The Brownings and 
 America 
 
 By 
 ELIZABETH PORTER GOULD 
 
 Author of " One's Self I Sing and Other Poems ; " " Anne Gilchrist 
 
 and Walt Whitman;" "John Adams and Daniel Webster 
 
 as Schoolmasters;" " Ezekiel Cheever: Schoolmaster," 
 
 " A Pioneer Doctor : A Story of the Seventies," etc. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 THE POET-LORE COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 1904 
 
Copyright 1904 by Elizabeth Porter Gould 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 mm r_-i^ 
 
 GRESSI 
 seived i 
 
 L1BRARV nf CONGRESS 
 Two CoDJes Receivefl 
 
 JUL 19 1904 
 
 <L Cocyrlfirht Entry 
 CLAS$ *- XXO. No. 
 COPY B 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE GORHAM PRESS 
 
 BOSTON, U. S. A. 
 
The Brownings and America 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND 
 AMERICA 
 
 FROM the first of their literary career, 
 America not only honored the Brownings, 
 but the Brownings honored America. At 
 an early age Mrs. Browning, as Elizabeth 
 Barrett, had read Paine's Age of Reason, and in 
 her Essay on Mind, published in 1826, had re- 
 ferred in the Rights of Man to his argument in 
 the throne's defense instead of against monarchy. 
 In the same Essay she had referred to Washing- 
 ton Irving as striking " Pierian chords." But 
 when Edgar Allan Poe dedicated to her his little 
 volume of thirty poems, " The Raven and other 
 Poems; New York; Wiley and Putnam: 1845," 
 her interest naturally became more personal. She 
 fully appreciated the dedicatory words: 
 
 " To the Noblest of her Sex — To the Author 
 of ' The Drama of Exile ' — To Miss Elizabeth 
 Barrett Barrett of England, I dedicate this Vol- 
 ume, with the most Enthusiastic Admiration, and 
 with the most Sincere Esteem — E. A. P." 
 
io THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Receiving such seemed to her, as she wrote in 
 reply (April, 1846), " to authorize or, at least, to 
 encourage " her to try to express what she had 
 long felt, her sense of the high honor he had done 
 her in his country and hers, in the dedication of 
 his poems. " It is too great a distinction," she 
 continues, " conferred by a hand of too liberal 
 generosity. I wish for my own sake I were 
 worthy of it. But I may endeavor, by future 
 work, to justify a little what I cannot deserve 
 anywise now. For it, meanwhile, I may be grate- 
 ful, because gratitude is the virtue of the hum- 
 blest." After this " imperfect acknowledgment " 
 of her personal obligation, she goes on to thank 
 him, as another reader would thank him, for this 
 " vivid writing, this power which is felt ! Your 
 Raven," she declares, " has produced a sensation, 
 a ' fit horror ' here in England. Some of my 
 friends are taken by the fear of it and some by 
 the music. I hear of persons haunted by the 
 ' Nevermore,' and one acquaintance of mine who 
 has the misfortune of possessing a bust of Pallas 
 never can bear to look at it in the twilight." She 
 then tells that " our great poet, Mr. Browning, 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA n 
 
 the author of ' Paracelsus ' and the ' Bells and 
 Pomegranates/ was struck much by the rhythm 
 of that poem." 
 
 From four different quarters, besides from the 
 author himself, she had received the Raven when 
 it had only a newspaper life. But though it had 
 for her an " uncommon voice and effect," she 
 could not feel " the immoderate joy " her friend 
 John Kenyon felt upon reading it. " It is the 
 rhythm which has taken him with glamour, I 
 fancy." This, as she wrote Mr. Home in May, 
 1845, " acted excellently upon the imagination, 
 the ' Nevermore ' having a solemn chime ; " yet 
 the poem did not seem to her to be the " natural 
 expression of a sane intellect in whatever mood." 
 She thought this should be specified in its title. 
 She felt that some of the lyrics had power of a 
 " less questionable sort." She even declared that 
 Poe showed more faculty in his account of that 
 horrible mesmeric experience (mad or not mad) 
 than in his poems. This tale of mesmerism (The 
 Case of M. Valdemar) which she wrote him she 
 did not find in the dedicatory volume, but which 
 was going the round of the newspapers, was 
 
i2 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 throwing them all into " most admired disorder " 
 and " dreadful doubts as to whether it could be 
 true, as the children said of ghost stories." But 
 she had to confess to the " power of the writer, 
 and the faculty he had of making horrible im- 
 probabilities seem near and familiar." 
 
 While Miss Barrett was reading Poe's works 
 he was reading hers; for about this time his 
 friend Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, in sending the 
 English poet a volume of her Poems from Amer- 
 ica, wrote that she ought to come to New York 
 " only to see Mr. Poe's wild eyes flash through 
 tears," when he read her verses. Could she then 
 have entered the little Fordham cottage where 
 the loved young wife Virginia was slowly dying 
 she would have seen among the books on the little 
 hanging bookshelf hers and Mr. Browning's hold- 
 ing posts of honor ; and she would have seen the 
 " quiet exultation " with which Poe drew from 
 his pocket to read to a friend who tells it the 
 letter he had received from Miss Barrett. It 
 would have rejoiced his sensitive heart could he 
 have heard years later (1851) the conversation 
 between the Brownings and his literary friend 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 13 
 
 John R. Thompson when they declared they had 
 formed " an ardent and just admiration " of the 
 author of The Raven, and felt a " strong desire 
 to see his memory vindicated from moral asper- 
 sion." (Harrison's Life of Poe.) 
 
 Not only the American poets, but the Ameri- 
 can magazines and papers, early appreciated this 
 gifted woman's work; notably the Arcturus, a 
 New York journal edited by Cornelius Mathews 
 and Evert A. Duyckinck (February, 1841) ; the 
 North American Reviezu of July, 1842 ; Graham's 
 Magazine of December, 1842; Democratic Re- 
 view of July and October, 1844 > an d the Evening 
 Mirror of December 7, 1844. 
 
 The writer in the North American Review, in 
 taking up the three publications she, as Miss 
 Barrett, had then published,* began by confess- 
 ing ignorance of the author as " to her lineage, 
 education, tastes, and (last and not least where a 
 lady is concerned) her personal attractions." 
 
 * An Essay on Mind, with other Poems, London, 
 1826 ; Prometheus Bound, translated from the Greek of 
 ^schylus, and Miscellaneous Poems by the Translator. 
 London, 1833; The Seraphim, and other Poems. Lon- 
 don, 1838. 
 
i 4 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 But he revealed a Yankee shrewdness which must 
 have amused the author when he stated that the 
 solitary fact he was able to gather from her 
 poetry was — her age ; for learning on good au- 
 thority that her first volume was published at the 
 age of seventeen, a guess might be given as to 
 result. After sixteen pages of remarks on the 
 poems, several of which he copied, he took leave 
 of Miss Barrett with " a sincere admiration of 
 her genius, her learning, and the tone of moral 
 and religious feeling which elevates and sanctifies 
 poetry." If he had spoken plainly of her faults 
 it was " because she could bear it." She had 
 " great gifts," and could do " better things than 
 she had yet done, if she would chastise the lawless 
 extravagance of her genius, beget in the whirl- 
 wind of her inspiration a temperance that shall 
 give it smoothness, and let in the light of day 
 upon those mazy and mystic labyrinths of thought 
 in which she delights to lose herself and bewilder 
 her readers. Her faults are excesses and not 
 defects, overflowings and not shortcomings, the 
 wild futility of a too luxuriant, and not the hun- 
 ger-bitten poverty of a meagre soul. Let her re- 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 15 
 
 member that extravagance is not power, that to 
 be obscure is not to be profound; to be mystical 
 is not to be sublime ; and that genius in its high- 
 est flight of ecstasy with all its robes and singing 
 garlands about it must be guided and controlled 
 by a law as unslumbering and unerring as that 
 which brings back the far depths of infinite 
 space." 
 
 This critic's condemnation of The Seraphim 
 was all Miss Barrett referred to in sending the 
 magazine to her friend and correspondent, Mr. 
 Hugh Stuart Boyd. " It seems to me," she 
 wrote, " it is not too hard. The poem wants 
 unity." In her Preface to it, she had declared 
 that she assumed " no power of art except that 
 power of love towards it which had remained 
 with her from childhood's days." Without " dis- 
 paraging speeches, and yet with a self-distrust 
 amounting to emotion," she had offered her 
 poetry to the public, and for the first time in her 
 own name, not " because there was a public, but 
 because it was thought and felt." She hoped to 
 write better verses — but she never could " feel 
 more intensely than at that moment the sub- 
 
16 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 lime uses of poetry and the solemn responsibilities 
 of the poet." 
 
 Her confession later (August, 1844), that the 
 Americans, and perhaps she herself, were of the 
 opinion that she had made great progress since 
 The Seraphim was written (" It seems to me that 
 I have more reach whether as thought or lan- 
 guage ") may have led her unsigned critic of the 
 North American Review to feel that he had pos- 
 sibly had a share in the progress. Who knows? 
 
 The Democratic Review, of July, 1844, in com- 
 plimenting her, declared that her poems " gen- 
 erated the sweetest union of womanly tenderness 
 of heart and masculine loftiness and power of 
 intellect." It compared her to Mrs. Norton. 
 
 The review in the Editor's Table of the Gra- 
 ham's Magazine called her the " learned poetess 
 of the day," and declared her " productions 
 unique in this age of lady authors. They have 
 the touch of nature in common with the best; 
 they have, too, sentiment, passion, and fancy in 
 the highest degree without reminding us of Mrs. 
 Hemans, Mrs. Norton, or L. E. L." Like the 
 North American Review, it copied entire the 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 17 
 
 poem The Sleep, Cowper's Grave, and several 
 others. In sending the magazine to Mr. Boyd 
 (January, 1843) sne wrote that " however ex- 
 travagant " the review was in its appreciation, 
 she felt it would give " his kindness pleasure. 
 I confess," she adds, " to a good deal of pleasure 
 myself from these American courtesies, expressed 
 not merely in the magazines but in the news- 
 papers." She tells of receiving a magazine from 
 America containing The Cry of the Human, 
 which a correspondent told her was considered 
 there " one of her most successful poems." She 
 doubts whether he would think so. " But tell 
 me exactly what you do think ? " she asks. Her 
 faith in the opinions of this learned, blind friend 
 is noticeable through all the correspondence. 
 " Here was the daughter that Milton should have 
 had ! " exclaims Edmund Clarence Stedman in 
 his Victorian Poets. 
 
 In her letters she refers to the American papers 
 sent her — the Nezv York Tribune, The Union, 
 The Union Flag — as being " scattered over with 
 extracts from her books, and benignant words 
 about their author." 
 
1 8 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 The Graham's Magazine, which contained the 
 review above mentioned, had, under the title 
 Sonnets, the four we now know as Grief, Super- 
 stition, Work, and Work and Contemplation. 
 For these she received fifty dollars. They had 
 been sent to Arcturus, but having arrived after 
 the discontinuance of that periodical, its editors 
 had sent them to Graham's, thinking that the 
 " good company into which they would be intro- 
 duced there would be every way agreeable to the 
 fair authoress." The following year (1843) a P _ 
 peared in different issues of the magazine her 
 Caterina to Camoens, Seraph and Poet, The 
 Soul's Expression, and The Child and the 
 Watcher. In 1844 appeared Loved Once, The 
 Lady's Yes, and Pain in Pleasure. The last was 
 signed E. B. B., the others Elizabeth B. Barrett. 
 The year before (1843) na d appeared in The 
 Pioneer, the short-lived periodical edited by 
 James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter, The 
 Maiden's Death, a poem of thirty-four lines. 
 Lowell, in referring to this, wrote to a friend. 
 " She promises more in a very pleasant letter." 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 19 
 
 The various requests from the United States 
 for contributions from her pen led the poet to 
 feel, as she wrote Mr. Boyd, that the Americans 
 were " as good-natured to her as if they took her 
 for the high Radical " she was. Upon receiv- 
 ing in April, 1845, a letter from " a poet in Mas- 
 sachusetts and another from a poetess ; — the he 
 Mr. Lowell, the she Mrs. Sigourney," she con- 
 fessed to her blind friend that " the sound of 
 my poetry is stirring the deep green forests of 
 the New World ; which sounds pleasantly, does 
 it not?" 
 
 Another American critic, Henry T. Tucker- 
 man, was sounding her praise in his Thoughts 
 on the Poets, published in 1848. He felt that 
 she was not only " an honor to her sex," but 
 that " no member thereof could fail to derive 
 advantage from the spirit of her muse," for it 
 spoke words of " heroic cheer," and suggested 
 " thoughtful courage, sublime resignation, and 
 exalted hope." He declared that her " reviews 
 were imbued with the spirit of antique models. 
 The scholar was everywhere coevident with the 
 poet." In this respect he thought she differed 
 
2o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 from Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Norton, in " whose 
 effusions enthusiasm gave the tone and color." 
 
 Upon receiving from Mr. Cornelius Mathews 
 his Poems on Man, she complimented him by 
 using a line from The Poet — 
 
 Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath — 
 
 as a heading to her poem A Rhapsody of Life's 
 Progress. His kindness to her caused her to 
 write him to know as much of his " intellectual 
 habits " as he taught her of his " genial feelings." 
 She expressed her thanks for the Pathfinder he 
 sent her (" what an excellent name for an Ameri- 
 can journal," she exclaimed), which contained 
 what seemed to her a somewhat harsh notice of 
 the Blot on the Scutcheon of Robert Browning. 
 This was in April, 1843. As she had not then 
 seen the poet, or even known him by correspond- 
 ence, what she wrote Mr. Mathews has a particu- 
 lar interest in the light of what followed: 
 " Whether through fellow-feeling for Eleusinian 
 mysteries, or whether through the more generous 
 motive of appreciation of his powers, I am very 
 sensitive to the thousand and one stripes with 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 21 
 
 which the assembly of critics doth expound its 
 vocation over him ; and the Athaeneum, for in- 
 stance, made me quite cross and misanthropic 
 last week. The truth is — it is easier to find a 
 more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius. 
 Don't let us fall into the category of the sons of 
 Noah. Noah was once drunk, indeed, but once 
 he built the ark." She then goes on to ask if the 
 Graham's Miscellany would care for occasional 
 contributions from her friend Richard Hengist 
 Home. If so, she thinks she could manage an 
 arrangement upon the same terms as her en- 
 gagement rested. 
 
 Some months later (November, 1843), she 
 wrote Mr. Home that Mr. Mathews had written 
 her he was delighted with his Orion, and was 
 going to send him some poems of his own as 
 " homage from the West." She said he desired 
 her to make known generally that " a copyright 
 club for the protection of authors poor and 
 honest " was being established at New York 
 with Mr. Bryant as president and he, Mr. 
 Mathews, as secretary ; and that " we are all to 
 be protected most effectually." In a previous 
 
22 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 letter to Mr. Mathews she had referred to a 
 pamphlet on international copyright as " welcome 
 at a distance," but it had not " come near her 
 yet." This refers to one of the speeches he had 
 made in New York city, doubtless the one pub- 
 lished at the office of Arcturus a few days after 
 its delivery in City Hall in February, 1842. It 
 would have a special interest to the English poet, 
 aside from its subject, because delivered at a 
 dinner given in honor of her compatriot Charles 
 Dickens. Washington Irving, then at the height 
 of his literary reputation, was the president of the 
 occasion. He had known diplomatic life in 
 London as Secretary of the Legation, and was 
 just then nominated by the Senate — Daniel 
 Webster Secretary of State — as Minister to 
 Spain. A letter sent to Dickens upon reading 
 his story of Little Nell had caused them from that 
 time, as Dickens afterward said, " to shake hands, 
 auto graphically, across the Atlantic." But his 
 being asked to preside upon this occasion was 
 doubtless more from his interest in the interna- 
 tional copyright law, " so long and so ineffecually 
 pressed upon Congress ; " for some two years 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 23 
 
 before (January, 1840) he had defined his posi- 
 tion by a letter to the editor of The Knicker- 
 bocker, in which he declared that for himself 
 his " literary career as an author was drawing to 
 a close, and could not be much affected by any 
 disposition of the question," but he felt there was 
 a " young literature springing up and daily un- 
 folding itself with wonderful energy and luxuri- 
 ance, which, as it promised to shed a grace and 
 lustre upon the nation," deserved its " fostering 
 care." Although confessing himself no speech- 
 maker, Mr. Irving was happy in his remarks on 
 this occasion, for, having proposed the sentiment 
 " International Copyright," he said : " It is but 
 fair that those who have laurels for their brows 
 should be permitted to browse on their laurels." 
 To this Mr. Mathews responded, closing with, 
 "An International Copyright — The only honest 
 turnpike between the readers of two great 
 nations." 
 
 Though strong in feeling on the subject of 
 international rights, the Brownings ever appre- 
 ciated the effort of the United States to be fair. 
 Referring one time to the " vantage ground of 
 
24 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 American pirates " concerning republishing, Mrs. 
 Browning wrote her friend Miss Mitford : " For 
 my part, I have every possible reason to thank 
 and love America; she has been very kind to 
 me." In a letter to Mr. Boyd in 1844, she noted 
 the spirit of a Philadelphia bookseller who, hav- 
 ing announced the publication of the Drama of 
 Exile as soon as it should reach America, aban- 
 doned the idea upon hearing that a New York 
 publisher had proof-sheets direct from the author 
 for its publication. This act of the Americans, in 
 " commanding an American edition to come out 
 either a little before, or simultaneously with, the 
 English one, and provided with a separate preface 
 for themselves," gave the author pleasure. Upon 
 the appearance of the work, she informed her 
 friend Mrs. Martin (November, 1844) that the 
 copies of the American edition " dazzled the 
 English one ; " one or two reviews were " trans- 
 atlantically transcended in vilee flatterie." 
 
 Among these reviews of the Drama of Exile 
 and other poems was that of Margaret Fuller, 
 who, despite some unfavorable criticism, de- 
 clared that " in vigor and nobleness of concep- 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 25 
 
 tion, depth of spiritual experience, and com- 
 mand of classic allusion," Miss Barrett was 
 " above any female writer the world had yet 
 known." She felt it was " a happiness for the 
 critic when, as in the present instance, his task 
 was mainly how to express a cordial admiration ; 
 to indicate an intelligence of beauties rather than 
 regret for defects ! " Among the poems of the 
 book her favorite seemed to be the Rhyme of the 
 Dutchess May. Possibly she was as much im- 
 pressed as we all are today with those sublime 
 lines : 
 
 And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around 
 
 our incompleteness, 
 'Round our restlessness, His rest. 
 
 Mrs. Browning was sane as well as sensi- 
 tive in her ideas of reviews. She could say what 
 Hawthorne wrote to Poe, after having read his 
 occasional notices of his works : " I care for 
 nothing but the truth, and shall always much 
 more readily accept a harsh truth in regard to 
 my writings than a sugared falsehood." She 
 once declared to Mrs. Martin that as she had 
 never reached her own ideal she could not expect 
 
26 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 to have satisfied other people's expectation. " But 
 it is (as I sometimes say) the least ignoble part 
 of me that I love poetry better than I love my own 
 success in it." The same year she wrote Mr. 
 Westland : " It is awful enough, this looking for- 
 ward to be reviewed. Never mind, the ultimate 
 prosperity of the book lies far above the critics, 
 and can neither be mended nor made nor unmade 
 by them." 
 
 When upon the publication of the Drama of 
 Exile pleasant words came to her, she confided 
 to Mr. Boyd (August, 1844) that she hoped it 
 was " not wrong to be pleased " at the " kind 
 spirit, the spirit of eager kindness indeed," with 
 which the Americans received the poetry. " In 
 this country (England)," she concluded, "there 
 may be mortifications waiting for me quite enough 
 to keep my modesty in a state of cultivation ; I 
 do not know." 
 
 When condemnation did come, as for instance 
 in that of Aurora Leigh, by her English friends., 
 she comforted herself with the thought that her 
 American publishers " shed tears of sympathy " 
 over the proofs (humorously adding, however, 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 27 
 
 that perhaps it was in reference to the one hun- 
 dred pounds they had to pay for them !) ; and that 
 the critics congratulated her upon having worked 
 herself clear " of affectations, mannerisms, and 
 other morbidities." Possibly she thought of the 
 consolation Bayard Taylor gave, upon calling on 
 her in Paris, when she was about publishing the 
 poem. " She feels a little nervous about it," he 
 wrote the Stoddards in New York (Aug. 4, 
 1856). " I told her she should not, for if it was 
 good it would surely be appreciated some time or 
 other, and, if not, the sooner it was damned the 
 better ; to which polite remark she agreed." If 
 she could have looked into the American home of 
 Celia and Levi Thaxter, she would have seen 
 them reading with delight the new book. " Such 
 good evenings as we have ! " wrote Mrs. Thaxter 
 to her friend E. C. Hoxie (1857). " They are so 
 fascinating sometimes we don't break up the 
 meeting till after ten. We draw the table up to 
 the roomy fire and I take my work and Levi reads 
 to me; first he reads Aurora (and you're an 
 abominable woman for not thinking it the beau- 
 tifullest book that ever was written), then Dred, 
 
28 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 which in spite of the little bird-women, horrid 
 little things, we enjoy." 
 
 Or, if she could have seen the letter a young 
 student at the Alexandria Theological Seminary, 
 afterwards famous as Phillips Brooks, was writ- 
 ing to a friend concerning this same Aurora 
 Leigh (which he read " as soon as it was out "), 
 she would have been pleased ; for in it he de- 
 clared he did not need to say that he was en- 
 thusiastic over it, as he had been over almost 
 everything that Mrs. Browning ever wrote. . . . 
 " It is a great book," he was proud to say, " the 
 book of the year beyond all question, so far as 
 poetry or light literature, if it be light, goes." 
 The year before (1856), in thoughts written out 
 after leaving Harvard College, he had referred 
 to the Preface of the first American edition of 
 her Poems, which he had been reading, where she 
 refers to poetry as being to her " as serious a 
 thing as life itself." 
 
 In the few lines he quoted he declared we had 
 the " key to the spirit of every poem in the volume 
 which they introduced. We say of every poem, 
 and say it consideringly. For there is no poet 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 29 
 
 that we can recall through the whole range of our 
 English poetry who has so distinctive a character 
 and who lives so constantly in that character as 
 Mrs. Browning. The great reality, sincerity, and 
 significance of all life is what is always weighing 
 on her heart or opens her lips; it is this which 
 always breaks forth into verse." He felt that 
 Mrs. Browning was herself in her poetry from 
 the first line to the last. " Devotion and sincerity 
 like hers," this youth of twenty declared, " are 
 personal, individual things belonging to each man 
 and each woman apart from all other men and 
 women, coinciding, if they coincide at all, by 
 accident and not by agreement. Individuality 
 then, a distinct, refined, personal character, is 
 stamped on all her works. The strength of her 
 thoughts is strong because they are peculiarly her 
 own, no less her own because others have thought 
 the same." The Sonnets from the Portuguese, 
 as read conscientiously and carefully, he pro- 
 nounced as " most beautiful, giving new, fresh, 
 ever more intimate views of their author's char- 
 acter and experience." As read in connection 
 with Mr. Browning's dedication of his Men and 
 
3 o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Women, which was the other side of the picture, 
 he felt the whole was " complete," revealing " the 
 deep love of two souls as capable of the best and 
 truest love as any two that breathe." 
 
 All this reminds one of what Edmund Clarence 
 Stedman said of the Sonnets in his essay on Mrs. 
 Browning, that it was " no sacrilege to say that 
 their music was showered from a higher and 
 purer atmosphere than that of the Swan of 
 Avon." 
 
 Later, when her Poems of Congress received 
 disapprobation in England, Mrs. Browning again 
 looked over the sea ; for, as addressed to America, 
 it had been considered rather " an amiable and 
 domestic trait on her part. But England ! Heav- 
 ens and Earth ! What a crime ! The very suspicion 
 of it is guilt." Hearing still further criticism of 
 her work, she wrote Miss Ha worth (i860) : " For 
 the rest, being turned out of the old world I fall 
 on my feet in the new world, where people have 
 been generous and even publishers turned liberal. 
 Think of my having an offer (on the ground of 
 that book) from a periodical in New York of one 
 hundred dollars for every single poem, though as 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 31 
 
 short as a sonnet, that is, for its merely passing 
 through their pages on the road to the publishers 
 proper." Writing to Mrs. Jameson of the " ex- 
 travagant praises and prices which had been 
 offered her from over the western sea, in conse- 
 quence of these Poems before Congress" she 
 added : " The nation is generous in these things 
 and not thin-skinned." She then told her she 
 was working at some Italian lyrics, several of 
 which she had sent to the New York Independent* 
 After the appearance of these Napoleonic 
 Poems Mrs. Browning wrote an American friend : 
 " My book has had a very angry reception in my 
 native country, as you probably observe, but I 
 
 * The following eleven Poems published in thirteen 
 months' time — from June 7, i860, to July 25, 1861 — are 
 now found in the files of that paper : " First News from 
 Villa France" (June 7, i860) ; "King Victor Emmanuel 
 entering Florence" (August 16, i860) ; "The Sword of 
 Castruccio Castrocani " (August 30, i860) ; " Summing- 
 up in Italy" (Sept. 27, i860): "Garibaldi" (October 
 11, i860); "De Profundus " (Dec. 6, i860); "Parting 
 Lovers " (March 21, 1861) ; "Mother and Poet" (May 
 2, t86i) ; "Only a Curl" (May 16, 1861) : "The King's 
 Gift, Caprera" (July 18, 1861) : published at same time 
 with news of her death, dated Florence, June 29th ; " A 
 View across the Roman Campagna " (July 25, 1861). 
 
32 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 shall be forgiven one day; meanwhile, forgiven 
 or unforgiven, it is satisfactory to one's own soul 
 to have spoken the truth as one apprehends the 
 truth." Alluding to the American feeling against 
 Napoleon, she said : " Mr. F. hints that your peo- 
 ple are not very Napoleonist. Neither am I, in 
 any particular sense." She then called attention 
 to the poem in the Independent, " Summing Up," 
 in which she thus wrote of him : 
 
 Napoleon — as strong as ten armies, 
 
 Corrupt as seven devils — a fact 
 You accede to, then seek where the harm is 
 
 Drained off from the man to his act, 
 And find ... a free nation! Suppose 
 
 Some hell-brood in Eden's sweet greenery 
 Convoked for creating ... a rose ! 
 
 Would it suit the infernal machinery? 
 
 The friend to whom she wrote this, in com- 
 menting on it, well said : " This, in prose, is, if 
 the Devil's workmen be doing God's work, who 
 ought to hinder? Such was Mrs. Browning's 
 Napoleonism." 
 
 As we all know, a free and united Italy was 
 finally fulfilled in Napoleon's formal recognition 
 of Italian freedom and unity very soon after her 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 33 
 
 peath. Would she could have lived to see this 
 dream of her life ! 
 
 While interested in her own success, Mrs. 
 Browning never lost sight of the appreciation 
 Americans were giving her countrymen. In her 
 Essay on Carlyle she refers to the fact of his 
 being generally read in America before he was 
 truly recognized in his own land — a fact, she 
 says, " replete with favorable promise for that 
 great country, and indicative of a noble love of 
 truth in it passing the love of dollars." 
 
 Carlyle at this time was not only being read in 
 America, but appreciating its practical help ; for, 
 in his correspondence with Emerson, he expressed 
 his thanks for the draft of fifty-one pounds en- 
 closed in his letter — "a new, unexpected munifi- 
 cence out of America — which is ever and anon 
 dropping gifts upon me — to be received, as in- 
 deed they partly are, like manna dropped out of 
 the sky, the gift of unseen divinities!" Later, 
 upon receiving from Emerson another draft of 
 thirty-six pounds and odd shillings, he wrote him : 
 " America, I think, is like an amiable teapot : you 
 think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable 
 
34 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 implement yields you another cup and another! 
 Many thanks to you, who are the heart of Amer- 
 ica to me." 
 
 But Mrs. Browning's greatest joy was in the 
 recognition America was giving her poet-hus- 
 band. She felt that the forty-two pages given 
 by the North American Review of April, 1848, 
 to his Plays and Poems had well introduced the 
 work to American readers, as had also Margaret 
 Fuller's review of " Bells and Pomegranates " in 
 the New York Tribune; indeed, this critic's short 
 review of Paracelsus in the Boston Dial of April, 
 1843, na -d appeared before any English notice 
 saw the light. Years afterward, when the sale of 
 his poems in England was almost infinitessimal, 
 Mrs. Browning rejoiced in the fact that they were 
 known and prized in the United States. " Ah, 
 dear Sarianna," she wrote his sister in March, 
 186 1, " I don't complain for myself of an unap- 
 preciative public. / have no reason. But just for 
 that reason I complain more about Robert — only 
 he does not hear me complain. ... In Amer- 
 ica he is a power, a writer, a poet — he is read, 
 he lives in the hearts of the people." After re- 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 35 
 
 ferring to Browning's readings in Boston, she 
 says: " The English hunt lions too, but their 
 lions are chiefly chosen among Lords." She then 
 wonders if Robert had told her ("no, I fancy 
 not," she hastens to say) that an English lady of 
 rank had recently asked the American Minister 
 whether Robert Browning was not an American. 
 " Is it possible," replied the Minister, " that you 
 ask me this ? Why, there is not so poor a village 
 in the United States where they would not tell 
 you that Robert Browning was an Englishman, 
 and that they were very sorry he was not an 
 American." To all this the proud wife adds: 
 " Very pretty of the American Minister, was it 
 not ? — and literally true, besides." 
 
 This was all the more gratifying to Mrs. 
 Browning because from the first she herself had 
 felt full faith in him and his work. Soon after 
 her correspondence with him began, she had 
 written to an American friend that he was " full 
 of great intentions ; the light of the future is on 
 his forehead . . . he is a poet for posterity. 
 I have a full faith in him as poet and prophet." 
 What would she or her poet-husband have said 
 
36 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 could they have known of his first published 
 book, " Pauline : a Fragment of a Confession, 
 1833," as having been sold at the Daniel F. Ap- 
 pleton auction sale in New York city in 1903 for 
 one thousand and twenty-five dollars ; thus mak- 
 ing it rank with Poe's " Tamerlane " as a record- 
 price book. 
 
 Lowell, in reviewing Lnria, as early as 1848, 
 declared it to be if not the best of Browning's 
 dramas certainly one of the " most striking in its 
 clearness of purpose, the energetic rapidity of its 
 movement, the harmony of its details, the natural 
 attraction with which they all tend toward and 
 at last end in the consummation, and in the sim- 
 plicity and concentration of its tragic element." 
 He had declared that his men and women were 
 men and women, and not Mr. Browning mas- 
 querading in different colored dominoes. 
 
 Professor Hiram Corson of Cornell Univer- 
 sity, in his Primer of English Verse, affirmed of 
 The Ring and the Book that all things con- 
 sidered it was the " greatest achievement of the 
 century in blank verse ; " not the greatest in bulk 
 (although it has double the number of Paradise 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 37 
 
 Lost) but in the effective use of blank verse in 
 the treatment of a great subject. He even de- 
 clared that it was the greatest subject when 
 viewed aright which had been treated in English 
 poetry — " vastly greater in its bearings upon the 
 higher education of man than that of the Paradise 
 Lost." He felt that, while having a " most com- 
 plex variety of character," it was the " most 
 dramatic blank verse since the Elizabethan era." 
 All this was his conclusion after having read the 
 entire poem aloud to classes every year for sev- 
 eral years. 
 
 Another American critic, Edmund Clarence 
 Stedman, though struck with wonder at the 
 " changeful flow of verse " in this poem, and the 
 " facility wherewith the poet records the specu- 
 lation of his various characters," felt compelled 
 to ask in his essay on Browning if it was " a 
 stronghold of poetic art." As a whole, he con- 
 fessed he could not admit that it was ; and yet 
 the " thought, the vocabulary, the imagery, the 
 wisdom lavished upon the story would equip a 
 score of ordinary writers, and place them beyond 
 danger of neglect." 
 
38 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Much could be copied here of valuable criticism 
 of this and other work of Browning given by 
 some of America's best writers, such as William 
 D. Howells, George E. Woodberry, Thomas 
 Wentworth Higginson, Moncure D. Conway, 
 George Willis Cooke, Charlotte Porter, and Helen 
 A. Clarke. That they have been far-seeing and 
 loyal to the poet argues to the credit of all. When 
 Richard Garnett in his Life of Emerson tells us 
 that Emerson included Browning in the list of 
 new acquaintances he made in England, in 1872, 
 would he could have told his opinion of him! 
 But silence on the subject seems to be upper- 
 most in all of Emerson's pathway. 
 
 American poets, however, have not been idle 
 in expression, as seen, for instance, in the follow- 
 ing Sonnet of Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton : 
 
 The Century was young — the month was May — 
 The spacious East was kindled with a light 
 That lent a sudden glory to the night, 
 
 And a new star began its upward way 
 
 Toward the high splendor of the perfect day. 
 With pure white flame, inexorably bright, 
 It reached the souls of men — no stain so slight 
 
 As to escape its all-revealing ray. 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 39 
 
 When countless voices cried "The Star has set!" 
 And through the lands there surged a sea of pain, 
 Was it Death's triumph — victory of Woe? 
 Nay! There are lights the sky may not forget; 
 When suns, and moons, and souls shall rise again, 
 In the New Life's wide East that star shall glow. 
 
 Neither have American artists failed to re- 
 member the work of either Mr. or Mrs. Brown- 
 ing. Ross Turner has added to his illumination 
 of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat and other master- 
 pieces that of the Portuguese Sonnets. It was a 
 joy indeed to see in a foremost place among the 
 literary treasures of the Browning Palace in 
 Venice, as the artist's gift to the poet-husband, 
 the illustrated American work of Ipsen, as seen 
 in the Sonnets. 
 
 Browning himself ever showed a recognition of 
 personal appreciation of his work in America. 
 It was a pleasure to him to procure for the 
 British Museum, as one of the curiosities of 
 literature, the first complete edition of his works 
 as reprinted in the Official Guide of the Chicago 
 & Alton Railroad in monthly issues from 1872- 
 1874. He flattered himself that in this Railway 
 
4o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Time Table he came near to the heart of the 
 people. He revealed a still further recognition 
 when, on the death of Levi Lincoln Thaxter, he 
 responded to his son's request for an inscription 
 for the tombstone with the following lines : 
 
 Thou whom these eyes saw never ! Say, friends true, 
 Who say my soul, helped onward by my song, 
 Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too? 
 I gave of but the little that I knew; 
 How were the gift requited, while along 
 Life's path I pace, could'st thou make weakness strong! 
 Help me with knowledge — for Life's old — Death's new! 
 (R. B. to L L. T., April, 1885.) 
 
 A few years before, Mrs. Thaxter had written 
 the poet that he was to Levi " the great enthu- 
 siasm of his life." Together they had enjoyed 
 reading his books. " I don't think you can have 
 any conception," she wrote her friend E. C. 
 Hoxie, " what an infinite source of pleasure and 
 consolation under all trials Browning's Men and 
 Women is to me. 
 
 " There is something satisfactory to every mood 
 of the human mind in that book. Many of the 
 shorter pieces I know by heart, and you would 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 41 
 
 laugh to hear the children, who catch everything 
 from me, talking about 
 
 " The patching house-leek's head of blossom wink 
 
 Through the chinks ..." 
 
 Later she is asking this same friend if she has 
 heard the " wise thrush " of Browning — 
 
 That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over 
 Lest you should think he never could recapture 
 The first fine careless rapture! 
 
 Doubtless she felt with Stedman and many 
 others that, though having in mind Shakespeare 
 and Shelley, these three lines were, nevertheless, 
 the finest ever written touching the song of a 
 bird. 
 
 " If you don't hear him," says Mrs. Thaxter, 
 " perhaps you'll see the man who wrote about 
 him, which will, perhaps, be better." She de- 
 clared he was one with all his " wits about him, 
 duly alive and aware. . . . What vitality in 
 all his words, what splendid power ! " After all, 
 she felt there was no one " quite so satisfying to 
 the human mind, and no one who wearied of his 
 worthiest speech any more than of Shakespeare." 
 
42 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Years later, in 1890, in writing to her friend 
 Bradford Torrey of birds being that winter " the 
 horrors of women's headgear," she refers to 
 Browning's having a " shot at these senseless 
 women in Asolando, his last book." 
 
 Browning's personal tribute to Levi Thaxter 
 recalls one bestowed a few years before on an- 
 other American, a daughter of his friend Mrs. 
 Bronson — as seen in a little book, which had 
 among other contributions of poet and artist the 
 following lines Longfellow had written : 
 
 She who comes to me and pleadeth 
 In the lovely name of Edith 
 
 Will not fail of what was wanted. 
 Edith means the " Blessed." Therefore 
 All that she may wish or care for 
 
 Will, when best for her, be granted ! 
 
 To ten lines from his Epilogue of Dramatic 
 Idyls beginning " Touch him ne'er so lightly into 
 song he broke," etc., Browning added : 
 
 Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters, 
 Poets dead and gone; and lo, the critics cried, 
 
 " Out on such a boast ! " as if I dreamed that fetters 
 Binding Dante, bind up — me ! as if true pride 
 
 Were not also humble ! 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 43 
 
 So I smiled and sighed, 
 As I oped your book in Venice this bright morning, 
 
 Sweet new friend of mine ! and felt the clay or sand — 
 Whatso'er my soil be — break — for praise or scorning — 
 Out in grateful fancies — weeds; but weeds expand 
 Almost into flowers, held by such a kindly band ! 
 October 14, 1880. (The Century Magazine, Vol. 25.) 
 
 This facility for impromptu expression so in- 
 terested his American friend Mrs. Clara J. 
 Bloomfield-Moore that once in opening before 
 him a letter from George Bancroft, the historian, 
 in which he had mentioned the approach of his 
 eighty-seventh birthday, she proposed that he 
 write something for her to cable. Almost as 
 quick as thought he wrote : 
 
 Bancroft, the message-bearing wire, 
 
 Which flashes my all-hail today, 
 Moves slowlier than the heart's desire 
 
 That what hand pens, tongue's self might say. 
 
 (May Lippincott, 1890.) 
 
 This facility of expression, also shown in im- 
 promptus to others, has not been wanting in the 
 American friends. Some instances may not be 
 out of place here. In a copy of Browning Bliss 
 
44 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Carman wrote sixteen four-line verses ending 
 thus: 
 
 Since first I sought you, found you, and bought you, 
 Hugged you, and brought you home from Cornhill, 
 
 While some upbraid you, and some parade you, 
 Nine years have made you my master still. 
 
 In a Christmas gift of 1882 by my side, "Aga- 
 memnon La Saissaz and Dramatic Idyls/' is this 
 impromptu of its giver, B. P. Shillaber (Mrs. 
 Partington) : 
 
 A merry Christmas I send with this, 
 Though it seems absurdity crowning 
 
 To wish for cachinatory bliss 
 Over the works of Browning. 
 
 Later, when presenting me Parleyings with 
 Certain People (1887), he wrote: 
 
 R. Browning, Browning, why your time exhaust 
 
 By these mysterious workings of your fancy, 
 Conjuring phantoms like another Faust, 
 
 Respect demanding for your necromancy? 
 Like some rare mechanism, genius-fraught, 
 
 We gaze, admire, yet fail we to command them; 
 Your ways show sweet perplexities of thought 
 
 That fascinate, though we can't understand them ! 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 45 
 
 In a volume of selected poems of Mrs. Brown- 
 ing, which followed this, the genial, loving soul 
 wrote : 
 
 Contrite for my preceding gift 
 
 Of Rob., with occult mysteries rife, 
 I here the cloud reproachful lift 
 By these sweet poems of his wife. 
 
 It is interesting to notice that Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's loyalty to the Americans made her sensi- 
 tive to criticism of them. When Dickens' 
 America appeared she declared to Mrs. Martin 
 (1843) tnat ^ sne were an American it would 
 make her " rabid," and " certain of the free citi- 
 zens are furious, I understand, while others 
 1 speak peace and ensue it.' " She said she ad- 
 mired Mr. Dickens as " an imaginative writer," 
 and she " loved the Americans ; " but she couldn't 
 possibly " admire or love that book " — and yet 
 she herself dared criticise American affairs. She 
 criticised authors, even James Russell Lowell 
 (who had written her several letters " all very 
 kind "), declaring that though he had a " refined 
 fancy," and was " graceful for an American 
 critic," yet he was " not deep enough in his pre- 
 
46 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 sentation of the early dramatists." When in that 
 same year (1845) Mrs. Sigourney sent her her 
 Scenes in My Native Land she wrote the same 
 friend (Mr. Browning) that, peeping between 
 the uncut leaves, she read of the " poet Hillhouse 
 of sublime spirit and Miltonic energy standing 
 in the temple of Fame as if it were built on pur- 
 pose for him." " I suppose," she concludes, " he 
 is like most of the American poets, who are 
 shadows of the true — as flat as a shadow, as 
 colorless as a shadow, as lifeless and as transi- 
 tory." Even when praising Poe to Mr. Brown- 
 ing (1846) she declared that Politian would make 
 him laugh, as the Raven had made her laugh — 
 though with something in it which accounts for 
 the hold it took upon the people such as Mr. N. 
 P. Willis and his peers." She had to acknowl- 
 edge, however, that there was " poetry in the 
 man seen between the great gaps of bathos." 
 Around this charitable conclusion might have 
 lingered the glowing testimony Poe gave her in 
 the Evening Mirror some two years before (Oc- 
 tober, 1844), when he said she "was worth a 
 dozen of Tennyson and six of Motherwell — 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 4 7 
 
 equal perhaps in original genius to Keats and 
 Shelley." This was followed in the Mirror of 
 Dec. 7, 1844, by another unmistakable sentence 
 on the poet : " We do not believe there is a 
 poetical soul embodied in this world that, as a 
 center of thought, sees further out towards 
 the periphery permitted to angels than Miss 
 Barrett." 
 
 Poe also reviewed her in the first two numbers 
 of the Broadway Journal of 1845. " She has 
 surpassed all her poetical contemporaries of 
 either sex (with a single exception) that excep- 
 tion being Tennyson." 
 
 While Mrs. Browning is interested in the work 
 of the American men she has an eye for what 
 the women are doing. In 1854, she is wondering 
 if Miss Mitford had seen Julia Ward Howe's 
 Passion Flowers, just out. " They were sent 
 me by an American friend," she writes, " but 
 were intercepted en route, so that I have not set 
 eyes on them yet, but one or two persons not 
 particularly reliable as critics have praised them 
 to me." She then goes on to tell that though she 
 is " the wife of the deaf and dumb philanthro- 
 
48 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 pist " (that was the fact as it reached her) " she 
 is herself neither deaf nor dumb (very much the 
 contrary) ; but, as she understood, a handsome 
 woman and brilliant in society." A few weeks 
 later, having read the poems, she declared to 
 this same friend : " Some of them are good — 
 many of the thoughts striking, and all of a cer- 
 tain elevation. Of poetry, however, strictly 
 speaking, there is not much ; and there is a large 
 proportion of conventional stuff in the volume. 
 . . . Of the ordinary impotencies and pretti- 
 nesses of female poets she does not partake, but 
 she can't take rank with poets in the good mean- 
 ing of the word, I think, so as to stand without 
 leaning. Also there is some bad taste and af- 
 fectations in the dressing of her personality." 
 But with all this criticism she finds space to de- 
 clare that she " must be a clever woman." 
 (Letters, Vol. II.) Thus to her sharpest criti- 
 cism ever hovers a loving charity. Even when 
 sending off to the Americans her thirty-six stanza 
 poem, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, 
 she felt it might be " too ferocious " for them to 
 publish. But " they asked for a poem and they 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 49 
 
 shall have it," she declared. She even wrote 
 Miss Mitford that nobody would want to print it 
 because she " could not help making it bitter." 
 If they did print it she should think them " more 
 boldly in earnest " than she fancied them. That 
 the Americans did realize its value for them in 
 that period of their history is seen in its appear- 
 ance in The Liberty Bell, a publication issued 
 and for sale by the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazar 
 of 1848. 
 
 From that time on Mrs. Browning watched 
 even more closely the slavery question in the 
 United States. As early as 1853 she is discuss- 
 ing the matter with Mrs. Jameson : " A difficult 
 question — yes ! All virtue is difficult. England 
 found it difficult, France found it difficult. But we 
 did not make ourselves an armchair for our sins. 
 As for America, I honor America in much ; but 
 I would not be an American for the world while 
 she wears that shameful scar upon her brow." 
 She declares that the address of the new Presi- 
 dent, General Franklin Pierce, " exasperated " 
 her. " Observe, I am an abolitionist," she con- 
 tinues, " not to the fanatical degree, because I 
 
50 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 hold that compensation should be given by the 
 North to the South, as in England. The States 
 should unite in buying off this national disgrace." 
 She wrote all this in the idea that Mrs. Jameson 
 thought a woman had no business with questions 
 like slavery. " Then she had better use a pen no 
 more/' she said. " She had better subside into 
 slavery and concubinage herself, I think, as in 
 the times of old, shut herself up with the Penel- 
 opes in the women's apartment, and take no 
 rank among thinkers and speakers. Certainly 
 you are not in earnest in these things." This ex- 
 pression of her feeling reminded her that the 
 " Americans were very kind and earnest," and 
 she liked them " all the better for their warm 
 feeling " towards Mrs. Jameson. 
 
 When the Civil War was approaching she 
 wrote Mrs. Martin from Rome (December, i860) 
 that " the crisis had come earlier than anyone 
 expected. It is a crisis ; and if the North accepts 
 such a compromise as has been proposed the 
 nation perishes morally, which would be sadder 
 than the mere dissolution of States however sad. 
 It is the difference between the death of the soul 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 51 
 
 and of the body." She felt there " might and 
 ought to be a pecuniary compromise; but a com- 
 promise of principle would be fatal." She was 
 confident that in their then Italian affairs Italy 
 could learn from America that " a certain degree 
 of centralization (not carried too far) was neces- 
 sary to a strong and vital government." Lin- 
 coln's Inaugural Address, with the exception of 
 certain expressions which did strike her as a 
 superfluity of the official form, she " admired." It 
 seemed to her " direct and resolute, simple, and 
 intense." (The superfluity was Mr. Lincoln's 
 voluntary offer to return fugitive slaves.) In 
 another letter to this same American friend she 
 alludes to a speech she had read in an American 
 paper. " What affected me most," she wrote, 
 " was not the eloquence — no, but the rare union 
 of largeness and tolerance with fidelity to special 
 truth. In our age faith and charity are found, 
 but they are found apart. We tolerate every- 
 body, because we doubt everything; or else we 
 tolerate nobody because we believe something." 
 During the early part of the war she continued 
 to fear the North would compromise; that they 
 
52 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 were not " heroically strong on their legs on the 
 moral question. I fear it much," she repeated. 
 " If they can but hold up it will be noble. . . . 
 Not that I despair of America," she wrote Miss 
 Blagden ; " God forbid." She could not agree 
 with those who were willing to let the South go. 
 She believed that " the unity of the States should 
 be asserted with a strong hand and the South 
 forced to pay taxes and submit to law." If the 
 North would only " be faithful to its conscience," 
 there would be " an increase of greatness after a 
 few years, even though it may rain blood betwixt 
 then and now." At this same time she repeated 
 to another friend (Miss Haworth) her anxiety 
 about the United States, " fearing a compromise " 
 in the North. " All other dangers," she said, 
 were " comparatively null." In an article on 
 Italy and America, published in the New York 
 Independent of March 21, 1861, she declared 
 again that if the North stood fast on the moral 
 ground no glory would be like their glory. " You 
 are compassed by a great cloud of witnesses," 
 she wrote, " and can afford to risk anything ex- 
 cept conscience." She further declared that she 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 53 
 
 honored Republicanism everywhere as an expres- 
 sion of the people; but it seemed to her that a 
 theoretical attachment to any form of govern- 
 ment whatever was " simply pedantry, as if one 
 should insist upon everybody's wearing one kind 
 of hat, or adopting one attitude." She believed 
 that a genuine government was " simply the at- 
 titude of that special people " ; that what was 
 required for every man (or state) was " life, 
 health, muscular freedom to choose his own at- 
 titude. Let us be for Democracy," she urged, 
 " and leave the rest. Who cares for the figure 
 at the helm, as long as the people's wind is in the 
 sails? I care little. Only I do care that the 
 Democracy should have power — that each man 
 should have the inheritance of a man, and the 
 right of voting where he is taxed." This, she 
 affirmed, was her " creed." In this same article 
 she said nothing would " destroy the Republic 
 but what corrupted its conscience and disturbed 
 its fame — for the stain upon the honor must 
 come off upon the flag." Her look at the prac- 
 tical side of the matter led her to ask : " Ought 
 not the North, for instance, to propose a pecuni- 
 
54 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 ary compromise, taxing itself for compensation 
 to the South?" 
 
 Among the last things she read, and found 
 pleasure in discussing with an American friend, 
 were Motley's letters on the American Crisis. 
 Referring to what foreign nations were saying, 
 she said : " Why do you heed what others say ? 
 You are strong and can do without sympathy; 
 and when you have triumphed your glory will be 
 the greater." 
 
 That Mrs. Browning could feel this deep in- 
 terest in a far-off nation while so fully laboring 
 for the progress of her loved and suffering Italy, 
 reveals the magnitude of her intelligence and 
 sympathies. Her inclination was ever to the de- 
 velopment of the individual. As early as 1848 
 she wrote Miss Mitford that " Liberty and civili- 
 zation when married together lawfully rather 
 evolve individuality than tend to generalization ; " 
 and a few days later she wrote John Kenyon, 
 " Nothing can be more hateful to me than this 
 communist idea of quenching individualities in 
 the mass. As if the hope of the world did not 
 always consist in the eliciting of the individual 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 55 
 
 man from the background of the masses in the 
 evolvement of individual gains, virtue, mag- 
 nanimity." 
 
 One could say of this what Stedman said of 
 Aurora Leigh, " that an audacious, speculative 
 freedom pervades it which smacks of the New 
 World rather than the Old." 
 
 Though Mr. Browning does not appear to say 
 as much on affairs in the United States as his 
 wife, when he does speak he is strong and help- 
 ful ; as, for instance, when he declared in a letter 
 to an American, dated September 11, 1861 : "I 
 have lost the explanation of American affairs, 
 but I assure you of my belief in the justice and 
 my confidence in the triumph of the great cause. 
 For the righteousness of the principle I want no 
 information. God prosper it and its defenders." 
 (Browning Society Papers, Part XII.) 
 
 The month before, August, 1861, upon hear- 
 ing of the disaster at Bull's Run, he had written 
 William W. Story that, so far as he knew any- 
 thing about it from having glanced at a single 
 newspaper, he felt that the good cause had suf- 
 fered, and that " we all suffer with it." . . . 
 
56 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 He looked, however, to success in the end " with 
 every confidence." " You must and will do 
 better, and best, another time," he continues, 
 " and meanwhile, the fewer big words on all sides 
 in any sense, the better!" (James' Life of 
 Story.) Later, in November, in referring again 
 to the American news, he declares that he never 
 heard a " word for the South even from those 
 who think the North underestimated its strength, 
 and despair of a better issue than separation." 
 " We say fight it out to the last ; but for English 
 lookers-on who abjure heroics, to say that would 
 be saying: Do yourselves as much harm as you 
 can." 
 
 Years before the Civil War, Powers' Greek 
 Slave had stirred the soul of Mrs. Browning in 
 these closing words of a Sonnet: 
 
 Pierce to the centre 
 Art's fiery finger, and break up ere long 
 
 The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone 
 From God's pure heights of beauty against man's wrong ! 
 
 Catch up in thy divine face, not alone 
 East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong 
 
 By thunders of white silence overthrown. 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 57 
 
 Thus in looking at the art of America the eye 
 and heart of the poet-woman paused in the in- 
 terests of freedom. She even dared to express 
 her belief to Bayard Taylor, upon meeting him 
 in London in 1851, that a Republican form of 
 government was unfavorable to the development 
 of the fine arts. To this opinion Mr. Taylor dis- 
 sented " as modestly as possible," and soon had 
 a powerful ally in Mr. Browning, who declared 
 that no artist had ever before been honored with 
 a more splendid commission than the state of 
 Virginia had given to Thomas Crawford for a 
 monument in Richmond. A general historical 
 discussion followed, Mr. and Mrs. Browning 
 taking different views. " It was good-humoredly 
 closed at last," said Mr. Taylor in his At Home 
 and Abroad, " and I thought both of them seemed 
 to enjoy it. There is no fear that two such fine 
 intellects will rust ; they will keep each other 
 bright through the delight of the encounter." 
 
 Several years later (in 1855), the Brownings 
 were enjoying art talks with another American, 
 Mr. James Russell Lowell. It was in one of the 
 art galleries of Paris, where Mr. Lowell was 
 
58 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 particularly interested, as he wrote Professor 
 Charles Eliot Norton, in Vandyke's portrait of 
 Lady Venetia Digby. He said he " was glad to 
 show Mrs. Browning the likeness of a woman 
 who had inspired so noble and enduring a love 
 in so remarkable a man as Sir Kenelm." 
 
 But other manifestations than those of the fine 
 arts were claiming the Brownings' attention, and 
 arousing animated but kindly discussions with 
 their friends. Mrs. Browning was " hearing," 
 and " would hear much " of the " rapping spirits." 
 She is asking Miss Blagden (winter of 1852-3) 
 if her American friends ever wrote to her about 
 them, as she had heard that at least 15,000 Ameri- 
 cans " of all classes and society were mediums, as 
 the term is. . . . Most curious, these phenomena," 
 she concludes. After referring to the matter in a 
 letter to Miss Mitford, she somewhat apologizes 
 for herself by saying : " You know I am rather 
 a visionary, and inclined to knock round at all 
 the doors of the present world to try to get out, 
 so that I listen with interest to every goblin story 
 of the kind, and indeed I hear enough of them 
 just now." 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 59 
 
 Any harsh criticism of this mental attitude of 
 Mrs. Browning always brings to my mind what 
 she wrote to Miss Haworth : " Investigation is 
 all I desire. It is not the communications that 
 impress me, but the probability of such. I look 
 at the movement." 
 
 It was an American, our own Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe, who seemed to understand Mrs. Brown- 
 ing on this subject, as she " opened out to her 
 very fully " in the Florentine home. The " char- 
 acter of Mrs. Stowe's intellect " pleased her ; she 
 was " devout, yet brave in the outlook for truth, 
 considering not whether a thing be sound, but 
 whether it be true." She was impressed by what 
 she wrote her of hearing from her drowned boy, 
 " without any seeking on her part," declaring that 
 she " spoke very calmly about it, with no dogma- 
 tism, but with the strongest disposition to receive 
 the facts of the subject with all their bearings 
 and at whatever loss of orthodoxy or sacrifice of 
 reputation for common sense." The appearance 
 of Uncle Tom's Cabin some years before had in- 
 terested her. " No woman ever had such a suc- 
 cess," she wrote Miss Mitford (1853), ''such a 
 
6o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 fame no man ever had in a single book. For my 
 own part, I rejoice greatly in it. It is an indi- 
 vidual glory full of healthy influence and bene- 
 diction to the world." A month later she wrote 
 Mrs. Jameson that she must read the book. " It 
 is quite a sign of the times, and has otherwise, 
 and intrinsically, considerable power. For my- 
 self, I rejoice in the success both as a woman and 
 a human being." 
 
 Upon meeting Mrs. Stowe for the first time, 
 several years later, she confessed she liked her 
 better than she thought she should. " I find more 
 refinement in the voice and manner, no rampant 
 Americanism. Very simple and gentle ; unde- 
 sirous of shining or poser-ing, so it seems to me, 
 . . She is nice-looking, too ; there is something 
 strong, copious, and characteristic in her dusky, 
 wavy hair. For the rest, the brow has not very 
 large capacity, and the mouth wants something, 
 both in frankness and sensitiveness I should say. 
 But what can one see in a morning visit ? I must 
 wait for another opportunity. . . . Her books 
 are not so much to me, I confess, as the fact is 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 61 
 
 that she above all women (yes, and men of the 
 age) has moved the world — and for good." 
 
 Years afterwards Mrs. Stowe expressed her 
 feeling for Mrs. Browning's personality when 
 she wrote the Duchess of Argyle (July 31, 1883) 
 that none of her poems could express what she 
 was — so grand, so comprehending, so strong, 
 with such inspired sight ; " she said she " stood 
 by Italy through its crisis. Her heart was with 
 all good through the world." 
 
 Others besides Mrs. Stowe were more or less 
 interested in Mrs. Browning's thought concern- 
 ing spiritual manifestations. The Hawthornes, 
 then living (1858) in the Montaiito Villa just 
 outside the walls of Florence, had their attention 
 particularly called to it through a certain power 
 possessed by a governess in their employ which 
 Mrs. Browning had noticed. Mrs. Hawthorne, 
 however, in writing to her sister, Elizabeth Pea- 
 body, of the conversations she was having with 
 the Brownings on the subject, confessed that she 
 " kept aloof in mind " in such things, because 
 Mr. Hawthorne had " such a repugnance to the 
 whole thing." She believed that Mrs. Brown- 
 
62 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 ing was " a spiritualist," while Mr. Browning 
 " opposed and protested with all his might," but 
 was " ready to be convinced." She recalls her 
 attempt in talking of spirit-hands, " to stem his 
 flow of eager, funny talk with her slender voice; 
 but, like an arrowy river, he rushed and foamed 
 and leaped over her slight tones, and she could 
 not succeed in explaining how she knew they 
 were spirit-hands." Though not particularly in 
 sympathy with her in this matter, Mrs. Hawthorne 
 found her " wonderfully interesting — the most 
 delicate sheath for a soul " she ever saw. " You 
 would be infinitely charmed," she wrote her sister, 
 " and with Mr. Browning as well. The latter 
 is very mobile, and flings himself about just as he 
 flings his thoughts on paper, while his wife is still 
 and contemplative. Love, evidently, has saved 
 her life." The following year she refers to de- 
 lightful visits with them, and especially to a 
 horseback ride she enjoyed with him. In her 
 Diary she tells that while stopping to talk with a 
 friend one day he " darted upon them across the 
 Piazza glowing with cordiality." But the ex- 
 quisite sympathy of Mrs. Browning, when Una, 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 6 3 
 
 the beloved first-born, was ill with Roman fever, 
 as told us by her daughter Rose in her Memories, 
 was particularly precious to her. " Even dear 
 Mrs. Browning.," she says, " who almost never 
 goes upstairs, came the moment she heard. She 
 was like an angel. I saw her but a moment, but 
 the clasp of her hand was electric, and her voice 
 permeated my heart." " Fortunate the eyes that 
 see her," she once exclaimed, " and the ears that 
 hear her." In a letter, now for the first time 
 published, written to a member of the household 
 at that time — xA.pril, 1859 — Mrs. Browning re- 
 veals her anxiety and love : 
 
 How I thank you for your little note — and the relief 
 it gives me. May God bless you all and bless and 
 keep that dear, sweet Una, whose lovely face as I saw it 
 last has been since so painful to me to think of. You 
 are very good, very comprehending — but a touch of 
 common human sympathy is worth nothing at such a 
 moment to poor Mrs. Hawthorne. If it is, she must be 
 very large-hearted indeed. I hope and trust that the 
 medical judgment will prove to be quite wrong. The 
 youth and the vitality of the patient will go far and 
 stand long against disease. 
 
 Let me subscribe myself 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
64 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 She then adds in a postscript: 
 
 You need not take the trouble of sending — we will 
 send. 
 
 In his English Notes Hawthorne has left one 
 of the finest pictures literature has revealed of 
 Mrs. Browning. It was at a breakfast at Monc- 
 ton Milnes, in 1856, when the shy, sensitive man 
 was assigned to lead her to the breakfast-room, 
 " a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark 
 hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face," 
 looking " youthful and comely," and " very gentle 
 and ladylike." In a " low, agreeable voice," she 
 conversed on various subjects. She said spirit- 
 ualism interested her much, although Mr. Brown- 
 ing " utterly rejected the subject, and would not 
 believe even in the outward manifestations of 
 which there was such overwhelming evidence." 
 They discussed the theory of Delia Bacon con- 
 cerning Shakespeare, " greatly to the horror " of 
 Mrs. Browning. " On the whole," Hawthorne 
 confesses, " I like her the better for loving the 
 man Shakespeare with a personal love." They 
 talked of Margaret Fuller, of William Wetmore 
 Story ; indeed, they talked " a good deal " during 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 65 
 
 breakfast, for, he declares, she was " of that 
 quickly appreciative and responsive order of 
 woman with whom I can talk more freely than 
 with any man ; and she has, besides, her own 
 originality wherewith to help on conversation, 
 though I should say not of a loquacious ten- 
 dency. ... I like her much." 
 
 After the breakfast he had a talk with Mr. 
 Browning — " handsome, with brown hair, very 
 simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, 
 talking as if his heart were uppermost. He 
 spoke of his pleasure in meeting me and his 
 appreciation of my books." Referring to the 
 fact that he mentioned the Blithedale Romance as 
 the one he admired most, he wondered why. " I 
 hope," he concludes, " I showed as much pleasure 
 at his praise as he did at mine, for I was glad to 
 see how pleasantly it moved him." 
 
 Hawthorne must have known of Browning's 
 appreciation of his work, for some time before 
 (1851) Mr. Fields had written him from Paris 
 that Browning had said he was " the finest genius 
 that had appeared in English literature for many 
 years." 
 
66 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Mary Anderson felt the frank, charming per- 
 sonality of Browning, when meeting him at a 
 party where he took her out to dinner, she says — 
 in her Memoirs — there was " a kind of friendly 
 chattiness in his conversation," which, however, 
 seemed to her " to be more agreeable than dis- 
 tinguished." She confessed she should have 
 named any of the men at table sooner than 
 he as the author of Rabbi Ben Ezra and Pippa 
 Passes. Her first impression was that he re- 
 sembled an " old-school Southern country gentle- 
 man " more than her ideal of England's mystic 
 poet. He seemed always at his best, she 
 thought, in the studio of some artist. The 
 poet was evidently pleased with " our Mary," for 
 he told a friend afterwards that he found her 
 " charming," a very " sensible young woman." 
 
 Another American, Edith Abell the gifted 
 musician, in recalling pleasant hours spent with 
 the poet in 1889- 1890, also testifies to the genial, 
 simple bearing he ever manifested towards her. 
 He was the same " cordial, genial, happy gentle- 
 man — the great poet being always kept in the 
 background." She says he was always pleased 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 67 
 
 to read his poems aloud, and he also knew how 
 to say the nice thing. " I will read to you, and in 
 return you shall sing to me." Among the little 
 incidents of her personal acquaintance with him 
 she recalls his unaffected, and even childlike de- 
 light, when, upon making her guess his age, she 
 candidly and honestly named some fifteen years 
 less than he really was. This caused him to 
 challenge her to read without a magnifying glass 
 what he would write with his naked eye — for 
 he did not use glasses. As a result she now owns 
 a precious card he gave her on which, with his 
 autograph, he wrote a verse of four lines which 
 her thumb-nail could easily cover, and which 
 few have strong sight enough to read without 
 glasses. 
 
 The Hon. Andrew D. White of Cornell Uni- 
 versity in his diplomatic Reminiscences testifies 
 to the conversational qualities of Browning. This 
 was revealed to him under somewhat novel cir- 
 cumstances. He was in London, in 1879, on 
 his way to take up his duties of Minister to Ger- 
 many as successor to Bayard Taylor. One even- 
 ing at the home of Alma Tadema he met Robert 
 
68 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Browning. On their departure, as Mr. Brown- 
 ing's carriage did not arrive, he offered to take 
 him home in his; but hardly had they started 
 when they found themselves in a dense fog. It 
 was soon evident that the driver had lost his 
 way. " As he wandered about for perhaps an 
 hour," says Mr. White, " hoping to find some in- 
 dication of it, Browning's conversation was very 
 agreeable. It ran at first on current questions, 
 then on travel, and finally on art — all very 
 simply and naturally, without a trace of posing 
 or paradox. Remembering the obscurity of his 
 verse I was surprised at the lucidity of his talk. 
 But at last both of us becoming somewhat 
 anxious we called a halt, and questioned the 
 driver, who confessed that he had no idea where 
 he was. As good or ill luck would have it there 
 just then emerged from the fog an empty hansom 
 cab, and, finding that its driver knew more than 
 ours, I engaged him as a pilot first to Browning's 
 house, and then to my own." 
 
 Both Mr. and Mrs. Browning showed a fa- 
 miliarity with the works of American authors, 
 each having their favorites. As early as 1853 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 69 
 
 Mrs. Browning wrote Miss Mitford (so Miss 
 Mitford wrote Mr. Fields) that she preferred 
 Lowell and Emerson. She found in some 
 English books of Henry Ward Beecher's writ- 
 ings " fine and thrilling things." She declared 
 they would " help her to live," and perhaps they 
 would " help her to sufTer." Mr. Browning il- 
 lustrated this knowledge even more practically 
 when, upon meeting Bayard Taylor at one time, 
 he welcomed him with " From the Desert I Come 
 to Thee." He not only knew it by heart, but 
 said it w T as the finest thing of the kind he ever 
 read ; at which the poet, in writing the fact to his 
 New York friends, the Stoddards, exclaimed : 
 "Hold me!" 
 
 This friendly interest in American literature 
 doubtless led Una Hawthorne, in taking up the 
 work her mother left of looking over the Haw- 
 thorne manuscripts, to ask Mr. Browning's as- 
 sistance in deciphering Septimius ere it was pub- 
 lished. But there was another, a more tender, 
 link to the poet. He had known her and her 
 sister Rose in their sorrow ; for he had been one 
 of the friends who had joined the American 
 
70 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 friends, Moncure D. Conway, William Henry 
 Channing, and Russell Sturgis, as they stood by 
 the open grave of her mother in Kensal Green 
 Cemetery that March day of 1871. She could 
 never forget it. 
 
 American scenery, as well as American litera- 
 ture, was also noted by the Brownings. In her 
 prose essay on the Poets Mrs. Browning refers 
 to Niagara Falls in treating of God in nature 
 and poetry. " Nature is where God is. Poetry 
 is where God is. Can you go up or down or 
 around and not find Him? In the loudest hum 
 of your machinery, in the densest volume of your 
 steam, in the foulest street of your city — there, 
 as surely as in the Brocken pine woods and the 
 watery thunders of Niagara — there as surely 
 as He is above all lie Nature and Poetry in full 
 life. Speak and they will answer." Years be- 
 fore, in her Essay on Mind, she had referred to 
 Niagara. " Behold afar, the playmate of the 
 storm " — " himself the savage of his native 
 woods " ; and, again, " Wild Niagara lifts his 
 awful form." And yet she never saw the glory, 
 for she nor her husband never came to America. 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 71 
 
 In later years Mr. Browning through " innum- 
 erable requests for autographs " (with which, 
 Mrs. Bronson tells us, he " was amused, but never 
 impatient,") heard particularly of the " Western 
 States and far California." A more lasting testi- 
 mony, however, was the dedication to him of a 
 pyramidal pile of rocks, which Joaquin Miller 
 erected on the summit of a hill in his California 
 home. 
 
 Local expressions of Americans were noted by 
 the Brownings; as, when settled in some new 
 quarters for a season, Mrs. Browning wrote Miss 
 Blagden : " Now we are fixed, as our American 
 friends would say." 
 
 Their friendly intercourse with Americans is 
 noticeable through all their Florentine life. " The 
 visits we receive from delightful and cordial per- 
 sons of that country have been most gratifying 
 to us," wrote Mrs. Browning. Settled in Casa 
 Guidi, they saw even " more Americans than 
 English," she wrote Miss Mitford in 1848. She 
 it was to whom she also told of her happy married 
 life. " After more than twenty months of mar- 
 riage we are happier than ever — I may say we." 
 
72 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 She felt she could never make her friend under- 
 stand what her husband was to her — " the 
 noblest and perfectest of human beings." After 
 " an absolute soul-to-soul intercourse and union," 
 she had to " look higher still for her first 
 ideal." She also wrote of her joy to Mrs. 
 Jameson, not only because she was the first to 
 know their happiness, but that she might " set 
 down in her photography of the possibility of 
 book-making creatures living happy together." 
 She confessed she was " happier and happier 
 month after month." She had to admit, how- 
 ever, that her husband was " an exceptional 
 human being and that it wouldn't be just to 
 measure another by him." (Letters.) This ex- 
 ceptional husband had also his confession to 
 make to Mrs. Jameson of his exceptional wife, 
 when he wrote of her " entirely angel nature, as 
 divine a heart as God ever made. I know more 
 of her every day; I who thought I knew some- 
 thing of her five years ago." 
 
 In this restful, growing life American liter- 
 arians were privileged to enter. In 1847, Mrs. 
 Browning refers to George Stillman Hillard as 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 73 
 
 " an American critic who reviewed her in (the 
 old) world and so came to view her in the new; 
 a very intelligent man of a good noble spirit." 
 Her friend Kenyon, who was also fond of the 
 Americans, was appreciative of this one, calling 
 him at one time the " best prepared " young for- 
 eigner he had ever met who had come to see 
 Europe. James T. Fields tells, in his Yesterday 
 with Authors, that at Kenyon's dinner table he 
 heard him say, in the presence of Mrs. Jameson, 
 Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, 
 Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and the Proctors, that 
 one of the best talkers on any subject that might 
 be started was the author of Six Months in Italy. 
 We are all familiar with the picture of the Brown- 
 ings Mr. Hillard has given in this book; that a 
 " happier home and a more perfect union than 
 theirs " it was not easy to imagine ; that Brown- 
 ing's poetry was " subtle, passionate, and pro- 
 found," but he himself was " simple, natural, and 
 playful " ; while Mrs. Browning was a " soul of 
 fire enclosed in a shell of pearl; nor," he added, 
 was she " more remarkable for genius and learn- 
 ing than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of 
 
74 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. . . 
 A union so complete as theirs — in which the 
 mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh 
 for — is cordial to behold and soothing to re- 
 member." He confessed (and this was in 1854) 
 that the names of these two poets were even more 
 familiar in America than in England, and that 
 their poetry was probably more read and better 
 understood there than among their own country- 
 men." This was partially due to their Boston 
 publisher, James T. Fields, who became a per- 
 sonal friend. In November, 1849, ne ^ s writing 
 Miss Mitford that he was just then " superin- 
 tending the republication of the complete Poems 
 of Robert Browning, the first American reprint 
 to be issued by their house in a few weeks." 
 Upon hearing this Miss Mitford replied that Mrs. 
 Browning " would be enchanted at this honor 
 done her husband. It is most creditable to 
 America that they think more of our thoughtful 
 poets than the English do themselves." The 
 early recognition the United States had given 
 her own work Miss Mitford never forgot. It led 
 her to say : " It takes ten years to make a literary 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 75 
 
 reputation in England, but America is wiser and 
 bolder and dares say at once, ' This is fine.' I 
 love America and the Americans," she once en- 
 thusiastically exclaimed. Two years after writ- 
 ing of the publication of Robert Browning's 
 Poems Mr. Fields is writing Miss Mitford of his 
 intention to republish a new edition of Mrs. 
 Browning; but another house having claimed 
 the right, the project was abandoned. In the 
 " charming " visit he paid them in 1852 he re- 
 gretted that he could not have seen more of 
 them. But he found Mrs. Browning in better 
 health than he expected and hoped she would 
 live " to write many more great poems." That 
 the visit was mutually enjoyable is seen by Miss 
 Mitford's writing to Mr. Fields that " Mrs. 
 Browning was delighted with your visit." 
 
 Among other Americans to the Browning 
 home, who " took coffee " with them once or 
 twice a week, was Mr. Ware, author of Letters 
 from Palmyra — "a delightful, earnest, simple 
 person." The different American ministers and 
 their wives who called in passing through the 
 city were welcomed. Among these were Gen- 
 
7o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 eral Watson Webb of the Court of Vienna, 
 " with an air of moral as well as military com- 
 mand on his brow and eyes " ; Honorable George 
 Marsh of the Court of Constantinople, and the 
 Honorable William B. Kinney, who became a 
 resident of Florence after his mission to Sar- 
 dinia. His wife Elizabeth C. Kinney (mother 
 of Edmund Clarence Stedman), in Scribner's 
 magazine for December, 1870, gives pleasant 
 reminiscences of their friendship. She tells of 
 spending with the " great Elizabeth, Queen of 
 Poetry, and Robert, the mighty, crowned also 
 in his own peculiar sphere of poesy," a beautiful 
 June day at Pratolino. They went in an open 
 carriage, with a man servant to carry the 
 luncheon. Having eaten this on a rustic table in 
 the grove they all went to the brow of the hill to 
 see the view. The silence which encompassed 
 them was only broken by a remark of Mrs. 
 Browning : " How it speaks to us ! " 
 
 An ever-precious memory to George William 
 Curtis was a two days' visit he had with the 
 poets to Vallombrosa in 1847, when, as he has 
 told us in his Easy Chair, they " sat under the 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 77 
 
 great trees upon the lawn-like hillsides near the 
 convent, or in the seats in the dusky convent 
 chapel, while Robert Browning, at the organ, 
 chased a fugue of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 
 or dreamed out upon twilight keys a faint, throb- 
 bing toccata of Galuppi." As one of the thou- 
 sand young Americans who had read with eager 
 enthusiasm Mrs. Browning's recently published 
 Poems, which, he confessed, had a " more general 
 and hearty welcome in the United States than 
 any English poet since the time of Byron and 
 Company," he had met them at their own tea 
 table a few days before. This was the first year 
 of their married life. As he gave her Margaret 
 Fuller's Essay in the New York Tribune he noted 
 how " deeply and most intelligently " she re- 
 garded America and the Americans, feeling a 
 " kind of enthusiastic gratitude to them for their 
 generous fondness of her poetry." In all her 
 conversation, " so mild and tender and womanly, 
 so true and intense and rich with rare learning," 
 he perceived a " girl-like simplicity and sensi- 
 tiveness, and a womanly earnestness that took 
 the heart captive." 
 
78 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 George Ticknor and Mr. Palfrey, as guests at 
 the Moncton Milnes breakfast, added another 
 link to the chain connecting the Brownings to the 
 United States. Later, when in Florence, Mrs. 
 Browning refers to " tete-a-tetes " with Theodora 
 Parker, who had been " making a little Christmas 
 book for the young to prove how they should 
 keep Christmas without a Christ." Upon his 
 death she wrote Miss Haworth that she felt " very 
 sorry. There was something high and noble 
 about the man, though he was not deep in pro- 
 portion." When Mr. Parker first met the 
 Brownings in Rome he wrote an American friend 
 that he " liked her much. He too seems a good 
 fellow, full of life." They both seemed to him 
 " intense Italians." A few weeks later (Jan- 
 uary, i860), he wrote of meeting them again. 
 " very pleasant people they are, too. I rejoice 
 in them." 
 
 Browning's fullness of life was what impressed 
 Phillips Brooks when he met him in England in 
 later years (1865-66) ; "one of the nicest people 
 to pass an evening with," he wrote, " cordial and 
 hearty as a dear old uncle, shakes your hand as 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 79 
 
 if he were really glad to see you." He seemed 
 to him " very like some of the best of Thackeray's 
 London men." He even called him " a full- 
 souled American." As to his talk, he said it 
 " wasn't Sordello and it wasn't as fine as Para- 
 celsus, but nobody ever talked more nobly, truly, 
 and cheerily than he." It was a fine compliment 
 he paid him, when he declared he went home and 
 slept, after hearing him, as one does " after a 
 fresh starlight walk with a good, cool breeze on 
 his face." 
 
 Upon the death of Browning in 1889, he rep- 
 resented the heart of the American students when 
 he wrote his brother Arthur, " We will mingle 
 our tears in memory of Browning and Lightfoot." 
 Fittingly his heartfelt prayer closed the beautiful 
 Browning memorial service which followed in 
 King's Chapel, Boston. 
 
 This fullness of life of Browning, this sym- 
 pathy with all phases of nature and human nature, 
 doubtless led Henry James to say that he was 
 the " accomplished, saturated, sane, sound man 
 of the London world, and the world of culture, of 
 whom it is impossible not to believe that he had 
 
8o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 arrived somehow for his own deep purpose at the 
 enjoyment of a double identity." (Life of Story.) 
 
 Some of the most comforting words from the 
 Browning home were sent to friends across the 
 Atlantic. To a Brooklyn lady whose daughter 
 had suddenly died Mrs. Browning wrote : " Hear- 
 ing of such things makes us silent before God, 
 What must it be to experience them? I have 
 suffered myself very heavy afflictions, but the 
 affliction of the mother I have not suffered, and I 
 shut my eyes to the image of it./ Only where 
 Christ brings His cross He brings His presence, 
 and where He is, none are desolate, and there is 
 no room for despair. At the darkest you have 
 felt a hand through the dark, closer perhaps and 
 tenderer than any touch dreamt of at noon. As 
 He knows His own, so He knows how to com- 
 fort them — using sometimes the very grief itself, 
 and straining it to the sweetness of a faith unat- 
 tainable to those ignorant of grief." 
 
 This Christian attitude of mind illustrates what 
 Peter Bayne says in his Essay on Mrs. Browning : 
 " Mrs. Browning is a Christian poetess not in the 
 sense of appreciating, like Carlyle, the loftiness of 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 81 
 
 the Christian type of character, not in the sense of 
 adopting, like Goethe, a Christian machinery for 
 artistic self-worship, not even in the sense of 
 preaching, like Wordsworth, an august but ab- 
 stract morality, but in the sense of finding, like 
 Cowper, the whole hope of humanity bound up 
 in Christ and taking all the children of her mind 
 to him, that He may lay His hand on them and 
 bless them." 
 
 From the first of the Italian life, American 
 artists seem to have been especially favored by 
 the Brownings. Hiram Powers, the sculptor, 
 with those " great burning eyes of his," was a 
 chief friend and favorite — a " most charming, 
 simple, straight-forward, genial American." His 
 family, as well as work, claimed personal atten- 
 tion. William Wetmore Story and his wife were 
 also favored friends ; " he, the son of Judge Story, 
 and full of all sorts of talent, and she, one of 
 those cultivated and graceful American women 
 who take away the reproach of the national want 
 of refinement." From the first of their meeting, 
 in 1848, courtesies had been extended. Brown- 
 ing, at this time, as Story wrote James Russell 
 
82 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Lowell, had " straight black hair, small eyes, wide 
 apart, which he twitches constantly together, a 
 smooth face, a slightly aquiline nose, and man- 
 ners nervous and rapid. He has a great vivacity, 
 but not the least humor, some sarcasm, consider- 
 able critical faculty, and very great frankness and 
 friendliness of manner and mind." " Mrs. 
 Browning," he continues, sat " buried up in a 
 large easy-chair, listening and talking very quietly 
 and pleasantly, with nothing of that peculiarity 
 which one would expect from reading her poems. 
 Her eyes are small, her mouth large, she wears 
 a cap and long curls. Very unaffected and pleas- 
 ant and simple-hearted is she, and Browning 
 says, " her poems are the least good part of 
 her." He also writes his poet-friend of reading 
 at his weekly " at home " on Sunday evenings the 
 Biglow Papers, when, giving as well as he could 
 " the true Yankee note," which had " convulsed 
 audiences of other evenings," the Brownings were 
 quite as much amused and delighted as he him- 
 self. Later he is writing of their " constant and 
 delightful intercourse " at the Baths of Lucca 
 (August, 1853), when they interchanged "long 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 83 
 
 evenings together two or three times a week." 
 " We like them very much," he continues. " They 
 are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic ;" both 
 are " busily engaged in writing, he on a new 
 volume of lyrical poems and she on a tale or novel 
 in verse." He is pleased to tell his old friend 
 that both of them " seemed greatly to have taken 
 to him and M.," adding, " we all join in stand- 
 ing on the ramparts and waving our handker- 
 chiefs for you to return." In this same letter he 
 says : " Browning does not smoke ; it is his great- 
 est defect; but he tells me that Tennyson does 
 excessively." (Life of Story.) But if they 
 could not smoke together, they all enjoyed the 
 " close communion of tea-drinking " between the 
 two houses. They spent hours together in the 
 woods. " The whole day in the woods with 
 the Brownings," he wrote. " We went at ten 
 o'clock, carrying our provisions. Browning and 
 I walked to the spot, and then, spreading shawls 
 under the great chestnuts, we read and talked the 
 live-long day, the Lima at our feet bubbling on, 
 clear and brown over the stones, and the distant 
 rock-ribbed peaks taking the changes of the 
 
8 4 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 hours. In the afternoon we took a long walk 
 through the grove, and found wondrous fungi, 
 some red as coral." Books are exchanged. 
 Browning lends Milnes's Life of Keats, which 
 Mrs. Story reads aloud to her husband as he 
 works in his studio ; while Mrs. Story carries to 
 Mrs. Browning her copy of Jane Eyre, which 
 Henry James, in telling of the fact, says was " al- 
 most certainly that of the American pirated form 
 contained in one of the parcels arriving from 
 Boston ' per Nautilus,' the blessed little New 
 England sailing-ship of the time before tariffs, 
 which coming straight to Leghorn made our 
 friends feel nearer home than anything had yet 
 done." 
 
 A loving word is occasionally sent, as when 
 Mrs. Browning writes to Story after referring 
 to some affair, " May you never be wounded 
 again through the objects of your love — the only 
 wounds which tell in this life. The rest are 
 scratches." 
 
 From Sienna, August, 1859, Story writes 
 Charles E. Norton of his continued delight in the 
 Brownings, who were then living a stone's throw 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 85 
 
 from him. " Every evening we sit on our lawn," 
 he writes, " under the ilexes and cypresses, and 
 take our tea and talk until the moon has made the 
 circuit of the quarter of the sky." After re- 
 ferring to Browning's being " full of life as ever," 
 even in good spirits about Mrs. Browning, al- 
 though she was " sadly weak and ill," he pictures 
 the little Pen as well, and as hearing him, as he 
 writes, laughing and playing with his boys and 
 daughter Edith on the terrace below his window. 
 
 This life with the Storys and the " excellent 
 and noble Brownings " Charles Sumner could not 
 forget; for this same year (1859) he is writing 
 them his remembrances of " those delicious Tus- 
 can evenings on your lawn with Browning and 
 the immortal style of Landor." The year be- 
 fore, while ill in England, he had found the 
 Brownings, as well as Mrs. Jameson, " full of 
 kindness " for him. " I like them all very much," 
 he wrote Longfellow. In his first visit to 
 Europe, some twenty years before, he had met 
 Browning, as the author of Paracelsus, and 
 Landor as his friend. 
 
 In all the loving intercourse of the Storys and 
 
86 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 the Brownings, the children were not forgotten. 
 In a chatty letter to Edith Story Browning refers 
 to her brother's work : " Julian's picture at the 
 Grosvenor is admirable in many respects, and 
 above the works on each side of it. Waldo's 
 statuette is exceedingly good also; they have, 
 each of them, enjoyed a better education than 
 is easily obtainable here." He also shows his 
 appreciation of the work she had sent him — a 
 translation of the autobiography of an interesting 
 Tuscan sculptor, Giovanni Dupre. (Life of 
 Story.) 
 
 In this beautiful Italian life, the poet helped 
 the artist and the artist the poet. It was after a 
 visit to Story's studio that Browning wrote his 
 Elegy of Sculpture, and its advantage over poetry 
 as finding work for uninspired moments. He 
 also studied modeling with the sculptor. In 1861 
 Mrs. Browning is writing Miss Blagden that Mr. 
 Story is " doing Robert's bust, likely to be a 
 success" (now in the Venetian palace). This 
 was the year he calls Story " the dearest of all 
 American friends," closing one of his letters with 
 " next year, next hundred years will change 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 87 
 
 nothing in my gratitude and love. Meantime I 
 run in and shake hands, and sit by the fire as of 
 old, see you always and love you always." 
 
 In his Conversations in a Studio, Mr. Story 
 has precious memories of these friends. He re- 
 calls her as " pure and noble a spirit as ever in- 
 formed this tenement of clay, as rare a genius as 
 ever dwelt within this noble city of Florence." 
 After her death he wrote his friend Norton that 
 she looked " like a young girl — all the outlines 
 rounded and filled up, all traces of disease effaced, 
 and a smile on her face so living that they could 
 not for hours persuade themselves she was really 
 dead." In some lines he then wrote he refers 
 to Browning's loss, with this comfort : 
 
 'Round every heart some happy memory clings 
 Some winds steal music from the slackest strings; 
 The coldest heart at moments must aspire, 
 The stormiest sense hath hidden sparks of fire. 
 
 All that we ever did were but as dust 
 
 Without these simple words — hope, love, and trust. 
 
 Another American visitor to Casa Guidi was 
 Mr. Page, " an earnest, simple, noble artist and 
 
88 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 man, who carries his Christianity down from his 
 deep heart to the point of his brush." The por- 
 trait he painted of Browning in 1854 the poet 
 considered " magnificent," the " finest even of his 
 works " ; he wrote Story : " just the head, which 
 he wished to concentrate his art upon in a manner 
 which would have been impossible had the can- 
 vass been larger." He considered the " result 
 marvellous," the " wonder of everybody — no 
 such work has been achieved in our time to my 
 knowledge at least. I am not qualified to speak 
 of the likeness, understand, only of the life and 
 effect, which I wish with all my heart had been 
 given to my wife's head, or any I like to look 
 at, than my own." 
 
 The presentation of the picture by Mr. Page 
 to Mrs. Browning gave much delight. " Such 
 a princely piece of generosity," wrote Mrs. 
 Browning to Mr. Story, " but there was no with- 
 standing his admirable delicacy and nobleminded- 
 ness, which made the sacrifice of such time and 
 labor even easy." 
 
 The year before, Page had painted Charlotte 
 Cushman, which, Story wrote Lowell, was " won- 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 89 
 
 derfully fine," the " finest portrait I think I ever 
 saw." (Life of Story.) Mrs. Browning heard 
 " wonderful things " of it, even declaring that the 
 Americans called Page the " American Titian." 
 In this same letter she refers to their having met 
 Charlotte Cushman twice — once on a balcony 
 on the boulevard, when together they saw Louis 
 Napoleon enter Paris in immediate face of the 
 empire, and once in Florence. " I like the manly 
 soul in her face and manners," she wrote. 
 " Manly and masculine — an excellent distinc- 
 tion of Mrs. Jameson's." Years before (1845), 
 Mr. Browning, upon meeting the American 
 actress, had called her " clever and truthful — 
 loving." 
 
 Christopher Cranch, another American artist 
 who enjoyed the Brownings, corroborates what 
 William W. Story says of him when he first met 
 him in 1849; — that he wore no beard, and that 
 his hair was nearly black. He ever loved to re- 
 call his " bright, alert, sunny, cordial presence " 
 as he sat in his studio in Florence, or as he saw 
 him with his poet-wife at Casa Guidi. When ani- 
 mated in conversation, he said he had " a way of 
 
9 o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 getting up and standing, or walking up and down, 
 while still continuing to talk in a fluent vein." 
 His manners were " extremely cordial and 
 friendly." 
 
 The Brownings' interest in Margaret Fuller is 
 another link to the United States. Aside from 
 her having been a reviewer of their poems, Mrs. 
 Browning had especially noted her work in Rome 
 during the siege. So, as " a devoted friend of 
 the republicans, and a meritorious attendant on 
 the hospitals," she welcomed her when with her 
 husband and child she came to Florence. She 
 found the Marquis " amiable and gentlemanly," 
 but having " no pretension to cope with his wife 
 on any ground appertaining to the intellect/' 
 " She talks and he listens." She declared she 
 always wondered at that species of marriage ; but 
 " people are so different in their matrimonial 
 ideals that it may answer sometimes." 
 
 When in London Margaret was told that 
 Browning had just married Miss Barrett and 
 gone to Italy. Her hope then that she might 
 meet them there was now fulfilled. " I see the 
 Brownings often," she wrote home, " and love 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 91 
 
 and admire them both more and more as I know 
 them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour 
 I pass with him, and is a most cordial, true, and 
 noble man." 
 
 Margaret Fuller had literary credentials to 
 these great poets' attention ; for, as she wrote her 
 friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, her two volumes 
 of Miscellanies had been " courteously greeted 
 in the London journals, and her Essays on Ameri- 
 can Literature had been translated and published 
 in La Revue I ndc pendant e." And she was ap- 
 preciated by them. Mrs. Browning, in writing 
 to Miss Mitford in April, 1850, of Margaret's 
 intention to sail for home, says they shall be sorry 
 to lose her. She calls her " a very interesting 
 person, far better than her writings — thought- 
 ful, spiritual in her habitual mode of mind; not 
 only exalted, but exaltee in her opinions, and yet 
 calm in manner." Several months later, after 
 mentioning that they spent with them their last 
 evening in Italy, she wrote this same friend : 
 " Deep called unto deep indeed. Now she is 
 where there is no more grief and no more sea; 
 and none of the restless in the world, none of the 
 
92 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 shipwrecked in heart ever seemed to me to want 
 peace more than she did. We saw much of her 
 last winter, and over a great gulf of differing 
 opinion we both felt drawn strongly to her. 
 High and pure aspiration she had — yes, and a 
 tender woman's heart — and we honored the 
 truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man." 
 She believed that the work she was preparing in 
 Italy would have been more equal to her faculty 
 than anything she had previously written, her 
 other writings seeming to her inferior to the im- 
 pressions her conversation gave. She seemed to 
 her to be chiefly known to America " by oral lect- 
 ures, and a connection with the newspaper press, 
 neither of them happy means of publicity." She 
 then refers to the parting gift — "a Bible from 
 her child to ours, ' In memory of Angelo Eugene 
 Ossoli ' (a strange prophetic expression) " and 
 declares Margaret herself was " full of a sad 
 presentment." 
 
 Mrs. Browning herself was thoughtful in gifts 
 to those she loved. Once upon returning to 
 Florence she brought to a young friend not only 
 one of her new books and some photographs, but 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 93 
 
 a pair of Roman gold sleeve buttons. And this 
 young friend was another American whom the 
 Brownings honored — none other than Kate 
 Field. Writing to her from Rome in i860 Mrs. 
 Browning refers to her as " learning Latin and 
 communing with Walter Savage Landor," who 
 felt, as they all did, that she was " clever, dear, 
 and good," and " the more they had of her the 
 better." We all know that one of the best 
 tributes paid Mrs. Browning after her death was 
 that of this young woman, contributed to an 
 American magazine, the Atlantic Monthly of 
 September, 1861. Mr. Browning showed his ap- 
 preciation in presenting to her in remembrance 
 of his wife a pet locket — a crystal center in 
 which was shaped her hair in two hearts, the sur- 
 rounding gold being a serpent emblem of eter- 
 nity. This became another link to the country 
 over the sea by becoming on the death of Miss 
 Field the possession of another American, her 
 biographer, Miss Lilian Whiting. 
 
 But perhaps the greatest favorite among the 
 young Americans whom the Brownings honored 
 was the sculptor, Harriet Hosmer; indeed, as 
 
94 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 Kate Field wrote from Rome in 1859, sne was 
 " a universal favorite, praised by everyone there." 
 Some five years before, Mrs. Browning had writ- 
 ten Miss Mitford of the young American sculptor 
 being " a great pet of mine and Robert's." She 
 " emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly 
 emancipated female from all shadow of blame by 
 the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at 
 twenty-two), dines and breakfasts at the cafes 
 precisely as a young man would, works from six 
 o'clock in the morning till night as a great artist 
 must, and this with an absence of pretension and 
 simplicity of manners which accord rather with 
 the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with 
 her broad forehead and high aims." Several 
 weeks later, upon her return to Florence, Mrs. 
 Browning again refers to her as " an immense 
 favorite with us both." When about to buy a 
 pony for little Robert, however, they decided to 
 hunt up someone else than " Hatty Hosmer," to 
 ride with him, " because she had been thrown 
 thirty times ! " not " on account of bad riding, 
 be it observed, but of daring and venturesome 
 riding." At about this time Mr. Story, in writ- 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 95 
 
 ing Lowell of his Italian life, speaks of her, with 
 Charlotte Cushman, Grace Greenwood, and others, 
 as one of the " emancipated females who dwell 
 there in heavenly unity." " Hatty," he writes, 
 " takes a high hand here with Rome, and would 
 have the Romans know that a Yankee girl can 
 do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her 
 horse alone, and laugh at their rules." (Life of 
 Story.) At another time Mrs. Browning refers 
 to her as bringing to them a most charming de- 
 sign for a fountain for Lady Marion Alford, add- 
 ing, " the imagination is unfolding its wings in 
 Hatty." Having met Lady Alford in Rome the 
 year before she had found her " very eager about 
 literature and art and Robert," for all which 
 reasons she declares she should care for her. 
 " Hatty calls her divine." She then tells of the 
 lady kneeling before Hatty and placing on her 
 finger, as a present, the " most splendid ring you 
 can imagine, a ruby in the form of a heart, sur- 
 rounded and crowned with diamonds. Hatty is 
 frankly delighted and says so with all sorts of 
 fantastical exaggerations." And who that has 
 ever known Harriet Hosmer, the irrepressible, 
 
96 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 can fail to recall her charming reminiscences of 
 this friendship? I can never forget the satisfied 
 joy she revealed when showing me the breastpin 
 these blest friends gave her; or when telling of 
 her visits in their home; or of seeing Salvini as 
 Othello in the same theater-box with them ; or of 
 having the runaway donkey-ride in a Caretta 
 with Robert Browning, supplemented by picnic 
 pleasures with them both and other gifted ones. 
 One of these excursions has a special interest for 
 us as the result of America's appreciation of 
 Robert Browning; for, upon receiving a check 
 from Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, his Boston 
 publishers, the poet came to her studio in high 
 glee with the assertion that it was to be spent on 
 a picnic excursion to Albano, with her and Fred- 
 eric Leighton (afterwards President of the Royal 
 Academy) as guests. This was all the more to 
 be enjoyed he said, because it was the publishers, 
 " own buona grazia " they were not in the least 
 obliged to give. " But this is the way they al- 
 ways do things," gratefully exclaimed the poet, 
 " invariably leaving us their debtors." 
 
 It was to this young American, this same 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 97 
 
 " Hatty Hosmer," that Mrs. Browning finally 
 consented to sit for the now famous Clasped 
 Hands, which symbolize, as Hawthorne says in 
 his Marble Fazvn, " the individuality and heroic 
 union of two high poetic lives." Only " Hatty " 
 shall cast them, " I will not sit to the Formatore," 
 she declared. (Private letter of Miss Hosmer.) 
 Another link of the Brownings to the United 
 States, which, however, Mrs. Browning did not 
 live to see, was the marriage of their son to an 
 American woman. Thus an American came to 
 be the presiding mistress over the loved books 
 and treasures as gathered in the home of Robert 
 Barrett Browning, the Rezzonico Palace in 
 Venice ; and to her came a share in the ministry 
 of the last days of the poet-husband. " His 
 death," she wrote Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore (to 
 whom he had written some of his last letters) 
 " was a fitting close in every respect to such a 
 noble life. . . . He had been so full of life, 
 and was so happy in our new home, that when his 
 illness came it was like a thunderbolt out of a 
 clear sky." After saying that he was glad his 
 illness had happened in Venice and not in Lon- 
 
98 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 don she said he was " touchingly grateful " for 
 all that they had tried to do for his recovery. 
 " God knows it was our best," she added. " But 
 his time to go had come ; and we all feel grateful 
 that it came as it did, that his falling asleep was 
 so peaceful." Referring to the ceremony at 
 Westminster Abbey she declared it was " beyond 
 words impressive, and as one would have desired 
 it to be in every way. Pen was immensely 
 touched by the fitting music to his mother's beau- 
 tiful words." 
 
 To another American, William Wetmore Story, 
 of all the many friends, was given the charge of 
 affairs consequent upon the death of the poet; 
 while of all those who ministered charming hospi- 
 tality and loving appreciation in the last years 
 two American ladies, Mrs. Arthur Bronson and 
 Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, must take the lead. Mrs. 
 Bronson, in the Century magazine (1900 and 
 1902) has pictured their life at Asolo and Venice, 
 and the poet has ever associated her with his last 
 book Asolando. It was when the Storys were 
 visiting at the Asolo home of this " supremely 
 amiable countrywoman," as James calls her, that 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 99 
 
 Browning, not long before his death, " so well and 
 in such force, brilliant and delightful as ever," 
 said, as he stood by the gate after a most tender 
 farewell : " We have been friends for over forty 
 years without a break." Upon hearing of his 
 death the poet-sculptor " spent the evening in 
 tears and in talks about him and the old time." 
 All he could do at the funeral, he wrote Mr. 
 Norton, was to lay on the coffin two wreaths, 
 " one of those exquisite white Florence roses, and 
 the other of laurel. She is a great loss to litera- 
 ture," he added, " to Italy and to the world — 
 the greatest poet among women." 
 
 It is to an American, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, 
 through the gift in 1882 to the New York Metro- 
 politan Museum of Art of a large painting, The 
 Meuse from Bouvigne, and to the Boston Art 
 Museum of another called Solitude, that America 
 perpetuates the work of the artist-son. It finally 
 remained for an American genius, Mrs. H. H. . 
 Beach, to give some of the best musical settings 
 to his poems, and an American poet, Richard 
 Watson Gilder, to write one of the most original 
 poems upon his death : 
 
 LofC. 
 
ioo THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 
 
 THE TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 1889. 
 
 On this day Browning died? 
 
 Say rather: On the tide 
 That throbs against those glorious palace walls; 
 
 That rises — pauses — falls 
 With melody and myriad-tinted gleams ; 
 
 On that enchanted tide 
 Half-real, and half-poured from lovely dreams, 
 A soul of Beauty — a white, rhythmic flame — 
 Passed singing forth into the Eternal Beauty whence it 
 came. 
 
 It was also an American, Professor Hiram 
 Corson, who organized the first Browning society 
 of any land, the Browning Society of Cornell 
 University. This, organized some five years be- 
 fore the London society in University College. 
 London (1881), was the result of a conference 
 between Mr. Corson and Dr. Furnivall, when the 
 American scholar was cordially invited to lecture 
 before the society the following year. The so- 
 cieties that followed in America — the Syracuse, 
 
 Note. — Written for and read at the Browning Me- 
 morial, at King's Chapel, Boston, where was also sung 
 a Browning poem, musically set by a Boston lady, Clara 
 K. Rogers. 
 
THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 101 
 
 Philadelphia, Baltimore, and others — originated 
 more or less from Professor Corson's lectures and 
 readings. 
 
 It remained at last for the Boston Browning 
 Society to give in Boston, for the first time on 
 any stage, in March, 1902, the tragedy of The 
 Return of the Druses. A few years before, 
 1899, it had given the first stage representation 
 of Pippa Passes, in six scenes, with music written 
 for the occasion. 
 
 While the work of the poet-husband is thus 
 being perpetuated in the United States, the gifted 
 wife is not forgotten. The unique, beautiful 
 Browning room in Wellesley College, Wellesley, 
 Mass., with its Browning windows, its Browning 
 autographs, and Story bust, is a perpetual re- 
 minder of the love of young women. New edi- 
 tions of her work, lovingly edited by well- 
 equipped Americans, are a continual reminder of 
 her who " loved America," and who publicly de- 
 clared : 
 
 For I am bound by gratitude, 
 
 By love and blood, 
 To brothers of mine across the sea, 
 Who stretch out kindly hands to me. 
 
I 
 
 FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MRS. 
 
 BROWNING'S DEATH, 
 
 JUNE 29, 1861. 
 
 " 'Tis beautiful," she faintly cried, 
 Then closed her weary eyes and died. 
 So stands plain fact on history's page, 
 Attested to by friend and sage. 
 But in our hearts the fact grows bright, 
 Illumined with immortal light. 
 For open eyes saw heaven's shores, 
 And life, not death, revealed its stores. 
 
 " 'Tis beautiful." It must be so, 
 If such a soul, 'midst parting's woe, 
 Could with truth's perfect clearness see 
 The secret of life's mystery; 
 Could know that fullest life of man 
 Needs heaven's light to round God's plan. 
 
 O woman-soul, without a peer, 
 
 We thank thee more and more each year, 
 
 For this sweet proof of beauty's power 
 
 Beyond earth's transitory hour. 
 
 It calms our hours of doubt and pain, 
 
 And beautifies earth's troubled reign, 
 
 To feel that thou art sending still 
 
 This same sweet message of God's will, 
 
 Born of fruition's grander sight, 
 
 Of perfect beauty, peace, and light. 
 
 102 
 
II 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast. 
 O thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 
 And with God be the rest! 
 
 — Prospice. 
 Fulfilled, December 12, 1889. 
 Oh, the blessed fruition 
 Of peace out of pain ! 
 Of a light without darkness, 
 
 A clasping again! 
 Of a full soul's reunion 
 In Love's endless reign! 
 
 Sing, O Earth, with new joy 
 
 At this victory won! 
 For the faith that endured 
 
 'Till the setting of sun ! 
 For the hope that shone clear 
 
 Through the mighty work done! 
 For the love that sought God 
 
 To guide love here begun! 
 Sing, O Earth, with new joy 
 
 For such victory won! 
 
 Elizabeth Porter Gould 
 103 
 
INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 Abell, Edith 66 
 
 " Agamemnon La Saissaz and Dramatic 
 
 Idyls" 44 
 
 Alexandria Theological Seminary. 28 
 
 Alford, Lady Marion 95 
 
 Alma-Tadema 67 
 
 Anderson, Mary 66 
 
 " Anniversary of Mrs. Browning's death " 102 
 
 Arcturus 13, 18, 22 
 
 Art Museum, Boston 99 
 
 Asolo 98 
 
 " Asolando " 42, 98 
 
 " Athenaeum " 21 
 
 " Atlantic Monthly " 93 
 
 Aurora Leigh 26, 27, 28, 55 
 
 Bacon, Delia 64 
 
 Baltimore (Browning Society) 101 
 
 Bancroft, George 43 
 
 Barrett, Elizabeth 9, 12, 13, 14, 18, 47, 90 
 
 Baths of Lucca 82 
 
 Bayne, Peter 80 
 
 Beach, Mrs. H. H. A 99 
 
 105 
 
io 6 INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward 69 
 
 " Bells and Pomegranates " 11, 34 
 
 " Biglow Papers " 82 
 
 Blagden, Miss 52, 58, 71, 86 
 
 " Blithedale Romance " 65 
 
 " Blot on the Scutcheon " 20 
 
 Boston, Massachusetts 35, 79, 101 
 
 Boston Anti-Slavery Bazar 49 
 
 Boyd, Hugh Stuart 15, 17, 19, 24, 26 
 
 British Museum 39 
 
 " Broadway Journal " 47 
 
 Bronson, Mrs. Arthur 42, 71, 98 
 
 Bronson, Edith 42 
 
 Brooks, Phillips 28, 78 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 
 
 45, 47, 54, 63, 64, 72, 73, 94, 102 
 
 Browning, Robert 10, 20, 34, 35, 55, 62, 64, 65, 
 
 79, 82, 83, 103 
 
 Browning, Robert Barrett 94, 97 
 
 Browning, Robert Barrett, Mrs 97, 98 
 
 Browning Memorial Service 79, 100 
 
 Browning Society, Boston 101 
 
 Browning Society, Cornell University. . . . 100 
 
 Browning Society, London 100 
 
 Browning Society Papers 55 
 
 Browning Windows, Wellesley College. . . 101 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen 21 
 
 "Bull's Run" 55 
 
INDEX 107 
 
 Page 
 
 California 71 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas 33, 73, 80 
 
 Carman, Bliss. 43, 44 
 
 Carter, Robert 18 
 
 " Casa Guidi," Florence 71, 87, 89 
 
 " Caterina to Camoens " 18 
 
 " Century Magazine " 43, 98 
 
 Channing, William H 70 
 
 Chicago and Alton Railroad 39 
 
 Civil War 50, 56 
 
 Clarke, Helen A 38 
 
 " Clasped Hands " 97 
 
 " Conversations in a Studio " , 87 
 
 Conway, Moncure D 38, 70 
 
 Cooke, George Willis « 38 
 
 Cornell University 36 
 
 Corson, Hiram 36, 100, 101 
 
 Cowper, 81 
 
 " Cowper's Grave " 17 
 
 Cranch, Christopher P 89 
 
 Crawford, Thomas 57 
 
 Curtis, George William j6 
 
 Cushman, Charlotte 88, 89, 95 
 
 " Democratic Review " 13, 16 
 
 " Dial " (Boston) 34 
 
 Dickens, Charles 22, 45 
 
 " Drama of Exile " 9, 24, 26 
 
io8 INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 " Dred " 27 
 
 Duchess of Argyle 61 
 
 Dupre, Giovanni 86 
 
 Duyckinck, Evert A 13 
 
 "Easy Chair" 76 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 33, 38, 69, 91 
 
 " English Notes " 64 
 
 " Epilogue of Dramatic Idyls " 42 
 
 " Essay on Carlyle " 33 
 
 " Essay on Mind " 9, 13, 70 
 
 " Essays on American Literature " 91 
 
 " Evening Mirror " 13, 46, 47 
 
 Field, Kate . . 93, 94 
 
 Fields, James T 65, 69, 73, 74, 75 
 
 Fordham Cottage 12 
 
 Fuller, Margaret 24, 34, 64, yj, 90, 91 
 
 Furnivall, Dr 100 
 
 Garnett, Richard 38 
 
 Gilder, Richard Watson 99, 100 
 
 Goethe 81 
 
 Gould, E. P 102, 103 
 
 " Graham's Magazine " 13, 16, 18, 21 
 
 " Greek Slave " (Powers) 56 
 
 Greenwood, Grace 95 
 
 "Grief" (Sonnet) 18 
 
INDEX 109 
 
 Page 
 
 Harrison's Life of Poe 13 
 
 Harvard College 28 
 
 Haworth, Miss , 30, 52, 59, 78 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 25, 61, 64, 65, 97 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Mrs 61, 62 
 
 Hawthorne, Rose 63, 69 
 
 Hawthorne, Una 62, 69 
 
 Hemans, Mrs 16, 20 
 
 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 38 
 
 Hillhouse, James 46 
 
 Hillard, George S y2, 73 
 
 Home, Richard H 11,21 
 
 Hosmer, Harriet 93, 94, 95, 97 
 
 Howe, Julia Ward 47, 48 
 
 Howells, William D 38 
 
 Hoxie, E. C 27, 40 
 
 " International Copyright " 22, 23 
 
 Ipsen's " Portuguese Sonnets " in Brown- 
 ing Palace, Venice 39 
 
 Irving, Washington 9, 22, 23 
 
 " Italian Lyrics " 31 
 
 " Italy and America " 52 
 
 Italy' 51, 90, 91 
 
 Jameson, Anna (Mrs.) . . 31, 49, 50, 60, J2 73, 
 
 85,89 
 James, Henry 79 
 
no INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 Jane Eyre 84 
 
 Keats 47, 84 
 
 Kensal Green Cemetery 70 
 
 Kenyon, John 11, 54, 73 
 
 King's Chapel, Boston 79, 100 
 
 Kinney, Elizabeth C 76 
 
 Kinney, Hon. W. B j6 
 
 " La Revue Independente " 91 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage 73, 85, 93 
 
 "L. E. L." 16 
 
 Leighton, Frederick (Sir) 96 
 
 Letter of Mrs. Browning, first time pub- 
 lished '. 63 
 
 " Letters from Palmyra " 75 
 
 Lightfoot, Mr 79 
 
 Lincoln's " Inaugural Address " 51 
 
 "Little Nell" 22 
 
 Longfellow, Henry W 42, 85 
 
 "Loved Once" 18 
 
 Lowell, James Russell. . 18, 19, 45, 57, 69, 81, 
 
 82, 88, 95 
 
 "Luria" 36 
 
 Marsh, Hon. George 76 
 
 Martin, Mrs 24, 25, 45, 50 
 
 Mathews, Cornelius 13, 20, 21, 23 
 
INDEX in 
 
 Page 
 
 " Men and Women " 29, 40 
 
 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 
 
 City 99 
 
 Miller, Joaquin 71 
 
 Milnes, Moncton 64, 78 
 
 Milton 17 
 
 Mitford, Miss. . 24, 47, 49, 54, 58, 59, 69, 71, 
 
 74, 91, 94 
 
 Montaiito Villa 61 
 
 Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield 43, 97, 98, 99 
 
 Motley's " American Crisis " 54 
 
 Moulton, Mrs. Louise Chandler 38 
 
 Motherwell 46 
 
 Napoleon 32 
 
 Napoleonic Poems 31 
 
 " Nautilus " 84 
 
 New York Independent 31, 32, 52 
 
 New York Tribune 17, 34, 77 
 
 Niagara Falls 70 
 
 " North American Review " 13, 16, 34 
 
 Norton, Charles Eliot 58, 84, 87, 99 
 
 Norton, Mrs 16, 20 
 
 "Official Guide" 39 
 
 " Orion" 21 
 
 Osgood, Frances S 12 
 
 Ossoli, Angelo Eugene 92 
 
ii2 INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 Ossoli, Marquis 90 
 
 Page, Mr 87, 88, 89 
 
 Paine's " Age of Reason " and "Rights of 
 
 Man " 9 
 
 " Pain in Pleasure " 18 
 
 Palfrey, Mrs 78 
 
 " Paracelsus " 1 1, 34, 79 
 
 " Paradise Lost " 36, 37 
 
 Parker, Theodore yS 
 
 " Parleyings with certain people " 44 
 
 " Passion Flowers " (Howe) 47 
 
 " Pauline: a fragment of a Confession ". . 36 
 
 Peabody, Elizabeth P 61 
 
 "Pen" 85, 98 
 
 Philadelphia (Browning Society) ........ 101 
 
 Pierce, General Franklin 49 
 
 " Pippa Passes " 66, 101 
 
 " Plays and Poems " 34 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan 9, 12, 25, 46 
 
 " Poems of Congress " 30, 31 
 
 " Politian " 46 
 
 Porter, Charlotte 38 
 
 Powers, Hiram 56, 81 
 
 Pratolino, Italy 76 
 
 " Prometheus Bound " 13 
 
 The Proctors 73 
 
INDEX 113 
 
 Page 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra 66 
 
 Railway Time Table 39 
 
 " Rapping Spirits " 58 
 
 " Raven " (Poe) 9, 10, 11, 46 
 
 Requests for autographs 71 
 
 Rezzonico Palace, Venice 86, 97 
 
 " Rhapsody of Life's Progress " 20 
 
 " Rhyme of the Duchess May " 25 
 
 Richmond, Virginia 57 
 
 Rogers, Clara K 100 
 
 Salvini, Tommaso 96 
 
 Sarianna Browning 34 
 
 " Septimius " 69 
 
 " Seraph and Poet " 18 
 
 Shelley 47 
 
 Shillaber, B. P. (Mrs. Partington) 44 
 
 Sigourney, Mrs 19, 46 
 
 " Six Months in Italy " 73 
 
 " Solitude " (painting of Robert Barrett 
 
 Browning) 99 
 
 " Sonnets from the Portuguese " 29, 39 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence. . 17, 30, 37, 41, 55 
 
 Stoddards, The 27, 69 
 
 Story, William Wetmore. . 55, 64, 81, 86, 87, 
 
 89, 94, 98 
 
 Story, Edith 86 
 
 Story, Julian 86 
 
ii4 INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 57, 60, 6 1 
 
 Sturgis, Russell 70 
 
 " Summing up " (Independent) 32 
 
 Sumner, Charles 85 
 
 " Superstition " (Sonnet) 18 
 
 Syracuse Browning Society 100 
 
 " Tamerlane " 36 
 
 Taylor, Bayard 27, 57, 67, 69 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred 46, 47, 83 
 
 Thaxter, Celia 27, 40, 41 
 
 Thaxter, Levi Lincoln 27, 40, 42 
 
 " The Case of M. Valdemar " 11 
 
 " The Child and the Watcher " 18 
 
 " The Cry of the Human " 17 
 
 " The Knickerbocker " 23 
 
 " The Lady's Yes " 18 
 
 "The Liberty Bell" 49 
 
 " The Maiden's Death " 18 
 
 " The Meuse from Bouvigne " (picture) . . 99 
 
 " The Pathfinder " 20 
 
 "The Pioneer" 18 
 
 " The Return of the Druses " 101 
 
 " The Ring and the Book " 36 
 
 " The Rubaiyat " 39 
 
 " The Runaway Slave " 48 
 
 " The Seraphim " 13, 15, 16 
 
 "The Sleep" 17 
 
 " The Soul's Expression " 18 
 
INDEX 115 
 
 Page 
 
 " The Union " (newspaper) 17 
 
 " The Union Flag " 17 
 
 Thompson, John R., 13 
 
 Ticknor and Fields, 96 
 
 Ticknor, George 78 
 
 Torrey, Bradford 42 
 
 Tuckerman, Henry T 19 
 
 Turner, Ross 39 
 
 " Uncle Tom's Cabin " 59 
 
 University College, London 100 
 
 Vallombrosa j6 
 
 Venice, 97, 98 
 
 Victorian Poets, Stedman 17 
 
 Virginia Poe 12 
 
 Ware, Henry 75 
 
 Webb, General Watson j6 
 
 Webster, Daniel 22 
 
 Wellesley College (Browning room) 101 
 
 Westland, Mr 26 
 
 Westminster Abbey 98 
 
 White, Andrew D 67, 68 
 
 Whiting, Lilian 93 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel P 46 
 
 Woodberry, George E 38 
 
 Wordsworth 81 
 
 "Work" (Sonnet) 18 
 
 " Work and Contemplation " (Sonnet) .... 18 
 
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