Life and Letters of Robert Browning | Page 8

for many years before his death, lived in
her communion. He became a Dissenter in middle life, and my mother,
born and brought up in the Kirk of Scotland, became one also; but they
could not be called bigoted, since we always in the evening attended
the preaching of the Rev. Henry Melvill* (afterwards Canon of St.
Paul's), whose sermons Robert much admired.'**
* At Camden Chapel, Camberwell.
** Mr. Browning was much interested, in later years, in hearing Canon,

perhaps then already Archdeacon, Farrar extol his eloquence and ask
whether he had known him. Mr. Ruskin also spoke of him with
admiration.
Little need be said about the poet's mother. She was spoken of by
Carlyle as 'the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.' Mr. Kenyon
declared that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they
made it wherever they were. But her character was all resumed in her
son's words, spoken with the tremulous emotion which so often
accompanied his allusion to those he had loved and lost: 'She was a
divine woman.' She was Scotch on the maternal side, and her kindly,
gentle, but distinctly evangelical Christianity must have been derived
from that source. Her father, William Wiedemann, a ship-owner, was a
Hamburg German settled in Dundee, and has been described by Mr.
Browning as an accomplished draughtsman and musician. She herself
had nothing of the artist about her, though we hear of her sometimes
playing the piano; in all her goodness and sweetness she seems to have
been somewhat matter-of-fact. But there is abundant indirect evidence
of Mr. Browning's love of music having come to him through her, and
we are certainly justified in holding the Scottish-German descent as
accountable, in great measure at least, for the metaphysical quality so
early apparent in the poet's mind, and of which we find no evidence in
that of his father. His strong religious instincts must have been derived
from both parents, though most anxiously fostered by his mother.
There is yet another point on which Mrs. Browning must have
influenced the life and destinies of her son, that of physical health, or,
at least, nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman, very anaemic
during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was perhaps a
symptom of this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself in her
daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution. With the
brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present, if more
difficult to trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him as a
brilliantly healthy man; he was healthy, even strong, in many essential
respects. Until past the age of seventy he could take long walks without
fatigue, and endure an amount of social and general physical strain
which would have tried many younger men. He carried on until the last

a large, if not always serious, correspondence, and only within the
latest months, perhaps weeks of his life, did his letters even suggest that
physical brain-power was failing him. He had, within the limits which
his death has assigned to it, a considerable recuperative power. His
consciousness of health was vivid, so long as he was well; and it was
only towards the end that the faith in his probable length of days
occasionally deserted him. But he died of no acute disease, more than
seven years younger than his father, having long carried with him
external marks of age from which his father remained exempt. Till
towards the age of forty he suffered from attacks of sore-throat, not
frequent, but of an angry kind. He was constantly troubled by imperfect
action of the liver, though no doctor pronounced the evil serious. I have
spoken of this in reference to his complexion. During the last twenty
years, if not for longer, he rarely spent a winter without a suffocating
cold and cough; within the last five, asthmatic symptoms established
themselves; and when he sank under what was perhaps his first real
attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very severe, but
because the heart was exhausted. The circumstances of his death
recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy still
farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong pulse which
always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake. It is
difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding
vitality of his younger body and mind. Any symptom of organic disease
could scarcely, in his case, have been overlooked. But so much is
certain: he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature
which neither father nor grandfather could have bequeathed to him. He
imputed to this, or, in other words, to an undue physical sensitiveness
to mental causes of irritation, his