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Updated: May 21, 2025
During the latter part of his life, he divided most of his time between London and Italy. When he died, in 1889, he was living with his son, Robert Barrett Browning, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice. Over his grave in Westminster Abbey was chanted Mrs. Browning's touching lyric: "He giveth his belovèd, sleep." Dramatic Monologues. Browning was a poet of great productivity.
This day week, at half-past four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning died. A great invalid from girlhood, owing to an unfortunate accident, Mrs. Browning's life was a prolonged combat with disease thereby engendered; and had not God given her extraordinary vitality of spirit, the frail body could never have borne up against the suffering to which it was doomed.
But the poem is psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy except as all beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his collected poems that he "acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance," shows how fully he recognized this. In 'Paracelsus, his next long poem, published some two years later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt.
Browning to Vallombrosa, and the one incident most clearly remembered is that of Browning's seating himself at the organ in the chapel, and playing some Gregorian chant, perhaps, or hymn of Pergolesi's.
Scrymgeour, I want to impress upon the reader, was, like myself, the sort of a man who, if asked whether he did not think "In Memoriam" Mr. Browning's greatest poem, would say Yes, as the easiest way of ending the conversation. Obviously he would save himself trouble by simply annexing the tin. He seized it and rowed off.
But the busts returned to their places, and Mrs Browning's faith in Napoleon sprang up anew; it was not he who was the criminal; the selfish powers of Europe had "forced his hand" and "truncated his great intentions." She rejoiced in the magnificent spectacle of dignity and calm presented by the people of Italy.
There was another and more striking peculiarity in Mr. Browning's attitude towards his works: his constant conviction that the latest must be the best, because the outcome of the fullest mental experience, and of the longest practice in his art.
A writer in the New Review said recently that of all the poets he remembered, only Shakespeare and Browning never drew a prig. It is this complete absence of the false note that gives to certain of Browning's poems the finality which is felt in all consummate works of art, great and small; the sense that they convey, if not the last word, at least the last necessary word, on their subject.
It is now known that Signor Crispi would have appealed to Parliament to rescind the exclusion from the Florentine cemetery, if the motive for doing so had been less promptly removed. Mr. Browning's own country had indeed opened a way for the reunion of the husband and wife.
And this is not the sense in which motive in art is currently belittled. It is rather the suggestion of Mrs. Browning's lines: "Better far Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means Than a sublime art frivolously." Nothing could be more misleading than to fancy Barye a kind of modern Cellini. Less than any sculptor of modern times is he a decorative artist.
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