[In this review, Chorley praises Browning's style and intent but claims that the plot of Aurora Leigh is "in its argument unnatural, and in its form infelicitous."]

Our best living English poetess—our greatest English poetess of any time—has essayed in Aurora Leigh to blend the epic with the didactic novel. The medium in which the story floats is that impassioned language—spotted and flowered with the imagery suggested by fancy or stored up by learning,—which has given the verse of Mrs. Browning a more fiery acceptance from the young and spiritual, and her name a higher renown than any woman has heretofore gained.

We dwell on the sex of the author of Aurora Leigh in no disrespectful spirit of comparison, but simply because to overlook it is rendered impossible by the poetess herself. Aurora Leigh, into which she says "have entered her highest convictions upon Life and Art," is her contribution to the chorus of protest and mutual exhortation, which Woman is now raising, in hope of gaining the due place and sympathy which, it is held, have been denied to her since the days when Man was created, the first of the pair in Eden. Who can quarrel with the intent? Who would silence any struggle made by those who fancy themselves desolate, oppressed, undervalued,—to unlock the prison-doors,—to melt the heart of injustice? Mrs. Browning is never unwomanly in her passionate pleadings for women: unwomanly she could not be, after having wrought out that beautiful and tender conception of Eve, which gives such peculiar grace to her 'Drama of Exile.' Her Confession (for like all works of its class, Aurora Leigh has in it a tone of confession,) amounts to an admission of failure: its conclusion is that indicated from another point of view by Mrs. Hemans, in her 'Properzia Rossi.' The moral is the insufficiency of Fame and Ambition, be either ever so generous, to make up for the absence of Love:—a class-vindication wound up by an appeal against class-separation. Thus, as in all the works of its kind, which women have so freely poured out from their full hearts during late years, we see the agony more clearly than the remedy. We are shown, at first, restlessness disdaining quiet; till, fevered and forlorn, as time and grief do their work, the restless heart ends in courting the very repose it so scorned when first tendered. But while Truth closes the tale, in its progress Imagination has been strained beyond permissible freedom. In brief, we regret to declare that Mrs. Browning's longest and most matured effort, jewelled though it be with rich thought and rare fancies, is in its argument unnatural, and in its form infelicitous.

Aurora Leigh is a born poetess, the child of an English father and an Italian mother,—on the father's side connected with wealth and old name. She is sent over to England, when an orphan, to be cared for and educated by a maiden aunt,—that well-worn spectral apparition of convention in buckram, without which no tale of woman's aspirings, it seems, can be told. Such persons, whose narrow capacities bring on limited views of duty, have been long abused; but their time, it appears, has not yet come. Meanwhile, they serve their turn with those who make fantastic panoramas of life. Without such aunts (grim substitute for the stepmother of ancient romance!) no woman of genius could be cradled into poetry through wrong; and Mrs. Browning only adopts a convention in denouncing convention. Aurora is wooed by her cousin, Romney Leigh, a rich, high-hearted philanthropist, to whom her heart is not disinclined. But he is too big in the consciousness of his own philanthropy; and waywardly she conceives the idea that she is asked to become his wife in a strain of persuasion unworthy the ear of a great and gifted woman,—that she is sought from low motives, (as, indeed, are most wives,) and that her career, as an unassisted and independent woman of genius, will be brighter if she retains her heart in her own keeping. Accordingly Aurora rejects Romney as a husband,—spurns his generous attempts to smooth the path of life for her by tendering a share of the family fortune. Putting on poverty as a singing robe, she adopts authorship in London, becomes famous and admired, and dwells like a star apart. Foiled of his object, Romney Leigh embraces his plans of social reforms with an earnestness, in which there is the intoxication of a wounded spirit as much as the conviction of one called to the priest's office. He opens a phalanstery, affects only the society of the sick, sorrowful, or guilty, and, willing to attest his superiority to class prejudice by the most solemn act a man can do, prepares to marry one Marian Erle, a milliner's apprentice,—who is humble, ignorant, but as devoted and as noble in her way as either Romney or Aurora. The latter (in spite of her having begun to discover that she had made a mistake in rejecting her cousin, and in fancying that fame could supply the place of love) seeks out Marian. The girl's story is powerfully told, but is unreal in the poetry and holiness of nature it reveals in one nurtured, tortured, and beset as she has been. Such resistance as hers must have hardened the victim in the struggle,—whereas Marian is soft as a briar-rose, besides being pure as the dew-bead on it. Aurora welcomes and embraces her with enthusiastic devotion. Not so other of Romney's female friends. A wicked influence is at work against the poor sempstress:—a woman of fashion, one Lady Waldemar, who has fallen in love with Romney Leigh, (and for his sake, with Christian socialism) so practises upon Marian, that on the appointed wedding-day, when St. Giles and St. James are bidden to church to see the Socialist gentleman married (a parade somewhat insolent in its condescension), the bride is not forthcoming, but in her place a mysterious letter. Instead of the bridal revel, where Rank and Rags were to sit at the same board, there is a brawl in the church:—Marian is gone—no one knows whither.

As years roll on, Aurora's authorship prospers. She is praised in the reviews—she is a lion in London soirées; and from not any of the most common-place and frivolous of these transactions, with all their train of prosaic and poverty-stricken adjuncts, does our artist shrink as a subject for art. Nevertheless, Aurora finds out that she is alone in spirit after all; and more stung than she cares to own, by a rumour in the coteries that Cousin Romney is about to marry this evil Lady Waldemar, she resolves to give up England for a time, and go home to Italy. On her way—in Paris—she lights on Marian, now the unwedded mother of a beautiful boy, and learns from her the sequel to her story: how Lady Waldemar had not only detached her from the noble gentleman who would have married her; had not only, as we have seen, prevailed on her to give up Cousin Romney; but, under pretext of sending her out to the Colonies, had allowed her to fall into the hands of an infamous woman, by whom Marian—herself innocent—was forced into ruin. In this hideous page of the romance Mrs. Browning puts forth all her power. Aurora at once takes the outraged Marian to her heart, carries her off with her child to Italy, and writes home her disclosure of Lady Waldemar's machinations—in order that it may reach Romney. After them, in due course of time, he arrives. By the old trick, well worn in novels and plays, Aurora receives him, under the misapprehension that he is Lady Waldemar's husband; but he presently assures her that, so far from being so, he has come to Italy still to marry Marian, and to adopt the child of violence and misery as his own. Once more, however, and this time unprompted by all except her own nature, Marian refuses to marry Romney;—assuring him that she does not love him now; that indeed she never did love him as he deserved to be loved; that she will live for her child, and no creature else: and it is in this crisis that Aurora and Romney at last come to an understanding. The artist has found the hollowness of Art to fill and to satisfy; and the philanthropist's experiences are drearier still. He has been rewarded for his care for the vile and the humble by having his father's house burnt over his head—in the catastrophe having lost his sight, it is hinted, owing to the vengeance of Marian's reprobate father.

Such is a brief sketch of the argument of Aurora Leigh; and not a few who read it will be tempted to say, This looks not like a poem, but a novel, belonging to the period which has produced 'Ruth,' and 'Villette,' and 'The Blithedale Romance.' We will not stop to ask how far the invention be true to life and to art; since the form of its presentment may be pleaded in excuse for anything unreal in character, false in sentiment, or exaggerated in incident, which exists in the plot and the persons working it out. But what are we to say if we waive purpose—if we do not discuss the wisdom of the form selected (large concessions these, yet due to one so gifted and so passionately in earnest as Mrs. Browning)—if we treat Aurora Leigh as a poetical romance? Simply, that we have no experience of such a mingling of what is precious with what is mean—of the voice of clarion and the lyric cadence of harp with the cracked school-room spinet—of tears and small-talk—of eloquent apostrophe and adust speculation—of the grandeur of passion and the pettiness of modes and manners—as we find in these nine books of blank verse. Milton's organ is put by Mrs. Browning to play polkas in May-Fair drawing-rooms, and fitted out by her with its Æsthetic Review stop, which drones out lengths and strains of a strange quality. But it yields, too, beneath her fingers those glorious chords and melodies, which (musicians have fancied) are the real occupation and utterance of that instrument. Is this severe? Let any one that thinks so take the following commencement of the scene in the church at Romney's interrupted wedding as a passage from a poem:

We waited. It was early: there was time
For greeting, and the morning's compliment;
And gradually a ripple of women's talk
Arose and fell, and tossed about a spray
Of English ss, soft as a silent hush,
And, notwithstanding, quite as audible
As louder phrases thrown out by the men.
—"Yes, really, if we've need to wait in church,
We've need to talk there."—"She? 'Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue—not purple! that's the dowager."
—"She looks as young."—"She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You'd call Miss Norris modest."—"You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back.
Up at six, Up still at ten: scarce time to change one's shoes.
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don't speak to me, Lord Belcher."—"No,
I'll look at you instead, and it's enough
While you have that face."—"In church, my lord! fle, fle!"
—"Adair, you stayed for the Division?"—"Lost
By one."—"The devil it is! I'm sorry for't.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove". .
—"You might have kept your word to Liverpool."

"Constituents must remember, after all,
We're mortal."—"We remind them of it.""Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!"
—"There? Dear, you are asleep still; don't you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they're ready to be married."—"Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow."—"Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh's?"—"No—wait! 'twas Mrs. Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her—
No, 'twasn't Mrs. Brookes."—"She's pretty?"—"Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?"—"How hot!
Pray is't the law to-day we're not to breathe?
You're treading on my shawl—I thank you, sir,"
—"They say the bride's a mere child, who can't read,
But knows the things she shouldn't, with wide-awake
Great eyes. I'd go through fire to look at her."
—"You do, I think."—"And Lady Waldemar
(You see her, sitting close to Romney Leigh;
How beautiful she looks, a little flushed!)
Has taken up the girl, and organized
Leigh's folly. Should I have come here, you suppose,
Except she'd asked me?"—"She'd have served him more
By marrying him herself."—
"Ah—there she comes,
The bride, at last!"
"Indeed, no. Past eleven.
She puts off her patched petticoat to-day
And puts on May-fair manners, so begins
By setting us to wait."

Surely the above is in the step of Mrs. Gore's prose, without its pungency. Or is the following more poetical?

Five acts to make a play.
And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?
What matter for the number of the leaves,
Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact
The literal unities of time and place,
When 'tis the essence of passion to ignore
Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.

Aurora Leigh contains too many pages as perversely trivial, too many passages as carelessly dry, as the above. We cannot forgive either the flippancy or the dreary disquisition from one like Mrs. Browning, when her theme, too, is of art and artists. Such are affectations, not discoveries. There is humanity even in May-Fair babble; there may be thought in criticism, be it ever so clear; but to bring Mr. Yellowplush, with his powder and calves, into a serious poem of grief and aspiration;—and when we would see Corinna to come upon a Gifford or Conder nibbing his pen for a succinct paragraph,—these things, we repeat, are novelties to which no diffusion of the new light will reconcile serious readers.

Why these fopperies and mistakes grieve us in Mrs. Browning we will show forthwith; for not one of her former works is richer in passages of power and beauty, in noble lines and lofty thoughts than Aurora Leigh. The following is full of a half-severe, half-humorous observation, not exceeded by Cowper's most terse and true character in verse. Here is the being to whom the Italy-born Poetess was confided when arriving as a child in England.—

I think I see my father's sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life (she was not old,
Although my father's elder by a year),
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,
Past fading also.

Next comes an apology, too (to use the word in its secondary sense), made by the artist for the direction of her studies, which is very graceful and tender.—

I read much. What my father taught before
From many a volume, Love re-emphasised
Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast
Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,
And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek
And Latin, he had taught me, as he would
Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives
If such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked man
Who heaps his single platter with goats' cheese
And scarlet berries; or like any man
Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,
Because he has it, rather than because
He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;
And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy's audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.

But, after I had read for memory,
I read for hope. The path my father's foot
Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off,
(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh
And passed) alone I carried on, and set
My child-heart 'gainst the thorny underwood,
To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.
Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brother-babe!
My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,
Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.

This, again, is charming.—

Many fervent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel
If steel had offered, in a restless heat
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread,
As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take,
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,
Before they sit down under their own vine
And live for use. Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,—and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

Here is a true strain of the poetry of London, taken from a later book of the poet's confessions.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude,
I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun
On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,
Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass,
With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,
In which the blood of wretches pent inside
Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—
Push out through fog with his dilated disk,
And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots
With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spunge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the south,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai: on Parnassus mount,
You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,
Except in fable and figure: forests chant
Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.
But sit in London, at the day's decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,—
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel's other singing girls,
Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

The following, too, is eloquent in its sarcasm.

Distrust that word.
"There is none good save God," said Jesus Christ.
If He once, in the first creation-week,
Called creatures good,—for ever, afterward,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs,
The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;
The word's grown dangerous. In the middle age,
I think they called malignant fays and imps
Good people. A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes,—cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation. I have known good wives,
As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar's;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child
To better an intrigue; good friends, beside,
(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck
And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do
By sleeping infants. And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes;
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;
Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause;
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax;
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;
Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up.—
Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
How bitterly I speak,—how certainly
The innocent white milk in us is turned,
By much persistent shining of the sun!—
Shake up the sweetest in us long enough
With men, it drops to foolish curd, too sour
To feed the most untender of Christ's lambs.

We have spoken of the passion thrown into the frightful story of Marian Erle. What we now cite will explain itself.—

"And you call it being lost,
That down came next day's noon and caught me there
Half gibbering and half raving on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine when God himself
Was certainly abolished.
"I was mad,—

How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.
I think they let me go, when I was mad,
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton Hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure;

While every roadside Christ upon his cross
Hung reddening through his gory wounds at me,
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying, Take the girl!
She's none of mine from henceforth.' Then, I knew,
(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)
The charitable peasants gave me bread
And leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,
At parting, Mary's image round my neck—
How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;
A woman has been strangled with less weight:
I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean
And ease my breath a little, when none looked;
I did not need such safeguards:—brutal men
Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen
My face,—I must have had an awful look."

Two Florentine pictures; the first in the open air.—

I rode once to the little mountain-house
As fast as if to find my father there,
But, when in sight of't, within fifty yards,
I dropped my horse's bridle on his neck
And paused upon his flank. The house's front
Was cased with lingots of ripe Indian corn
In tesselated order, and device
Of golden patterns: not a stone of wall
Uncovered,—not an inch of room to grow
A vine-leaf. The old porch had disappeared;
And, in the open doorway, sate a girl
At plaiting straws,—her black hair strained away
To a scarlet kerchief caught beneath her chin
In Tuscan fashion,—her full ebon eyes,
Which looked too heavy to be lifted so,
Still dropt and lifted toward the mulberry-tree
On which the lads were busy with their staves
In shout and laughter, stripping all the boughs
As bare as winter, of those summer leaves
My father had not changed for all the silk
In which the ugly silkworms hide themselves.
Enough. My horse recoiled before my heart—
I turned the rein abruptly. Back we went
As fast, to Florence.

The second an interior.—

Musing so,
I walked the narrow unrecognizing streets,
Where many a palace-front peers gloomily
Through stony vizors iron-barred, (prepared
Alike, should foe or lover pass that way,
For guest or victim,) and came wandering out
Upon the churches with mild open doors
And plaintive wail of vespers, where a few,
Those chiefly women, sprinkled round in blots
Upon the dusky pavement, knelt and prayed
Toward the altar's silver glory. Oft a ray
(I liked to sit and watch) would tremble out,
Just touch some face more lifted, more in need,
Of course a woman's—while I dreamed a tale
To fit its fortunes. There was one who looked
As if the earth had suddenly grown too large
For such a little humpbacked thing as she;
The pitiful black kerchief round her neck
Sole proof she had a mother. One, again,
Looked sick for love,—seemed praying some soft saint
To put more virtue in the new fine scarf
She spent a fortnight's meals on, yesterday,
That cruel Gigi might return his eyes
From Giuliana. There was one, so old,
So old, to kneel grew easier than to stand,—
So solitary, she accepts at last
Our Lady for her gossip, and frets on
Against the sinful world which goes its rounds
In marrying and being married, just the same
As when 'twas almost good and had the right,
(Her Gian alive, and she herself eighteen).
And yet, now even, if Madonna willed,
She'd win a tern in Thursday's lottery,
And better all things.

Ere we close it we will show a few of the happy touches with which this book is full.—

For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,
Will get to wear it as a hat aside
With a flower stuck in't.

I used him for a friend
Before I ever knew him for a friend.
'Twas better, 'twas worse also, afterward:
We came so close, we saw our differences
Too intimately.

But I could not hide
My quickening inner life from those at watch.
They saw a light at a window now and then
They had not set there. Who had set it there?

We talked on fast, while every common word
Seemed tangled with the thunder at one end,
And ready to pull down upon our heads
A terror out of sight. And yet to pause

Were surelier mortal: we tore greedily up
All silence, all the innocent breathing-points,
As if, like pale conspirators in haste,
We tore up papers where our signatures
Imperilled us to an ugly shame or death.

The last of all our quotations are taken almost from the last pages—from the last explosion of long-pent passion, when the Poetess confesses that her life has been a failure, and lays her love in the arms of him who has been hungering and thirsting for it so many a weary day.—

Could I see his face,
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,
Or did his arms constrain me? Were my cheeks
Hot, overflooded, with my tears, or his?
And which of our two large explosive hearts
So shook me? That, I know not.

What he said,
I fain would write. But if an angel spoke
In thunder, should we, haply, know much more
Than that it thundered? If a cloud came down
And wrapt us wholly, could we draw its shape,
As if on the outside, and not overcome?

But oh, the night! oh, bitter-sweet! oh, sweet!
O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy
Of darkness! O great mystery of love,—
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason's self
Enlarges rapture,—as a pebble dropt
In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine!
While we two sate together, leaned that night
So close, my very garments crept and thrilled
With strange electric life; and both my cheeks
Grew red, then pale, with touches from my hair
In which his breath was; while the golden moon
Was hung before our faces as the badge
Of some sublime inherited despair,
Since ever to be seen by only one.

Here we must hand over Aurora Leigh to those who will wonder at, or decry, or enthusiastically commend, or pass over the differences and discords of the tale; for it will have readers of all the four classes. To some it will be so much rank foolishness,—to others almost a scriptural revelation. The huge mistake of its plan, the disdain of selectness in its details, could not be exhausted were we to write for column and column,—nor would page on page suffice to contain the high thoughts, the deep feelings, the fantastic images showered over the tale with the authority of a prophetess, the grace of a muse, the prodigality of a queen. Such a poem, we dare aver, has never before been written by woman; and if our apprehension of its discords and discrepancies has been keen and expressed without measure, it is because our admiration of its writer's genius, and our sympathy with the nobility of her purpose, are also keen and without measure.