A LOVE STORY

If by some happy chance you should ever find yourself in the Italian city of Florence, take a little time out for a sentimental pilgrimage. Leave the Piazza Vecchio, cross over the Ponte Vecchio, where the goldsmith shops are. Go up the Via Maggiore towards the Pitti Palazzo where, just opposite the Palazzo and the church of San Felice, stands the Casa Guidi. This is the shrine of our pilgrimage. It is a proper pilgrimage to make on Valentines day, for here in this old ancestral house of the Guidi family was enacted one of the great love stories of all times. I would like you, to re-lieve with me two touching scenes from that love story. The first scene takes place on an early spring morning in the year 1849. Standing on the street below we can see the large windows of the Casa Guidi open up, and a man, an Englishman, stand there looking across towards San Felice, but actually lost in thought. He is a writer, a poet, and he is thinking about what he will write that day. He doesnt hear his wife coming up behind him until he feels her hand push some papers into his pocket and turning, he sees her fleeing from the room. An hour later, he is still standing there by the window, his cheeks wet with tears. For what he read in his wifes neat handwriting on the crumpled sheets of paper was the answer to a question an answer which he kept to himself for 12 years. Until his wife died. Then he gave it to the world. We all know both the question and the answer: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways; I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach; I love thee to the level of every days most quiet need, by sun and candlelight I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs a love I seemed to lose in my lost saints, I love thee with the breadth, smiles, tears, of all my life, And if God chooses thee, I shall but love thee better after death. Elizabeth Barett, the Englishmans wife who wrote those lines, never dreamt she would every say such things, feel such things. At 16, she had fallen from a horse the injury developed into tuberculosis. It also gave a tyrannically

possessive father the weapon with which to imprison her for 15 years in a room where no brightness neither smile or sunshine every came. To pass the time, she wrote poems. A kindly uncle published some of them. One day, she received a note which read I love your poetry with all my heart, and I love you, too. Signed, Robert Browning. What followed is an astonishing example of the power of love. Elizabeth escaped from her fathers house, married Robert Browning and sailed to Italy, to Florence, to the Casa Guidi on Via Maggiore which was to be her home until she died. That incurable invalid bore her husband a son, and so filled his heart with song that Robert Browning became one of Englands great poets. While she, transformed by his love wrote a collection of sonnets which earned for her an immortal place among the worlds great poets of love. My young friends, what advice do you think Elizabeth Browning would have for you today? I choose to ask Elizabeth rather than her husband because I have found at least in my reading of literature, that while male poets like Sydney, Wyatt, Shakespeare, John Donne excel in expressing their love, it is the women who get to the heart of the matter. Perhaps because, as Jane Austen, an English novelist wrote Love is only part of mans life. It is a womans whole life. And as she went on to say that while men may love as long as there is hope, women love long after there is none. When Jeremy Irons, playing English gentleman, asked the French Lieutenants woman if she walked those bleak shores waiting for her lieutenant, the woman proved Jane Austens point. She had learned, she said that the very brave can be very false. She knew he wouldnt return and yet she waited. Elizabeths advice to all young lovers is contained in a sonnet which, having already told her husband how she loved him, she now tells him how she wants to be loved. She asked him not to build his love on the shifting sands of change not on looks or mind or personality or shared interests or on pity for love so wrought can be unwrought so. She wrote: If though must love me, let it be for naught except for loves sake only. Do not say I love her for her smile, her look, her way of speaking gently for a trick of though that falls in well with mine, and brought a sense of pleasant ease on such a day.

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may be changed, or, changed for thee and love so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pitys wiping my tears dry. For a creature might forget to weep who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby. But love me for loves sake that evermore. Though mayest love on through loves eternity. For Elizabeth Browing, love was not an exchange. A deal. A barter. You give to me. I give to you. For her true love was an outright unconditioned gift. It gives all and asks nothing. The second and last scene in our love story takes place 12 years later in same Casa Guidi. Again, it is early morning. Robert Browning is sitting, fully dressed, at Elizabeths bedside. They are alone. Elizabeth is sleeping, resting against his cheek. He has been there all night. She wakens and he asks how she feels. Later, he wrote Then came what my heart will keep until I see her again the most perfect expression of her love for me within my whole knowledge of her. She answered, Beautiful. And died. Today the Casa Guidi still stands there along the Via Maggiore, opposite the Pitti Palazzo. A small plaque near the door tells us that this is where Elizabeth and Robert Browning lived. But the anthologies and histories of English literature tell us more. In these pages along with William Shakespeare, and John Donne, and John Keats, along with Byron and Shelley, we read the names of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, who loved each other with the breath, smiles and tears of all their life, and who now live on in loves eternity.