snowy white, 
 he seemed to me more like some sage of bygone 
 ages. There was a statue in the Capitol of 
 Rome to which Mrs. Sartoris always likened 
 him. I cannot imagine that any draped and 
 filleted sage could ever have been so delightful 
 a companion, so racy, so unselfishly interested 
 in the events of the hour as he. " He was not 
 only ready for talk, but fond of it," said the 
 writer of an admirable article in the Standard. 
 " He was absolutely unaffected in his choice of 
 topics ; anything but the cant of literary circles 
 pleased him. If only we knew a tithe of what 
 he knew, and of what, unluckily, he gives us 
 
214 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 credit for knowing, many a hint that serves 
 only to obscure the sense would be clear 
 enough." 
 
 To quote the many voices as they speak of 
 him is to quote the voices of a whole host of 
 friends and followers, whether in the spirit or 
 the letter. 
 
 Browning is a poet for the old as well as 
 for the young. Some poets write of summer, 
 others of spring. Browning belongs even more 
 to wintry times, or to the early silent months 
 which precede spring — the branches of the trees 
 may be dry and frozen, but in them lies the 
 sap of hope and life ; the frost-bound earth 
 contains the harvests of the year, its joys and 
 fragrance and sweetness to be. Who more 
 than Browning has ever made us realise that 
 life which exists alongside with death, that 
 truth and law which underlies confusion ? 
 
 " I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast, its splendour 
 Soon or late will pierce the gloom.'' 
 
 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, in his essay on 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING zi; 
 
 Hooker, quotes a passage which might almost 
 serve for a motto to some of Browning's finest 
 works : "In all created and imperfect beings 
 there is an appetite and desire, whereby they 
 incline to something which they may be, which 
 as yet they are not in act — 
 
 " ' So in man's self arise 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendour ever on before. 
 In that eternal circle life pursues.' — Paracelsus." 
 
 And again : " That which doth assign to 
 each thing the kind, that which doth moderate 
 the force and power, that which doth appoint 
 the form and measure of working, the same we 
 term a law. Again hear ' Paracelsus ' — 
 
 " ' But thou shalt painfully attain to joy 
 
 While hope and fear and love shall keep thee man.' " 
 
 Among Browning's many gifts, that of de- 
 lightful story -telling is certainly one which 
 should not be passed over. His memory was 
 very remarkable for certain things — general 
 facts, odds and ends of rhyme and doggerel, 
 bits of recondite knowledge came back to him 
 
2i6 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 spontaneously and with vivacity. This is all 
 
 to be noticed in his books, which treat of so 
 
 many quaint facts and theories. His stories 
 
 were specially delightful, because they were told 
 
 so appositely, and were so simple and complete 
 
 in themselves. A doggerel always had a 
 
 curious fascination for him, and he preferred 
 
 to quote the very worst poetry in his talks. 
 
 On one occasion we were dining at Mr. and 
 
 Mrs. Lehmann's house in Half-Moon Street ; 
 
 it was a cottage of delight rather than a palace, 
 
 and the guests were somewhat crowded. My 
 
 friend Mrs. CunlifFe was thei-e, and remembers 
 
 that Millais, turning round, happened to brush 
 
 off the head of a flower that Browning wore in 
 
 his buttonhole. Concerning the said flower, the 
 
 poet immediately remembered a story of a city 
 
 clerk who had considered himself inspired, and 
 
 had some of his verses printed. One poem 
 
 began something like this — 
 
 " I love the gentle primrose 
 
 That grows beside the rill ; 
 I love the water-lily. 
 Narcissus, and jonquil." 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 217 
 
 This last word was by mistake printed " John 
 Quill," which seemed so appropriate a name, 
 and the clerk got so much chaffed about it, 
 that his poetical inspirations were nipped in 
 the bud, and he printed no more poems. 
 
 Another reminiscence which Mrs. Cunliffe 
 has also recalled to my less accurate memory 
 is in a sadder strain. It was a description 
 of something Mr. Browning once saw in 
 Italy. It happened at Arezzo, where he had 
 turned by chance into an old church among 
 the many old churches there, that he saw a 
 crowd of people at the end of an aisle, and 
 found they were looking at the skeleton of a 
 man just discovered by some workmen who 
 were breaking away a portion of the wall oppo- 
 site the high altar. The flesh was like brown 
 leather, but the features were distinguishable. 
 Mr. Browning made inquiries as to who it was. 
 He could hear of no tradition even of a man 
 being walled up. The priests thought it must 
 have been done three or four hundred years 
 ago. A hole had been left above his head to 
 
21 8 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 enable him to breathe. Mr. Browning said the 
 dead man was standing with his hands crossed 
 upon his breast ; on the face was a look of 
 expectation, an expression of hoping against 
 hope. The man looked up, knowing help could 
 only come from above, and must have died still 
 hoping. Mrs. Cunliffe said to Mr. Browning she 
 wondered he had not written a poem about it. 
 He replied he had done so, and had given it 
 away. 
 
 I often find myself going back to Darwin's 
 saying about the duration of a man's friendships 
 being one of the best measures of his worth, and 
 Browning's friendships are very characteristic 
 and convincing. He specially loved Landor, to 
 whom he and his wife were good Samaritans 
 indeed. For the Tennysons his was also a real 
 and warm affection. Was there ever a happier 
 dedication than that of his collected selections — 
 
 " To Alfred Tennyson, 
 
 In poetry illustrious and consummate, 
 In friendship noble and sincere " ? 
 
 How enduring was his friendship for Mr. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 219 
 
 Procter, and how often has his faithful coming 
 cheered the dear and kind old man ! Of his 
 feeling for Mr. Milsand I have already spoken. 
 Among the women who were Mr. Browning's 
 real and confidential friends there is the same 
 sense of trust and dependence. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Besides actual personal feelings, there are also 
 the affinities of a life to be taken into account. 
 The following passages, which I owe to Pro- 
 fessor Knight's kindness, are very remarkable, 
 for they show what Browning's estimation was 
 of Wordsworth, and although they were not 
 written till much later, I give them here. 
 Indeed, the point of meeting of these two 
 beneficent poet streams is one full of interest 
 to those upon the shore. The first para- 
 graph of the first letter relates to some new 
 honours and dignities gratefully and firmly 
 declined : — 
 
220 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 "2I« March 1883. 
 
 " I do feel increasingly (cowardly as seems the avowal) 
 the need of keeping the quiet corner in the world's van 
 which I have got used to for so many years. 
 
 " I will, as you desire, attempt to pick out the twenty 
 poems which strike me (and so as to take away my breath) 
 as those worthiest of the master Wordsworth. . . . 
 
 " Speaking of a classification of Wordsworth's poems, in 
 my heart I fear I should do it almost chronologically, so 
 immeasurably superior seem to me the first sprightly 
 runnings ; your selection would appear to be excellent, 
 and the partial admittance of the latter work prevents one 
 from observing the too definitely distinguishing black line 
 between supremely good and — well ! what is fairly toler- 
 able, from Wordsworth always understand." 
 
 At the end of one of the letters addressed to 
 Professor Knight there is this touching post- 
 script : — 
 
 "I open the envelope to say — what I had nearly 
 omitted — that Lord Coleridge proposed, and my humble 
 self, at his desire, seconded you last evening for admission 
 to the Athenjeum. I had the less scruple in offering my 
 services that you will most likely never see in the offer 
 anything but a record of my respect and regard, since your 
 election will come on when I shall be — dare I hope .^ — 
 ' elect ' in even a higher society ! " 
 
 Here is another letter also relating to 
 Wordsworth : — 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 221 
 
 "19 Warwick Crescent, W., 
 "z^th February 1886. 
 
 " My DEAR Professor — I have kept you waiting this 
 long while, and for how shabby a result ! You must 
 listen indulgently while I attempt to explain why I am 
 forced to disappoint you. One remembers few more 
 commonplace admonitions to a poet than that ' he would 
 wiselier have written but a quarter of the works which 
 he has laboured at for a lifetime,' unless it be this other, 
 often coupled with it, 'that such works ought to be 
 addressed to the general apprehension, not exclusively 
 suited to the requirements of a (probably quite imaginary) 
 few.' Each precept contradicts the other. Write, on set 
 purpose, for the many, and you will soon enough be 
 reminded of the old ' Tot homines ' ; and write as con- 
 scientiously for the few — your idealised 'Double' (it 
 comes to that) — and you may soon suit him with the 
 extremely little that suits yourself. Now in view of 
 which of these objects should the maker of a selection of 
 the works of any poet worth the pains begin his employ- 
 ment ? 
 
 " I have myself attempted the business, and know 
 something of the achievements in this kind of my betters. 
 They furnish a list of the pieces which the selector has 
 found most delight in. And I have found also that others, 
 playing the selector with apparently as good a right and 
 reason, were dissatisfied with this unaccountable addition, 
 and that as inexplicable omission ; in short, that the sole 
 selector was not himself. The only case in which no 
 such stumbling-block occurs being that obvious one — if it 
 has ever occurred — when a public, wholly unacquainted 
 with an author, is presumed to be accessible to a specimen 
 of his altogether untried productions — for, by chance, the 
 sample of the poetry by Brown and Jones may pierce the 
 
2 22 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 ignorance of somebody — say, of Robinson. It is quite 
 another matter of interest to know what Matthew Arnold 
 thinks most worthy in Wordsworth ; but should anybody 
 have curiosity to inquire which 'fifteen or twenty' of his 
 poems have most thoroughly impressed such a one as 
 myself, all I can aiErm is that I treasure as precious every 
 poem written during about the first twenty years of 
 the poet's life ; after these, the solution grows weaker, the 
 crystals gleam more rarely, and the assiduous stirring up 
 of the mixture is too apparent and obtrusive. To the 
 end crystals are to be come at ; but my own experience 
 resembles that of the old man in the admirable ' Resolution 
 and Independence' : 
 
 * Once I could meet with them on every side, 
 But they have dwindled long by slow decay, 
 Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.' 
 
 — that is, in the poet's whole work, which I should leave 
 to operate in the world as it may, each recipient his own 
 selector. 
 
 " I only find room to say that I was delighted to make 
 acquaintance with your daughter, and that should she fe^el 
 any desire to make that of my sister, we shall welcome her 
 gladly. — Believe me, my dear Professor, yours most truly, 
 
 " Robert Browning." 
 
 IX 
 
 We were all living in " sea-coast-nook-full " 
 Normandy one year, scattered into various 
 chateaus and shops and tenements. Some of 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 223. 
 
 our party were installed in a clematis-wreathed 
 mansion near the church tower ; others were 
 at the milk-woman's on the road to the sea. 
 Most of the lively population of the little 
 watering-place was stowed away in chalets, of 
 which the fronts seemed wide open to the 
 road from morning to night ; numbers of 
 people contentedly spent whole days in tents 
 on the sea-shore. It was a fine hot summer, 
 with sweetness and completeness everywhere ; 
 the cornfields gilt and far-stretching, the waters 
 blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the 
 sunsets succeeding each other, in most glorious 
 light and beauty. Mr. Milsand had a little 
 country lodge at St. Aubin, near Luc-sur-Mer, 
 and I wrote to him from the shady courtyard 
 of our chateau, and begged him , to come over 
 and see us ; and when he came he told us Mr. 
 and Miss Browning were also living close by. 
 We were walking along the dusty road and 
 passing the old square tower when he suddenly 
 stood still, and fixing his earnest look upon me, 
 said : 
 
224 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 " Tell me why is there some reserve. Is 
 anything wrong between you and Robert 
 Browning ? I see you are reserved ; I see he 
 is also constrained ; what is it ? " 
 
 To which I replied honestly enough that I 
 did not know what it was ; there was some 
 constraint between me and my old friend. I 
 imagined that some one had made mischief. 
 I could see plainly enough when we met that 
 he was changed and vexed and hurt, but I 
 could not tell why, and it certainly made me 
 very unhappy. " But this must not be," said 
 Milsand ; " this must be cleared." I said it 
 was hopeless ; it had lasted for months, and in 
 those days I was still young enough to imagine 
 that a mood was eternal, that coldness could 
 never change. Now I find it almost impossible 
 to give that consideration to a quarrel which is 
 invariably claimed under such circumstances. 
 
 I happened to be alone next day ; the cousins 
 and the children who were with me had gone 
 down to the sea. I was keeping house in the 
 blazing heat with F (the family despot, the 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 225 
 
 late nurse and present housekeeper of the party). 
 The shutters were closed against the blinding 
 light ; I was writing in my bedroom, with a 
 pleasant sense of temporary solitude and silence, 
 when I chanced to go to the window, and looked 
 into the old walled court. I saw the great gates 
 open a little way, and a man's broad-shouldered 
 figure coming through them, and then advance, 
 striding across the stones, towards the house. 
 It was Mr. Browning, dressed all in white, with 
 a big white umbrella under his arm. It was 
 the poet himself, and over and beyond this, it 
 was my kind old friend returned, all reserve and 
 coldness gone, never to trouble or perplex again. 
 We had no explanations. 
 
 " Don't ask," he said ; " the facts are not 
 worth remembering or inquiring into ; people 
 make mischief without even meaning it. It is 
 all over now. I have come to ask when you 
 will come to St. Aubin ; my sister is away for 
 a few days, but the Milsands are counting on 
 you. 
 
 We started almost the next day in a rattle- 
 Q 
 
226 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 trap chaise, with an escort of donkeys ridden by 
 nephews and nieces, along the glaring sandy 
 road to Luc. The plains were burning hot, 
 and the sea seemed on fire, but the children 
 and donkeys kept up valiantly. At last we 
 reached a little village on the outer edges of 
 Luc-sur-Mer, and in the street stood Monsieur 
 Milsand, in front of a tiny house. How kind 
 was his greeting ! How cordial was that of 
 his wife and daughter, coming to the door to 
 make us welcome ! Mr. Browning was also 
 waiting in the diminutive sitting-room, where 
 I remember a glimpse of big books and com- 
 fortable seats and tables. The feast itself was 
 spread out-of-doors on the terrace at the back, 
 with a shady view of the sea between lilac- 
 bushes ; the low table was laid with dainties, 
 glasses, and quaint decanters. Mr. Milsand 
 was the owner of vineyards in the South, and 
 abstemious though he was himself, he gave his 
 friends the best of good wine, as well as of 
 words and welcome. From this by-gone and 
 happy feast two dishes are still present to my 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING , 227 
 
 mind: a certain capon and a huge fish, lying 
 in a country platter, curled on a bed of fennel, 
 surrounded by a wreath of marigolds, and in its 
 mouth a bunch of flowers. The host helped us 
 each in turn ; the Normandy maid appeared 
 and disappeared with her gleaming gold ear- 
 rings ; then came a pause, during which 
 Madame Milsand rose quietly and went into 
 the house. The gentlemen were talking pleas- 
 antly, and the ladies listening agreeably (there 
 are many local politics to be discussed on the 
 Normandy coast). But somehow, after a time, 
 the voices ceased, and in the silence we heard 
 the strains of distant martial music. Mr. 
 Milsand looked inquiringly at his daughter. 
 
 "It is the regiment marching by," said 
 Mile. Milsand. 
 
 " But where is my wife ? " said Monsieur 
 Milsand. " She cannot have gone to the 
 review." 
 
 Still the music sounded ; still we waited. 
 Then to us returned our handsome, dignified 
 hostess. " She had not been to the review,' 
 
228 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 she said, laughing and apologising ; " but, 
 ladies and gentlemen," she added, " you must 
 please content yourselves with your fricandeau, 
 for, alas ! there is no news of my larded capon. 
 It went to the pastry-cook's to be roasted ; I 
 have just sent the maid to inquire ; it was 
 despatched, ready for the table, half an hour 
 ago, on a tray carried by the pastry-cook's boy. 
 It is feared that it is running after the soldiers. 
 I am in despair at your meagre luncheon." 
 
 But I need not say we were in a land flowing 
 with milk and honey. As we feasted on, as 
 the last biscuit was crumbled, the last fragrant 
 cup of coifee handed round, once more came 
 the Normandy earrings. 
 
 " Shall I serve the capon, madame .'' Pierre 
 has just returned from the review." 
 
 But we all cried out that we must come back 
 another day to eat the capon. The sun was 
 getting low. If we were to carry out our intention 
 of walking to St. Aubin and seeing Mr. Brown- 
 ing's cottage, we must start forthwith. 
 
 The path ran along the high cliff. Mr. 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 229 
 
 Browning went before us, leading the way to 
 " mine own hired house." Once more the 
 whole scene comes before me : the sea-coast 
 far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation 
 of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragons 
 lining the paths. There was not much other 
 colour ; the tones were delicate, half airy, half 
 solid ; the sea was in a vast circle around us ; 
 the waves were flowing into the scooped sandy 
 bay of Luc-sur-Mer ; the rocks of the Calvados 
 were hidden behind the jutting promontories ; 
 here and there a rare poppy, like a godsend, 
 shone up by chance. It took us half an hour's 
 quick walk to reach the two little straight sentry- 
 boxes, standing on the cliffs against the sky, to 
 which Mr. Browning pointed. He himself has 
 described this habitation in " Red Cotton Night- 
 cap Country " : — 
 
 " That just behind you is mine own hired house. 
 With right of pathway through the field in front. 
 No prejudice to all its growth unsheath'd 
 Of emerald Luzern bursting into blue. . . . 
 Be sure I keep the path that hugs the wall 
 Of mornings, as I pad from door to gate ! 
 
2 30 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 Yon yellow — what if not wild-mustard flower ? 
 
 Of that my naked sole makes lawful prize. 
 
 Bruising the acrid aromatics out. . . . 
 
 And lo, the wave protrudes a lip at last. 
 
 And flecks my foot with froth, nor tempts in vain." 
 
 We entered the Brownings' house. The 
 sitting-room door opened to the garden and the 
 sea beyond — a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, 
 three straw chairs, one book upon the table. 
 Mr. Browning told us it was the only book he 
 had with him. The bedrooms were as bare 
 as the sitting-room, but I remember a little 
 dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he 
 used to practise in the early morning. I heard 
 Mr. Browning declare they were perfectly satis- 
 fied with their little house ; that his brains, 
 squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready 
 for fresh air. 
 
 But has not Browning himself best summed 
 
 up the contrast between the meek, hitherto un-. 
 
 Murrayed, bathing-place and London, where 
 
 " My toe trespassed upon your flounce. 
 Small blame unto you, seeing the staircase party in the 
 
 square 
 Was small and early, and you broke no rib.'' 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 231 
 
 X 
 
 This visit to St. Aubin was followed by the 
 publication of " Red Cotton Nightcap Country," 
 from which I have been quoting ; and on this 
 occasion I must break my rule, and trench 
 upon the ground traversed by Mrs. Orr. I 
 cannot give myself greater pleasure than by 
 inserting the following passage from the Life : — 
 
 "The August of 1872 and of 1873 again 
 found him and his sister at St. Aubin, and the 
 earlier visit was an important one, since it sup- 
 plied him with the materials of his next work, 
 of which Miss Annie Thackeray, there also for 
 a few days, suggested the title. The tragic 
 drama which forms the subject of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's poem had been in great part enacted in 
 the vicinity of St. Aubin, and the case of dis- 
 puted inheritance to which it had given rise 
 was pending at that moment in the tribunals 
 of Caen. The prevailing impression left on 
 Miss Thackeray's mind by this primitive dis- 
 
232 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 trict was, she declared, that of white cotton 
 nightcaps (the habitual headgear of the Nor- 
 mandy peasants). She engaged to write a story 
 called 'White Cotton Nightcap Country,' and 
 Mr. Browning's quick sense of both contrast and 
 analogy inspired the introduction of this element 
 of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, 
 prosaic existence, and of the ghostly, spiritual 
 conflict to which it had served as back- 
 ground." 
 
 And perhaps the writer may be excused for 
 adding a letter which concerns the dedication 
 of "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" — a very 
 unexpected and delightful consequence of our 
 friendly meeting : — 
 
 "9M May 1873. 
 
 " Dear Miss Thackeray — Indeed the only sort of pain 
 that any sort of criticism could give me would be by the 
 reflection of any particle of pain it managed to give you. 
 I daresay that, by long use, I don't feel or attempt to feel 
 criticisms of this kind, as most people might. Remember 
 that everybody this thirty years has given me his kick and 
 gone his way, just as I am told the understood duty of all 
 highway travellers in Spain is to bestow at least one 
 friendly thump for the Mayoral's sake on his horses as 
 they toil along uphill, ' so utterly a puzzle,' ' organ-grind- 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 233 
 
 ing,' and so forth, come and go again without much 
 notice ; but any poke at me which would touch you 
 would vex me indeed ; therefore pray don't let my critics 
 into that secret ! Indeed, I thought the article highly 
 complimentary, which comes of. being in the category 
 celebrated by Butler : 
 
 ' Some have been kicked till they know not whether 
 The shoe be Spanish or neat's leather." 
 
 You see the little patch of velvet in the toe-piece of this 
 slipper seemed to tickle by comparison. — Ever yours affec- 
 tionately, Robert Brow^ning." 
 
 But whatever the past may have contained, 
 Mr. Browning had little to complain of in his 
 future critics. This is not an unappreciative 
 age ; the only fault to be found with it is that 
 there are too many mouths using the same 
 words over and over again, until the expres- 
 sions seem to lose their senses and fly about 
 almost giddily and at haphazard. The extra- 
 ordinary publicity in which our bodies live 
 seems to frighten away our souls at times ; we 
 are apt to stick to generalities, or to well- 
 hackneyed adjectives which have ceased to have 
 much meaning or responsibility ; or if we try 
 to describe our own feelings, it is in terms 
 
2 34 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 which sometimes grow more and more emphatic 
 as they are less and less to the point. When 
 we try to say what is our simple and genuine 
 conviction the effort is almost beyond us, we 
 remember so many clever confusing things that 
 other people have said. The truth is too like 
 Cordelia's. To say that you have loved a man 
 or a woman, that you admire them and delight 
 in their work, does not any longer mean to you 
 or to others what it means in fact. It seems 
 almost a test of Mr. Browning's true greatness 
 that the love and the trust in his genius have 
 survived the things which have been said 
 about it. 
 
 XI 
 
 Not the least interesting part of the Milsand 
 correspondence relates to the MSS. which the 
 cultivated Frenchman now regularly revised for 
 his English friend before they were sent to the 
 printer. Here is a letter to Mr. Milsand, 
 dated May 1872: "Whenever you get the 
 whole series," Browning says, " you will see 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 235 
 
 what I fail to make you understand, how in- 
 estimable your assistance has been ; there is not 
 one point to which you called attention which I 
 was not thereby enabled to improve, in some 
 cases essentially benefit ; the punctuation was 
 nearly as useful as the other apparently more 
 important assistance. The fact is that in the 
 case of a writer with my peculiarities and habits, 
 somebody quite ignorant of what I may have 
 meant to write, and only occupied with what is 
 really written, is needed to supervise the thing 
 produced, and I never hoped or dreamed that 
 I should find such intelligence as yours at my 
 service. I won't attempt to thank you, dearest 
 friend, but simply in my own interest do not 
 you undervalue your service to me, because in 
 logical consequence the next step ought to be 
 that you abate it or withdraw it." In another 
 letter, dated 1875, ^^- Browning writes again 
 about punctuation : " Your way of punctuation 
 (French way) is different from ours — I don't 
 know why. We use ' : ' where you prefer ' ; ' 
 — but I have Frenchified myself in this respect 
 
236 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 for your sake." " I know how I trouble all 
 but your goodness," he repeats to his friend. 
 Is it not a pleasure to think of the records in 
 the old carved house at Dijon ; of the good 
 service rendered, and so generously acknow- 
 ledged ? 
 
 Here is one more extract from the Dijon 
 correspondence, dated 7th April 1878: "I am 
 glad you like the poems. The measures were 
 hitherto unused by me. That of the first poem is 
 
 and the cassura falls just as you say, and should, 
 as a rule, be strictly observed ; but to prevent 
 monotony, I occasionally break it." This letter 
 concludes with an allusion to a French friend who 
 is learning English, and speaking of the diffi- 
 culties of a foreign tongue Mr. Browning says : 
 " The thoughts outstrip and leave behind the 
 words; in the slower process of writing the 
 thought is compelled to wait, and get itself suited 
 in a phrase." " Now for yourself," he con- 
 cludes, " I enjoy altogether your enjoyment of 
 Bebe, and wish that grandmere may be tyrannised 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 237 
 
 over more and more Turkishly. It is the 
 good time. Give my true love to whoever will 
 take it of your joyous party. Sarianna writes 
 often, I know. We hail the announcement of 
 your speedy arrival as ever." 
 
 The house by the water-side, in Warwick 
 Crescent, which Browning hastily took, and in 
 which he lived for so many years after his return 
 to England, was a very charming corner, I used 
 to think. It was London, but London touched 
 by some indefinite romance ; the canal used to 
 look cool and deep, the green trees used to 
 shade the Crescent ; it seemed a peaceful oasis 
 after crossing that dreary iEolia of Paddington, 
 with its many despairing shrieks and whirling 
 eddies. The house was an ordinary London 
 house, but the carved oak furniture and tapes- 
 tries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, 
 and pictures and books lined the stairs. In the 
 garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I 
 am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering 
 silver wings and long throats, who used to come 
 and meet their master hissing and fluttering. 
 
238 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 When I said I liked the place he told us of 
 some visitor from abroad, who had lately come 
 to see him, who also liked Warwick Crescent, 
 and who, looking up and down the long row 
 of. houses and porticoes in front of the canal, 
 said, " Why, this is a mansion, sir ; do you 
 inhabit the whole of this great building, and do 
 you allow the public to sail upon the water ? " 
 
 As we sat at luncheon I looked up and down 
 the room, with its comfortable lining of books, 
 and also I could not help noticing the chimney- 
 board heaped with invitations. I never saw so 
 many cards in my life before. Lothair himself 
 might have wondered at them. 
 
 Mr. Browning talked on, not of the present 
 London, but of Italy and villegiatura, with his 
 old friends, the Storys ; of Siena days and 
 of Walter Savage Landor. He told us the 
 piteous story of the old man wandering forlorn 
 down the street in the sunshine without a hole 
 to hide his head. He kindled at the remem- 
 brance of the old poet ; he said his was the most 
 remarkable personality he had ever known ; and 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 239 
 
 then, getting up abruptly from the table, he 
 reached down some of Landor's many books 
 from the shelves near the fireplace, declaring he 
 knew no finer reading. 
 
 He read us sortie extracts from the Con- 
 versations with the Dead, quickly turning 
 over the leaves, seeking, with his short-sighted 
 eyes, for his favourite passages. 
 
 There is a little anecdote which I think he 
 also told us on this occasion. It concerned a 
 ring which he used to wear, and which had 
 belonged to his wife. One day in the Strand 
 he discovered that the intaglio from the setting 
 was missing. People were crowding in and 
 out, there seemed no chance of recovering ; 
 but all the same he retraced his steps, and lo ! 
 in the centre of the crossing, there lay the 
 jewel on a stone, shining in the sun. He 
 had lost the ring on a previous occasion in 
 Florence, and found it there by another happy 
 chance. 
 
240 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 XII 
 
 It was not until 1887 that Mr. Browning 
 moved to De Vere Gardens, where I saw him 
 almost for the last time. I remember calling 
 there at an early hour with my children. The 
 servant hesitated about letting us in. Kind 
 Miss Browning came out to speak to us, and 
 would not hear of us going away. 
 
 " Wait a few minutes. I know he will see 
 you," she said. " Come in. Not into the 
 dining-room ; there are some ladies waiting 
 there ; and there are some members of the 
 Browning Society in the drawing-room. Robert 
 is in the study with some Americans who have 
 come by appointment. Here is my sitting- 
 room," she said ; " he will come to you 
 directly." 
 
 We had not waited five minutes, when the 
 door opened wide and Mr. Browning came in. 
 Alas ! it was no longer the stalwart visitor 
 from St. Aubin. He seemed tired, hurried, 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 241 
 
 though not less outcoming and cordial, in his 
 silver age. 
 
 " Well, what can I do for you ? " he said, 
 dropping into a chair, and holding out both 
 his hands. 
 
 I told him it was a family festival, and that 
 I had brought the children to ask for his 
 blessing. 
 
 " Is that all ? " he said, laughing, with a 
 kind look, not without some relief. He also 
 hospitably detained us, and when his American 
 visitors were gone, took us in turn up into his 
 study, where the carved writing-tables were 
 covered with letters — a milky way of letters, 
 it seemed to me, flowing in from every direc- 
 tion. 
 
 " What ! all this to answer .'' " I exclaimed. 
 
 " You can have no conception of what it 
 is," he replied. " I am quite worn out with 
 writing letters by the time I begin my day's 
 work." 
 
 But his day's work was ending here. In 
 the autumn of the year 1889 he went to 
 
 R 
 
242 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 Italy, and from Asolo wrote a happy and 
 delightful letter to his brother-in-law, Mr. 
 George Barrett, describing the " ancient city 
 older than Rome." The immense indescrib- 
 able charm of the surrounding country — the 
 Alps on one side, the Asolan Mountains all 
 round, and opposite the vast Lombard Plains 
 — all are described. " We think of leaving in 
 a week or two," so he says, " for Venice, — 
 guests of Pen and his wife ; " so he writes on, 
 of his children, and of his own and his sister's 
 happiness in the beautiful Italian home, and 
 also of the new edition of the works of 
 E. B. B. He seemed well when he first reached 
 Venice, but it was winter even in Venice, Mrs. 
 Orr says, and taking his usual walk on the 
 Lido he caught cold. Attacks of faintness 
 set in, and two hours before midnight on 
 Thursday, i2th December, he breathed his 
 last, closing his eyes at Venice among those 
 he loved best. His son, his sister, his 
 daughter-in-law, were round about his bed, 
 tending and watching to the last. When 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 243 
 
 all was over they brought him home to 
 England. 
 
 It often happens when a man dies in the 
 fulness of years, that as you look across his 
 grave you can almost see his lifetime written 
 in the faces gathered round about it. There 
 stands his history. There are his companions, 
 and his early associates, and those who loved 
 him, and those with whom his later life was 
 passed. You may hear the voices that have 
 greeted him, see the faces he last looked upon ; 
 you may even go back and find some impression 
 of early youth in the young folks who recall a 
 past generation to those who remember the 
 past. And how many phases of a long and 
 varied life must have been represented in the 
 great procession which followed Robert Brown- 
 ing to his honoured grave ! — passing along the 
 London streets and moving on through the 
 gloomy fog, assembling from many a distant 
 place to show respect to one 
 
 " Who never turned his back, but marched breast forward. 
 Never doubted clouds would break ; 
 
244 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 
 
 Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted. 
 Wrong would triumph. 
 
 Held — we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better. 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 When Spenser died in the street in West- 
 minster in which he dwelt after his home in 
 Ireland was burnt and his child was killed by 
 the rebels, it is said that, after lingering in this 
 world in poverty and neglect, he was carried 
 to the grave in state, and that his sorrowing 
 brother-poets came and stood round about his 
 grave, and each in turn flung in an ode to his 
 memory, together with the pen with which it 
 had been written. The present Dean of West- 
 minster, quoting this story, added that probably 
 Shakespeare had stood by the grave with the 
 rest of them, and that Shakespeare's own pen 
 might still be lying in dust in the vaults of the 
 old Abbey. There is something in the story 
 very striking to the imagination. One pictures 
 to oneself the gathering of those noble dignified 
 men of the Elizabethan age, whose thoughts 
 were at once so strong and so gentle, so fierce 
 and so tender, whose dress was so elaborate and 
 
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BROWNING 245 
 
 Stately. Perhaps in years to come people may 
 imagine to themselves the men who stood, only 
 the other day, round Robert Browning's grave, 
 the friends who loved him, the writers who 
 have written their last tribute to this great and 
 generous poet. There are still some eagles' 
 quills among us ; there are others of us who 
 have not eagles' quills to dedicate to his 
 memory, only nibs with which to pen a feel- 
 ing, happily stronger and more various than 
 the words and scratches which try to speak of 
 it : a feeling common to all who knew him, and 
 who loved the man of rock and sunshine, and 
 who were proud of his great gift of spirit and 
 of his noble human nature. 
 
 THE END 
 
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 A PRIMER ON BROWNING. By F. Mary Wilson. 
 
 Tfte Primer has been divided into three chapters of unegtcal length. The first 
 briefly puts forth in some fourteen pages the main facts of Browning's literary life ; 
 Chapter 11. devotes thirty four pages to an estimate of the chief characteristics of his 
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 succinct introduction to each poejn, which students of Browning will, it is hoped, find 
 useful. 
 
 SPEAKER— ^^'l\x6,^m!tTi\. and good taste combine with adequate knowledge to 
 render A Primer on Browning a satisfactory book." 
 
 PALL MALL G^Z^rr^— "Thoughtful and concise." 
 
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 enumeration of his ' characteristics,' the bulk of the Primer being devoted to ' Introduc- 
 tions to the Poems.' These last are marked by intelligence and patience." 
 
 GLASGOW HERALD — " May safely he recommended as both sound and informa- 
 tive. . . . No better companion could be named to the student of Browning's voluminous 
 works." 
 
 MORNING POST — "It is a book of real value for those who have a genuine. 
 interest in the poems so copiously annotated therein." 
 
 DUBLIN MAIL — "The introductions give an admirably succinct exposition of the 
 relative poems." 
 
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 and greater merit of sobriety of statement." 
 
 MANCHESTER EXAMINER— " A capital book, concisely written, and giving 
 abundant evidence that the authoress has made a very close study of Browning's poetry, 
 and is possessed of no ordinary powers of discernment." 
 
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 THE WORKS OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. In 
 
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