The Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Robert Browning. Robert Browning

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      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 fault was altogether mine, for my husband, to please me, took rooms with which I was not pleased for three days, through the absence of sunshine. The consequence was that we had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go, ourselves, but you can scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in Italy. So away we came into the blaze of him into the Piazza Pitti; precisely opposite the Grand Duke’s palace; I with my remorse, and poor Robert without a single reproach. Any other man, a little lower than the angels, would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing,—but as for his being angry with me for any cause except not eating enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way first.”

      Mrs. Browning’s dog, Flush, was a member of the household not to be ignored, and her one source of consolation, in being turned away from the Vallombrosa summer, lay in the fact that “Flush hated it,” and was frightened by the vast and somber pine forests. “Flush likes civilized life,” said Mrs. Browning laughingly, “and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as abound in Florence.”

      So now they bestowed themselves in “rooms yellow with sunshine from morning till night,” in Casa Guidi, where, “for good omen,” they looked down on the old gray church of San Felice. There was a large, square anteroom, where the piano was placed, with one large picture, picked up in an obscure street in Florence; and a little dining-room, whose walls were covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and of Robert Browning; a long, narrow room, wraith-like with plaster casts СКАЧАТЬ