The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning

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      “I think the fewer books we take the better; they take up room,—and the wise way always seemed to me to read at home, and open one’s eyes and see abroad. A critic somewhere mentioned that as my characteristic—there were two other poets he named placed in novel circumstances ... in a great wood, for instance, Mr. Trench would begin opening books to see how woods were treated ... the other man would set to writing poetry forthwith,—and R. B. would sit still and learn how to write after! A pretty compliment, I thought that. But, seriously, there must be a great library at Pisa (with that University) and abroad they are delighted to facilitate such matters.... I have read in a chamber of the Doges’ palace at Venice painted all over by Tintoretto, walls and ceiling, and at Rome there is a library with a learned priest always kept ready ‘to solve any doubts that may arise.’”

      Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were married on September 12, 1846, in the church of St. Pancras, Marylebone, the only witnesses being his cousin, James Silverthorne, and her maid, Wilson. To have taken her sisters into her confidence would have been to expose them to the fairly insane wrath of her father. “I hate and loathe everything which is clandestine—we both do, Robert and I,” said Mrs. Browning later; but this was the only possible way. Had Mr. Browning spoken to her father in the usual manner, “he would have been forbidden the house without a moment’s scruple,” she explained to a friend; “and I should have been incapacitated from any after exertion by the horrible scenes to which, as a thing of course, I should have been exposed.... I cannot bear some words. In my actual state of physical weakness, it would have been the sacrifice of my whole life—of my convictions, of my affections, and, above all, of what the person dearest to me persisted in calling his life, and the good of it—if I had observed that ‘form.’ Therefore I determined not to observe it, and I consider that in not doing so, I sinned against no duty. That I was constrained to act clandestinely, and did not choose to do so, God is my witness. Also, up to the very last, we stood in the light of day for the whole world, if it please, to judge us. I never saw him out of the Wimpole Street house. He came twice a week to see me, openly in the sight of all.”

      In no act of her life did Mrs. Browning more impressively reveal her good sense than in this of her marriage. “I had long believed such an act,” she said, “the most strictly personal of one’s life,—to be within the rights of every person of mature age, man or woman, and I had resolved to exercise that right in my own case by a resolution which had slowly ripened. All the other doors of life were shut to me, and shut me as in a prison, and only before this door stood one whom I loved best and who loved me best, and who invited me out through it for the good’s sake he thought I could do him.”... To a friend she explained her long refusal to consent to the marriage, fearing that her delicate health would make it “ungenerous” in her to yield to his entreaty; but he replied that

      “he would not tease me, he would wait twenty years if I pleased, and then, if life lasted so long for both of us, then, when it was ending, perhaps, I might understand him and feel that I might have trusted him.... He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfillment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world.”

      She continues:

“I tell you so much that you may see the manner of man I had to do with, and the sort of attachment which for nearly two years has been drawing and winning me. I know better than any in the world, indeed, what Mr. Kenyon once unconsciously said before me, that ‘Robert Browning is great in every thing.’... Now may I not tell you that his genius, and all but miraculous attainments, are the least things in him, the moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew him admit.”

      After the marriage ceremony Mrs. Browning drove with her maid to the home of Mr. Boyd, resting there, as if making a morning call on a familiar friend, until joined by her sisters, who took her for a little drive on Hampstead Heath. For five days she remained in her father’s house, and during this time Browning could not bring himself to call and ask for his wife as “Miss Barrett,” so they arranged all the details of their journey by letter. On September 19 they left for Paris, and the last one of these immortal letters, written the evening before their departure, from Mrs. Browning to her husband, contains these words:

      “By to-morrow at this time I shall have you, only, to love me, my beloved! You, only! As if one said, God, only! And we shall have Him beside, I pray of Him!”

      With her maid, Mrs. Browning walked out of her father’s house the next day, meeting her husband at a bookseller’s around the corner of the street, and they drove to the station, leaving for Southampton to catch the night boat to Havre.

Never could the world have understood the ineffable love and beauty and nobleness of the characters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had these letters been withheld from the public. Quite aside from the deeper interest of their personal revelation,—the revelation of such nobleness and such perfect mutual comprehension and tenderness of sympathy as are here revealed,—the pages are full of interesting literary allusion and comment, of wit, repartee, and of charm that defies analysis. It was a wise and generous gift when the son of the poets, Robert Barrett Browning, gave these wonderful letters to the reading public. The supreme test of literature is that which contributes to the spiritual wealth of the world. Measured by this standard, these are of the highest literary order. No one can fail to realize how all that is noblest in manhood, all that is holiest in womanhood, is revealed in this correspondence.

      Edmund Clarence Stedman, after reading these letters, said: “It would have been almost a crime to have permitted this wonderful, exceptional interchange of soul and mind, between these two strong, ‘excepted’ beings, to leave no trace forever.”

      Robert Barrett Browning, in referring to his publication of this correspondence in a conversation with the writer of this volume, remarked that he really had no choice in the matter, as the Apochryphal legends and myths and improvisations that had even then begun to weave themselves about the remarkable and unusual story of the acquaintance, courtship, and marriage of his parents, could only be dissipated by the simple truth, as revealed in their own letters.

      Their love took its place in the spiritual order; it was a bond that made itself the mystic force in their mutual development and achievement; and of which the woman, whose reverence for the Divine Life was the strongest element in her nature, could yet say,—

      “And I, who looked for only God, found thee!”

      Life, as well as Literature, would have been the poorer had not Mr. Barrett Browning so wisely and generously enriched both by the publication of this correspondence.

Not the least among the beautiful expressions that have been made by those spirits so touched to fine issues as to enter into the spiritual loveliness of these letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, is a sonnet by a New England poet, Rev. William Brunton,—a poet who “died too soon,” but whose love for the poetry of the Brownings was as ardent as it was finely appreciative:

      “Oh! dear departed saints of highest song,

       Behind the screen of time your love lay hid,

       Its fair unfoldment was in life forbid—

       As doing such divine affection wrong,

       But now we read with interest deep and strong,

       And lift from off the magic jar the lid,

       And lo! your spirit stands the clouds amid

       And speaks to us in some superior tongue!

       “Devotion such as yours is heavenly-wise,

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