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The Site and Ancient City of Browning's Love Among the Ruins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Robert browning'S Love Among the Ruins (1855) is comprised chiefly of descriptions of a once-great capital city—its present desolate site as contrasted with the city's magnificence in the ancient days of its splendor. William C. DeVane suggests that the poem is “a vivid recollection of the Italian scene, or perhaps of some picture which Browning had recently seen in the Louvre.” Three critics maintain the Roman Campagna to be the scene which Browning had in mind, but cite no descriptions of this area pertinent to the poem. Bernhard Fehr shows that the city of the poem resembles the description of Babylon given in the History of Herodotus and the Apocalypse of St. John. Robert A. Law suggests that Browning drew upon i Chronicles for two images and thus had in mind Jerusalem. A recent commentator proposes that the poem was suggested by some remarks on the transience of great cities in Letter cxvii of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953
References
1 The Shorter Poems of Robert Browning (New York, 1934), p. 344, and A Browning Handbook (New York, 1935), p. 191.
2 Edward Berdoe, The Browning Cyclopaedia (London, 1891, 1928), p. 257; William Lyon Phelps, Robert Browning: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1915), p. 156; Martha Hale Shackford, The Brownings and Leighton (Wellesley, Mass., 1942), p. 9.
3 “Über Robert Browning's Love Among the Ruins,” Archiv, cxlii (1921), 260-262.
4 “The Background of Browning's Love Among the Ruins,” MLN, xxxvii (1922), 312-313.
5 C. R. Tracy, “Browning and Goldsmith,” PMLA, lxi (1946), 600-601.
6 The date of composition of Love Among the Ruins seems not to have been definitely established. Griffin and Minchin (Life, 1938 ed., p. 189) suggest 1852, accepted by DeVane (Handbook, p. 191; Shorter Poems, p. 344). Berdoe (p. 257), Sharpe (Life, 1890, p. 166), and Shackford (p. 9) suggest 1854. The poem was first published in Men and Women in Nov. 1855.
7 See Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning (Boston, 1908), pp. 188-190, 192.
8 Cf. Love Among the Ruins: “the country does not even boast a tree.”
9 John Murray, publ. Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 2nd ed. (London, 1850), pp. 217, 286. Notice that Murray's last sentence suggests precisely what Browning does in the poem. We know that the Brownings used this guidebook—almost every traveller did—because Mrs. Browning quotes in a letter part of Murray's description of Fano. Cf. Orr, pp. 150-151; Murray, p. 118.
10 Frances Anne Kemble, Further Records, 1848-1883, A Series of Letters (New York, 1891), p. 160; Cornelia Carr, Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memoirs (New York, 1912), pp. 107-114.
11 Cf. Love Among the Ruins: “aqueducts,” “games” of the circus, the “domed” palace, the “tower,” the “solitary” pastures, and (of course) “Among the Ruins.”
12 8th ed. (Boston, 1887), i, 3; ii, 340-341, 368-369, 374-375, 377. Cf. Love Among the Ruins: “Miles and miles,” “the country does not even boast a tree,” “slopes of verdure,” “hills,” “grass,” “aqueducts,” “solitary pastures,” “sheep” which “crop” the pastures, “temples,” “every vestige of the city.”
13 Tarquinia was situated about 12 miles due north of Civita Vecchia and about 20 miles northwest of Rome. Veii, 11 miles northeast of Rome, was near modern Isola Farnese. Cf. Murray, pp. 611, 585.
14 Tour of the Sepulchres of Etruria in 1839, 2nd ed. (London, 1841), pp. 131, 160-162, 177-178. See also her History of Etruria, 2 vols. (London, 1843), i, 416-417 et passim. Cf. Love Among the Ruins: “our country's very capital,” “the single little turret that remains” to mark the basement of the “tower,” the “temples,” “aqueducts,” “colonnades,” “their triumphs and their glories,” and the contrast of the present site with its past.
15 Edinburgh Rev., xc (1849), 107.
16 The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 2 vols. (London, 1848), i, 15.
17 See James Silk Buckingham, The Buried City of the East: Nineveh (London, 1851), Chs. ii, iii, iv, et passim. Cf. also George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, 3 vols. (New York, 1881); Robert William Rogers, A History of Babylonia and Assyria, 2 vols. (New York, 1915).
18 See Claudius James Rich, Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811 (London, 1839), containing also his Two Memoirs on the Ruins (published originally in 1815 and 1818). Cf. William O. Raymond, “Browning and Higher Criticism,” PMLA, xliv (1929), 590-621.
19 Buckingham, op. cit., Rogers, op. cit., and William N. Bruce, ed. Sir A. Henry Layard, G.C.B., D.C.L., Autobiography and Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1903).
20 See Poole's Index, Vol. I.
21 Two Memoirs on Babylon (London, 1815), p. 56.
22 Nineveh and Its Remains (London, 1849), i, 27-29, 82-87; Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (London, 1853; New York, 1875), pp. 206-209.
23 (New York, 1841), i, 95. The first English edition of this authoritative work, frequently cited in early editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, appeared in 1738.
24 (London, 1847), pp. 1, 4, 21. This work first appeared in 1828. Apparently the sudden public interest in Nineveh warranted its 2nd ed. in 1847. I have found nowhere else a statement that any city's walls were built of marble; in almost all instances they were built of brick or stones cemented together with bitumen.
25 Howard Leonard Jones, ed. The Geography of Strabo (Loeb ed., 1930), vn, 197-199; C. H. Oldfather, ed. Diodorus of Sicily (Loeb ed., 1933), i, 373; William Beloe, trans. Herodotus, Bk. I, Ch. 179 (Philadelphia, 1840), pp. 54-55; Rollin, p. 96. Fehr's article (see n. 3, above) shows that Browning's city resembles Babylon in three main instances: the evil character of the city, its emphasis on gold and riches, its hundred-gated wall. Fehr mentions only Herodotus and St. John as sources of information. F. Mercey, “Les Fouilles de Ninive,” Revue des Deux Mondes, Tome Deuxième (April 1853), 39-58, a journal Browning is known to have been fond of, mentions ancient Nineveh's “les colonnades, les aqueducs,… cintrées comme les arcs triomphaux des Romains” (p. 40), “monuments, temples, palais, portes, colonnes, etc.” (p. 49).
26 See Bayard Taylor, “Recent Visit to Thebes,” Bentley's Miscellany, xxxi (1852), 581-589. Taylor visited the Brownings in London in the summer of 1851 just before he made his journey up the Nile and wrote this article. Cf. Sharpe, Life, pp. 161-162. When Browning visited Paris he must have observed the huge obelisk from Thebes which had been transported to Paris and erected in the Place de la Concorde.
27 Jones ed., viii, 125.
28 Rollin, pp. 95, 98.
29 Beloe, trans., Bk. i, Ch. 181, p. 55.
30 Rollin, pp. 97-98. Rich even commented that the Biblical passage “should read ‘and its top to the skies’ instead of ‘may reach unto heaven’ as Gen. xi. 4 is commonly understood.” Two Memoirs on Babylon (London, 1815), p. 46.
31 Cf. Letters of Robert Browning, Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed. Thurman L. Hood ' (New Haven, 1933), pp. 107, 291, 293, 317.
32 Orr, p. 165. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., under “Mohl,” and Kathleen O'Meara, Madame Mohl: Her Salon and Her Friends (Boston, 1886), pp. 116 et passim.
33 Cf. Buckingham (see n. 17), pp. 52-61; Rogers (ibid.), p. 166; Layard, Autobiography, ii, 184 ff. Layard addressed the members of the Institute for an hour.
34 By the summer of 1851 Layard returned from Assyria to stay. Cf. Autobiography, ii, 192, 194, 197.
35 O'Meara (see n. 32), pp. 69 ff. Among those always included (Mrs. Browning writes) was “M. Ampere, the member of the French Institute, who is witty and agreeable” (Orr, p. 192).
36 O'Meara, pp. 151-152; Orr, p. 128.
37 Layard's progress was frequently reported in the columns of the Athenaeum, a favorite journal of the Brownings. Buckingham, pp. 308 ff., reproduces these Athenaeum reports verbatim. Browning visited London during the summer of 1852, just after Layard had returned from Nineveh and Babylon to find himself famous; but I have searched in vain for conclusive evidence that the Layard-Browning friendship began prior to the publication of Love Among the Ruins in 1855.