The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition - Robert Browning страница 122
Название: The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition
Автор: Robert Browning
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027230167
isbn:
······
God strikes a silence through you all,
And giveth His beloved, sleep.”
Almost could the friends gathered there hear her poet-voice saying:
“And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let One, most loving of you all,
Say ‘Not a tear must o’er her fall!
He giveth His beloved, sleep.’”
CHAPTER IX
1861-1869
“Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?
“Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!”
The Completed Cycle—Letters to Friends—Browning’s Devotion to his Son—Warwick Crescent—“Dramatis Personæ”—London Life—death of the Poet’s Father—Sarianna Browning—Oxford Honors the Poet—Death of Arabel Barrett—Audierne—“The Ring and the Book.”
“The cycle is complete,” said Browning to the Storys, as they all stood in those desolate rooms and gazed about. The salon was just as she had left it; the table covered with books and magazines, her little chair drawn up to it, the long windows open to the terrace, and the faint chant of nuns, “made for midsummer nights,” in San Felice, on the air. “Here we came fifteen years ago,” continued Mr. Browning; “here Ba wrote her poems for Italy; here Pen was born; here we used to walk up and down this terrace on summer evenings.” The poet lingered over many tender reminiscences, and after the Storys had taken leave, he and his son yielded to the entreaties of Isa Blagden to stay with her in her villa on Bellosguardo during the time that he was preparing to leave Florence, which he never looked upon again.
When all matters of detail were concluded, Miss Blagden, “perfect in all kindness,” accompanied them to Paris, continuing her own journey to England, while Browning with his son, his father, and sister, proceeded to St. Enogat, near St. Malo, on the Normandy coast. Before Mrs. Browning’s illness there had been a plan that all the Brownings and Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Stillman should pass the summer together at Fontainebleau.
There was something about St. Enogat singularly restful to Browning, the sea, the solitude, the “unspoiled, fresh, and picturesque place,” as he described it in a letter to Madame Du Quaire. The mystic enchantment of it wrought its spell, and Penini had his pony and was well and cheerful, and Browning realized too well that the change called death is but the passing through “the gates of new life,” to be despairing in his sorrow. The spirit of one
“... who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,”
breathes through all the letters that he wrote at this time to friends. “Don’t fancy I am prostrated,” he wrote to Leighton; “I have enough to do for myself and the boy, in carrying out her wishes.” Somewhat later he expressed his wish that Mr. (later Sir Frederick) Leighton should design the memorial tomb, in that little Florence cemetery, for his wife; and the marble with only “E. B. B.” inscribed on it, visited constantly by all travelers in Florence and rarely found without flowers, is the one Sir Frederick designed.
Tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery, Florence
Designed by Sir Frederick Leighton, R.A.
In a letter to his boyhood’s friend, Miss Haworth, Browning alluded to the future, when Penini would so need the help of “the wisdom, the genius, the piety” of his mother; and the poet adds: “I have had everything, and shall not forget.” In reply to a letter of sympathy from Kate Field, he wrote:
“Dear Friend,—God bless you for all your kindness which I shall never forget. I cannot write now except to say this, and beside, that I have had great comfort from the beginning.”
In the early autumn Browning took his son to London. The parting of the ways had come, and already he dimly perceived that the future would not copy fair the past. There are “reincarnations,” in all practical effect, that are realized in this life as well as, speculatively, hereafter; and his days of Italian terraces and oleander blooms, of enchanting hours on Bellosguardo, and lingerings in old palaces and galleries, and saunterings down narrow streets crowded with contadini,—these days were as entirely past as if he had been transported to another planet.
“Not death; we do not call it so,
Yet scarcely more with dying breath
Do we forego;
We pass an unseen line,
And lo! another zone.”
The sea and the sands and the sky prefigured themselves in those days to Browning as all indistinguishably blended in an unreal world, from which the past had receded and on which the Future had not yet dawned.
“Gray rocks and grayer sea,
And surf along the shore;
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more.”
To Story he wrote with assurances of affection, but saying, “I can’t speak about anything. I could, perhaps, if we were together, but to write freezes me.” Miss Blagden, in London, had taken rooms in Upper Westbourne Terrace, and when in the late autumn Browning and his son went on to England, he took an apartment in Chichester Road, almost opposite the house where Miss Blagden was staying. But she had lived too long in enchanted Florence to be content elsewhere, and she soon returned to her villa on the heights of Bellosguardo, from which the view is one of the most beautiful in all Europe. Browning soon took the house, No. 19 Warwick Crescent, which for nearly all the rest of his life continued to be his home. Here he was near Mrs. Browning’s sister, Arabel Barrett, of whom he was very fond, and whose love for her sister’s little son was most grateful to them both. Mr. Browning had his old tapestries, pictures, and furniture of old Florentine carving, some of it black with age, sent on from Casa Guidi, and he proceeded to transform a prim London house into an interior СКАЧАТЬ