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

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СКАЧАТЬ Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where Byron had lived, was not far away, on the banks of the Arno. They quite preferred the Duomo and the Campo Santo to social festivities, and Professor Ferrucci offered them all the hospitalities of the University library. They had an apartment of four rooms, “matted and carpeted,” coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner at the Trattoria, “thrushes and chianti with a marvelous cheapness, no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet Elijah, or the lilies of the field, took as little thought for their dining,” writes Mrs. Browning, “and it exactly suits us. At nine we have our supper of roast chestnuts and grapes.... My head goes round sometimes. I was never happy before in my life.... And when I am so good as to let myself be carried up-stairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my duty is considered done to a perfection worthy all adoration.... Mrs. Jameson and Geraldine are staying in the hotel, and we manage to see them every day; so good and true and affectionate she is, and so much we shall miss her when she goes.... Our present residence we have taken for six months, but we have dreams, and we discuss them like soothsayers over the evening grapes and chestnuts.”

That in London Mrs. Jameson, on her first call on Miss Barrett, should have so winningly insisted on being admitted to her room as to be successful, almost to Miss Barrett’s own surprise, seems, when seen in connection with the way in which Fate was to throw them together afterward, in Italy, to have been one of those “foreordained” happenings of life.

      They heard a musical mass for the dead in the Campo Santo; they walked under orange trees with golden fruit hanging above their heads; they took drives to the foot of the mountains, and watched the reflections in the little lake of Ascuno. Mrs. Browning, from her windows, could see the cathedral summit glitter whitely, between the blue sky and its own yellow marble walls. Beautiful and tender letters came to them both from Mr. Kenyon, and they heard that Carlyle had said that he hoped more from Robert Browning, for the people of England, than from any other living English writer. All of these things entered into the very fiber of their Pisan days. Pisa seemed to her a beautiful town,—it could not be less, she felt, with Arno and its palaces, and it was to her full of repose, but not desolate. Meantime, Mr. Browning was preparing for a new edition of his collected poems.

      Curiously, all the biographers of Robert Browning have recorded that it was during this sojourn in Pisa that the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” were first made known to him. Dr. Dowden quotes the story as given by Mr. Edmund Gosse, and Mr. Gosse cites Browning himself as his authority. Yet there was some mistake, as the Sonnets were not seen by Mr. Browning till some time later.

      Robert Barrett Browning, in Florence, in the spring of 1910, in reply to a question asked by the writer of this book in regard to the accuracy of this impression, replied that both Mr. Gosse and Dr. Dowden were mistaken; as his mother did not show these “Sonnets” to his father until the summer of 1849, when they were at Bagni di Lucca. Mr. Gosse must in some way have mistaken Mr. Browning’s words, and the error has perpetuated itself through every successive biography of the poet.

The first home of the Brownings in Florence was in an apartment near Santa Maria Novella, where the Italian sunshine burned fiercely, and where Mrs. Browning exclaimed that she began to comprehend the possibility of St. Lawrence’s ecstasies on the gridiron. “Yet there have been cool intermissions,” she wrote, “and as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as we can step out of the window on a balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon watermelons, and iced water, and figs, and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with angelic patience.”

There was a five days’ interlude at Vallombrosa, which the poets vainly entreated the monks to prolong to two months, but the brethren would have none of the presence of two women,—Mrs. Browning and her maid, Wilson. So they perforce left these fascinating hills, “a sea of hills looking alive among the clouds.” Still further up above the monastery was the old Hermitage now transformed into a hotel. It was here that Migliorotti passed many years, asserting that he could only think of it as Paradise, and thus it came to be known as Paradisino, the name it still bears. Far below in a dim distance lies Florence, with her domes and towers on which the sunshine glitters, or the white moonlight of the Val d’Arno shines; and on every hand are the deep valleys and crevasses, the Val di Sieve, the Val di Casentino, and the height of San Miniato in Alpe. Castles and convents, or their ruins, abound; and here Dante passed, and there St. Benedict, and again is the path still holy with the footsteps of St. Francis. The murmuring springs that feed the Arno are heard in the hills; and the vast solitudes of the wood, with their ruined chapels and shrines, made this sojourn to the Brownings something to be treasured in memory forever. They even wandered to that beautiful old fifteenth-century church, Santa Maria delle Grazie Vallombrosella, “a daughter of the monastery of Vallombrosa,” where were works of Robbia, and saw the blue hills rise out of the green forests in their infinite expanse.

      Old Monastery at Vallombrosa

      “And Vallombrosa we two went to see Last June beloved companion...”

      Casa Guidi Windows.

      When they fared forth for Vallombrosa, it was at four o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning being all eagerness and enthusiasm for this matutinal pilgrimage. Reaching Pelago, their route wound for five miles along a “via non rotabile,” through the most enchanting scenery, to Pontassieve.

      “Oh! such mountains,” wrote Mrs. Browning of this never-to-be-forgotten journey, “as if the whole world were alive with mountains—such ravines—black in spite of flashing waters in them—such woods and rocks—traveled in basket sledges drawn by four white oxen—Wilson and I and the luggage—and Robert riding step by step. We were four hours doing the five miles, so you may fancy what rough work it was. Whether I was most tired or charmed was a tug between body and soul.

      “The worst was that,” she continued, “there being a new abbot at the monastery—an austere man, jealous of his sanctity and the approach of women—our letter, and Robert’s eloquence to boot, did nothing for us, and we were ingloriously and ignominiously expelled at the end of five days.”

      While the Brownings were in Vallombrosa Arnould wrote to Alfred Domett:

      “Browning is spending a luxurious year in Italy—is, at this present writing, with his poetess bride dwelling in some hermit hut in Vallombrosa, where the Etruscan shades high overarched embower. He never fails to ask pressingly about you, and I give him all your messages. I would to God he would purge his style of obscurities,—that the wide world would, and the gay world and even the less illuminated part of the thinking world, know his greatness even as we do. I find myself reading ‘Paracelsus’ and the ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ more often than anything else in verse.”

They descended, perforce, into Florence again, burning sunshine and all, the abbot of the monastery having someway confounded their pleadings with the temptation of St. Anthony, as something to be as heroically resisted. They set up their household gods in the shades of the Via delle Belle Donne, near the Duomo, where dinners, “unordered,” Mrs. Browning said, “come through the streets, and spread themselves on our table, as hot as if we had smelt cutlets hours before.” She found Florence “unspeakably beautiful,” both by grace of nature and of art, but they planned to go to Rome in the early autumn, taking an apartment “over the Tarpeian rock.” Later this plan was relinquished, and with an apartment on their hands for six months they yet abandoned it, for want of sunshine, and removed to Casa Guidi.

      “Think what we have done,” wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford; “taken two houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, pre-signing the contract. You will set it down to excellent poet’s work in the way of domestic economy, but the СКАЧАТЬ