Friday morning found me on the road heading to Waco. It has been a month since I've seen my little chick-a-dee. The weather was absolutely gorgeous yesterday!! After grabbing a bite to eat, Kris and I strolled around the BU campus. We found ourselves standing in front of the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Library.
WOW! Talk about stepping back in time. We were both overcome with awe and wonder as we meandered through the rooms that now house personal belongings from the Browning household. Books, books and more books! There is a tea basket with two cups and saucers, the tea/suger holder and the small pot used for boiling the water. Rings, hair pins, hair barettes and a snuff tin. (I had to explain that one to Kris.) One room was designed to replicate Elizabeth's salon. The woman had to be very, very petite because the chair she sat upon while at her desk would break under a normal person's weight. The legs are pencil thin!!
Kris showed me the "Great Hall" from the which the "Ball Room" was designed in the Walt Disney movie "Beauty and the Beast". Stained glass windows adorn every outer wall of the library. And I'm talking HUGE windows from ceiling to floor in the Great Hall. The domed ceiling looked like it was covered in velvet. There are some pieces of furniture throughout the library that I didn't recognize but hope that my mother can help identify based on my descriptions. I couldn't take any pictures because the sign was posted "NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE THIS BUILDING". It was too dark inside to have bothered with the camera.
And although I don't consider myself to be sophisticated enough to fully appreciate museums, I do appreciate the time and effort it took to gather and preserve the items belonging to the Brownings. The majority of items were donated to BU from either descendents of the Brownings or people who had somehow acquired the items through the years.
I wasn't inspired to run out and read poetry but felt humbled after glimpsing a personal side of two of the better known authors in poetry history. What a different world they lived in. I can only imagine the circle of society they belonged to. And for the record, Elizabeth was six years older than Robert. And that is your trivia for the day.
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I experienced that "awe" feeling when we visited Monticello last summer. It amazed me the house was so well preserved and filled with items from that Jefferson's life. I guess being a pack-rat and hanging on to things is sometimes a good thing.
For me it was standing in the British Museum in London looking at the tiny notebooks made of brown wrapping paper sewed together in which the Bronte sisters penned their novels. Sent chills up my spine to think of them poor as church mice, but so determined to write.
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