Chapter 12 - Page 2

told, nevertheless, in Mr. Sharp's 'Life', that a personal
character no less actual than that of the 'Guardian Angel' has been
claimed for it. The writer, with characteristic delicacy, evades all
discussion of the question; but he concedes a great deal in his manner
of doing so. The poem, he says, conveys a sense of that necessary
isolation of the individual soul which resists the fusing power of
the deepest love; and its meaning cannot be personally--because it is
universally--true. I do not think Mr. Browning meant to emphasize this
aspect of the mystery of individual life, though the poem, in a certain
sense, expresses it. We have no reason to believe that he ever accepted
it as constant; and in no case could he have intended to refer its
conditions to himself. He was often isolated by the processes of his
mind; but there was in him no barrier to that larger emotional sympathy
which we think of as sympathy of the soul. If this poem were true, 'One
Word More' would be false, quite otherwise than in that approach to
exaggeration which is incidental to the poetic form. The true keynote
of 'Two in the Campagna' is the pain of perpetual change, and of the
conscious, though unexplained, predestination to it. Mr. Browning could
have still less in common with such a state, since one of the qualities
for which he was most conspicuous was the enormous power of anchorage
which his affections possessed. Only length of time and variety of
experience could fully test this power or fully display it; but the
signs of it had not been absent from even his earliest life. He loved
fewer people in youth than in advancing age: nature and circumstance
combined to widen the range, and vary the character of his human
interests; but where once love or friendship had struck a root, only a
moral convulsion could avail to dislodge it. I make no deduction from
this statement when I admit that the last and most emphatic words of the
poem in question,

Only I discern--
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn,

did probably come from the poet's heart, as they also found a deep echo
in that of his wife, who much loved them.

From London they returned to Paris for the winter of 1855-6. The younger
of the Kemble sisters, Mrs. Sartoris, was also there with her family;
and the pleasant meetings of the Campagna renewed themselves for Mr.
Browning, though in a different form. He was also, with his sister,
a constant visitor at Lady Elgin's. Both they and Mrs. Browning were
greatly attached to her, and she warmly reciprocated the feeling. As Mr.
Locker's letter has told us, Mr. Browning was in the habit of reading
poetry to her, and when his sister had to announce his arrival from
Italy or England, she