Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/160

144 one of the most pleasant and interesting incidents in Mrs. Browning's life—her interview with George Sand.

As early as 1844 the poetess had styled her famous contemporary "the greatest female genius the world ever saw." Naturally, from her thoroughly English nature and temperament, Mrs. Browning contemned, with all the intensity of her soul, much that was innately natural to George Sand, but she fully recognised her humanity and genius, and felt urged to pay homage to both. Comparing her to Sappho, she deemed that, like her prototype, she had "suffered her senses to leaven her soul—to permeate it through and through, and make a sensual soul of it," but she indulged the hope that George Sand was "rising into a purer atmosphere by the very strength of her wing."

Inspired by such views, Mrs. Browning wrote her two sonnets on George Sand—"A Desire" and "A Recognition," and included them in the 1844 edition of her poems. Of course, she had not then met this "large-brained woman and large-hearted man," and it was not until the winter of 1851–2 that the interview—they had but one—took place between the two chief women of their age.

Introduced by a letter from Mazzini, and accompanied by her husband, Mrs. Browning called on her French contemporary, who had come to Paris in order to intercede with the President of the Republic (afterwards Napoleon the Third) for a condemned prisoner. Mrs. Browning found George Sand in quite a lowly room, with a bed in it, after a fashion common in France. Upon seeing the famous Frenchwoman, Mrs. Browning could not refrain from stooping to kiss her hand, but George Sand threw her arms round her visitor's neckband kissed her on the lips. What passed