myself, I rejoice in the success, both as
a woman and a human being. Oh, and is it possible that you think
a woman has no business with questions like the question of
slavery? Then she had better use a pen no more. She had better
subside into slavery and concubinage herself, I think, as in the
times of old, shut herself up with the Penelopes in the "women's
apartment," and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.
Certainly you are not in earnest in these things. A difficult
question--yes! All virtue is difficult. England found it
difficult. France found it difficult. But we did not make
ourselves an armchair of our sins. As for America, I honor
America in much; but I would not be an American for the world
while she wears that shameful scar upon her brow. The address of
the new president[11] exasperates me. Observe, I am an
abolitionist, not to the fanatical degree, because I hold that
compensation should be given by the North to the South, as in
England. The states should unite in buying off this national
disgrace.[12]

Under date Florence, December 11, 1854, Mrs. Browning wrote to Miss
Mitford as follows:

I am reading now Mrs. Stowe's _Sunny Memories_, and like the
naturalness and simplicity of the book much, in spite of the
provincialism of the tone of mind and education, and the really
wretched writing. It's quite wonderful that a woman who has
written a book to make the world ring should write so
abominably.[13]

More and more as the Civil War approached was Mrs. Browning depressed
by the thought of the impending conflict. Between June 7, 1860, and
July 25, 1861, she contributed to the recently established
_Independent_ eleven poems, chiefly on subjects of Italian liberty.
Sometimes, however, especially in the letters accompanying her poems,
she touched on themes somewhat closer to the American people. For the
issue of March 21, 1861, she wrote to the editor as follows:

My partiality for frenzies is not so absorbing, believe me, as to
exclude very painful consideration on the dissolution of your
great Union. But my serious fear has been, and is, not for the
dissolution of the body but the death of the soul--not of a
rupture of states and civil war, but at reconciliation and peace
at the expense of a deadly compromise of principle. Nothing will
destroy the Rep