66 I offer it for no more than it is worth and indeed grown-up troubles too, besides with homage to you both. being called by it, on so many other occaNevertheless, I must not forget to add sions, both private and public, I could not that the poem is a wonderful biographico-help being almost personally startled now conversational poem. Wordsworth has and then by the piteousness of the above written a biographical poem, which I am designation, by the remonstrative “Mister ashamed to say I have not yet read; but Leighs," a man like Leigh," "Smith between you and me, Robert Browning, who talks Leigh's subjects," etc. Having growing bold again on the strength of no other pretentions, however, wrong or my convictions, I dare affirm that Words- right, to be a Leigh in the poem, never worth, veritable poet as he is, is barren | having thought that my fellow-creatures and prosaic by the side of the ever exu- were to be "rescued by half means withberant poetry of this book; and as to dia- out the inner life," much less having logue, out of the pale of the drama, and But to say no more about myself, thanks that only of the finest kinds, I know of and thanks again for the whole book, and none like it; for the wit and satire for the new poems in the other books, of dialogues in Pope and Churchill are just resumers of the rights in the Portuthings of another and lower form, be- guese sonnets, the appatriation of which sides being nothing nigh so long; so that (what is the proper word?) I always this poem is unique as a conversational grudged them, though it was a very natupoem, as well as being the production of ral refuge from the misapprehensions of the greatest poetess the world ever saw, the ignoble. With the other contents of with none but great poets to compare those three precious volumes I shall make with her. How did she contrive it, the myself reacquainted and more intimate. little black-eyed playful thing (for I can Some of them remind me - as a word did see plainly that she omits no proper qual- also which you let fall here one dayity in her universality), pretending to be that I once, I believe, said something in no more than other women and wives, yet allusion to them about “morbidity.” having such a great big creation of things withdraw the term utterly, not because in all to herself? apparently similar treatment of certain points of faith I should not believe it ap plicable to most persons, but because in our great English poetess I can recognize no excesses of sensibility incompatible with a mind and understanding healthily strong; or rather I cannot but recognize the health and strength notwithstanding them, and discern the unbigoted and all reconciling conclusions of prospective and heavenly right-reason and justice in which they finally repose. Perhaps you know and I sometimes think you do, from your great expressions of good-will towards me in the inscription in your books (for we may love and reverence a man for his good intentions however much we may differ in kind or degree with his opinions) Nor must I omit to thank her for so small a thing as a title - a great thing too, like a master's note or two of prelude on an instrument; "Aurora Leigh," -it sounds to me like the blowing of the air of a great golden dawn upon a lily; strength sweetness (fill up that gap for me, please, for my cheeks are burning) [Thursday evening] for the poor little word "Leigh" is a gentle word, too, and a soft-just the half of the word "lily" (lee-lee), and I thank her, in the names of all who are called by it, for the honor it has received at her hands. The late Lord Leigh, a great lover of poetry, after whose father I was christened, would have been charmed by it, and so, I believe, will his son; though where she got the notion of its being particularly stately and aristocratic, I do not know, albeit "Stoneleigh Abbey" has a fine sound; and Stanley (Staneleigh), the same word provincialized, is an ancient great name, half made of it- Ley, Lee, Lea, Legh, and Leigh being all forms, you know, of the same word; meaning, some say, a meadow, others a common, others an uncultivated plain, and some, I believe, a green by the water's side. As to me, having grown up in the name, and been used to be pitied as poor Leigh" for my juvenile 66 I that you have seen a book of mine called "The Religion of the Heart." I forget exactly what was going to say here; but it is no matter. Very likely you will be able to supply from your own thoughts what was rising in mine. I began the preceding page and a few lines before it on this present Friday morning. You must not suppose I am in the habit of writing my letters in this manner, though I am apt to do so when they grow long and I have other things to write in the course of the day. My only objections to Mrs. Browning's poetry at any time—very seldom in her latest chiefly, if I remember, in "Casa Guidi Windows' are now and then a word too insignificant at the end of her blank verses (if, indeed, it does not add to the general look of strength by its carelessness and freedom), and a giving way to an excess of thought and imagery, amounting sometimes to an apparent irrelevancy into which she is tempted by her facility of rhyming as well as thinking, and which, as in Keats's early poem "Endymion," forces a sense of the rhymes upon you for their own sakes, by very reason of the disrespect felt for their services, the air of indifference with which they are treated, and the arbitrary uses to which they are put. The same objection often applies to rhymes in Dante, whatever some critics may say to the contrary, and notwithstanding his own assertion (according to his sons) that a rhyme never put him out." Very likely it did not, partly because he was a great poet and had images at will, and partly because he willed to think it didn't. For his will was greater even than his great poetry; otherwise he never would have written that truly Infernal poem, or rather poems, of his (for his Heaven is often as Infernal as his Hell), in which he goes "dealing damnation round the land" and cutting up his antagonists (often, very likely, better men than himself), and then calls his work sacro, and tells us it made him out of pure sense of its sacredness and grandeur, I suppose macro, chusing to forget the violence and bad passions he mixed up with it. I am aware that there are theories and philosophies, and excuses and charities, and a fine, deep sense at bottom of them all, that can reconcile these and all other such perplexities by the way, and for some great and final good, and I pretend to gainsay none of them; nay, I go along with them all; but then the evil must be shared and shared alike, and Dante's portion of it not blinked for the sake even of his genius; no, nor of his tenderness; which I admit and marvel at, as I do at his ferocity; wondering that he could have so much of the without its producing misgivings one may come "), and on the very same grounds that I should not like to see a woman fighting (though I allow that the illustration is an extreme one, and in the case of our poetess ludicrous if it should not rather be termed irreverent, and not to be fancied), I do not like to find her advocating war. Wars, I allow, must sometimes be fought, till men arrive at man's estate, and nations must rise against oppression; but I would rather have the women among them saying to the warriors, "Come in here and be healed," than "Go forth and kill." The other objection, or rather doubt, refers to a circumstance to which the critics have demurred, I believe, in the new poem (which mention of the critics reminds me, by the way, that I hoped I should myself have been the first person to notice the poem, and for that purpose, among others, proposed to a new periodical work, which has lately been set up under good promise, to commence a series of articles in it under the title of "Notes of a Reader; " but though the editors accepted another article from me, and expressed a wish that I should co-operate with them, they objected to these). The circumstance in question cannot have been objected to by any very high-minded or thoughtful reader, upon those ordinary grounds, the very refinements of which are coarse. [Saturday morning.] Such readers on the contrary might consider it, with the writer, the best that could be found, if not for the happier purposes of the story, yet for the very triumph and ascendency of the highest points of refinement and conscious worth over profoundest insult, the one excess being necessary to the proof of the other. But unfortunately such readers are very rare even in "the highest circles;" and so far the book may suffer drawback, though the poetry, and the human interest too, must surely in the long run carry all before it. Some of my favorite passages (if you will not think I am making my opinion of too much importance) are the one at p. 2, beginning "Oh my father's hand," etc. (words which I never read without tears), down to "not overjoyous truly;' "She stood straight and calm" (p. 10) down to But I am terribly digressing. "eat berries;" ""We get no good" (p. 26) Oh, there are one or two other objec- down to " good from a book; "O detions which I had forgotten. One is that light" (p. 33) to "How those gods look!" whatever may be said for the good which (I can conceive no poet that ever_lived it might assist in furthering (for we "must writing finer poetry than that); "Being not do evil," you know, even "that good | observed" (p. 74) to "They might say about the other. "" me; to Wednesday Morning. I have been called off from my letter for these three days by the necessity of attending to my poor wife, who has had another attack of illness worse than the last. The peril of it has now abated, and we begin again to cheer up; although these repeated attacks, at her time of life, and after so many years' confinement to her room, are very alarming. something" (horrible intensity of insipid | which you allude when you express "rev forbiddingness!); the paragraph begin-erence" for anything in my nature. (I ning" Day and night" at p. 98; that at have said this before!) I also sometimes p. 1or beginning A lady called upon fear you have, or may, lest you should "Lady Waldemar's "love" and the differ with it more than I could wish. answer to it, pp. 105 and 6; the dreadful But as you and your fellow-worker touch passage at p. 122, "Father, mother, so often on points common to such aspirahome," etc.; the hospital, p. 128; "Dear tions as the title of the book implies, it Marian " (p. 139) to "backward on re- was chiefly on those points that I intended pose; " "I should have thought" (p. 153) to ask you both to talk to me on that un"diamonds almost; "Every fortunate night when age and infirmity age" (p. 187) to "apprehended near; ""I lost me the conversation which I had answered slow" (215) to " everybody's most longed for since I lost Shelley. morals;" the infant, p. 250 and 51 (though here I recollect an objection which oc curred to me, I don't know whether physi ologically just, though it seems as if it ought to be so an ante-natal objection, as to whether such a heavenly perfection of little earth could or ought to be born of such a horror); "O crooked world" (p. 278) to "most devilish when respectable;"" Carrington, be glad," etc. (p. 303), down to "first similitude." Oh, but I've another objection, now I see it marked again, which is at p. 343, where the heroine says that being more wise" means being "sadder." I am ashamed, it is true, to remind Mrs. Browning that wisdom is here confounded - is it not?with knowledge, and that knowledge is not at all wisdom; for nobody must know it better than she; and Coleridge who knew it as well has yet said the same thing in his "Ancient Mariner." Wisdom, you know, is the optimization of knowledge, the turning it to its best and therefore least sad account. But to conclude these favorites: page 378 brings me to "Her broad wild woodland eyes down to "spoke out again; " then the divine, self-reconciling, all reconciling confession of love beginning "But I love you, sir" (p. 390), and ending at "word or kiss" (p. 394); then the "heart's sweet scripture" (same page) to "lift a constant aspect; " then, p. 398, "I flung closer to his breast," etc.; and lastly, the evangile (though I construe it, perhaps, not so much after the writer's interpretation, or not quite literally so much, as after my own), beginning "The world's old" (p. 402) and ending "He shall make all new." A thousand thanks for them all and for almost every bit of all the rest; perhaps I should say every bit, if I understood it exactly as it was meant. I do not know whether you have seen a book of mine called "The Religion of the Heart." I sometimes think you have, and that it is my good intentions in it to Being able again to think of something else, and returning to my letter, I find that my fright has delivered me from a worry that was haunting me; for you must know that I am apt to feel troubles, both warrantable and unwarrantable, with a sort of monomania; till the thought being broken into, for however short a time, I know that all will be right again; and the hope of this interruption, which long experience has given me, helps it to come, and thus always enables me to look for it, sooner or later, be it from nothing but some new trouble, which is pretty sure to be the case; at least, such it has been for a good many years past. I do not complain. I have had a great many enjoyments in the course of my life and a profusion of animal spirits; and I have often thought that had I not had an unusual portion of troubles, my lot as a fellowcreature would have been unfair and far beyond my deserts. They have taken care, however, to see fair play, leaving me, I hope, upon the whole, a case for compensation in some other sphere. Did it ever strike you how frightful it would be (Hibernice) to be wholly prosperous and happy? happy all your life? I think or fancy it would have made me look upon myself as a sort of outcast from the general lot and its claims - doomed to perish wholly and be put out, as a thing completed and done with, -never to know or enjoy anything further, never to see again faces that we have lost. The incompleteness argued against us all here is surely our claim hereafter, incompleteness of joy, incompleteness of knowledge, incompleteness of nature. I think God means to round all these things in human want and aspiration, just as he rounds orbs or oranges. He does not incomplete anything else. Why should he leave us poor and anxious imperfections incomplete? The argument, thus put, appears to me, you must know, to complete the argument of compensation. This is what the angels see when they say, "Sweet," in the beautiful sonnet beginning, Experience, like a pale musician, holds a lovely beginning, albeit I thought when dents in versification, and poets who wrote in loftier strains, to try to write it as well, and see how difficult it was. You know how a poet so rare as Tennyson failed in it, in his verses on the Duke of Wellington. This omission I can still take an opportunity of supplying, as far as itself goes, and shall; but when I saw the name of John Kenyon, etc., in the Times obituary, I said to myself, "Ah, Kenyon is gone; and I can now never let him know how pleased I was, and how much I felt in common with his books." [Here follows an erased passage.] Sunday Morning. I have been forced to leave off my letI read it, "That's what I do," and so far ter again, and for thus long, partly by the I myself am like the musician thus musi-poor sick-room, and partly by the necescally graced. 66 But what if you should have no patience with patience in this long letter? I believe am putting off the account of my "" worry for very shame of it; and yet I must tell it you, in order to vindicate myself from what may (possibly) have seemed an insensibility or unthankfulness on my part towards praise from Mr. Kenyon and his own merits besides. Probably neither he nor his friends thought anything of the matter, especially as I knew very little of him personally; having but once dined with him at his invitation, or perhaps Landor's suggestion of it (who was with us) many years ago; and seen him but once, long afterwards, for a few minutes at Mr. Thackeray's. But I knew well, and think I must have said what I thought of his "Rhymed Plea for Tolerance," surely did if I had any public journal in my editorship at the time, and you may imagine how a man of my opinions and my regard for the old heroic couplet must have liked it. But in 1849 he left his "Day of Tivoli" at my door, and in this "Day of Tivoli" was a note, praising, to my extreme gratification, one of the very few passages of mine in verse which seemed to me to be allied to poetry of the inner sort; and I not only fear that I never wrote to thank him for this (doubtless, if so, out of my foolish habit of delaying to write anything till I could write much), but, as if from the very fact of his lying so close to me in thought and intention (a circumstance that has happened to me before), overlooked the opportunity of mentioning him as the almost solitary instance of a graceful and facile employer of the heroic couplet since it went out of fashion, and of asking stu sity of answering the letters of some friends and others. Excuse the above vile scoring out. Owing to some preposterous yet most worrying misconceptions of me a few years ago, the supposed intender of which expressed to me his "deep sorrow "for having inadvertently given rise to them, I happen to be what I never dreamt of the necessity of becoming, one of the most jealous of men for the reputation of my personal delicacy in money matters; and there are points sometimes on which such a man cannot go on talking of himself, even to those who would be incapable of misconceiving him. Suffice to add to what I have said of Mr. Kenyon, that when I saw his name a second time in the newspapers, I said to myself, "At all events, a man who could enjoy and indulge his tastes so much as he did in life, and who could bestow so much happiness when he died, may well have been able to dispense with a few words from me." Wednesday (another Wednesday!). Since writing the above I have read the article on "Aurora Leigh" (my pen feels a pleasure in writing those two words) in Blackwood's Magazine (my old enemy during the Tory wars, and subsequently regretful friend, - -a common lot of mine, and one of the melancholy prides of my life). Like almost all Blackwood's articles there is a certain amount of strength and acuteness in it; but the writer's understanding is not of a measure to take the height of the poetess's; and after an attentive perusal I can remember no objection in it worth notice except that to Marian's accomplished style of language, which a great nature, however, and my word is the greatest compliment you can pay to your affectionate friend, LEIGH HUNT. P.S. "More last words!" I find that I must deprive Mrs. Jago of another bit of her space; but the page is of a good size, and I hope she can write as small as myself, and so retain space enough. It is to say a word respecting the lock of Milton's hair. Mrs. Jago asked me the other day, very naturally, about its authentical thought-forcing sorrows might have tended to produce; though what these could not complete must be laid perhaps to a certain account common to the poetess's great family ancestor Shakespeare (for she certainly is of his blood). His only departure, you know, from nature consists in his tendency to make his characters too indiscriminately talk as well as himself. As to the critic's writing out her verse like prose, and then pretending it is not poetry (a process formidable, I own, to too much of what is called poetry, and Iness; and this has made me consider that have trembled to see it applied to myself, even under no disparaging announcement), he might as well have written out a symphony of Beethoven's without the bars, and then pretended it was not music. you and Mrs. Browning might as naturally, indeed still more so, as you were so good as to accept my rude bit of pull from it, be glad to be told what I told her. The evidence simply amounts to this; though I accepted it, as I think you will do, with a trusting as well as a willing faith. The lock was given me, together with those of Dr. Johnson and Swift, by the late Dr. Batty, the physician, a man of excellent character, to whom I was to bequeath them back if he survived me, which he has not done. To Dr. Batty the three locks were given by Hoole, the translator of Tasso, etc., and Hoole, though a bad translator, was a very honest man. And to Hoole they were given by Dr. Johnson himself, whose scrupulous veracity as to matters of fact is well known. I forget at this distance of time what Batty further said to me on the sub I must close at last! - my long letter, for I have told Mrs. Jago, who offered to post it for me, that it would very cer tainly be ready to go off to-day (having twice told her nearly as much before,) and I have added that as there is nothing in it which I could not have said in the presence of you and Mrs. Browning she might read it, if she would like to do so; which she says she would. I would fain show her what respect I can, and give her any little entertainment in my power; for she has been extremely kind to Mrs. Hunt, visiting her often, and giving her personal and I may say even professional, help under the like kind advice of Mr. Jago, who,ject, for it was a long while ago, and I was though he cannot go out, comes to us in spirit. But I told her, also, that I would leave her room enough to answer a letter which she has received from Mrs. Browning, and in which best remembrances, she tells me, are sent to me; for which hearty thanks. Don't fancy that I am going to tax your corresponding faculties with another such epistolary pamphlet as this! I have been led into it by degrees and by particular circumstances, and I do not pretend to apologize for it; for besides taking some interest in it on its own account, I know how welcome letters of almost any kind from their native country are to people abroad. I shall write letters in future of reasonable dimensions, if you encourage me with a few words in answer to them, or in notice of them, and I do not in the least expect that you should take any greater notice of this, or wish that you should say anything of one superfluous point in it; and people like you will believe me when I add, that to take me at in a confusion of pleasure at the moment; but my impression is that the locks of Milton and Swift were given to Johnson while he was writing the " Lives of the Poets," and that Milton's was one, or part of one, which had been at the back of a miniature of the poet belonging to Addison. Addison, you know, personally knew and took an interest in the welfare of Milton's youngest surviving daughter, Deborah. I do not find any mention of him among the possessors of portraits of Milton, and it does not seem likely that the miniature and the lock would become divorced. Yet I think you will agree with me that there is strong presumptive evidence in these three descents of the belief on the part of true and honorable men, one of whom asks me to bequeath the lock back to him in case I died first; nor do I myself feel the least doubt of the lock, short of positive certainty. I have driven Mrs. Jago up into a corner indeed. I am afraid she must take refuge in a separate sheet. |