Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/203

Rh Browning believed she had aroused in her native country is preposterous. The asperity of a few reviews, such as that which Chorley deemed it his political duly to indulge in, could have had very little influence upon any class in England, however much the literary susceptibilities of the authoress may have magnified it. To an American friend Mrs. Browning said, "My book has had a very angry reception in my native country, as you probably observe; but I shall be forgiven one day; and meanwhile, forgiven or unforgiven, it is satisfactory to one's own soul to have spoken the truth as one apprehends the truth."

That England did sympathise very strongly with Italy in her struggles for independence, no one who reads the history of the time can doubt, and that her moral and political aid was of immense value to the Italian cause cannot be gainsaid; but English statesmen did not deem it for their country's welfare to interfere too actively, especially while the occult motives of Napoleon were to be taken into account, and this it was that stirred up Mrs. Browning's anger. She, whose heart and brain throbbed but for Italy, could not brook the reticence of England, the reluctance of Englishmen to join Napoleon in his adventurous, perhaps chivalrous, policy. During 1860 she continued to pour forth passionate poems on behalf of Italy, or inspired by Italian themes, but none of them, it must be confessed, equal in poetic value to some lines entitled "Little Mattie," which she published in the Cornhill Magazine. In this lyric she attained a higher standard of poetic excellence than she had done for some years past.

About this time, in viewing Rome's gift of swords to her heroes, Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel, she