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In a cheap, tarnished frame of gilt, above the four flickering pencils of light, hung a picture of the Virgin. Blagden stared at it in amazement. It had evidently been painted by a master hand. Blagden was no artist; but the face told him that. It was drawn with wonderful appreciation of the woman's sweetness. Perhaps the eyes were what was most wonderful, pitiful, trusting, a little sad perhaps.
Beneath it, on a little stand, lay a slim-bladed, vicious knife, covered with dust. Blagden wonderingly stooped to pick it up and a voice spoke out of the darkness behind him. "I would not touch it, Signor," it said, and Blagden wheeled guiltily. A man was standing in the shadow, almost at his elbow. He was old, the oldest man Blagden had ever seen, and he wore the long brown gown of a monk.
In justice to my brother's memory I must say that this was not written to me with any such presumptuous idea as that of offering his criticism to the poetess. But I showed the letter to Isa Blagden, and at her request left it with her. A day or two later, she writes to me: "Dear friend, I send you back your criticism and Mrs. B.'s rejoinder.
At about the end of July he left Florence with his son; also accompanied by Miss Blagden, who travelled with them as far as Paris. She herself must soon have returned to Italy; since he wrote to her in September on the subject of his wife's provisional disinterment,* in a manner which shows her to have been on the spot.
On touching his side, Sir Charles Blagden found it cold like a corpse, and yet the heat of his body under his tongue was 98 degrees. Hence they concluded that the human body possesses the power of destroying a certain degree of heat when communicated with a certain degree of quickness. This power, however, varies greatly in different media.
He had had notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant to take him by the hand.
The belief conveyed in the letter to Miss Blagden that what proceeds from a genuine inspiration is justified by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion which had been engendered in him by its long neglect, made him slow to anticipate the results of external judgment, even where he was in some degree prepared to endorse them. For his value as a poet, it was best so.
He is increasingly precious to me. . . . Waring came back the other day, after thirty years' absence, the same as ever, nearly. He has been Prime Minister at New Zealand for a year and a half, but gets tired, and returns home with a poem.* * 'Ranolf and Amohia'. This is my last extract from the correspondence with Miss Blagden. Her death closed it altogether within the year.
Browning was recovering from a rather sharp attack of illness, that they took a short holiday, going for a few weeks to Siena, a place which they were again to visit some years later, during the last two summers of Mrs. Browning's life. The letter announcing their arrival is the first in the present collection addressed to Miss Isa Blagden.
The efforts of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the "paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" God knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath.
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