Browning, Robert, 1812-1889; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and
Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning
and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness
and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to
find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." Their
reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel
teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated
into song:
We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul's content
--My angel with me too.
Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically
true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, "elbowing out the purple
tides," and brown houses--"an exfoliation of the rock"--they lived for a
week on fish and cold water. The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with
a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines. Next
year--1849--when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in
Browning's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but
faintly; it was Mrs Browning's part to compel him, for the baby's sake
and hers, to seek his own good. They visited Spezzia and glanced at the
house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards,
and rested in "a sort of eagle's nest" at the highest habitable point of
the Baths of Lucca. Here the baby's great cheeks grew rosier; Browning
gained in spirits; and his wife was able "to climb the hills and help
him to lose himself in the forests." When they wandered at noon except
for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his
waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the
waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air
without its keenness. On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent
courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and
donkeyback--"such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the
stormy light we saw them by." It was certainly a blessed transformation
of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at Wimpole Street. Setting
aside his own happiness, Browning could feel with regard to her and his
deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul,
and in this matter was satisfied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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