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Robert Browning

Title: Robert Browning Author: G. K. Chesterton Release date: August 31, 2004 [eBook #13342]Most recently updated: December 18, 2020 Language: English Credits: Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG DistributedProofreaders On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel thisor to say that. But a man like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to inSordello, he could have given an account of the man and an account of his father and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. Anything that is deliberate, twisted, createdas a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some particular allusion inSordellomeans has gone on so far, and may go on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle class—the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main matter in hand. There is atradition, for example, that men of his name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to every people in which he was interested, he must have been of extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked exceedingly unlike a negro. There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in history or biography a great deal worse than being false—they are misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of all things—social tone. It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all the three races above named could be connectedwith Browning's personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue," as he says inThe Ring and the Book. We should be right; for there really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he inherited that logical agilitywhich marks him among English poets? If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the storms and the falling stars. A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like the great majority of English middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only within theirown class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, Kingsley'sWater Babies, in which the pedigree of the Professor is treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods." It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much more important, aclear account of his home. For the great central and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism ofFifine at the Fairand the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness ofTime's Revengesto the despotic fantasy ofInstans Tyrannus; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built wasalways the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of theseventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased adjuring him to model himself upon Pope. He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. Robert Browning's mother was the daughter ofWilliam Wiedermann, a German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training—a very strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear to look at places where she had walked. Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we test the matter by the test of actual schools anduniversities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge—knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so ably defended inFifine at the Fair. A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his onlysister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. Browning began to live in the life of his own age. As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their characters practically formed in a period long previous to their appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic Poem," and had to search even inhis own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution. The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race of youngmen like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys. Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often fanciful andabrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume calledInconditawere noticed to contain the fault of "too much splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitatedby his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the spirit of escape and Bohemianism,The Flight of the Duchess. Such other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence in the first plan ofPippa Passes. At the end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since become less common in Camberwell. When Browningas a boy was intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception of Camberwell." Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert Browning senior had to go back to hiswater colours and the faultless couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that he cannot understand. The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution.Paulineappeared anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it forTait's Magazine, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and beautiful asPauline, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome reading. The chief interest ofPauline, with all its beauties, lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual measles. No one of any degree of maturity in readingPaulinewill be quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the storyas he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one grand and logical basis of all optimism—the doctrine of original sin. The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was one of the best in the world, took this view ofPaulinein after years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed of it. "This," he said ofPauline, "is the only crab apple that remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. AlthoughPaulinewas published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to an older generation and a statelier school of manners andscholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he himself regarded as representative—Paracelsus. The poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years afterwards he wroteParleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day, the last poem published inhis lifetime; and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wroteParacelsusandSordello. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, theà prioriscientist of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but thealchemist. It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked—it calls it uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign civilisation, and thiswas its supreme characteristic, that it cared for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages was really a garden, where each of God's flowers—truth and beauty and reason—flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden. It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important deduction to be made from the moral ofParacelsus. The usual accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the age of twenty-three. Paracelsuswas in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the literary world. It was many years, andeven many decades, before he had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his standard upon the publication ofParacelsus. The celebrated John Forster had taken upParacelsus"as a thing to slate," and had ended its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; "catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he once, while excitedly explaining some point ofmystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would have been four miserable people instead of two. Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, and selected for his subject "Strafford." In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very earliest of thereally important works in English literature which are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and Puritan historical outlook. ForStraffordis, of course, an example of that most difficult of all literary works—a political play. The thing has been achieved once at least admirably in Shakespeare'sJulius Cæsar, and something like it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been done excellently inL'Aiglon. But the difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutelydistinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example than the case ofStrafford. It is clear that no one could possibly tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political problem,is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts at despotism, like that of Strafford, area kind of disease of public spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because Browning, although henever again attacked a political drama of such palpable importance asStrafford, could never keep politics altogether out of his dramatic work.King Victor and King Charles, which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic instinct much meaner than that of Strafford.Colombe's Birthday, again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in the world that is as intellectual as theEncyclopædia Britannicaand as rapid as the Derby. One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the question of whether Browning's plays, such asStrafford, were successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play asStraffordwas not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the definite success which attended the representation ofStraffordfrom the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. As a classical and established personality he did not come into his kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric personality, as a man who existed and whohad arisen on the outskirts of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very handsome, and—may I hint it?—just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the Browning of these days—quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European literature and offered to sing. In 1840Sordellowas published. Its reception by the great majority of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had readSordellowith great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem— "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," and the last line— "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told," were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were lies. Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and beganSordello. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, putdown the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception accorded toSordello, a reception which, as I have said, bears no resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising; but withSordelloenters into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised bySordellowhen it is considered, as most people consider it, as hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota ofevidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they all agree in one point—that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouringout, with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers. There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true.Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun beforeStrafford, and was therefore the third of his works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoringPauline, the second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious. A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers'intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism.Sordellowas the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man. In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general idea, which is aperfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the thinker that it becomes startling to the world. It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conceptionthat he was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. "Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. The Browning then who publishedSordellowe have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humbleman, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities ofSordelloillustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part of the difficulty ofSordello, for instance, is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem ofSordello, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented byPaulineandParacelsus.Pauline, Paracelsus, andSordellostand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament finds initself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. Sordello, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only the letters and to lose the man. When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new voice. His visit to Asolo, "hisfirst love," as he said, "among Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841Pippa Passesappeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man does at last make—the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Crusoe.Pippa Passesis the greatest poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded Christ. Browning, likeevery one else, when awakened to the beauty and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is. There is one other point aboutPippa Passeswhich is worth a moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form very seriously. NowPippa Passesis, among other things, eminently remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series ofdisconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, inPippa Passes; and, as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty ofPippa Passesto make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower inDramatic Lyrics, published in 1842. Herehe showed himself a picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and almost unexpectedly otherwise. Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of theDramatic Lyrics. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called "Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may becharming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious characteristics—first, that they contain not even a suggestion of anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. It is permissible to say that theDramatic Lyricsrepresent the arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan—Paracelsuswith its splendid version of the faults of the intellectual,Pippa Passeswith its beautiful deification of unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern times, does at last end by makingthe discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. InDramatic Lyricshe discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had found himself. The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thoughtand the intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic philosopher except Whitman. The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love. In that delightfulpoem "Youth and Art" we have the singing girl saying to her old lover— "No harm! It was not my faultIf you never turned your eye's tail upAs I shook upon Ein alt,Or ran the chromatic scale up." This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is treated in "A Lover's Quarrel." "See, how she looks now, dressedIn a sledging cap and vest!'Tis a huge fur cloak—Like a reindeer's yokeFalls the lappet along the breast:Sleeves for her arms to rest,Or to hang, as my Love likes best." That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos,but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, an old door. In 1843 appeared that marvellous dramaThe Return of the Druses, a work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have inThe Return of the Druseshis love of the corners of history, his interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to pursue. InPaulineand the poems that follow it, Browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. InPippa Passeshe has the only less easy task of giving an account of humanity. InThe Return of the Druseshe has for the first time the task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity—the task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth—Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero ofFifine at the Fair. With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours—the defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal inThe Return of the Drusesis the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not content with seeking sinners—he sought the sinners whom even sinners cast out. Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every naturaltendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to reach the centre. A Blot on the 'ScutcheonfollowedThe Return of the Druses. In connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was onlydiscontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting opposite. Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one most striking and determining element in the question—Browning's simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very interesting letter of his remains in which he describeshis pleasure in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:— "There was a bad poet named Clough,Whom his friends all united to puff.But the public, though dull,Has not quite such a skullAs belongs to believers in Clough." The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in that departmentthan whether he could be redder than the sunset or greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett. That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare. We find it lingering inHudibras, and we do not find it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:— "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—sooth,But glittered dew-like in the covenantedAnd high-rayed light. He was a despot—granted,But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouthSaid 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnifiedThe image of the freedom he denied." Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light shades of the same colour. Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt and renunciation. The parts played by EdwardBarrett, however, though little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her spine, however,will be found, the more we study her history, to be only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all atmospheres—a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty of the sentimentalist. It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not madethoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, "tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments almostas colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of her life if their relations had always remained a learned and delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he wassufficiently fond of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do." Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many profound questions. It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in theirnature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, in short, isnot the fact that they tell us about the love of the Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it. Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love. There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when Ididthink I might go modestly on ... [Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles." What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one—that Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of MissBarrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it was. With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words "tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of Browning is often like a strange animal walkingbackwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionistlanguage, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other—nobody else would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a missionof superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able. Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me.—I never learned to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will call at two on Tuesday." They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the other!—'Why, eventhen,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would notdo.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right." This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject.It is illustrative of the very best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human mind. Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible that any one so ill as her family believed her to beshould have lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, he was, and remained,right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and are entirely correct. But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe. And as long as the great mass of authoritieswere on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he refused. He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the fine verse of Swinburne:— "The racks of the earth and the rodsAre weak as the foam on the sands;The heart is the prey for the gods,Who crucify hearts, not hands." He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey together. Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett,the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is rather a picturesque thing to think about. The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie, and he toldit with perfect cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett of his attitude towards the approachingcoup de théâtre. In one place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some Meredithian comedy. The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed it to affect him. Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost monotonous assertion of Browningthat this elopement was the only possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she ever produced. Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September 1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising effect of familiar scenes and faces. Onetrifling incident is worth mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt inclined to do it ourselves. At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all probability Barrett had discoveredthat his dying daughter had fled with Browning to Italy. They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she had grown up in the house of a madman. The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of which his life is full, triflingand picturesque things, a series of interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death of Browning's mother in 1849. It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life in Italian politics. Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in Italy gave him,of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable poems on painting—"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and "Pictor Ignotus"—will remember how fully they deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professionallovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but Browning could not merely talk art with artists—he could talk shop with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And these were the things that Browning knew. He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures byroasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian town. Indeed, his ownRing and the Bookis merely a sublime detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite." The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same phenomenon in an even more important matter—the essence and individuality of the country itself. Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas—the making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panoramaof the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets. Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers of mankindfor ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal in this sense. And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as Browning in love with Italy. And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost entirely on the bestperiods and the best qualities of the oldrégime. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediæval Church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—thatwhile Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane. Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of humanity and liberty, and was willing, like somepassionate Jesuit of the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a city like a mediævalGhetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles—struggles about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting people of their time—Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by the bedside of a third. It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. That statement must, ofcourse, be modified and even contradicted if it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought anAct of Parliamentgood when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal principles could never pardon for theCoup d'État. If they differed on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in her excellentLife of Browning, states that the difficulty arose from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the French legitimismof De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It arose from quite a different side of his character—his uncompromising dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read theMemoirsof David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom Browning came in contact. TheseMemoirsconstitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage inwhich Home describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was "of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship George Sand,à genou basbetween an oath and an ejection of saliva." When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour at first, andBrowning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had attended oneséanceat least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event occurred, which is described in Home'sMemoirswith a gravity even more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wifedid not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the account in Home'sMemoirsprincipally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical mysteries than if they were thehocus-pocusof a charlatan. He knew his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended in an asylum. The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a dislike of Home's investigations impliesa theoretic disbelief in spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose and nameless energies of the universe. Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine feelings far beyond the reach of argument—things that lie so deep that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be mentioned for many years. Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether regrettable anddisgraceful; they have established, as it were, a convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his feelings. Poetry deals with primal and conventional things—the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense—the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins. All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great figures of morality—the hero, the saint, the average man, the gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He delighted, with a truepoetic delight, in being conventional. Being by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure—a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read for the Bar, and probably began doingso. But all this vigorous and very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which every man would desire to have made. One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, "and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects. One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him living with some of hiswife's relations, and engaged in a continuous and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and stately but almost extinct blend—the aristocratic republican. Like an old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual. Men do not like anotherman because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there. Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics against his wife and Louis Napoleon." One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alonein the room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again but only a splendid surface. Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of the intellectual. Browning was now famous,Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve, andDramatis Personæhad successively glorified his Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on morefamous things. He has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness:— "picture framesWhite through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyryPolished and rough, sundry amazing bustsIn baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed webWhen reds and blues were indeed red and blue,Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'—With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,And 'Stall,' cried I; aliramade it mine." This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry ofdébris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife Pompiliain the year 1698. And this again, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive ofThe Ring and the Book. Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as hismagnum opusto which he would devote many years to come. Then came the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien symbols and the veilof a wholly different story, the inner truth about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who is worthy to live. As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act has the immense difference from all legal acts—that it can only be justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, please?" Before and after this event his life was astranquil and casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after years—the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besidesThe Ring and the Book, and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. "Each life unfulfilled, you see;It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:We have not sighed deep, laughed free,Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy." And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. The enormous scope and seriousness ofThe Ring and the Bookoccupied Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing ofThe Ring and the Book, had been years of an almost feverish activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of him—the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more sentimental type would have professed to find the life of dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it isthe entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one great requirement of a poet—he was not difficult to please. The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend that they bored him. In a letter belonging to thisperiod of his life he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do that. Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain-worker. He looks here what he was—a very healthy man, too scholarly to live a completely healthy life. His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual eminence. Lockhart saidbriefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his voluminousness and obscurity in literature—a kind of headlong humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious character, we can still feel thatBrowning might have achieved his purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige." Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition. Prejudice,in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world good because he had found so many things that were good in it—religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found so many things in it that were bad. As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced uponthe bones of Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write aLifefounded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: "Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him to silence, probably from stupefaction. The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is this—that it is always used to express a certain wholesomefury and contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many people suppose. Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the great universities continued thenceforth unceasinglyuntil his death, despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The young men themselves were probablyunaware that they were the representatives of the "Filius Terrae." But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whomSordellowas dedicated, died in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy—there was no diminution in the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual output. In 1871 he producedBalaustion's Adventure, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thoroughassimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisation.Balaustion's Adventure, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others; andBalaustion's Adventureis a monument of this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem on the drama of Hellas.Aristophanes' Apologycame out in 1875, andThe Agamemnon of Æschylus, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. In fact, a page ofAristophanes' Apologyis like a page ofAristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's treatise, with its load of jokes. In 1871 also appearedPrince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of Society, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe twice—once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of arégime. He did these hideous things not so much that he mightbe able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama—the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms onHohenstiel-Schwangau, which, says Browning, "the Editor of theEdinburgh Reviewcalls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself." In 1873 appearedRed-Cotton Night-Cap Country, which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the poem is probably well known. He was travellingalong the Normandy coast, and discovered what he called "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!" Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better thanParadise Lost. Some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. FromThe Ring and the BooktoRed-Cotton Night-Cap Countrya great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness inThe Ring and the Book. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered thewhole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.'" Shortly before this, in 1872, he had publishedFifine at the Fair, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability.Fifine at the Fair, likePrince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies—thesoliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even in a sensual fool. AfterFifine at the Fairappeared theInn Album, in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after theInn Albumcame what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote,Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages:— "Long after the last of your numberHas ceased my front-court to encumberWhile, treading down rose and ranunculus,YouTommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us!Troop, all of you man or homunculus,Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,If once on your pates she a souse madeWith what, pan or pot, bowl orskoramis,First comes to her hand—things were more amiss!I would not for worlds be your place in—Recipient of slops from the basin!You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishnessWon't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the brute-force of language. In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax— "Hush, I pray you!What if this friend happen to be—God." It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary quality, Sensationalism. The volume entitledPacchiarotto, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity—"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop." In spite of his increasing years, his books seemedif anything to come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878—La Saisiaz, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of theancien régime,The Two Poets of Croisic. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series ofDramatic Idylls, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" and "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series ofDramatic Idylls, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality.Jocoseriadid not appear till 1883. It contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over seventy. In the next year appearedFerishtah's Fancies, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning—his sense of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophicalidea—some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating." Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime wasParleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives—Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyondthe more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight—that his genius was the least important thing about him. During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the "Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense anervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, "another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why,amico mio, you know as well as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Never say of me that I am dead." On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his innumerable voyages. During hislast Italian period he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and whistling for the lizards. This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great central sanctity—the story of a man's youth. All that the old man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as if she had died yesterday." Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He took very little food; it wasindeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the day that he diedAsolandowas published. Mr. William Sharp, in hisLifeof Browning, quotes the remarks of another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of rockeries and flower-beds. As we find, after this manner, that Browning doesnot act satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be—a logician—it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to what he himself professed to be—a poet. And if we study this seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as "transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic method is, roughly speaking, simply this—that a scientific statement means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an artistic statement means something entirely different, according to the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature—such a sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"—the matter is quite different. If thesentence came at the beginning of a short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the profane speculator falls flat upon his face— "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,Will let those quails fly, will not eat this monthOne little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their precision and analysis." No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many different metres as there are different poems. The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense—that they were content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode,and "Prometheus Unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were.The Ring and the Book, for example, is an illuminating departure in literary method—the method of telling the same story several times and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several different and equally interesting stories.Pippa Passes, to take another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing of a good poem—it is something like the invention of the sonnet or the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create himself—he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, mocking echoes indeed— "And dipt of his wings in Paris square,They bring him now to lie burned alive.[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,ye shall say to confirm him who singeth—We bring John now to be burned alive." A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the samestructural and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as "House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of "Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams." The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and unmeaning criticism. The usual way ofcriticising an author, particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that really boisterous will to live which may be found inMartin Chuzzlewit. The right thing to say aboutCyrano de Bergeracis that it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have writtenIn Memoriamif he had tried. Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called ugliness was toBrowning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the whole poem, and a very good poem too— "Up jumped Tokay on our table,Like a pigmy castle-warder,Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,Arms and accoutrements all in order;And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling SouthBlew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,Jingled his huge brass spurs together,Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,And then, with an impudence nought could abash,Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!" I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficientlyapparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised about Browning's work. It is this—that it is absolutely necessary to remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that Tennyson's "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do notsay that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet— "From the lilies and languors of virtueTo the raptures and roses of vice," wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line— "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of adramatis personæand act perpetually in character. Browningsometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great deal too like himself. "Will I widen thee out till thou turnestFrom Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole justification of Browning as an artist. The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental elements in life? One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after strength. Now, tosay that Browning's poems, artistically considered, are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse— "He is either himsell a devil frae hell,Or else his mother a witch maun be;I wadna have ridden that wan waterFor a' the gowd in Christentie," is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,And the nightingale sings in it all the night long," is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no melody inverse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the essential point has been suggested. "They were purple of raiment and golden,Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,In marvellous chambers of thine," is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. This, for instance, has also a tune in it— "I—'next poet.' No, my hearties,I nor am, nor fain would be!Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,Not one soul revolt to me! Which of you did I enableOnce to slip inside my breast,There to catalogue and labelWhat I like least, what love best,Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,Seek and shun, respect, deride,Who has right to make a rout ofRarities he found inside?" This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical method—that the question is not whether that method is the best in the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which can only be conveyed bythat method. It is perfectly true, for instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as— "Thou art the highest, and most human too" and "We needs must love the highest when we see it" would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It would probably become "High's human; man loves best, best visible," and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"— "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!Down it dips, gone like a rocket.What, you want, do you, to come unawares,>Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,And find a poor devil has ended his caresAt the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?Do I carry the moon in my pocket?" —it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and ran— "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to findDisjected bones adrift upon the stairThou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that IPouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?" Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent poetry of its kind, and yet would be badexactly in so far as it was good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in Tennyson himself. The humorous passages inThe Princess, though often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If Browning had written the passage which opensThe Princess, descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of which Mr. Henley writes— "Praise the generous gods for giving,In this world of sin and strife,With some little time for living,Unto each the joy of life," the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday crowd at Margate. To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most would be to go very deep into hisspirit indeed, probably a great deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live in the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy like the toadstool.Energy which disregards the standard of classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from "The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was most Browning, regarded physical nature. "And pitch down his basket before us,All trembling aliveWith pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;You touch the strange lumps,And mouths gape there, eyes open, all mannerOf horns and of humps,Which only the fisher looks grave at." Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,The simplest of creations, just a sacThat's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet livesAnd feels, and could do neither, we conclude,If simplified still further one degree." (SLUDGE.) These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the Everlasting. There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a householdpet is curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning. But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself on having writtenThe Ring and the Book, and he also prided himself on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided himself on such rhymes as the following inPacchiarotto:— "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey,By piping advice in one key—That his pipe should play a preludeTo something heaven-tinged not hell-hued,Something not harsh but docile,Man-liquid, not man-fossil." This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has nothing atall to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from "Holy Cross Day":— "Give your first groan—compunction's at work;And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.Lo, Micah—the self-same beard on chinHe was four times already converted in!" This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which it is physically impossible for any one to say:— "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice,If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!" This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him perverse and unusual despite all his working normalityand simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood with a knot in it. The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any great writer since the time of Kabelais and the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused. In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matterof fact the two have little or nothing to do with each other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:— "Hobbs hints blue—straight he turtle eats.Nobbs prints blue—claret crowns his cup.Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?What porridge had John Keats?" The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural comment:— "... Who fished the murex up?What porridge had John Keats?" So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity. If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, they might both be obscure,but their obscurities would be entirely different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description would run:— "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairsTakes bump from back." This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story. Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certainkind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last book he published in his life-time,Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, was a new poem, and more revolutionary thanParacelsus. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable example can be found in that splendid poem "ChildeRoland to the Dark Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalkAbove its mates, the head was chopped; the bentsWere jealous else. What made those holes and rentsIn the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulkAll hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walkPashing their life out, with a brute's intents." This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added—that everything means nothing. When we have once realised the great conception of the plan ofThe Ring and the Book, the studying of a single matter from nine different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates inThe Ring and the Bookwill scarcely be very interesting to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right side; there are also partisans who bringcogent and convincing arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic strokes inThe Ring and the Book. We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and found in somecause célèbreof our day, such as the Parnell Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design toThe Ring and the Book. The first monologue, which would be called "Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browningmonologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote anything that did not mean a great deal. It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air. These are the sensationswith which the true Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's critics and biographers aboutThe Ring and the Book. That criticism was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not know whatThe Ring and the Bookmeans. We feel about it as we should feel about a man who said that the plot ofTristram Shandywas not well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact thatTristram Shandy isa game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not readTristram Shandyat all. The man who objects to the Rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence ofThe Ring and the Bookis that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things. The supreme difference that dividesThe Ring and the Bookfrom all the great poems of similar length and largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about affairs commonly called important, andThe Ring and the Bookis about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of allmortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea inThe Ring and the Bookall criticism is misleading. In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. The characteristic of the modern movementspar excellenceis the apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical significance of the twitchingof a man's toes, or the loss of his appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes. This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was one man in English literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have driven him to a condition not farfrom madness. Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of philosophers: the vase, like the jar in theArabian Nights, to send up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for instance,Prince Hohenstiel—Schwangauexplains the psychological meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental restlessness anddesire to add a touch to things in the spirit of man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea. It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very essence ofThe Ring and the Book, that it should be the enormous multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike.The Ring and the Booktherefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness of life by taking as a texta poor story. It pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments—the great compliment which monarchy paid to mankind—the compliment of selecting from it almost at random. But this is only the first half of the claim ofThe Ring and the Bookto be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement.The Ring and the Bookis of course, essentially speaking, a detective story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it is. But the element which is important, and which now requires pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some little way in literary history. I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave'sGolden Treasury. However that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's almost too well known "When lovely woman stoops to folly,And finds too late that men betray,What charm can soothe her melancholy?What art can wash her guilt away?" Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of note, the voice of Burns:— "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,How can ye bloom sae fair?How can ye chant, ye little birds,And I sae fu' of care? Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird,That sings upon the bough,Thou minds me of the happy daysWhen my fause Love was true." A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject—the subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole difference—the difference struck by the very first note of the voice of any one who reads them—is this fundamental difference, that Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's words are spoken in that situation. In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, thevates, was the supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the human drama; hewas, to employ two words, which when analysed are the same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the outside. Then, as in the case ofThe Golden Treasury, he has no sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that thevatesor poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. Now Browning, as he appears inThe Ring and the Book, represents the attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not touch ormodify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which he had not even the miserable comfort of alocus standi. All these characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. Here then we have the second great respect in whichThe Ring and the Bookis the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely theapplication of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had written theOdysseyon the principle ofThe Ring and the Book, how disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes whichbred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of Mordred. One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and social, which is represented byThe Ring and the Book. It is the step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn.The Ring and the Bookis the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the epic of free speech. Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted,just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and we forget that free speech is a paradox. It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the truth had not been told until he had seen in thevillain the pure and disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the nature of things wrong. Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went to visit an elephant.One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and serpents without reason and without result. The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of "Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature,there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been crucified He would not have been asgreat as thousands of wretched fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something to be added. Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded onopinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I cannot in the least understand why a good digestion—that is, a good body—should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, he need only compare the old optimisticuse of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of things. Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat inadequate word, was a result of experience—experience which is for some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at revivalist meetings. In theSalvation Army a man's experiences mean his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question "Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. To his traditions hope was traced toorder, to his speculations hope was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting bookInterpretations of Poetry and Religion. He, in contradistinction to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was the real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might, perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we havegrown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in the dark. Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is anevolutionary stage of great biological value. And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we have been examining, that beyondall his conclusions, and deeper than all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and exalted by the waggonette. To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes. Each one of themwore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions. In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with some astonishment. He immediately asked whyForster should suppose him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we are notallowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him. Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God. It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the firstcharcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a generalstatement of the view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. But so, when we havecomprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be found to be. The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of "Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the trickster's life by a surveyof the border-land between truth and fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the remotest desert and the darkest incognito. This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To think that such a view involves thenegation of honesty is like thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny his right to be heard. We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general excuse by thefact that in the heat of social life, in the course of telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses. "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to doBefore I found the useful book that knows." It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even than fraud—effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem.He says in effect: "Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy which has something of the disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his honour. It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:— "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?You've heard what I confess: I don't unsayA single word: I cheated when I could,Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,And all the rest; believe that: believe this,By the same token, though it seem to setThe crooked straight again, unsay the said,Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that,It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.This trade of mine—I don't know, can't be sureBut there was something in it, tricks and all!" It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence in a good anecdote, or putting the last act ofOthellointo the middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this—that some real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight thrillingbattles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that part of himself which exists in every man—that part which does believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given before—the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what he had done, say something like this:— "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp!I only wish I dared burn down the houseAnd spoil your sniggering!" and so on, and so on. He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about spiritualism, or that hewas speaking more truthfully in the second outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and coarse speaking will seldom do it. When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical monologues—Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology, and several of the monologues inThe Ring and the Book. They are all, without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that we require to know. If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even brutal English. Browning'slove of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician grossness of a grand dinner-partyà deux. It has many touches of an almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. Then comes the passage:— "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,A chorus ending from Euripides,—And that's enough for fifty hopes and fearsAs old and new at once as Nature's self,To rap and knock and enter in our soul,Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—The grand Perhaps!" Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over the comfortable wine and the cigars. Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has been the true means of realising what he believes to be thewill of God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. A Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The,120 Alliance, The Holy,89. "Andrea del Sarto,"83 Aristophanes' Apology,120,199. Arnold, Matthew,41,55,56. Asolando,132. Asolo (Italy),42,131. "At the Mermaid,"117. Austria,88,89. B "Bad Dreams,"138. Balaustion's Adventure,119-120. Barrett, Arabella,74,119. Barrett, Edward Moulton,58seq.,70,73,74,76,79. Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey,149. Bells and Pomegranates,105. "Ben Ezra,"23,201. Birrell, Mr. Augustine,160. "Bishop Blougram,"51,189. Bishop Blougram's Apology,188,189,199,200. Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A,53. Boyd, Mr.,62. Browning, Robert:birth and family history,3;theories as to his descent,4-8;a typical Englishman of the middle class,9;his immediate ancestors,10seq.;education,12;boyhood and youth,17;first poems,Incondita,17;romantic spirit,18;publication ofPauline,20;friendship with literary men,21;Paracelsus,22;introduction to literary world,25;his earliest admirers,26;friendship with Carlyle,26;Strafford,27;Sordello,34;Pippa Passes,43;Dramatic Lyrics,45;The Return of the Druses,51;A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,53;correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett,62seq.;their first meeting,70;marriage and elopement,78,79;life in Italy,81seq.;love of Italy,82,85seq.;sympathy with Italian Revolution,90;attitude towards spiritualism,91seq.,113,190-199;death of his wife,103;returns to England,105;The Ring and the Book,110;culmination of his literary fame,110,117;life in society,110;elected Fellow of Balliol,117;honoured by the great Universities,118;Balaustion's Adventure,119-120;Aristophanes' Apology,120;The Agamemnon of Aeschylus,120;Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,121;Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country,122;Fifine at the Fair,124;The Inn Album,125;Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper,125;La Saisiaz,127;The Two Poets of Croisic,127;Dramatic Idylls, 127;Jocoseria,127;Ferishtah's Fancies,127;Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day,128;accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy,129;goes to Llangollen with his sister,130;last journey to Italy,130;death at Venice,132;publication ofAsolando,132;his conversation,36;vanity,33,36;faults and virtues,40,55;his interest in Art,82seq.;his varied accomplishments,84-85;personality and presence,18,33,112seq.;his prejudices,113-116;his occasional coarseness,116;politics,86seq.;Browning as a father,105;as dramatist,52;as a literary artist,133seq.;his se of the grotesque,48,140,143,148seq.;his failures,141;artistic originality,136,143, 158;keen sense of melody and rhythm,145seq.;ingenuity in rhyming,152;his buffoonery,154;obscurity,154seq.;his conception of the Universe,175;philosophy,177seq.;optimism,179seq.;his love poetry,49;his knaves,51,201-202;the key to his casuistical monologues,199. Browning, Life of(Mrs. Orr),92. Browning, Robert (father of the poet),10,119. Browning, Mrs.,néeWiedermann (mother),11,82. Browning, Anna (sister),14,105. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife),57seq.,91-99,101,103,116, 119,129,131. Browning Society,129. Burns, Robert,169-170. Byron,11,38,141,143. Byronism,19,117. C "Caliban,"9,120. "Caliban upon Setebos,"93,135,138. Camberwell,3,8,19. "Caponsacchi,"108. Carlyle, Thomas,12,16,17,26,55,56,87,115. Carlyle, Mrs.,26. "Cavalier Tunes,"46. Cavour,86,90,103. Charles I.,28,29. Chaucer,117. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,"159. Christmas Eve,105. Church in Italy, The,88. "Clive,"127. Clough, Arthur Hugh,56. Colombe's Birthday,32. Corelli, Miss Marie,38. Cromwell, Oliver,73. D Darwin,23,39. Dickens,16. "Djabal,"51,52. Domett, Alfred,21. "Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis,"161. Dramatic Idylls,127. Dramatic Lyrics,45-50. Dramatis Personæ,105. Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan,187,188. E Edinburgh Review,122. "Englishman in Italy, The,"150. F "Fears and Scruples,"126,138. "Ferishtah's Fancies,"138. Fifine at the Fair,9,13,51,124,199. Fitzgerald, Edward,116,131. Flight of the Duchess, The,18. Florence,81,94. Forster, John,26. Foster, John,187,188. Fox, Mr. Johnson,20. Fox, Mrs. Bridell,33. "Fra Lippo,",51. Fra Lippo Lippi,83,199. French Revolution,87. Furnivall, Dr.,7,129. G "Garden Fancies,"46. Garibaldi,86,89. Gilbert, W.S.,144. Gissing, Mr. George,165. Gladstone,117. Golden Treasury(Palgrave),168. Goldsmith,169,170. Gordon, General,90. "Guido Franceschini,"106,120,200. H Henley, Mr.,148. "Heretic's Tragedy, The,"137. Hickey, Miss E.H.,129. "Holy Cross Day,"153. Home, David (spiritualist),93-97,113,190,191. Home, David,Memoirsof,93seq. Horne,26. Houghton, Lord,129. "House,"138. "Householder, The,"138. "How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix,"46. Hudibras(Butler),57. Hugo, Victor,17. Hunt, Leigh,26. I Incondita,17. Inn Album, The,125. Instans Tyrannus,9. Italy,85seq. Italian Revolution,88seq. "Ivàn Ivànovitch,"127. J Jameson, Mrs.,75. Jerrold, Douglas,34. Jocoseria,127. Jowett, Dr.,118. Julius Cæsar(Shakespeare),28. "Juris Doctor Bottinius,"161. K Keats,15,16,19,137,142. Kenyon, Mr.,22,58,69-70,74,76. King Victor and King Charles,32. Kipling, Rudyard,142. Kirkup, Seymour,103. L L'Aiglon,28. "Laboratory, The,"47,143. Landor,26,56,93,101-103. La Saisiaz,127. Letters, The Browning,63. Liberalism,86. "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald,"131. Llangollen,130. Lockhart,112. "Lost Leader, The,"46. "Lover's Quarrel, A,"50. "Luigi,"45. Lytton, Lord (novelist),91. M Macready,17,27,53. Maeterlinck,164,184. Manning, Cardinal,91. Mary Queen of Scots,29. "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,"147. "May and Death."21. Mazzini,89. Men and Women,105. Meredith, George,156,165. Mill, John Stuart,26,56. Milsand,119. Milton,137. Monckton-Milnes,26,100. Mr. Sludge the Medium,82,96,120,190-199. "Muléykeh,"127. "My Star,"138. N "Nationality in Drinks,"46,138. Napoleon,42,89. Napoleon III.,56,92,121. "Never the Time and the Place,"127. Newman, Cardinal,193. Norwood,18. O "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth),136. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats),137. "Old Masters in Florence,"177. "One Word More,"65. Orr, Mrs.,72. P Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper,125,126,152. Paracelsus,22,25,26,41,47,158. "Paracelsus,"24,25. Painting, Poems on,83. Palgrave, Francis,117. Paris,94. Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day,22,128,158. Pauline,20,21,37,41,51. "Pheidippides,"127. Phelps (actor),53. "Pictor Ignotus,"83. "Pied Piper of Hamelin, The,"153. "Pippa,"45,120. Pippa Passes,18,45,47,51,137. Pisa,81. Pius IX., Church under,88. Plato,21,23. Poe, Edgar Allan,144. Poetry, Pessimistic school of,130. "Pompilia,"201. Pope,11,20,57. "Portrait, A,"138. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,121-122. Princess, The(Tennyson),148. "Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley),137. Prussia,88,89. Puritans,30. Pym,28,30. R "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"201. Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country,122-124. Return of the Druses, The,51-53. Revolution,The French,15;Italian,90. Ring and the Book, The,85,106,109,123,137,160-176. Ripert-Monclar, Comte de,22,93. Roman Church,114,187,188. Rossetti,163. Royalists,30. Ruskin,16,55,56,91,115. Russia,88. S Sand, George,9,94. Santayana's, Mr.,Interpretations of Poetry and Religion,183-186. "Sebald,"45. Shakespeare,17,57. Shakespeare Society,129. Sharp, Mr. William,133. Shaw, Mr. Bernard,165. Shelley,15,16,17,19,56,136,141,143. "Shop,"138. "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,"138. Silverthorne (Browning's cousin),21. "Sludge,"51,52,150,189,200. Smith, Elder (publishers),110. "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The,"47. "Sonnets from the Portuguese,"65. Sordello,23,34,42. Speech, Free,173. Spenser,142. Spiritualism,9,91,113,190. "Statue and the Bust, The,"109. Sterne,117. Stevenson, Robert Louis,60,114. Straford,27seq.,37. "Stafford,"28,29,30. Swinburne,56,116,142,143. T Tait's Magazine,20. Talfourd, Sergeant,26. Tennyson,27,34,55,117,141,142,143,148. Thackeray, Miss,123. "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr,"46. Time's Revenges,9,93. Tolstoi,115. Tristram Shandy(Sterne),163. Two Poets of Croisic, The,127. U University College,14. "Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted),140. V Venice,131. Victor of Sardinia, King,23. Vogler, Abt,23. W Water Babies(Kingsley),8. Watts, Mr. G.F.,112. Whitman, Walt,21,43,49,114,165,184. "Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet),86. Wiedermann, William,12. Wiseman, Cardinal,188. Wimbledon Common,18. Wordsworth,69,136,141,143. Wordsworth Society,129. Y "Youth and Art,"50,109. Z Zola,164. NEW SERIES. Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each. GEORGE ELIOT. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B. RUSKIN. By FREDERIC HARRISON. TENNYSON. By Sir ALFRED LYALL. RICHARDSON. By AUSTIN DOBSON. BROWNING. By G.K. CHESTERTON. CRABBE. By the Rev. Canon AINGER. JANE AUSTEN. By the Rev. Canon BEECHING. HOBBES. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B. ADAM SMITH. By FRANCIS W. HIRST. SYDNEY SMITH. By GEORGE W.E. RUSSELL. FANNY BURNEY. By AUSTIN DOBSON. 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More Nonsense

Title: More Nonsense Author: Edward Lear Release date: October 8, 2004 [eBook #13648]Most recently updated: December 18, 2020 Language: English E-text prepared by Dave Newman, Ben Courtney,and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders Originally published 1872 Original CoverClick for larger version. In offering this little book—the third of its kind—to the public, I am glad to take the opportunity of recording the pleasure I have received at the appreciation its predecessors have met with, as attested by their wide circulation, and by the universally kind notices of them from the Press. To have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands, may surely be a just motive for satisfaction, and an excuse for grateful expression. At the same time, I am desirous of adding a few words as to the history of the two previously publishedvolumes, and more particularly of the first or original "Book of Nonsense," relating to which many absurd reports have crept into circulation, such as that it was the composition of the late Lord Brougham, the late Earl of Derby, etc.; that the rhymes and pictures are by different persons; or that the whole have a symbolical meaning, etc.; whereas, every one of the Rhymes was composed by myself, and every one of the Illustrations drawn by my own hand at the time the verses were made. Moreover, in no portion of these Nonsense drawings have I ever allowed any caricature of private or public persons to appear, and throughout, more care than might be supposed has been given to make the subjects incapable of misinterpretation: "Nonsense," pure and absolute, having been my aim throughout. As for the persistently absurd report of the late Earl of Derby being the author of the "First Book of Nonsense," I may relate an incident which occurred to me four summers ago, the first that gave me any insight into the origin of the rumor. I was on my way from London to Guildford, in a railway carriage, containing, besides myself, one passenger, an elderly gentleman: presently, however, two ladies entered, accompanied by two little boys. These, who had just had a copy of the "Book of Nonsense" given them, were loud in their delight, and by degrees infected the whole party with their mirth. "How grateful," said the old gentleman to the twoladies, "all children, and parents too, ought to be to the statesman who has given his time to composing that charming book!" (The ladies looked puzzled, as indeed was I, the author.) "Do you not know who is the writer of it?" asked the gentleman. "The name is 'Edward Lear,'" said one of the ladies. "Ah!" said the first speaker, "so it is printed; but that is only a whim of the real author, the Earl of Derby. 'Edward' is his Christian name, and, as you may see, LEAR is only EARL transposed." "But," said the lady, doubtingly, "here is a dedication to the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces of Edward, thirteenth Earl of Derby, by the author, Edward Lear." "That," replied the other, "is simply a piece of mystification; I am in a position to know that the whole book was composed and illustrated by Lord Derby himself. In fact, there is no such a person at all as Edward Lear." "Yet," said the other lady, "some friends of mine tell me they know Mr. Lear." "Quite a mistake! completely a mistake!" said the old gentleman, becoming rather angry at the contradiction; "I am well aware of what I am saying: I can inform you, no such a person as 'Edward Lear' exists!" Hitherto I had kept silence; but as my hat was, as well as my handkerchief and stick, largely marked inside with my name, and as I happened to have in my pocket several letters addressed to me, the temptation was too great to resist; so, flashing all these articles at once on my would-be extinguisher's attention, I speedily reduced him to silence. The second volume of Nonsense, commencing with the verses, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," was written at different times, and for different sets of children: the whole being collected in the course of last year, were then illustrated, and published in a single volume, by Mr. R.J. Bush, of 32 Charing Cross. The contents of the third or present volume were made also at different intervals in the last two years. Long years ago, in days when much of my time was passed in a country house, where children and mirth abounded, the lines beginning, "There was an old man of Tobago," were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse lending itself to limitless variety for rhymes and pictures; and thenceforth the greater part of the original drawings and verses for the first "Book of Nonsense" were struck off with a pen, no assistance ever having been given me in any way but that of uproarious delight and welcome at the appearance of every new absurdity. Most of these Drawings and Rhymes were transferred to lithographic stones in the year 1846, and were then first published by Mr. Thomas McLean, ofthe Haymarket. But that edition having been soon exhausted, and the call for the "Book of Nonsense" continuing, I added a considerable number of subjects to those previously-published, and having caused the whole to be carefully reproduced in woodcuts by Messrs. Dalzell, I disposed of the copyright to Messrs. Routledge and Warne, by whom the volume was published in 1843. EDWARD LEAR. VILLA EMILY, SAN REMO,August, 1871. Barkia HowlaloudiaEnkoopia ChickabiddiaJinglia TinkettliaNasticreechia KrorluppiaArthbroomia RigidaSophtsluggia GlutinosaMinspysia DeliciosaShoebootia UtilisStunnia DinnerbelliaTickia OrologicaWashtubbia CircularisTigerlillia Terribilis 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100 There was a young person of Bantry,Who frequently slept in the pantry;When disturbed by the mice, she appeased them with rice,That judicious young person of Bantry. There was an Old Man at a Junction,Whose feelings were wrung with compunctionWhen they said, "The Train's gone!" he exclaimed, "How forlorn!"But remained on the rails of the Junction. There was an old person of Minety,Who purchased five hundred and ninetyLarge apples and pears, which he threw unawaresAt the heads of the people of Minety. There was an old man of Thermopylae,Who never did anything properly;But they said, "If you choose to boil eggs in your shoes,You shall never remain in Thermopylae." There was an old person of Deal,Who in walking used only his heel;When they said, "Tell us why?" he made no reply,That mysterious old person of Deal. There was an old man on the Humber,Who dined on a cake of Burnt Umber;When he said, "It's enough!" they only said, "Stuff!You amazing old man on the Humber!" There was an old man in a barge,Whose nose was exceedingly large;But in fishing by night, it supported a light,Which helped that old man in a barge. There was an old man of Dunrose;A parrot seized hold of his nose.When he grew melancholy, they said, "His name's Polly,"Which soothed that old man of Dunrose. There was an old man of ToulouseWho purchased a new pair of shoes;When they asked, "Are they pleasant?" he said, "Not at present!"That turbid old man of Toulouse. There was an old person of Bree,Who frequented the depths of the sea;She nurs'd the small fishes, and washed all the dishes,And swam back again into Bree. There was an old person of Bromley,Whose ways were not cheerful or comely;He sate in the dust, eating spiders and crust,That unpleasing old person of Bromley. There was an old person of Shields,Who frequented the vallies and fields;All the mice and the cats, and the snakes and the rats,Followed after that person of Shields. There was an old man of Dunluce,Who went out to sea on a goose:When he'd gone out a mile, he observ'd with a smile,"It is time to return to Dunluce." There was an old man of Dee-sideWhose hat was exceedingly wide,But he said, "Do not fail, if it happen to hail,To come under my hat at Dee-side!" There was an old person in black,A Grasshopper jumped on his back;When it chirped in his ear, he was smitten with fear,That helpless old person in black. There was an old man of the DargleWho purchased six barrels of Gargle;For he said, "I'll sit still, and will roll them down hill,For the fish in the depths of the Dargle." There was an old person of Pinner,As thin as a lath, if not thinner;They dressed him in white, and roll'd him up tight,That elastic old person of Pinner. There was an old person of China,Whose daughters were Jiska and Dinah,Amelia and Fluffy, Olivia and Chuffy,And all of them settled in China. There was an old man in a Marsh,Whose manners were futile and harsh;He sate on a log, and sang songs to a frog,That instructive old man in a Marsh. There was an old person of Brill,Who purchased a shirt with a frill;But they said, "Don't you wish, you mayn't look like a fish,You obsequious old person of Brill?" There was an old person of Wick,Who said, "Tick-a-Tick, Tick-a-Tick;Chickabee, Chickabaw." And he said nothing more,That laconic old person of Wick. There was an old man at a Station,Who made a promiscuous oration;But they said, "Take some snuff!—You have talk'd quite enough,You afflicting old man at a Station!" There was an old man of Three Bridges,Whose mind was distracted by midges,He sate on a wheel, eating underdone veal,Which relieved that old man of Three Bridges. There was an old man of Hong Kong,Who never did anything wrong;He lay on his back, with his head in a sack,That innocuous old man of Hong Kong. There was a young person in green,Who seldom was fit to be seen;She wore a long shawl, over bonnet and all,Which enveloped that person in green. There was an old person of Fife,Who was greatly disgusted with life;They sang him a ballad, and fed him on salad,Which cured that old person of Fife. There was an old man who screamed outWhenever they knocked him about:So they took off his boots, and fed him with fruits,And continued to knock him about. There was a young lady in white,Who looked out at the depths of the night;But the birds of the air, filled her heart with despair,And oppressed that young lady in white. There was an old person of Slough,Who danced at the end of a bough;But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees,You imprudent old person of Slough." There was an old person of Down,Whose face was adorned with a frown;When he opened the door, for one minute or more,He alarmed all the people of Down. There was a young person in red,Who carefully covered her head,With a bonnet of leather, and three lines of feather,Besides some long ribands of red. There was an old person of Hove,Who frequented the depths of a grove;Where he studied his books, with the wrens and the rooks,That tranquil old person of Hove. There was a young person in pink,Who called out for something to drink;But they said, "O my daughter, there's nothing but water!"Which vexed that young person in pink. There was an old lady of France,Who taught little ducklings to dance;When she said, "Tick-a-tack!" they only said, "Quack!"Which grieved that old lady of France. There was an old person of Putney,Whose food was roast spiders and chutney,Which he took with his tea, within sight of the sea,That romantic old person of Putney. There was an old person of Loo,Who said, "What on earth shall I do?"When they said, "Go away!" she continued to stay,That vexatious old person of Loo. There was an old person of Woking,Whose mind was perverse and provoking;He sate on a rail, with his head in a pail,That illusive old person of Woking. There was an old person of DeanWho dined on one pea, and one bean;For he said, "More than that, would make me too fat,"That cautious old person of Dean. There was a young lady in blue,Who said, "Is it you? Is it you?"When they said, "Yes, it is," she replied only, "Whizz!"That ungracious young lady in blue. There was an old Man in a Garden,Who always begged every one's pardon;When they asked him, "What for?" he replied, "You're a bore!And I trust you'll go out of my garden." There was an old person of Pisa,Whose daughters did nothing to please her;She dressed them in gray, and banged them all day,Round the walls of the city of Pisa. There was an old person of Florence,Who held mutton chops in abhorrence;He purchased a Bustard, and fried him in Mustard,Which choked that old person of Florence. There was an old person of Sheen,Whose expression was calm and serene;He sate in the water, and drank bottled porter,That placid old person of Sheen. There was an old person of Ware,Who rode on the back of a bear;When they ask'd, "Does it trot?" he said, "Certainly not!He's a Moppsikon Floppsikon bear!" There was a young person of Janina,Whose uncle was always a fanning her;When he fanned off her head, she smiled sweetly, and said,"You propitious old person of Janina!" There was an old man of Cashmere,Whose movements were scroobious and queer;Being slender and tall, he looked over a wall,And perceived two fat ducks of Cashmere. There was an old person of Cassel,Whose nose finished off in a tassel;But they call'd out, "Oh well! don't it look like a bell!"Which perplexed that old person of Cassel. There was an old person of Pett,Who was partly consumed by regret;He sate in a cart, and ate cold apple tart,Which relieved that old person of Pett. There was an old man of Spithead,Who opened the window, and said,—"Fil-jomble, fil-jumble, fil-rumble-come-tumble!"That doubtful old man of Spithead. There was an old man on the Border,Who lived in the utmost disorder;He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,Which vexed all the folks on the Border. There was an old man of Dumbree,Who taught little owls to drink tea;For he said, "To eat mice is not proper or nice,"That amiable man of Dumbree. There was an old person of Filey,Of whom his acquaintance spoke highly;He danced perfectly well, to the sound of a bell,And delighted the people of Filey. There was an old man whose remorseInduced him to drink Caper Sauce;For they said, "If mixed up with some cold claret-cup,It will certainly soothe your remorse!" There was an old man of Ibreem,Who suddenly threaten'd to scream;But they said, "If you do, we will thump you quite blue,You disgusting old man of Ibreem!" There was an old person of Wilts,Who constantly walked upon stilts;He wreathed them with lilies and daffy-down-dillies,That elegant person of Wilts. There was an old person of Grange,Whose manners were scroobious and strange;He sailed to St. Blubb in a waterproof tub,That aquatic old person of Grange. There was an old person of Newry,Whose manners were tinctured with fury;He tore all the rugs, and broke all the jugs,Within twenty miles' distance of Newry. There was an old man of Dumblane,Who greatly resembled a crane;But they said, "Is it wrong, since your legs are so long,To request you won't stay in Dumblane?" There was an old man of Port Grigor,Whose actions were noted for vigour;He stood on his head till his waistcoat turned red,That eclectic old man of Port Grigor. There was an old man of El Hums,Who lived upon nothing but crumbs,Which he picked off the ground, with the other birds round,In the roads and the lanes of El Hums. There was an old man of West Dumpet,Who possessed a large nose like a trumpet;When he blew it aloud, it astonished the crowd,And was heard through the whole of West Dumpet. There was an old person of Sark,Who made an unpleasant remark;But they said, "Don't you see what a brute you must be,You obnoxious old person of Sark!" There was an old man whose despairInduced him to purchase a hare:Whereon one fine day he rode wholly away,Which partly assuaged his despair. There was an old person of Barnes,Whose garments were covered with darns;But they said, "Without doubt, you will soon wear them out,You luminous person of Barnes!" There was an old person of Nice,Whose associates were usually Geese.They walked out together in all sorts of weather,That affable person of Nice! There was a young lady of Greenwich,Whose garments were border'd with Spinach;But a large spotty Calf bit her shawl quite in half,Which alarmed that young lady of Greenwich. There was an old person of Cannes,Who purchased three fowls and a fan;Those she placed on a stool, and to make them feel coolShe constantly fanned them at Cannes. There was an old person of Ickley,Who could not abide to ride quickly;He rode to Karnak on a tortoise's back,That moony old person of Ickley. There was an old person of Hyde,Who walked by the shore with his bride,Till a Crab who came near fill'd their bosoms with fear,And they said, "Would we'd never left Hyde!" There was an old person in gray,Whose feelings were tinged with dismay;She purchased two parrots, and fed them with carrots,Which pleased that old person in gray. There was an old man of Ancona,Who found a small dog with no owner,Which he took up and down all the streets of the town,That anxious old man of Ancona. There was an old person of Sestri,Who sate himself down in the vestry;When they said, "You are wrong!" he merely said "Bong!"That repulsive old person of Sestri. There was an old person of Blythe,Who cut up his meat with a scythe;When they said, "Well! I never!" he cried, "Scythes for ever!"That lively old person of Blythe. There was a young person of Ayr,Whose head was remarkably square:On the top, in fine weather, she wore a gold feather;Which dazzled the people of Ayr. There was an old person of Rimini,Who said, "Gracious! Goodness! O Gimini!"When they said, "Please be still!" she ran down a hill,And was never more heard of at Rimini. There is a young lady, whose nose,Continually prospers and grows;When it grew out of sight, she exclaimed in a fright,"Oh! Farewell to the end of my nose!" There was an old person of Ealing,Who was wholly devoid of good feeling;He drove a small gig, with three Owls and a Pig,Which distressed all the people of Ealing. There was an old man of Thames Ditton,Who called out for something to sit on;But they brought him a hat, and said, "Sit upon that,You abruptious old man of Thames Ditton!" There was an old person of Bray,Who sang through the whole of the dayTo his ducks and his pigs, whom he fed upon figs,That valuable person of Bray. There was a young person whose historyWas always considered a mystery;She sate in a ditch, although no one knew which,And composed a small treatise on history. There was an old person of Bow,Whom nobody happened to know;So they gave him some soap, and said coldly, "We hopeYou will go back directly to Bow!" There was an old person of Rye,Who went up to town on a fly;But they said, "If you cough, you are safe to fall off!You abstemious old person of Rye!" There was an old person of Crowle,Who lived in the nest of an owl;When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest,That depressing old person of Crowle. There was an old Lady of Winchelsea,Who said, "If you needle or pin shall seeOn the floor of my room, sweep it up with the broom!"That exhaustive old Lady of Winchelsea! There was an old man in a tree,Whose whiskers were lovely to see;But the birds of the air pluck'd them perfectly bare,To make themselves nests in that tree. There was a young lady of Corsica,Who purchased a little brown saucy-cur;Which she fed upon ham, and hot raspberry jam,That expensive young lady of Corsica. There was a young lady of Firle,Whose hair was addicted to curl;It curled up a tree, and all over the sea,That expansive young lady of Firle. There was an old person of Stroud,Who was horribly jammed in a crowd;Some she slew with a kick, some she scrunched with a stick,That impulsive old person of Stroud. There was an old man of Boulak,Who sate on a Crocodile's back;But they said, "Towr'ds the night he may probably bite,Which might vex you, old man of Boulak!" There was an old person of Skye,Who waltz'd with a Bluebottle fly:They buzz'd a sweet tune, to the light of the moon,And entranced all the people of Skye. There was an old man of Blackheath,Whose head was adorned with a wreathOf lobsters and spice, pickled onions and mice,That uncommon old man of Blackheath. There was an old man, who when littleFell casually into a kettle;But, growing too stout, he could never get out,So he passed all his life in that kettle. There was an old person of Dundalk,Who tried to teach fishes to walk;When they tumbled down dead, he grew weary, and said,"I had better go back to Dundalk!" There was an old person of Shoreham,Whose habits were marked by decorum;He bought an Umbrella, and sate in the cellar,Which pleased all the people of Shoreham. There was an old person of Bar,Who passed all her life in a jar,Which she painted pea-green, to appear more serene,That placid old person of Bar. There was a young person of Kew,Whose virtues and vices were few;But with blamable haste she devoured some hot paste,Which destroyed that young person of Kew. There was an old person of Jodd,Whose ways were perplexing and odd;She purchased a whistle, and sate on a thistle,And squeaked to the people of Jodd. There was an old person of Bude,Whose deportment was vicious and crude;He wore a large ruff of pale straw-colored stuff,Which perplexed all the people of Bude. There was an old person of Brigg,Who purchased no end of a wig;So that only his nose, and the end of his toes,Could be seen when he walked about Brigg. There was an old man of Messina,Whose daughter was named Opsibeena;She wore a small wig, and rode out on a pig,To the perfect delight of Messina. The Absolutely Abstemious Ass,who resided in a Barrel, and only lived onSoda Water and Pickled Cucumbers. The Bountiful Beetle,who always carried a Green Umbrella when it didn't rain,and left it at home when it did. The Comfortable Confidential Cow,who sate in her Red Morocco Arm Chair andtoasted her own Bread at the parlour Fire. The Dolomphious Duck,who caught Spotted Frogs for her dinnerwith a Runcible Spoon. The Enthusiastic Elephant,who ferried himself across the water with theKitchen Poker and a New pair of Ear-rings. The Fizzgiggious Fish,who always walked about upon Stilts,because he had no legs. The Good-natured Grey Gull,who carried the Old Owl, and his Crimson Carpet-bag,across the river, because he could not swim. The Hasty Higgeldipiggledy Hen,who went to market in a Blue Bonnet and Shawl,and bought a Fish for her Supper. The Inventive Indian,who caught a Remarkable Rabbit in aStupendous Silver Spoon. The Judicious Jubilant Jay,who did up her Back Hair every morning with a Wreath of Roses,Three feathers, and a Gold Pin. The Kicking Kangaroo,who wore a Pale Pink Muslin dresswith Blue spots. The Lively Learned Lobster,who mended his own Clothes witha Needle and Thread. The Melodious Meritorious Mouse,who played a merry minuet on thePiano-forte. The Nutritious Newt,who purchased a Round Plum-puddingfor his grand-daughter. The Obsequious Ornamental Ostrich,who wore Boots to keep hisfeet quite dry. The Perpendicular Purple Polly,who read the Newspaper and ate Parsnip Piewith his Spectacles. The Queer Querulous Quail,who smoked a Pipe of tobacco on the top ofa Tin Tea-kettle. The Rural Runcible Raven,who wore a White Wig and flew awaywith the Carpet Broom. The Scroobious Snake,who always wore a Hat on his Head, forfear he should bite anybody. The Tumultuous Tom-tommy Tortoise,who beat a Drum all day long in themiddle of the wilderness. The Umbrageous Umbrella-maker,whose Face nobody ever saw, because it wasalways covered by his Umbrella. The Visibly Vicious Vulture,who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in aVolume bound in Vellum. The Worrying Whizzing Wasp,who stood on a Table, and played sweetly on aFlute with a Morning Cap. The Excellent Double-extra XXimbibing King Xerxes, who lived along while ago. The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,whose Head was ever so much bigger than hisBody, and whose Hat was rather small. The Zigzag Zealous Zebra,who carried five Monkeys on his back allthe way to Jellibolee.

The Unknown Eros

Title: The Unknown Eros Author: Coventry Patmore Release date: October 7, 2004 [eBook #13672]Most recently updated: December 18, 2020 Language: English This eBook was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset. To this edition of “The Unknown Eros” are added all the other poems I have written, in what I venture—because it has no other name—to call “catalectic verse.”  Nearly all English metres owe their existence as metres to “catalexis,” or pause, for the time of one or more feet, and, as a rule, the position and amount of catalexis are fixed.  But the verse in which this volume is written is catalecticpar excellence, employing the pause (as it does the rhyme) with freedom only limited by the exigencies of poetic passion.  From the time of Drummond of Hawthornden to our own, some of the noblest flights of English poetry have been taken on the wings of this verse; but with ordinary readers it has been more or less discredited by the far greater number of abortive efforts, on the part sometimes of considerable poets, to adapt it to purposes with which it has no expressional correspondence; or to vary it by rhythmical movements which are destructive of its character. Some persons, unlearned in the subject of metre, have objected to this kind of verse that it is “lawless.”  But it has its laws as truly as any other.  In its highest order, the lyric or “ode,” it is a tetrameter, the line having the time of eight iambics.  When it descends to narrative, or the expression of a less-exalted strain of thought, it becomes a trimeter, having the time of six iambics, or even a dimeter, with the time of four; and it is allowable to vary the tetrameter “ode” by the occasional introduction of passages in either or both of these inferior measures, but not, I think, by the use of any other.  The license to rhyme at indefinite intervals is counterbalanced, in the writing of all poets who have employed this metre successfully, by unusual frequency in the recurrence of the same rhyme.  For information on the generally overlooked but primarily important function of catalexis in English verse I refer such readers as may be curious about the subject to the Essay printed as an appendix to the later editions of my collected poems. I do not pretend to have done more than very moderate justice to the exceeding grace and dignity and the inexhaustible expressiveness of which this kind of metre is capable; but I can say that I have never attempted to write in it in the absence of that one justification of and prime qualification for its use, namely, the impulse of some thought that “voluntary moved harmonious numbers.” COVENTRY PATMORE.HASTINGS, 1890. PROEM. I.      SAINT VALENTINE’S DAYII.     WIND AND WAVEIII.    WINTERIV.     BEATAV.      THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROWVI.     TRISTITIAVII.    THE AZALEAVIII.   DEPARTUREIX.     EURYDICEX.      THE TOYSXI.     TIRED MEMORYXII.    MAGNA EST VERITASXIII.   1867XIV.    ‘IF I WERE DEAD’XV.     PEACEXVI.    A FAREWELLXVII.   1880-85.XVIII.  THE TWO DESERTSXIX.    CREST AND GULFXX.     ‘LET BE!’XXI.    ‘FAINT YET PURSUING’XXII.   VICTORY IN DEFEATXVIII.  REMEMBERED GRACEXXIV.   VESICA PISCIS I.      TO THE UNKNOWN EROSII.     THE CONTRACTIII.    ARBOR VITAEIV.     THE STANDARDSV.      SPONSA DEIVI.     LEGEM TUAM DILEXIVII.    TO THE BODYVIII.   ‘SING US ONE OF THE SONGS OF SION’IX.     DELICIAE SAPIENTIAE DE AMOREX.      THE CRY AT MIDNIGHTXI.     AURAS OF DELIGHTXII.    EROS AND PSYCHEXIII.   DE NATURA DEORUMXIV.    PSYCHE’S DISCONTENTXV.     PAINXVI.    PROPHETS WHO CANNOT SINGXVII.   THE CHILD’S PURCHASEXVIII.  DEAD LANGUAGE AMELIAL’ALLEGROREGINA COELITHE OPEN SECRETVENUS AND DEATHMIGNONNEALEXANDER AND LYCONSEMELE “Deliciae meae esse cum filiis hominum.”PROV. VIII. 31. ‘Many speak wisely, some inerrably:Witness the beast who talk’d that should have bray’d,And Caiaphas that saidExpedient ’twas for all that One should die;But what availsWhen Love’s right accent from their wisdom fails,And the Truth-criers know not what they cry!Say, wherefore thou,As under bondage of some bitter vow,Warblest no word,When all the rest are shouting to be heard?Why leave the fervid running just when Fame’Gan whispering of thy nameAmongst the hard-pleased Judges of the Course?Parch’d is thy crystal-flowing source?Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe, the trodden ground,Till passion’s buried floods be found;Intend thine eyeInto the dim and undiscover’d skyWhose lustres are the pulsings of the heart,And promptly, as thy trade is, watch to chartThe lonely suns, the mystic hazes and throng’d sparkles brightThat, named and number’d rightIn sweet, transpicuous words, shall glow alwayWith Love’s three-stranded ray,Red wrath, compassion golden, lazuline delight.’Thus, in reproof of my despondency,My Mentor; and thus I:O, season strange for song!And yet some timely power persuades my lips.Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue,As other Kingdoms, nearing their eclipse,Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strongThe voice that was their voice in earlier days?Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry,The note which those that seem too weak to sighWill sometimes utter just before they die?Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways,There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard,Her ancient beauty marr’d,And, in her cold and aimless roving sight,Horror of light;Sole vigour left in her last lethargy,Save when, at bidding of some dreadful breath,The rising deathRolls up with force;And then the furiously gibbering corseShakes, panglessly convuls’d, and sightless stares,Whilst one Physician pours in rousing wines,One anodynes,And one declaresThat nothing ails it but the pains of growth.My last look lothIs taken; and I turn, with the reliefOf knowing that my life-long hope and griefAre surely vain,To that unshapen time to come, when She,A dim, heroic Nation long since dead,The foulness of her agony forgot,Shall all benignly shedThrough ages vastThe ghostly grace of her transfigured pastOver the present, harass’d and forlorn,Of nations yet unborn;And this shall be the lotOf those who, in the bird-voice and the blastOf her omniloquent tongue,Have truly sungOr greatly said,To shew as oneWith those who have best done,And be as rays,Thro’ the still altering world, around her changeless head.Therefore no ’plaint be mineOf listeners none,No hope of render’d use or proud reward,In hasty times and hard;But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throatAt latest eve,That does in each calm noteBoth joy and grieve;Notes few and strong and fine,Gilt with sweet day’s decline,And sad with promise of a different sun.’Mid the loud concert harshOf this fog-folded marsh,To me, else dumb,Uranian Clearness, come!Give me to breathe in peace and in surpriseThe light-thrill’d ether of your rarest skies,Till inmost absolution startThe welling in the grateful eyes,The heaving in the heart.Winnow with sighsAnd wash awayWith tears the dust and stain of clay,Till all the Song be Thine, as beautiful as Morn,Bedeck’d with shining clouds of scorn;And Thou, Inspirer, deign to broodO’er the delighted words, and call them Very Good.This grant, Clear Spirit; and grant that I remainContent to ask unlikely gifts in vain. Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to holdIn vestal February;Not rather choosing out some rosy dayFrom the rich coronet of the coming May,When all things meet to marry!O, quick, praevernal PowerThat signall’st punctual through the sleepy mouldThe Snowdrop’s time to flower,Fair as the rash oath of virginityWhich is first-love’s first cry;O, Baby Spring,That flutter’st sudden ’neath the breast of EarthA month before the birth;Whence is the peaceful poignancy,The joy contrite,Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight,That burthens now the breath of everything,Though each one sighs as if to each aloneThe cherish’d pang were known?At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart,With it the Blackbird breaks the young Day’s heart;In evening’s hushAbout it talks the heavenly-minded Thrush;The hill with like remorseSmiles to the Sun’s smile in his westering course;The fisher’s drooping skiffIn yonder sheltering bay;The choughs that call about the shining cliff;The children, noisy in the setting ray;Own the sweet season, each thing as it may;Thoughts of strange kindness and forgotten peaceIn me increase;And tears ariseWithin my happy, happy Mistress’ eyes,And, lo, her lips, averted from my kiss,Ask from Love’s bounty, ah, much more than bliss!Is’t the sequester’d and exceeding sweetOf dear Desire electing his defeat?Is’t the waked Earth now to yon purpling copeUttering first-love’s first cry,Vainly renouncing, with a Seraph’s sigh,Love’s natural hope?Fair-meaning Earth, foredoom’d to perjury!Behold, all-amorous May,With roses heap’d upon her laughing brows,Avoids thee of thy vows!Were it for thee, with her warm bosom near,To abide the sharpness of the Seraph’s sphere?Forget thy foolish words;Go to her summons gay,Thy heart with dead, wing’d Innocencies fill’d,Ev’n as a nest with birdsAfter the old ones by the hawk are kill’d.Well dost thou, Love, to celebrateThe noon of thy soft ecstasy,Or e’er it be too late,Or e’er the Snowdrop die! The wedded light and heat,Winnowing the witless space,Without a let,What are they till they beatAgainst the sleepy sod, and there begetPerchance the violet!Is the One found,Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,To make Heaven’s bound;So that in HerAll which it hath of sensitively goodIs sought and understoodAfter the narrow mode the mighty Heavens prefer?She, as a little breezeFollowing still Night,Ripples the spirit’s cold, deep seasInto delight;But, in a while,The immeasurable smileIs broke by fresher airs to flashes blentWith darkling discontent;And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,’Tward the void sky-line and an unguess’d weal;Until the vanward billows feelThe agitating shallows, and divine the goal,And to foam roll,And spread and strayAnd traverse wildly, like delighted hands,The fair and feckless sands;And so the wholeUnfathomable and immenseTriumphing tide comes at the last to reachAnd burst in wind-kiss’d splendours on the deaf’ning beach,Where forms of children in first innocenceLaugh and fling pebbles on the rainbow’d crestOf its untired unrest. I, singularly movedTo love the lovely that are not beloved,Of all the Seasons, mostLove Winter, and to traceThe sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.It is not death, but plenitude of peace;And the dim cloud that does the world enfoldHath less the characters of dark and coldThan warmth and light asleep,And correspondent breathing seems to keepWith the infant harvest, breathing soft belowIts eider coverlet of snow.Nor is in field or garden anythingBut, duly look’d into, contains sereneThe substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,And evidence of Summer not yet seen.On every chance-mild dayThat visits the moist shaw,The honeysuckle, ’sdaining to be crostIn urgence of sweet life by sleet or frost,’Voids the time’s lawWith still increaseOf leaflet new, and little, wandering spray;Often, in sheltering brakes,As one from rest disturb’d in the first hour,Primrose or violet bewilder’d wakes,And deems ’tis time to flower;Though not a whisper of her voice he hear,The buried bulb does knowThe signals of the year,And hails far Summer with his lifted spear.The gorse-field dark, by sudden, gold caprice,Turns, here and there, into a Jason’s fleece;Lilies, that soon in Autumn slipp’d their gowns of green,And vanish’d into earth,And came again, ere Autumn died, to birth,Stand full-array’d, amidst the wavering shower,And perfect for the Summer, less the flower;In nook of pale or crevice of crude bark,Thou canst not miss,If close thou spy, to markThe ghostly chrysalis,That, if thou touch it, stirs in its dream dark;And the flush’d Robin, in the evenings hoar,Does of Love’s Day, as if he saw it, sing;But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or SpringAre Winter’s sometime smiles, that seem to wellFrom infancy ineffable;Her wandering, languorous gaze,So unfamiliar, so without amaze,On the elemental, chill adversity,The uncomprehended rudeness; and her sighAnd solemn, gathering tear,And look of exile from some great repose, the sphereOf ether, moved by ether only, orBy something still more tranquil. Of infinite Heaven the rays,Piercing some eyelet in our cavern black,Ended their viewless trackOn thee to smiteSolely, as on a diamond stalactite,And in mid-darkness lit a rainbow’s blaze,Wherein the absolute Reason, Power, and Love,That erst could moveMainly in me but toil and weariness,Renounced their deadening might,Renounced their undistinguishable stressOf withering white,And did with gladdest hues my spirit caress,Nothing of Heaven in thee showing infinite,Save the delight. Perchance she droops within the hollow gulfWhich the great wave of coming pleasure draws,Not guessing the glad cause!Ye Clouds that on your endless journey go,Ye Winds that westward flow,Thou heaving SeaThat heav’st ’twixt her and me,Tell her I come;Then only sigh your pleasure, and be dumb;For the sweet secret of our either selfWe know.Tell her I come,And let her heart be still’d.One day’s controlled hope, and then one more,And on the third our lives shall be fulfill’d!Yet all has been before:Palm placed in palm, twin smiles, and words astray.What other should we say?But shall I not, with ne’er a sign, perceive,Whilst her sweet hands I hold,The myriad threads and meshes manifoldWhich Love shall round her weave:The pulse in that vein making alien pauseAnd varying beats from this;Down each long finger felt, a differing strandOf silvery welcome bland;And in her breezy palmAnd silken wrist,Beneath the touch of my like numerous blissComplexly kiss’d,A diverse and distinguishable calm?What should we say!It all has been before;And yet our lives shall now be first fulfill’d,And into their summ’d sweetness fall distill’dOne sweet drop more;One sweet drop more, in absolute increaseOf unrelapsing peace.O, heaving Sea,That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,And separatest not dear heart from heart,Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart,For yet awhileLet it not seem that I behold her smile.O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,Love in each moment years and years of rest,Be calm, as being not.Ye oceans of intolerable delight,The blazing photosphere of central Night,Be ye forgot.Terror, thou swarthy Groom of Bride-bliss coy,Let me not see thee toy.O, Death, too tardy with thy hope intenseOf kisses close beyond conceit of sense;O, Life, too liberal, while to take her handIs more of hope than heart can understand;Perturb my golden patience not with joy,Nor, through a wish, profaneThe peace that should pertainTo him who does by her attraction move.Has all not been before?One day’s controlled hope, and one again,And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,O Life, Death, Terror, Love!But soon let your unrestful rapture cease,Ye flaming Ethers thin,Condensing till the abiding sweetness winOne sweet drop more;One sweet drop more in the measureless increaseOf honied peace. Darling, with hearts conjoin’d in such a peaceThat Hope, so not to cease,Must still gaze back,And count, along our love’s most happy track,The landmarks of like inconceiv’d increase,Promise me this:If thou alone should’st winGod’s perfect bliss,And I, beguiled by gracious-seeming sin,Say, loving too much thee,Love’s last goal miss,And any vows may then have memory,Never, by grief for what I bear or lack,To mar thy joyance of heav’n’s jubilee.Promise me this;For else I should be hurl’d,Beyond just doomAnd by thy deed, to Death’s interior gloom,From the mild borders of the banish’d worldWherein they dwellWho builded not unalterable fateOn pride, fraud, envy, cruel lust, or hate;Yet loved too laxly sweetness and heart’s ease,And strove the creature more than God to please.For such as theseLoss without measure, sadness without end!Yet not for this do thou disheaven’d beWith thinking upon me.Though black, when scann’d from heaven’s surpassing bright,This might mean light,Foil’d with the dim days of mortality.For God is everywhere.Go down to deepest Hell, and He is there,And, as a true but quite estranged Friend,He works, ’gainst gnashing teeth of devilish ire,With love deep hidden lest it be blasphemed,If possible, to blendEase with the pangs of its inveterate fire;Yea, in the worstAnd from His Face most wilfully accurstOf souls in vain redeem’d,He does with potions of oblivion killRemorse of the lost Love that helps them still.Apart from these,Near the sky-borders of that banish’d world,Wander pale spirits among willow’d leas,Lost beyond measure, sadden’d without end,But since, while erring most, retaining yetSome ineffectual fervour of regret,Retaining still such wealAs spurned Lovers feel,Preferring far to all the world’s delightTheir loss so infinite,Or Poets, when they markIn the clouds dunA loitering flush of the long sunken sun,And turn away with tears into the dark.Know, Dear, these are not mineBut Wisdom’s words, confirmed by divineDoctors and Saints, though fitly seldom heardSave in their own prepense-occulted word,Lest fools be fool’d the further by false hope,And wrest sweet knowledge to their own decline;And (to approve I speak within my scope)The Mistress of that dateless exile grayIs named in surpliced SchoolsTristitia.But, O, my Darling, look in thy heart and seeHow unto me,Secured of my prime care, thy happy state,In the most unclean cellOf sordid Hell,And worried by the most ingenious hate,It never could be anything but well,Nor from my soul, full of thy sanctity,Such pleasure dieAs the poor harlot’s, in whose body stirsThe innocent life that is and is not hers:Unless, alas, this fount of my reliefBy thy unheavenly griefWere closed.So, with a consecrating kissAnd hearts made one in past all previous peace,And on one hope reposed,Promise me this! There, where the sun shines firstAgainst our room,She train’d the gold Azalea, whose perfumeShe, Spring-like, from her breathing grace dispersed.Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom,For this their dainty likeness watch’d and nurst,Were just at point to burst.At dawn I dream’d, O God, that she was dead,And groan’d aloud upon my wretched bed,And waked, ah, God, and did not waken her,But lay, with eyes still closed,Perfectly bless’d in the delicious sphereBy which I knew so well that she was near,My heart to speechless thankfulness composed.Till ’gan to stirA dizzy somewhat in my troubled head—Itwasthe azalea’s breath, and shewasdead!The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed,And I had fall’n asleep with to my breastA chance-found letter press’dIn which she said,‘So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu!Parting’s well-paid with soon again to meet,Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet,Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you!’ It was not like your great and gracious ways!Do you, that have nought other to lament,Never, my Love, repentOf how, that July afternoon,You went,With sudden, unintelligible phrase,And frighten’d eye,Upon your journey of so many days,Without a single kiss, or a good-bye?I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;And so we sate, within the low sun’s rays,You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,Your harrowing praise.Well, it was well,To hear you such things speak,And I could tellWhat made your eyes a growing gloom of love,As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.And it was like your great and gracious waysTo turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,Lifting the luminous, pathetic lashTo let the laughter flash,Whilst I drew near,Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.But all at once to leave me at the last,More at the wonder than the loss aghast,With huddled, unintelligible phrase,And frighten’d eye,And go your journey of all daysWith not one kiss, or a good-bye,And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d:’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways. Is this the portent of the day nigh past,And of a restless graveO’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast;Or but the heaped waveOf some chance, wandering tide,Such as that world of aweWhose circuit, listening to a foreign law,Conjunctures ours at unguess’d dates and wide,Does in the Spirit’s tremulous ocean draw,To pass unfateful on, and so subside?Thee, whom ev’n more than Heaven loved I have,And yet have not been trueEven to thee,I, dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursueThro’ sordid streets and lanesAnd houses brown and bareAnd many a haggard stairOchrous with ancient stains,And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,In whose unhaunted gloomsDead pauper generations, witless of the sun,Their course have run;And ofttimes my pursuitIs check’d of its dear fruitBy things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,Furious that I should keepTheir forfeit power to weep,And mock, with living fear, their mournful malice thin.But ever, at the last, my way I winTo where, with perfectly sad patience, nurstBy sorry comfort of assured worst,Ingrain’d in fretted cheek and lips that pine,On pallet poorThou lyest, stricken sick,Beyond love’s cure,By all the world’s neglect, but chiefly mine.Then sweetness, sweeter than my tongue can tell,Does in my bosom well,And tears come free and quickAnd more and more aboundFor piteous passion keen at having found,After exceeding ill, a little good;A little goodWhich, for the while,Fleets with the current sorrow of the blood,Though no good here has heart enough to smile. My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyesAnd moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,I struck him, and dismiss’dWith hard words and unkiss’d,His Mother, who was patient, being dead.Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,I visited his bed,But found him slumbering deep,With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yetFrom his late sobbing wet.And I, with moan,Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;For, on a table drawn beside his head,He had put, within his reach,A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,A piece of glass abraded by the beachAnd six or seven shells,A bottle with bluebellsAnd two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,To comfort his sad heart.So when that night I pray’dTo God, I wept, and said:Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,Not vexing Thee in death,And Thou rememberest of what toysWe made our joys,How weakly understood,Thy great commanded good,Then, fatherly not lessThan I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’ The stony rock of death’s insensibilityWell’d yet awhile with honey of thy loveAnd then was dry;Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the bandWhich really spann’dThy body chaste and warm,Thenceforward moveUpon the stony rock their wearied charm.At last, then, thou wast dead.Yet would I not despair,But wrought my daily task, and daily saidMany and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm.In vain.‘For ’tis,’ I said, ‘all one,The wilful faith, which has no joy or pain,As if ’twere none.’Then look’d I miserably roundIf aught of duteous love were left undone,And nothing found.But, kneeling in a Church, one Easter-Day,It came to me to say:‘Though there is no intelligible rest,In Earth or Heaven,For me, but on her breast,I yield her up, again to have her given,Or not, as, Lord, Thou wilt, and that for aye.’And the same night, in slumber lying,I, who had dream’d of thee as sad and sick and dying,And only so, nightly for all one year,Did thee, my own most Dear,Possess,In gay, celestial beauty nothing coy,And felt thy soft caressWith heretofore unknown reality of joy.But, in our mortal air,None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,And fresh despairBade me seek round afresh for some extremeOf unconceiv’d, interior sacrificeWhereof the smoke might riseTo God, and ’mind him that one pray’d below.And so,In agony, I cried:‘My Lord, if thy strange will be this,That I should crucify my heart,Because my love has also been my pride,I do submit, if I saw how, to blissWherein She has no part.’And I was heard,And taken at my own remorseless word.O, my most Dear,Was’t treason, as I fear?’Twere that, and worse, to plead thy veiled mind,Kissing thy babes, and murmuring in mine ear,‘Thou canst not beFaithful to God, and faithless unto me!’Ah, prophet kind!I heard, all dumb and blindWith tears of protest; and I cannot seeBut faith was broken.  Yet, as I have said,My heart was dead,Dead of devotion and tired memory,When a strange grace of theeIn a fair stranger, as I take it, bredTo her some tender heed,Most innocentOf purpose therewith blent,And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet suchThat the pale reflex of an alien love,So vaguely, sadly shown,Did her heart touchAboveAll that, till then, had woo’d her for its own.And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn,Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine,And made me weak,By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,And Nature’s long suspended breath of flamePersuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name,Awhile to smile and speakWith this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine;Thy Sister sweet,Who bade the wheels to stirOf sensitive delight in the poor brain,Dead of devotion and tired memory,So that I lived again,And, strange to aver,With no relapse into the void inane,For thee;But (treason was’t?) for thee and also her. Here, in this little Bay,Full of tumultuous life and great repose,Where, twice a day,The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,I sit me down.For want of me the world’s course will not fail:When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;The truth is great, and shall prevail,When none cares whether it prevail or not. In the year of the great crime,When the false English Nobles and their Jew,By God demented, slewThe Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,One said, Take up thy Song,That breathes the mild and almost mythic timeOf England’s prime!But I, Ah, me,The freedom of the fewThat, in our free Land, were indeed the free,Can song renew?Ill singing ’tis with blotting prison-bars,How high soe’er, betwixt us and the stars;Ill singing ’tis when there are none to hear;And days are nearWhen England shall forgetThe fading glow which, for a little while,Illumes her yet,The lovely smileThat grows so faint and wan,Her people shouting in her dying ear,Are not two daws worth two of any swan!Ye outlaw’d Best, who yet are brightWith the sunken light,Whose common styleIs Virtue at her gracious ease,The flower of olden sanctities,Ye haply trust, by love’s benignant guile,To lure the dark and selfish broodTo their own hated good;Ye haply dreamYour lives shall still their charmful sway sustain,Unstifled by the fever’d steamThat rises from the plain.Know, ’twas the force of function high,In corporate exercise, and public aweOf Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s LawThat Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,Which kept you in your sky!But, when the sordid Trader caughtThe loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,And soon, to the Mechanic vain,Sold the proud toy for nought,Your charm was broke, your task was sped,Your beauty, with your honour, dead,And though you still are dreaming sweetOf being even now not lessThan Gods and Goddesses, ye shall not long so cheatYour hearts of their due heaviness.Go, get you for your evil watching shriven!Leave to your lawful Master’s itching handsYour unking’d lands,But keep, at least, the dignityOf deigning not, for his smooth use, to be,Voteless, the voted delegatesOf his strange interests, loves and hates.In sackcloth, or in private strifeWith private ill, ye may please Heaven,And soothe the coming pangs of sinking life;And prayer perchance may winA term to God’s indignant moodAnd the orgies of the multitude,Which now begin;But do not hope to wave the silken ragOf your unsanction’d flag,And so to guideThe great ship, helmless on the swelling tideOf that presumptuous Sea,Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly brightWith lights innumerable that give no light,Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right,Rejoicing to be free.And, now, because the dark comes on apaceWhen none can work for fear,And Liberty in every Land lies slain,And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,And heavy prophecies, suspended longAt supplication of the righteous few,And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear,And the dread baptism of blood seems nearThat brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,Breathless be song,And let Christ’s own look throughThe darkness, suddenly increased,To the gray secret lingering in the East. ‘If I were dead, you’d sometimes say, Poor Child!’The dear lips quiver’d as they spake,And the tears brakeFrom eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.Poor Child, poor Child!I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.It is not true that Love will do no wrong.Poor Child!And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,And of those words your full avengers make?Poor Child, poor Child!And now, unless it beThat sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,O God, have Thounomercy upon me!Poor Child! O England, how hast thou forgot,In dullard care for undisturb’d increaseOf gold, which profits not,The gain which once thou knew’st was for thy peace!Honour is peace, the peace which does accordAlone with God’s glad word:‘My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’O England, how hast thou forgot,How fear’st the things which make for joy, not fear,Confronted near.Hard days?  ’Tis what the pamper’d seek to buyWith their most willing gold in weary lands.Loss and pain risk’d?  What sport but understandsThese for incitements!  Suddenly to die,With conscience a blurr’d scroll?The sunshine dreaming upon Salmon’s heightIs not so sweet and whiteAs the most heretofore sin-spotted soulThat darts to its delightStraight from the absolution of a faithful fight.Myriads of homes unloosen’d of home’s bond,And fill’d with helpless babes and harmless women fond?Let those whose pleasant chanceTook them, like me, among the German towns,After the war that pluck’d the fangs from France,With me pronounceWhether the frequent black, which then array’dChild, wife, and maid,Did most to magnify the sombreness of grief,Or add the beauty of a staid reliefAnd freshening foilTo cheerful-hearted Honour’s ready smile!Beneath the heroic sunIs there then noneWhose sinewy wings by choice do flyIn the fine mountain-air of public obloquy,To tell the sleepy mongers of false easeThat war’s the ordained way of all alive,And therein with goodwill to dare and thriveIs profit and heart’s peace?But in his heart the fool now saith:‘The thoughts of Heaven were past all finding out,Indeed, if it should rainIntolerable woes upon our Land again,After so long a drought!’‘Will a kind Providence our vessel whelm,With such a pious Pilot at the helm?’‘Or let the throats be cut of pretty sheepThat care for nought but pasture rich and deep?’‘Were ’t Evangelical of God to deal so foul a blowAt people who hate Turks and Papists so?’‘What, make or keepA tax for ship and gun,When ’tis full three to oneYon bully but intendsTo beat our friends?’‘Let’s put asideOur costly pride.Our appetite’s not goneBecause we’ve learn’d to doffOur caps, where we were used to keep them on.’‘If times get worse,We’ve money in our purse,And Patriots that know how, let who will scoff,To buy our perils off.Yea, blessed in our midstArt thou who lately didst,So cheap,The old bargain of the Saxon with the Dane.’{35}Thus in his heart the fool now saith;And, lo, our trusted leaders trust fool’s luck,Which, like the whale’s ’mazed chine,When they thereon were mulling of their wine,Will some day duck.Remnant of Honour, brooding in the darkOver your bitter cark,Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied seven days,Upon the corpses of so many sons,Who loved her once,Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways,Who could have dreamtThat times should come like these!Prophets, indeed, taught lies when we were young,And people loved to have it so;For they teach well who teach their scholars’ tongue!But that the foolish both should gaze,With feeble, fascinated face,Upon the wan crest of the coming woe,The billow of earthquake underneath the seas,And sit at ease,Or stand agape,Without so much as stepping back to ’scape,Mumbling, ‘Perchance we perish if we stay:’Tis certain wear of shoes to stir away!’Who could have dreamtThat times should come like these!Remnant of Honour, tongue-tied with contempt,Consider; you are strong yet, if you please.A hundred just men up, and arm’d but with a frown,May hoot a hundred thousand false loons down,Or drive them any way like geese.But to sit silent now is to subornThe common villainy you scorn.In the dark hourWhen phrases are in power,And nought’s to choose betweenThe thing which is not and which is not seen,One fool, with lusty lungs,Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues,Shall ne’er undo.In such an hour,When eager hands are fetter’d and too few,And hearts alone have leave to bleed,Speak; for a good word then is a good deed. With all my will, but much against my heart,We two now part.My Very Dear,Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear.It needs no art,With faint, averted feetAnd many a tear,In our opposed paths to persevere.Go thou to East, I West.We will not sayThere’s any hope, it is so far away.But, O, my Best,When the one darling of our widowhead,The nursling Grief,Is dead,And no dews blur our eyesTo see the peach-bloom come in evening skies,Perchance we may,Where now this night is day,And even through faith of still averted feet,Making full circle of our banishment,Amazed meet;The bitter journey to the bourne so sweetSeasoning the termless feast of our contentWith tears of recognition never dry. Stand by,Ye Wise, by whom Heav’n rules!Your kingly hands suit not the hangman’s tools.When God has doom’d a glorious Past to die,Are there no knaves and fools?For ages yet to come your kind shall count for nought.Smoke of the strife of other PowersThan ours,And tongues inscrutable with fury fraught‘Wilder the sky,Till the far good which none can guess be wrought.Stand by!Since tears are vain, here let us rest and laugh,But not too loudly; for the brave time’s come,When Best may not blaspheme the Bigger Half,And freedom for our sort means freedom to be dumb.Lo, how the dross and draffJeer up at us, and shout,‘The Day is ours, the Night is theirs!’And urge their routWhere the wild dawn of rising Tartarus flares.Yon strives their Leader, lusting to be seen.His leprosy’s so perfect that men call him clean!Listen the long, sincere, and liberal brayOf the earnest Puller at another’s hay’Gainst aught that dares to tug the other way,Quite void of fearsWith all that noise of ruin round his ears!Yonder the people cast their caps o’erhead,And swear the threaten’d doom is ne’er to dreadThat’s come, though not yet past.All front the horror and are none aghast;Brag of their full-blown rights and liberties,Nor once surmiseWhen each man gets his due the Nation dies;Nay, still shout ‘Progress!’ as if seven plaguesShould take the laggard who would stretch his legs.Forward! glad rush of Gergesenian swine;You’ve gain’d the hill-top, but there’s yet the brine.Forward! to meet the welcome of the wavesThat mount to ’whelm the freedom which enslaves.Forward! bad corpses turn into good dung,To feed strange futures beautiful and young.Forward! God speed ye down the damn’d decline,And grant ye the Fool’s true good, in abject ruin’s gulfAs the Wise see him so to see himself!Ah, Land once mine,That seem’d to me too sweetly wise,Too sternly fair for aught that dies,Past is thy proud and pleasant state,That recent dateWhen, strong and single, in thy sovereign heart,The thrones of thinking, hearing, sight,The cunning hand, the knotted thewOf lesser powers that heave and hew,And each the smallest beneficial part,And merest pore of breathing, beat,Full and complete,The great pulse of thy generous might,Equal in inequality,That soul of joy in low and high;When not a churl but felt the Giant’s heat,Albeit he simply call’d it his,Flush in his common labour with delight,And not a village-Maiden’s kissBut was for thisMore sweet,And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh,And for its private self less greet,The whilst that other so majestic self stood by!Integrity so vast could well affordTo wear in working many a stain,To pillory the cobbler vainAnd license madness in a lord.On that were all men well agreed;And, if they did a thing,Their strength was with them in their deed,And from amongst them came the shout of a king!But, once let traitor coward meet,Not Heaven itself can keep its feet.Come knave who said to dastard, ‘Lo,The Deluge!’ which but needed ‘No!’For all the Atlantic’s threatening roar,If men would bravely understand,Is softly check’d for evermoreBy a firm bar of sand.But, dastard listening knave, who said,‘’Twere juster were the Giant dead,That so yon bawlers may not missTo vote their own pot-belly’d bliss,’All that is past!We saw the slaying, and were not aghast.But ne’er a sun, on village Groom and Bride,Albeit they guess not how it is,At Easter or at Whitsuntide,But shines less gay for this! Not greatly moved with awe am ITo learn that we may spyFive thousand firmaments beyond our own.The best that’s knownOf the heavenly bodies does them credit small.View’d close, the Moon’s fair ballIs of ill objects worst,A corpse in Night’s highway, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst;And now they tellThat the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burstToo horribly for hell.So, judging from these two,As we must do,The Universe, outside our living Earth,Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth,Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep,To make dirt cheap.Put by the Telescope!Better without it man may see,Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight,The ghost of his eternity.Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eyeThe things which near us lie,Till Science rapturously hails,In the minutest water-drop,A torment of innumerable tails.These at the least do live.But rather giveA mind not much to pryBeyond our royal-fair estateBetwixt these deserts blank of small and great.Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,Pressing to catch our gaze,And out of obvious waysNe’er wandering far. Much woe that man befallsWho does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls;But whether he serve God, or his own whim,Not matters, in the end, to any one but him;And he as soonShall map the other side of the Moon,As trace what his own deed,In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed.This he may know:His good or evil seedIs like to grow,For its first harvest, quite to contraries:The father wiseHas still the hare-brain’d brood;’Gainst evil, ill example better works than good;The poet, fanning his mild flightAt a most keen and arduous height,Unveils the tender heavens to horny human eyesAmidst ingenious blasphemies.Wouldst raise the poor, in Capuan luxury sunk?The Nation lives but whilst its Lords are drunk!Or spread Heav’n’s partial gifts o’er all, like dew?The Many’s weedy growth withers the gracious Few!Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise.Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jestOf mankind’s progress; all its spectral raceMere impotence of rest,The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,Crest altering still to gulfAnd gulf to crestIn endless chace,That leaves the tossing water anchor’d in its place!Ah, well does he who does but stand aside,Sans hope or fear,And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear,And prophesies ’gainst trust in such a tide:For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught,Whose message is that he sees only nought.Nathless, discern’d may be,By listeners at the doors of destiny,The fly-wheel swift and stillOf God’s incessant will,Mighty to keep in bound, tho’ powerless to quell,The amorous and vehement drift of man’s herd to hell. Ah, yes; we tell the good and evil treesBy fruits: But how tell these?Who does not knowThat good and illAre done in secret still,And that which shews is verily but show!How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood:But not all height is holiness,Nor every sweetness good;And grace will sometimes lurk where who could guess?The Critic of his kind,Dealing to each his share,With easy humour, hard to bear,May not impossibly have in him shrined,As in a gossamer globe or thickly padded pod,Some small seed dear to God.Haply yon wretch, so famous for his falls,Got them beneath the Devil-defended wallsOf some high Virtue he had vow’d to win;And that which you and ICall his besetting sinIs but the fume of his peculiar fireOf inmost contrary desire,And means wild willingness for her to die,Dash’d with despondence of her favour sweet;He fiercer fighting, in his worst defeat,Than I or you,That only courteous greetWhere he does hotly woo,Did ever fight, in our best victory.Another is mistookThrough his deceitful likeness to his look!Let be, let be:Why should I clear myself, why answer thou for me?That shaft of slander shotMiss’d only the right blot.I see the shameThey cannot see:’Tis very just they blameThe thing that’s not. Heroic Good, target for which the youngDream in their dreams that every bow is strung,And, missing, sighUnfruitful, or as disbelievers die,Thee having miss’d, I will not so revolt,But lowlier shoot my bolt,And lowlier still, if still I may not reach,And my proud stomach teachThat less than highest is good, and may be high.An even walk in life’s uneven way,Though to have dreamt of flight and not to flyBe strange and sad,Is not a boon that’s given to all who pray.If this I hadI’d envy none!Nay, trod I straight for oneYear, month or week,Should Heaven withdraw, and Satan me amerceOf power and joy, still would I seekAnother victory with a like reverse;Because the good of victory does not die,As dies the failure’s curse,And what we have to gainIs, not one battle, but a weary life’s campaign.Yet meaner lot being sentShould more than me content;Yea, if I lieAmong vile shards, though born for silver wings,In the strong flight and feathers goldOf whatsoever heavenward mounts and singsI must by admiration so complyThat there I should my own delight behold.Yea, though I sin each day times seven,And dare not lift the fearfullest eyes to Heaven,Thanks must I giveBecause that seven times are not eight or nine,And that my darkness is all mine,And that I liveWithin this oak-shade one more minute even,Hearing the winds their Maker magnify. Ah, God, alas,How soon it came to passThe sweetness melted from thy barbed hookWhich I so simply took;And I lay bleeding on the bitter land,Afraid to stir against thy least command,But losing all my pleasant life-blood, whenceForce should have been heart’s frailty to withstand.Life is not life at all without delight,Nor has it any might;And better than the insentient heart and brainIs sharpest pain;And better for the moment seems it to rebel,If the great Master, from his lifted seat,Ne’er whispers to the wearied servant ‘Well!’Yet what returns of love did I endure,When to be pardon’d seem’d almost more sweetThan aye to have been pure!But day still faded to disastrous night,And thicker darkness changed to feebler light,Until forgiveness, without stint renew’d,Was now no more with loving tears imbued,Vowing no more offence.Not less to thine Unfaithful didst thou cry,‘Come back, poor Child; be all as ’twas before.’But I,‘No, no; I will not promise any more!Yet, when I feel my hour is come to die,And so I am secured of continence,Then may I say, though haply then in vain,“My only, only Love, O, take me back again!”‘Thereafter didst thou smiteSo hard that, for a space,Uplifted seem’d Heav’n’s everlasting door,And I indeed the darling of thy grace.But, in some dozen changes of the moon,A bitter mockery seem’d thy bitter boon.The broken pinion was no longer sore.Again, indeed, I wokeUnder so dread a strokeThat all the strength it left within my heartWas just to ache and turn, and then to turn and ache,And some weak sign of war unceasingly to make.And here I lie,With no one near to mark,Thrusting Hell’s phantoms feebly in the dark,And still at point more utterly to die.O God, how long!Put forth indeed thy powerful right hand,While time is yet,Or never shall I see the blissful land!Thus I: then God, in pleasant speech and strong,(Which soon I shall forget):‘The man who, though his fights be all defeats,Still fights,Enters at lastThe heavenly Jerusalem’s rejoicing streetsWith glory more, and more triumphant ritesThan always-conquering Joshua’s, when his blastThe frighted walls of Jericho down cast;And, lo, the glad surpriseOf peace beyond surmise,More than in common Saints, for ever in his eyes.’ Since succour to the feeblest of the wiseIs charge of nobler weightThan the securityOf many and many a foolish soul’s estate,This I affirm,Though fools will fools more confidently be:Whom God does once with heart to heart befriend,He does so till the end:And having planted life’s miraculous germ,One sweet pulsation of responsive love,He sets him sheer above,Not sin and bitter shameAnd wreck of fame,But Hell’s insidious and more black attempt,The envy, malice, and pride,Which men who share so easily condoneThat few ev’n list such ills as these to hide.From these unalterably exempt,Through the remember’d graceOf that divine embrace,Of his sad errors none,Though gross to blame,Shall cast him lower than the cleansing flame,Nor make him quite departFrom the small flock named ‘after God’s own heart,’And to themselves unknown.Nor can he quailIn faith, nor flush nor paleWhen all the other idiot people spellHow this or that new Prophet’s word beliesTheir last high oracle;But constantly his soulPoints to its poleEv’n as the needle points, and knows not why;And, under the ever-changing clouds of doubt,When others cry,‘The stars, if stars there were,Are quench’d and out!’To him, uplooking t’ward the hills for aid,Appear, at need display’d,Gaps in the low-hung gloom, and, bright in air,Orion or the Bear. In strenuous hope I wrought,And hope seem’d still betray’d;Lastly I said,‘I have labour’d through the Night, nor yetHave taken aught;But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!’And, lo, I caught(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,)Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea,For food, my wish,But Thee!Then, hiding even in me,As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish,Thou sigh’d’st, with joy, ‘Be dumb,Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’ What rumour’d heavens are theseWhich not a poet sings,O, Unknown Eros?  What this breezeOf sudden wingsSpeeding at far returns of time from interstellar spaceTo fan my very face,And gone as fleet,Through delicatest ether feathering soft their solitary beat,With ne’er a light plume dropp’d, nor any traceTo speak of whence they came, or whither they depart?And why this palpitating heart,This blind and unrelated joy,This meaningless desire,That moves me like the ChildWho in the flushing darkness troubled lies,Inventing lonely prophecies,Which even to his Mother mildHe dares not tell;To which himself is infidel;His heart not less on fireWith dreams impossible as wildest Arab Tale,(So thinks the boy,)With dreams that turn him red and pale,Yet less impossible and wildThan those which bashful Love, in his own way and hour,Shall duly bring to flower?O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,What portent and what Delphic word,Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird,Is this?In me life’s even floodWhat eddies thus?What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood,Like a perturbed moon of Uranus,Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;And whenceThis rapture of the senseWhich, by thy whisper bid,Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental signA bond I know not of nor dimly can divine;This subject loyalty which longsFor chains and thongsWoven of gossamer and adamant,To bind me to my unguess’d want,And so to lie,Between those quivering plumes that thro’ fine ether pant,For hopeless, sweet eternity?What God unhonour’d hitherto in songs,Or which, that nowForgettest the disguiseThat Gods must wear who visit human eyes,Art Thou?Thou art not Amor; or, if so, yon pyre,That waits the willing victim, flames with vestal fire;Nor mooned Queen of maids; or, if thou’rt she,Ah, then, from TheeLet Bride and Bridegroom learn what kisses be!In what veil’d hymnOr mystic danceWould he that were thy Priest advanceThine earthly praise, thy glory limn?Say, should the feet that feel thy thoughtIn double-center’d circuit run,In that compulsive focus, Nought,In this a furnace like the sun;And might some note of thy renownAnd high behestThus in enigma be expressed:‘There lies the crownWhich all thy longing cures.Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!It is a Spirit, though it seems red gold;And such may no man, but by shunning, hold.Refuse it, till refusing be despair;And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair.’ Twice thirty centuries and more ago,All in a heavenly Abyssinian vale,Man first met woman; and the ruddy snowOn many-ridgëd Abora turn’d pale,And the song choked within the nightingale.A mild white furnace in the thorough blastOf purest spirit seem’d She as she pass’d;And of the Man enough that this be said,He look’d her Head.Towards their bowerTogether as they went,With hearts conceiving torrents of content,And linger’d prologue fit for Paradise,He, gathering powerFrom dear persuasion of the dim-lit hour,And doubted sanction of her sparkling eyes,Thus supplicates her conjugal assent,And thus she makes replies:‘Lo, Eve, the Day burns on the snowy height,But here is mellow night!’‘Here let us rest.  The languor of the lightIs in my feet.It is thy strength, my Love, that makes me weak;Thy strength it is that makes my weakness sweet.What would thy kiss’d lips speak?’‘See, what a world of roses I have spreadTo make the bridal bed.Come, Beauty’s self and Love’s, thus to thy throne be led!’‘My Lord, my Wisdom, nay!Does not yon love-delighted Planet run,(Haply against her heart,)A space apartFor ever from her strong-persuading Sun!O say,Shall we no voluntary barsSet to our drift?  I, Sister of the Stars,And Thou, my glorious, course-compelling Day!’‘Yea, yea!Was it an echo of her coming wordWhich, ere she spake, I heard?Or through what strange distrust was I, her Head,Not first this thing to have said?AlwaySpeaks not within my breastThe uncompulsive, great and sweet behestOf something bright,Not named, not known, and yet more manifestThan is the morn,The sun being just at point then to be born?O Eve, take back thy “Nay.”Trust me, Beloved, ever in all to meanThy blissful service, sacrificial, keen;But bondless be that service, and let speak—’‘This other world of roses in my cheek,Which hide them in thy breast, and deepening seekThat thou decree if they mean Yea or Nay.’‘Did e’er so sweet a word such sweet gainsay!’‘And when I lean, Love, on you, thus, and smileSo that my Nay seems Yea,You must the whileThence be confirm’d that I deny you still.’‘I will, I will!’‘And when my arms are round your neck, like this,And I, as now,Melt like a golden ingot in your kiss,Then, more than ever, shall your splendid wordBe as Archangel Michael’s severing sword!Speak, speak!Your might, Love, makes me weak,Your might it is that makes my weakness sweet.’‘I vow, I vow!’‘And are you happy, O, my Hero and Lord;And is your joy complete?’‘Yea, with my joyful heart my body rocks,And joy comes down from Heaven in floods and shocks,As from Mount Abora comes the avalanche.’‘My Law, my Light!Then am I yours as your high mind may list.No wile shall lure you, none can I resist!’Thus the first EveWith much enamour’d Adam did enactTheir mutual free contractOf virgin spousals, blissful beyond flightOf modern thought, with great intention staunch,Though unobliged until that binding pact.Whether She kept her word, or He the mindTo hold her, wavering, to his own restraint,Answer, ye pleasures faint,Ye fiery throes, and upturn’d eyeballs blindOf sick-at-heart Mankind,Whom nothing succour can,Until a heaven-caress’d and happier EveBe join’d with some glad SaintIn like espousals, blessed upon Earth,And she her Fruit forth bring;No numb, chill-hearted, shaken-witted thing,‘Plaining his little span,But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,The Son of God and Man. With honeysuckle, over-sweet, festoon’d;With bitter ivy bound;Terraced with funguses unsound;Deform’d with many a bossAnd closed scar, o’ercushion’d deep with moss;Bunch’d all about with pagan mistletoe;And thick with nests of the hoarse birdThat talks, but understands not his own word;Stands, and so stood a thousand years ago,A single tree.Thunder has done its worst among its twigs,Where the great crest yet blackens, never pruned,But in its heart, alwayReady to push new verdurous boughs, whene’erThe rotting saplings near it fall and leave it air,Is all antiquity and no decay.Rich, though rejected by the forest-pigs,Its fruit, beneath whose rough, concealing rindThey that will break it findHeart-succouring savour of each several meat,And kernell’d drink of brain-renewing power,With bitter condiment and sour,And sweet economy of sweet,And odours that remindOf haunts of childhood and a different day.Beside this tree,Praising no Gods nor blaming, sans a wish,Sits, Tartar-like, the Time’s civility,And eats its dead-dog off a golden dish. That last,Blown from our Sion of the Seven Hills,Was no uncertain blast!Listen: the warning all the champaign fills,And minatory murmurs, answering, marThe Night, both near and far,Perplexing many a drowsy citadelBeneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell,With armed jarAnd angry threat, surceaseTheir long-kept compact of contemptuous peace!Lo, yonder, where our little English band,With peace in heart and wrath in hand,Have dimly ta’en their stand,Sweetly the lightShines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,Whence, o’er the dawning Land,Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate’Gainst the black flag of Hate.{62}Envy not, little band,Your brothers under the Hohenzollern hoofPut to the splendid proof.Your hour is near!The spectre-haunted time of idle Night,Your only fear,Thank God, is done,And Day and War, Man’s work-time and delight,Begun.Ho, ye of the van there, veterans great of cheer,Look to your footing, when, from yonder verge,The wish’d Sun shall emerge;Lest once again the Flower of Sharon bloomAfter a way the Stalk call heresy.Strange splendour and strange gloomAlike confuse the pathOf customary faith;And when the dim-seen mountains turn to flameAnd every roadside atom is a spark,The dazzled sense, that used was to the dark,May well doubt, ‘Is’t the safe way and the sameBy which we cameFrom Egypt, and to Canaan mean to go?’But know,The clearness then so marvellously increas’d,The light’ning shining Westward from the East,Is the great promised signOf His victorious and divineApproach, whose coming in the clouds shall be,As erst was His humility,A stumbling unto some, the first bid to the Feast.Cry, Ho!Good speed to them that come and them that goFrom either gathering host,And, after feeble, false allegiance, now first knowTheir post.Ho, yeWho loved our FlagOnly because there flapp’d none other ragWhich gentlemen might doff to, and such be,‘Save your gentility!For leagued, alas, are weWith many a faithful rogueDiscrediting bright Truth with dirt and brogue;And flatterers, too,That still would sniff the grassAfter the ’broider’d shoe,And swear it smelt like musk where He did pass,Though he were Borgia or Caiaphas.Ho, yeWho dread the bondage of the boundless fieldsWhich Heaven’s allegiance yields,And, like to house-hatch’d finches, hop not freeUnless ’tween walls of wire,Look, there be many cages: choose to your desire!Ho, ye,Of God the least beloved, of Man the most,That like not leaguing with the lesser host,Behold the invested Mount,And that assaulting Sea with ne’er a coast.You need not stop to count!But come up, yeWho adore, in any way,Our God by His wide-honour’d Name of YEA.Come up; for where ye stand ye cannot stay.Come allThat either mood of heavenly joyance know,And, on the ladder hierarchical,Have seen the order’d Angels to and froDescending with the pride of service sweet,Ascending, with the rapture of receipt!Come who have felt, in soul and heart and sense,The entire obedienceWhich opes the bosom, like a blissful wife,To the Husband of all life!Come ye that find contentment’s very coreIn the light storeAnd daisied pathOf Poverty,And know how moreA small thing that the righteous hathAvaileth than the ungodly’s riches great.Come likewise yeWhich do not yet disown as out of dateThat brightest third of the dead Virtues three,Of Love the crown elateAnd daintiest glee!Come up, come up, and join our little band.Our time is near at hand.The sanction of the world’s undying hateMeans more than flaunted flags in windy air.Be ye of gathering fateNow gladly ware.Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought,The brilliant shall be brought;The white stone mystic set between the eyesOf them that get the prize;Yea, part and parcel of that mighty StoneWhich shall be thrownInto the Sea, and Sea shall be no more. What is this Maiden fair,The laughing of whose eyeIs in man’s heart renew’d virginity;Who yet sick longing breedsFor marriage which exceedsThe inventive guess of Love to satisfyWith hope of utter binding, and of loosing endless dear despair?What gleams about her shine,More transient than delight and more divine!If she does something but a little sweet,As gaze towards the glass to set her hair,See how his soul falls humbled at her feet!Her gentle step, to go or come,Gains her more merit than a martyrdom;And, if she dance, it doth such grace conferAs opes the heaven of heavens to more than her,And makes a rival of her worshipper.To die unknown for her were little cost!So is she without guile,Her mere refused smileMakes up the sum of that which may be lost!Who is this FairWhom each hath seen,The darkest once in this bewailed dell,Be he not destin’d for the glooms of hell?Whom each hath seenAnd known, with sharp remorse and sweet, as QueenAnd tear-glad Mistress of his hopes of bliss,Too fair for man to kiss?Who is this only happy She,Whom, by a frantic flight of courtesy,Born of despairOf better lodging for his Spirit fair,He adores as Margaret, Maude, or Cecily?And what this sigh,That each one heaves for Earth’s last lowliheadAnd the Heaven highIneffably lock’d in dateless bridal-bed?Are all, then, mad, or is it prophecy?‘Sons now we are of God,’ as we have heard,‘But what we shall be hath not yet appear’d.’O, Heart, remember thee,That Man is none,Save One.What if this Lady be thy Soul, and HeWho claims to enjoy her sacred beauty be,Not thou, but God; and thy sick fireA female vanity,Such as a Bride, viewing her mirror’d charms,Feels when she sighs, ‘All these are for his arms!’A reflex heatFlash’d on thy cheek from His immense desire,Which waits to crown, beyond thy brain’s conceit,Thy nameless, secret, hopeless longing sweet,Not by-and-by, but now,Unless deny Him thou! The ‘Infinite.’  Word horrible! at feudWith life, and the braced moodOf power and joy and love;Forbidden, by wise heathen ev’n, to beSpoken of Deity,Whose Name, on popular altars, was ‘The Unknown,’Because, or ere It was reveal’d as OneConfined in Three,The people fear’d that it might proveInfinity,The blazon which the devils desired to gain;And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent;Yet did so far relent,That they might seek relief, and not in vain,In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain.Nor bides alone in hellThe bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel.But for compulsion of strong grace,The pebble in the roadWould straight explode,And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space.The furious power,To soft growth twice constrain’d in leaf and flower,Protests, and longs to flash its faint self farBeyond the dimmest star.The sameSeditious flame,Beat backward with reduplicated might,Struggles alive within its stricter term,And is the worm.And the just Man does on himself affirmGod’s limits, and is conscious of delight,Freedom and right;And so His Semblance is, Who, every hour,By day and night,Buildeth new bulwarks ’gainst the Infinite.For, ah, who can expressHow full of bonds and simplenessIs God,How narrow is He,And how the wide, waste field of possibilityIs only trodStraight to His homestead in the human heart,And all His artIs as the babe’s that wins his Mother to repeatHer little song so sweet!What is the chief news of the Night?Lo, iron and salt, heat, weight and lightIn every star that drifts on the great breeze!And theseMean Man,Darling of God, Whose thoughts but live and moveRound him; Who woos his willTo wedlock with His own, and does distilTo that drop’s spanThe atta of all rose-fields of all love!Therefore the soul select assumes the stressOf bonds unbid, which God’s own style expressBetter than well,And aye hath, cloister’d, borne,To the Clown’s scorn,The fetters of the threefold golden chain:Narrowing to nothing all his worldly gain;(Howbeit in vain;For to have noughtIs to have all things without care or thought!)Surrendering, abject, to his equal’s rule,As though he were a fool,The free wings of the will;(More vainly still;For none knows rightly what ’tis to be freeBut only heWho, vow’d against all choice, and fill’d with aweOf the ofttimes dumb or clouded Oracle,Does wiser than to spell,In his own suit, the least word of the Law!)And, lastly, bartering life’s dear bliss for pain;But evermore in vain;For joy (rejoice ye Few that tasted have!)Is Love’s obedienceAgainst the genial laws of natural sense,Whose wide, self-dissipating wave,Prison’d in artful dykes,Trembling returns and strikesThence to its source again,In backward billows fleet,Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet,Thrilling each vein,Exploring every chasm and coveOf the full heart with floods of honied love,And every principal streetAnd obscure alley and laneOf the intricate brainWith brimming rivers of light and breezes sweetOf the primordial heat;Till, unto view of me and thee,Lost the intense life be,Or ludicrously display’d, by forceOf distance; as a soaring eagle, or a horseOn far-off hillside shewn,May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.Nor by such bonds alone—But more I leave to say,Fitly revering the Wild Ass’s bray,Also his hoof,Of which, go where you will, the marks remainWhere the religious walls have hid the bright reproof. Creation’s and Creator’s crowning good;Wall of infinitude;Foundation of the sky,In Heaven forecastAnd long’d for from eternity,Though laid the last;Reverberating dome,Of music cunningly built homeAgainst the void and indolent disgraceOf unresponsive space;Little, sequester’d pleasure-houseFor God and for His Spouse;Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,Ev’n to the tingling, sweetSoles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,And from the inmost heartOutwards unto the thinSilk curtains of the skin,Every least partAstonish’d hearsAnd sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;Form’d for a dignity prophets but darkly name,Lest shameless men cry ‘Shame!’So rich with wealth conceal’dThat Heaven and Hell fight chiefly for this field;Clinging to everything that pleases theeWith indefectible fidelity;Alas, so trueTo all thy friendships that no graceThee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;Which thus ’bides with thee as the Jebusite,That, maugre all God’s promises could do,The chosen People never conquer’d quite;Who therefore lived with them,And that by formal truce and as of right,In metropolitan Jerusalem.For which false fealtyThou needs must, for a season, lieIn the grave’s arms, foul and unshriven,Albeit, in Heaven,Thy crimson-throbbing GlowInto its old abode aye pants to go,And does with envy seeEnoch, Elijah, and the Lady, sheWho left the roses in her body’s lieu.O, if the pleasures I have known in theeBut my poor faith’s poor first-fruits be,What quintessential, keen, ethereal blissThen shall be hisWho has thy birth-time’s consecrating dewFor death’s sweet chrism retain’d,Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned! How sing the Lord’s Song in so strange a Land?A torrid waste of water-mocking sand;Oases of wild grapes;A dull, malodorous fogO’er a once Sacred River’s wandering strand,Its ancient tillage all gone back to bog;A busy synod of blest cats and apesExposing the poor trick of earth and starWith worshipp’d snouts oracular;Prophets to whose blind stareThe heavens the glory of God do not declare,Skill’d in such question niceAs why one conjures toads who fails with lice,And hatching snakes from sticks in such a swarmAs quite to surfeit Aaron’s bigger worm;A nation which has gotA lie in her right hand,And knows it not;With Pharaohs to her mind, each drifting as a logWhich way the foul stream flows,More harden’d the more plagued with fly and frog!How should sad Exile sing in such a Land?How should ye understand?What could he win but jeers,Or howls, such as sweet music draws from dog,Who told of marriage-feasting to the manThat nothing knows of food but bread of bran?Besides, if aught such earsMight e’er unclog,There lives but one, with tones for Sion meet.Behoveful, zealous, beautiful, elect,Mild, firm, judicious, loving, bold, discreet,Without superfluousness, without defect,Few are his words, and find but scant respect,Nay, scorn from some, for God’s good cause agog.Silence in such a Land is oftenest such men’s speech.O, that I might his holy secret reach;O, might I catch his mantle when he goes;O, that I were so gentle and so sweet,So I might deal fair Sion’s foolish foesSuch blows! Love, light for meThy ruddiest blazing torch,That I, albeit a beggar by the PorchOf the glad Palace of Virginity,May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see;For, crown’d with roses all,’Tis there, O Love, they keep thy festival!But first warn off the beatific spotThose wretched who have notEven afar beheld the shining wall,And those who, once beholding, have forgot,And those, most vile, who dressThe charnel spectre drearOf utterly dishallow’d nothingnessIn that refulgent fame,And cry, Lo, here!And nameThe Lady whose smiles inflameThe sphere.Bring, Love, anear,And bid be not afraidYoung Lover true, and love-foreboding Maid,And wedded Spouse, if virginal of thought;For I will sing of noughtLess sweet to hearThan seemsA music in their half-remember’d dreams.The magnet calls the steel:Answers the iron to the magnet’s breath;What do they feelBut death!The clouds of summer kiss in flame and rain,And are not found again;But the heavens themselves eternal are with fireOf unapproach’d desire,By the aching heart of Love, which cannot rest,In blissfullest pathos so indeed possess’d.O, spousals high;O, doctrine blest,Unutterable in even the happiest sigh;This know ye allWho can recallWith what a welling of indignant tearsLove’s simpleness first hearsThe meaning of his mortal covenant,And from what pride comes downTo wear the crownOf which ’twas very heaven to feel the want.How envies he the waysOf yonder hopeless star,And so would laugh and yearnWith trembling lids eterne,Ineffably content from infinitely farOnly to gazeOn his bright Mistress’s responding rays,That never know eclipse;And, once in his long year,With praeternuptial ecstasy and fear,By the delicious law of that ellipseWherein all citizens of ether move,With hastening pace to comeNearer, though never near,His LoveAnd always inaccessible sweet Home;There on his path doubly to burn.Kiss’d by her doubled lightThat whispers of its source,The ardent secret ever clothed with Night,Then go forth in new forceTowards a new return,Rejoicing as a Bridegroom on his course!This know ye all;Therefore gaze bold,That so in you be joyful hope increas’d,Thorough the Palace portals, and beholdThe dainty and unsating Marriage-Feast.O, hearThem singing clear‘Cor meum et caro mea’ round the ‘I am,’The Husband of the Heavens, and the LambWhom they for ever follow there that kept,Or losing, never sleptTill they reconquer’d had in mortal fightThe standard white.O, hearFrom the harps they bore from Earth, five-strung, what music springs,While the glad Spirits chideThe wondering strings!And how the shining sacrificial Choirs,Offering for aye their dearest hearts’ desires,Which to their hearts come back beatified,Hymn, the bright aisles along,The nuptial song,Song ever new to us and them, that saith,‘Hail Virgin in Virginity a Spouse!’Heard first belowWithin the little houseAt Nazareth;Heard yet in many a cell where brides of ChristLie hid, emparadised,And where, althoughBy the hour ’tis night,There’s light,The Day still lingering in the lap of snow.Gaze and be not afraidYe wedded few that honour, in sweet thoughtAnd glittering will,So freshly from the garden gather stillThe lily sacrificed;For ye, though self-suspected here for nought,Are highly styledWith the thousands twelve times twelve of undefiled.Gaze and be not afraidYoung Lover true and love-foreboding Maid.The full noon of deific vision brightAbashes nor abatesNo spark minute of Nature’s keen delight.’Tis there your Hymen waits!There where in courts afar, all unconfused, they crowd,As fumes the starlight softIn gulfs of cloud,And each to the other, well-content,Sighs oft,‘’Twas this we meant!’Gaze without blameYe in whom living Love yet blushes for dead shame.There of pure Virgins noneIs fairer seen,Save One,Than Mary Magdalene.Gaze without doubt or fearYe to whom generous Love, by any name, is dear.Love makes the life to beA fount perpetual of virginity;For, lo, the ElectOf generous Love, how named soe’er, affectNothing but God,Or mediate or direct,Nothing but God,The Husband of the Heavens:And who Him love, in potence great or small,Are, one and all,Heirs of the Palace glad,And inly cladWith the bridal robes of ardour virginal. The Midge’s wing beats to and froA thousand times ere one can utter ‘O!’And Sirius’ ballDoes on his business runAs many times immenser than the Sun.Why should things not be great as well as small,Or move like light as well as move at all?St. Michael fills his place, I mine, and, if you please,We will respect each other’s provinces,I marv’lling not at him, nor he at me.But, if thou must go gaping, let it beThat One who could make Michael should make thee.O, foolish Man, meting things low and highBy self, that accidental quantity!With this conceit, Philosophy stalks frailAs peacock staggering underneath his tail.Who judge of Plays from their own penny gaff,At God’s great theatre will hiss and laugh;For what’s a Saint to themBrought up in modern virtues brummagem?With garments grimed and lamps gone all to snuff,And counting others for like Virgins queer,To list those others cry, ‘Our Bridegroom’s near!’Meaning their God, is surely quite enoughTo make them rend their clothes and bawl out, ‘Blasphemy!’ Beautiful habitations, auras of delight!Who shall bewail the crags and bitter foamAnd angry sword-blades flashing left and rightWhich guard your glittering height,That none thereby may come!The vision which we haveRevere we so,That yet we craveTo foot those fields of ne’er-profaned snow?I, with heart-quake,Dreaming or thinking of that realm of Love,See, oft, a doveTangled in frightful nuptials with a snake;The tortured knot,Now, like a kite scant-weighted, flung bewitch’dSunwards, now pitch’d,Tail over head, down, but with no taste gotEternallyOf rest in either ruin or the sky,But bird and vermin each incessant strives,With vain dilaceration of both lives,’Gainst its abhorred bond insoluble,Coveting fiercer any separate hellThan the most weary Soul in PurgatoryOn God’s sweet breast to lie.And, in this sign, I conThe guerdon of that golden Cup, fulfill’dWith fornications foul of Babylon,The heart where good is well-perceiv’d and known,Yet is not will’d;And Him I thank, who can make live again,The dust, but not the joy we once profane,That I, of ye,Beautiful habitations, auras of delight,In childish years and since had sometime sense and sight,But that ye vanish’d quite,Even from memory,Ere I could get my breath, and whisper ‘See!’But did for meThey altogether die,Those trackless glories glimps’d in upper sky?Were they of chance, or vain,Nor good at all againFor curb of heart or fret?Nay, though, by grace,Lest, haply, I refuse God to His face,Their likeness wholly I forget,Ah, yet,Often in straits which else for me were ill,I mind me stillIdidrespire the lonely auras sweet,Ididthe blest abodes behold, and, at the mountains’ feet,Bathed in the holy Stream by Hermon’s thymy hill. ‘Love, I heard tell of thee so oft!Yea, thrice my face and bosom flush’d with heatOf sudden wings,Through delicatest ether feathering softTheir solitary beat.Long did I muse what service or what charmsMight lure thee, blissful Bird, into mine arms;And nets I made,But not of the fit strings.At last, of endless failure much afraid,To-night I would do nothing but lie still,And promise, wert thou once within my window-sill,Thine unknown will.In nets’ default,Finch-like me seem’d thou might’st be ta’en with salt;And here—and how thou mad’st me start!—Thou art.’‘O Mortal, by Immortals’ cunning led,Who shew’d you how for Gods to bait your bed?Ah, Psyche, guess’d you noughtI craved but to be caught?Wanton, it was not you,But I that did so passionately sue;And for your beauty, not unscath’d, I foughtWith Hades, ere I own’d in you a thought!’‘O, heavenly Lover true,Is this thy mouth upon my forehead press’d?Are these thine arms about my bosom link’d?Are these thy hands that tremble near my heart,Where join two hearts, for juncture more distinct?By thee and by my maiden zone caress’d,What dim, waste tracts of life shine sudden, like moonbeamsOn windless ocean shaken by sweet dreams!Ah, stir not to depart!Kiss me again, thy Wife and Virgin too!O Love, that, like a rose,Deckest my breast with beautiful repose,Kiss me again, and clasp me round the heart,Till fill’d with thee am IAs the cocoon is with the butterfly!—Yet how ’scape quiteNor pluck pure pleasure with profane delight?How know I that my Love is what he seems!Give me a signThat, in the pitchy night,Comes to my pillow an immortal Spouse,And not a fiend, hiding with happy boughsOf palm and asphodelThe pits of hell!’‘’Tis this:I make the childless to keep joyful house.Below your bosom, mortal Mistress mine,Immortal by my kiss,Leaps what sweet pain?A fiend, my Psyche, comes with barren bliss,A God’s embraces never are in vain.’‘I ownA life not mine within my golden zone.Yea, how’Tis easier grownThine arduous rule to donThan for a Bride to put her bride-dress on!Nay, rather, now’Tis no more service to be borne serene,Whither thou wilt, thy stormful wings between.But, Oh,Can I endureThis flame, yet live for what thou lov’st me, pure?’‘Himself the God let blameIf all about him bursts to quenchless flame!My Darling, knowYour spotless fairness is not match’d in snow,But in the integrity of fire.Whate’er you are, Sweet, I require.A sorry God were heThat fewer claim’d than all Love’s mighty kingdoms three!’‘Much marvel IThat thou, the greatest of the Powers above,Me visitest with such exceeding love.What thing is this?A God to make me, nothing, needful to his bliss,And humbly wait my favour for a kiss!Yea, all thy legions of liege deityTo look into this mystery desire.’‘Content you, Dear, with them, this marvel to admire,And lay your foolish little head to restOn my familiar breast.Should a high King, leaving his arduous throne,Sue from her hedge a little Gipsy Maid,For far-off royal ancestry bewray’dBy some wild beauties, to herself unknown;Some voidness of herself in her strange waysWhich to his bounteous fulness promised dainty praise;Some power, by all but him unguess’d,Of growing king-like were she king-caress’d;And should he bid his dames of loftiest gradePut off her rags and make her lowliheadPure for the soft midst of his perfumed bed,So to forget, kind-couch’d with her alone,His empire, in her winsome joyance free;What would he do, if such a fool were sheAs at his grandeur there to gape and quake,Mindless of love’s supreme equality,And of his heart, so simple for her sakeThat all he ask’d, for making her all-blest,Was that her nothingness alwayShould yield such easy fee as frank to playOr sleep delighted in her Monarch’s breast,Feeling her nothingness her giddiest boast,As being the charm for which he loved her most?What if this reed,Through which the King thought love-tunes to have blown,Should shriek, “Indeed,I am too base to trill so blest a tone!”Would not the King allegeDefaulted consummation of the marriage-pledge,And hie the Gipsy to her native hedge?’‘O, too much joy; O, touch of airy fire;O, turmoil of content; O, unperturb’d desire,From founts of spirit impell’d through brain and blood!I’ll not call ill what, since ’tis thine, is good,Nor best what is but second best or third;Still my heart fails,And, unaccustom’d and astonish’d, quails,And blames me, though I think I have not err’d.’Tis hard for fly, in such a honied flood,To use her eyes, far more her wings or feet.Bitter be thy behests! Lie like a bunch of myrrh between my aching breasts.Some greatly pangful penance would I brave.Sharpness me saveFrom being slain by sweet!’‘In your dell’d bosom’s double peaceLet all care cease!Custom’s joy-killing breathShall bid you sigh full soon for custom-killing death.So clasp your childish arms again around my heart:’Tis but in such captivityThe unbounded Heav’ns know what they be!And lie still there,Till the dawn, threat’ning to declareMy beauty, which you cannot bear,Bid me depart.Suffer your soul’s delight,Lest that which is to come wither you quite:For these are only your espousals; yes,More intimate and fruitfuller farThan aptest mortal nuptials are;But nuptials wait you such as now you dare not guess.’‘In all I thee obey!  And thus I knowThat all is well:Should’st thou me tellOut of thy warm caress to goAnd roll my body in the biting snow,My very body’s joy were but increased;More pleasant ’tis to please thee than be pleased.Thy love has conquer’d me; do with me as thou wilt,And use me as a chattel that is thine!Kiss, tread me under foot, cherish or beat,Sheathe in my heart sharp pain up to the hilt,Invent what else were most perversely sweet;Nay, let the Fiend drag me through dens of guilt;Let Earth, Heav’n, Hell’Gainst my content combine;What could make nought the touch that made thee mine!Ah, say not yet, farewell!’‘Nay, that’s the Blackbird’s note, the sweet Night’s knell.Behold, Beloved, the penance you would brave!’‘Curs’d when it comes, the bitter thing we crave!Thou leav’st me now, like to the moon at dawn,A little, vacuous world alone in air.I will not care!When dark comes back my dark shall be withdrawn!Go free;For ’tis with meAs when the cup the Child scoops in the sandFills, and is part and parcel of the Sea.I’ll say it to myself and understand.Farewell!Go as thou wilt and come!  Lover divine,Thou still art jealously and wholly mine;And this thy kissA separate secret by none other scann’d;Though well I wisThe whole of life is womanhood to thee,Momently wedded with enormous bliss.Rainbow, that hast my heaven sudden spann’d,I am the apple of thy glorious gaze,Each else life cent’ring to a different blaze;And, nothing though I beBut now a no more void capacity for thee,’Tis all to know there’s not in air or landAnother for thy Darling quite like me!Mine arms no more thy restless plumes compel!Farewell!Whilst thou art gone, I’ll search the weary meadsTo deck my bed with lilies of fair deeds!And, if thou choose to come this eventide,A touch, my Love, will set my casement wide.Farewell, farewell!Be my dull daysMusic, at least, with thy remember’d praise!’‘Bitter, sweet, few and veil’d let beYour songs of me.Preserving bitter, very sweet,Few, that so all may be discreet,And veil’d, that, seeing, none may see.’ ‘Good-morrow, Psyche!  What’s thine errand now?What awful pleasure do thine eyes bespeak,What shame is in thy childish cheek,What terror on thy brow?Is this my Psyche, once so pale and meek?Thy body’s sudden beauty my sight oldStings, like an agile bead of boiling gold,And all thy life looks troubled like a tree’sWhose boughs wave many ways in one great breeze.’‘O Pythoness, to strangest story hark:A dreadful God was with me in the dark—’‘How many a Maid—Has never told me that!  And thou’rt afraid—’‘He’ll come no more,Or come but twice,Or thrice,Or only thrice ten thousand times thrice o’er!’‘For want of wishing thou mean’st not to miss.We know the Lover, Psyche, by the kiss!’‘If speech of honey could impart the sweet,The world were all in tears and at his feet!But not to tell of that in tears come I, but this:I’m foolish, weak, and small,And fear to fall.If long he stay away, O frightful dream, wise Mother,What keeps me but that I, gone crazy, kiss some other!’‘The fault were his!  But know,Sweet little Daughter sad,He did but feign to go;And never moreShall cross thy window-sill,Or pass beyond thy door,Save by thy will.He’s present now in some dim place apartOf the ivory house wherewith thou mad’st him glad.Nay, this I whisper thee,Since none is near,Or, if one were, since only thou could’st hear,That happy thing which makes thee flush and start,Like infant lips in contact with thy heart,Is He!’‘Yea, this I know, but never can believe!O, hateful light! when shall mine own eyes markMy beauty, which this victory did achieve?’‘When thou, like Gods and owls, canst see by dark.’‘In vain I cleanse me from all blurring error—’‘’Tis the last rub that polishes the mirror.’‘It takes fresh blurr each breath which I respire.’‘Poor Child, don’t cry so!  Hold it to the fire.’‘Ah, nought these dints can e’er do out again!’‘Love is not love which does not sweeter liveFor having something dreadful to forgive.’‘Sadness and change and painShall me for ever stain;For, though my blissful fateBe for a billion years,How shall I stop my tearsThat life was once so low and Love arrived so late!’‘Sadness is beauty’s savour, and pain isThe exceedingly keen edge of bliss;Nor, without swift mutation, would the heav’ns be aught.’‘How to behave with him I’d fain be taught.A maid, meseems, within a God’s embrace,Should bear her like a Goddess, or, at least, a Grace.’‘When Gods, to Man or Maid below,As men or birds appear,A kind ’tis of incognito,And that, not them, is what they choose we should revere.’‘Advise me what oblation vast to bring,Some least part of my worship to confess!’‘A woman is a little thing,And in things little lies her comeliness.’‘Must he not soon with mortal tire to toy?’‘The bashful meeting of strange Depth and HeightBreeds the forever new-born babe, Delight;And, as thy God is more than mortal boy,So bashful more the meeting, and so more the joy.’‘He loves me dearly, but he shakes a whipOf deathless scorpions at my slightest slip.Mother, last night he call’d me “Gipsy,” soRoughly it smote me like a blow!Yet, oh,I love him, as none surely e’er could loveOur People’s pompous but good-natured Jove.Heused to send me stately overture;But marriage-bonds, till now, I never could endure!’‘How should great Jove himself do else than missTo win the woman he forgets to kiss;Or, won, to keep his favour in her eyes,If he’s too soft or sleepy to chastise!By Eros, her twain claims are ne’er forgot;Her wedlock’s marr’d when either’s miss’d:Or when she’s kiss’d, but beaten not,Or duly beaten, but not kiss’d.Ah, Child, the sweetContent, when we’re both kiss’d and beat!—But whence these wounds?  What Demon thee enjoinsTo scourge thy shoulders whiteAnd tender loins!’‘’Tis nothing, Mother.  Happiness at play,And speech of tenderness no speech can say!’‘How learn’d thou art!Twelve honeymoons profane had taught thy docile heartLess than thine Eros, in a summer night!’‘Nay, do not jeer, but help my puzzled plight:Because he loves so marvellously me,And I with all he loves in love must be,How to except myself I do not see.Yea, now that other vanities are vain,I’m vain, since him it likes, of being withalWeak, foolish, small!’‘How can a Maid forget her ornaments!The Powers, that hopeless doom the proud to die,Unask’d smile pardon upon vanity,Nay, praise it, when themselves are praised thereby.’‘Ill-match’d I am for a God’s blandishments!So great, so wise—’‘Gods, in the abstract, are, no doubt, most wise;But, in the concrete, Girl, they’re mysteries!He’s not with thee,At all less wise nor moreThan human Lover is with her he deigns to adore.He finds a fair capacity,And fills it with himself, and glad would dieFor that sole She.’‘Know’st thou some potion me awake to keep,Lest, to the grief of that ne’er-slumbering Bliss,Disgraced I sleep,Wearied in soul by his bewildering kiss?’‘The Immortals, Psyche, moulded men from sodsThat Maids from them might learn the ways of Gods.Think, would a wakeful Youth his hard fate weep,Lock’d to the tired breast of a Bride asleep?’‘Ah, me, I do not dream,Yet all this does some heathen fable seem!’‘O’ermuch thou mind’st the throne he leaves above!Between unequals sweet is equal love.’‘Nay, Mother, in his breast, when darkness blinds,I cannot for my life but talk and laughWith the large impudence of little minds!’‘Respectful to the Gods and meek,According to one’s lights, I grant’Twere well to be;But, on my word,Child, any one, to hear you speak,Would take you for a Protestant,(Such fish I do foreseeWhen the charm’d fume comes strong on me,)Or powder’d lackey, by some great man’s board,A deal more solemn than his Lord!Know’st thou not, Girl, thine Eros loves to laugh?And shall a God do anything by half?He foreknew and predestinated allThe Great must pay for kissing things so small,And ever loves his little Maid the moreThe more she makes him laugh.’‘O, Mother, are you sure?’‘Gaze steady where yon starless deep the gaze revolts,And say,Seest thou a Titan forging thunderbolts,Or three fair butterflies at lovesome play?And this I’ll add, for succour of thy soul:Lines parallel meet sooner than some think;The least part oft is greater than the whole;And, when you’re thirsty, that’s the time to drink.’‘Thy sacred words I ponder and revere,And thank thee heartily that some are clear.’‘Clear speech to men is mostly speech in vain.Their scope is by themselves so justly scann’d,They still despise the things they understand;But, to a pretty Maid like thee, I don’t mind speaking plain.’‘Then one boon more to her whom strange Fate mocksWith a wife’s duty but no wife’s sweet right:Could I at will but summon my Delight—’‘Thou of thy jewel art the dainty box;Thine is the charm which, any time, unlocks;And this, it seems, thou hitt’st upon last night.Now go, Child!  For thy sakeI’ve talk’d till this stiff tripod makes my old limbs ache.’ ‘Enough, enough, ambrosial plumed Boy!My bosom is aweary of thy breath.Thou kissest joyTo death.Have pity of my clay-conceived birthAnd maiden’s simple mood,Which longs for ether and infinitude,As thou, being God, crav’st littleness and earth!Thou art immortal, thou canst ever toy,Nor savour lessThe sweets of thine eternal childishness,And hold thy godhead bright in far employ.Me, to quite other custom life-inured,Ah, loose from thy caress.’Tis not to be endured!Undo thine arms and let me see the sky,By this infatuating flame obscured.O, I should feel thee nearer to my heartIf thou and IShone each to each respondently apart,Like stars which one the other trembling spy,Distinct and lucid in extremes of air.O, hear me pray—’‘Be prudent in thy prayer!A God is bond to her who is wholly his,And, should she ask amiss,He may not her beseeched harm deny.’‘Not yet, not yet!’Tis still high day, and half my toil’s to do.How can I toil, if thus thou dost renewToil’s guerdon, which the daytime should forget?The long, long night, when none can work for fear,Sweet fear incessantly consummated,My most divinely Dear,My Joy, my Dread,Will soon be here!Not, Eros, yet!I ask, for Day, the use which is the Wife’s:To bear, apart from thy delight and thee,The fardel coarse of customary life’sExceeding injucundity.Leave me awhile, that I may shew thee clearHow Goddess-like thy love has lifted me;How, seeming lone upon the gaunt, lone shore,I’ll trust thee near,When thou’rt, to knowledge of my heart, no moreThan a dream’s heedOf lost joy track’d in scent of the sea-weed!Leave me to pluck the incomparable flowerOf frailty lion-like fighting in thy name and power;To make thee laugh, in thy safe heaven, to seeWith what grip fellI’ll cling to hope when life draws hard to hell,Yea, cleave to thee when me thou seem’st to slay,Haply, at close of some most cruel day,To find myself in thy reveal’d arms clasp’d,Just when I say,My feet have slipp’d at last!But, lo, while thus I store toil’s slow increase,To be my dower, in patience and in peace,Thou com’st, like bolt from blue, invisibly,With premonition none nor any sign,And, at a gasp, no choice nor fault of mine,Possess’d I am with theeEv’n as a sponge is by a surge of the sea!’‘Thus irresistibly by Love embracedIs she who boasts her more than mortal chaste!’‘Find’st thou me worthy, then, by day and night,But of this fond indignity, delight?’‘Little, bold Femininity,That darest blame Heaven, what would’st thou have or be?’‘Shall I, the gnat which dances in thy ray,Dare to be reverent?  Therefore dare I say,I cannot guess the good that I desire;But this I know, I spurn the gifts which HellCan mock till which is which ’tis hard to tell.I love thee, God; yea, and ’twas such assaultAs this which made me thine; if that be fault;But I, thy Mistress, merit should thine ireIf aught so little, transitory and lowAs this which made me thineShould hold me so.’‘Little to thee, my Psyche, is this, but much to me!’‘Ah, if, my God, that be!’‘Yea, Palate fine,That claim’st for thy proud cup the pearl of price,And scorn’st the wine,Accept the sweet, and say ’tis sacrifice!Sleep, Centre to the tempest of my love,And dream thereof,And keep the smile which sleeps within thy faceLike sunny eve in some forgotten place!’ O, Pain, Love’s mystery,Close next of kinTo joy and heart’s delight,Low Pleasure’s opposite,Choice food of sanctityAnd medicine of sin,Angel, whom even they that will pursuePleasure with hell’s whole gustFind that they mustPerversely woo,My lips, thy live coal touching, speak thee true.Thou sear’st my flesh, O Pain,But brand’st for arduous peace my languid brain,And bright’nest my dull view,Till I, for blessing, blessing give again,And my roused spirit isAnother fire of bliss,Wherein I learnFeelingly how the pangful, purging fireShall furiously burnWith joy, not only of assured desire,But also present joyOf seeing the life’s corruption, stain by stain,Vanish in the clear heat of Love irate,And, fume by fume, the sick alloyOf luxury, sloth and hateEvaporate;Leaving the man, so dark erewhile,The mirror merely of God’s smile.Herein, O Pain, abides the praiseFor which my song I raise;But even the bastard good of intermittent easeHow greatly doth it please!With what reposeThe being from its bright exertion glows,When from thy strenuous storm the senses sweepInto a little harbour deepOf rest;When thou, O Pain,Having devour’d the nerves that thee sustain,Sleep’st, till thy tender food be somewhat grownagain;And how the lullWith tear-blind love is full!What mockery of a man am I express’dThat I should wait for theeTo woo!Nor even dare to love, till thou lov’st me.How shameful, too,Is this:That, when thou lov’st, I am at first afraidOf thy fierce kiss,Like a young maid;And only trust thy charmsAnd get my courage in thy throbbing arms.And, when thou partest, what a fickle mindThou leav’st behind,That, being a little absent from mine eye,It straight forgets thee what thou art,And ofttimes my adulterate heartDallies with Pleasure, thy pale enemy.O, for the learned spirit without attaintThat does not faint,But knows both how to have thee and to lack,And ventures many a spell,Unlawful but for them that love so well,To call thee back. Ponder, ye just, the scoffs that frequent goFrom forth the foe:‘The holders of the Truth in VerityAre people of a harsh and stammering tongue!The hedge-flower hath its song;Meadow and tree,Water and wandering cloudFind Seers who see,And, with convincing music clear and loud,Startle the adder-deafness of the crowdBy tones, O Love, from thee.Views of the unveil’d heavens alone forth bringProphets who cannot sing,Praise that in chiming numbers will not run;At least, from David until Dante, none,And none since him.Fish, and not swim?They think they somehow should, and so they try;But (haply ’tis they screw the pitch too high)’Tis still their fatesTo warble tunes that nails might draw from slates.Poor Seraphim!They mean to spoil our sleep, and do, but all their gainsAre curses for their pains!’Now who but knowsThat truth to learn from foesIs wisdom ripe?Therefore no longer let us stretch our throatsTill hoarse as frogsWith straining after notesWhich but to touch would burst an organ-pipe.Far better be dumb dogs. A PROLOGUE. As a young Child, whose Mother, for a jest,To his own use a golden coin flings down,Devises blythe how he may spend it best,Or on a horse, a bride-cake, or a crown,Till, wearied with his quest,Nor liking altogether that nor this,He gives it back for nothing but a kiss,Endow’d so IWith golden speech, my choice of toys to buy,And scanning power and pleasure and renown,Till each in turn, with looking at, looks vain,For her mouth’s bliss,To her who gave it give I it again.Ah, Lady elect,Whom the Time’s scorn has saved from its respect,Would I had artFor uttering this which sings within my heart!But, lo,Thee to admire is all the art I know.My Mother and God’s; Fountain of miracle!Give me thereby some praise of thee to tellIn such a SongAs may my Guide severe and glad not wrongWho never spake till thou’dst on him conferr’dThe right, convincing word!Grant me the steady heatOf thought wise, splendid, sweet,Urged by the great, rejoicing wind that ringsWith draught of unseen wings,Making each phrase, for love and for delight,Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night!Aid thou thine own dear fame, thou only Fair,At whose petition meekThe Heavens themselves decree that, as it were,They will be weak!Thou Speaker of all wisdom in a Word,Thy Lord!Speaker who thus could’st well affordThence to be silent;—ah, what silence thatWhich had for prologue thy ‘Magnificat?’—O, Silence full of wondersMore than by Moses in the Mount were heard,More than were utter’d by the Seven Thunders;Silence that crowns, unnoted, like the voiceless blue,The loud world’s varying view,And in its holy heart the sense of all things ponders!That acceptably I may speak of thee,Ora pro me!Key-note and stopOf the thunder-going chorus of sky-Powers;Essential dropDistill’d from worlds of sweetest-savour’d flowersTo anoint with nuptial praiseThe Head which for thy Beauty doff’d its rays,And thee, in His exceeding glad descending, meant,And Man’s new daysMade of His deed the adorning accident!Vast Nothingness of Self, fair female TwinOf Fulness, sucking all God’s glory in!(Ah, Mistress mine,To nothing I have added only sin,And yet would shine!)Ora pro me!Life’s cradle and death’s tomb!To lie within whose womb,There, with divine self-will infatuate,Love-captive to the thing He did create,Thy God did not abhor,No moreThan Man, in Youth’s high spousal-tide,Abhors at last to touchThe strange lips of his long-procrastinating Bride;Nay, not the least imagined part as much!Ora pro me!My Lady, yea, the Lady of my Lord,Who didst the first descryThe burning secret of virginity,We know with what reward!Prism wherebyAlone we seeHeav’n’s light in its triplicity;Rainbow complexIn bright distinction of all beams of sex,Shining for ayeIn the simultaneous sky,To One, thy Husband, Father, Son, and Brother,Spouse blissful, Daughter, Sister, milk-sweet Mother;Ora pro me!Mildness, whom God obeys, obeying thyselfHim in thy joyful Saint, nigh lost to sightIn the great gulfOf his own glory and thy neighbour light;With whom thou wast as else with husband noneFor perfect fruit of inmost amity;Who felt for theeSuch rapture of refusal that no kissEver seal’d wedlock so conjoint with bliss;And whose good singular eternally’Tis now, with nameless peace and vehemence,To enjoy thy married smile,That mystery of innocence;Ora pro me!Sweet Girlhood without guile,The extreme of God’s creative energy;Sunshiny Peak of human personality;The world’s sad aspirations’ one Success;Bright Blush, that sav’st our shame from shamelessness;Chief Stone of stumbling; Sign built in the wayTo set the foolish everywhere a-bray;Hem of God’s robe, which all who touch are heal’d;To which the outside Many honour yieldWith a reward and graceUnguess’d by the unwash’d boor that hails Him to His face,Spurning the safe, ingratiant courtesyOf suing Him by thee;Ora pro me!Creature of God rather the sole than first;Knot of the cordWhich binds together all and all unto their Lord;Suppliant Omnipotence; best to the worst;Our only Saviour from an abstract ChristAnd Egypt’s brick-kilns, where the lost crowd plods,Blaspheming its false Gods;Peace-beaming Star, by which shall come enticed,Though nought thereof as yet they weet,Unto thy Babe’s small feet,The Mighty, wand’ring disemparadised,Like Lucifer, because to theeThey will not bend the knee;Ora pro me!Desire of Him whom all things else desire!Bush aye with Him as He with thee on fire!Neither in His great Deed nor on His throne—O, folly of Love, the intenseLast culmination of Intelligence,—Him seem’d it good that God should be alone!Basking in unborn laughter of thy lips,Ere the world was, with absolute delightHis Infinite reposed in thy Finite;Well-match’d: He, universal being’s Spring,And thou, in whom are gather’d up the ends of everything!Ora pro me!In season due, on His sweet-fearful bed,Rock’d by an earthquake, curtain’d with eclipse,Thou shar’d’st the rapture of the sharp spear’s head,And thy bliss paleWrought for our boon what Eve’s did for our bale;Thereafter, holding a little thy soft breath,Thou underwent’st the ceremony of death;And, now, Queen-Wife,Sitt’st at the right hand of the Lord of Life,Who, of all bounty, craves for only feeThe glory of hearing it besought with smiles by thee!Ora pro me!Mother, who lead’st me still by unknown ways,Giving the gifts I know not how to ask,Bless thou the workWhich, done, redeems my many wasted days,Makes white the murk,And crowns the few which thou wilt not dispraise.When clear my Songs of Lady’s graces rang,And little guess’d I ’twas of thee I sang!Vainly, till now, my pray’rs would thee compelTo fire my verse with thy shy fame, too longShunning world-blazon of well-ponder’d song;But doubtful smiles, at last, ’mid thy denials lurk;From which I spell,‘Humility and greatness grace the taskWhich he who does it deems impossible!’ ‘Thou dost not wisely, Bard.A double voice is Truth’s, to use at will:One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill,Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard,Wherein She strives to look as near a lieAs can comport with her divinity;The other tender-soft as seemThe embraces of a dead Love in a dream.These thoughts, which you have sungIn the vernacular,Should be, as others of the Church’s are,Decently cloak’d in the Imperial Tongue.Have you no fearsLest, as Lord Jesus bids your sort to dread,Yon acorn-munchers rend you limb from limb,You, with Heaven’s liberty affronting theirs!’So spoke my monitor; but I to him,‘Alas, and is not mine a language dead?’ Whene’er mine eyes do my Amelia greetIt is with such emotionAs when, in childhood, turning a dim street,I first beheld the ocean.There, where the little, bright, surf-breathing town,That shew’d me first her beauty and the sea,Gathers its skirts against the gorse-lit downAnd scatters gardens o’er the southern lea,Abides this MaidWithin a kind, yet sombre Mother’s shade,Who of her daughter’s graces seems almost afraid,Viewing them ofttimes with a scared forecast,Caught, haply, from obscure love-peril past.Howe’er that be,She scants me of my right,Is cunning careful evermore to balkSweet separate talk,And fevers my delightBy frets, if, on Amelia’s cheek of peach,I touch the notes which music cannot reach,Bidding ‘Good-night!’Wherefore it came that, till to-day’s dear date,I curs’d the weary months which yet I have to waitEre I find heaven, one-nested with my mate.To-day, the Mother gave,To urgent pleas and promise to behaveAs she were there, her long-besought consentTo trust Amelia with me to the graveWhere lay my once-betrothed, Millicent:‘For,’ said she, hiding ill a moistening eye,‘Though, Sir, the word sounds hard,God makes as if He least knew how to guardThe treasure He loves best, simplicity.’And there Amelia stood, for fairness shewnLike a young apple-tree, in flush’d arrayOf white and ruddy flow’r, auroral, gay,With chilly blue the maiden branch between;And yet to look on her moved less the mindTo say ‘How beauteous!’ than ‘How good and kind!’And so we went aloneBy walls o’er which the lilac’s numerous plumeShook down perfume;Trim plots close blownWith daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen,Engross’d each oneWith single ardour for her spouse, the sun;Garths in their glad arrayOf white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay,With azure chill the maiden flow’r between;Meadows of fervid green,With sometime sudden prospect of untoldCowslips, like chance-found gold;And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze,Rending the air with praise,Like the six-hundred-thousand-voiced shoutOf Jacob camp’d in Midian put to rout;Then through the Park,Where Spring to livelier gloomQuicken’d the cedars dark,And, ’gainst the clear sky cold,Which shone afarCrowded with sunny alps oracular,Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad like cliffs of bloom;And everywhere,Amid the ceaseless rapture of the lark,With wonder newWe caught the solemn voice of single air,‘Cuckoo!’And when Amelia, ’bolden’d, saw and heardHow bravely sang the bird,And all things in God’s bounty did rejoice,She who, her Mother by, spake seldom word,Did her charm’d silence doff,And, to my happy marvel, her dear voiceWent as a clock does, when the pendulum’s off.Ill Monarch of man’s heart the Maiden whoDoes not aspire to be High-Pontiff too!So she repeated soft her Poet’s line,‘By grace divine,Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine!’And I, up the bright steep she led me, trod,And the like thought pursuedWith, ‘What is gladness without gratitude,And where is gratitude without a God?’And of delight, the guerdon of His laws,She spake, in learned mood;And I, of Him loved reverently, as Cause,Her sweetly, as Occasion of all good.Nor were we shy,For souls in heaven that beMay talk of heaven without hypocrisy.And now, when we drew nearThe low, gray Church, in its sequester’d dell,A shade upon me fell.Dead Millicent indeed had been most sweet,But I how little meetTo call such graces in a Maiden mine!A boy’s proud passion free affection blunts;His well-meant flatteries oft are blind affronts;And many a tearWas Millicent’s before I, manlier, knewThat maidens shineAs diamonds do,Which, though most clear,Are not to be seen through;And, if she put her virgin self asideAnd sate her, crownless, at my conquering feet,It should have bred in me humility, not pride.Amelia had more luck than Millicent:Secure she smiled and warm from all mischanceOr from my knowledge or my ignorance,And glow’d contentWith my—some might have thought too much—superior age,Which seem’d the gageOf steady kindness all on her intent.Thus nought forebade us to be fully blent.While, therefore, nowHer pensive footstep stirr’dThe darnell’d garden of unheedful death,She ask’d what Millicent was like, and heardOf eyes like her’s, and honeysuckle breath,And of a wiser than a woman’s brow,Yet fill’d with only woman’s love, and howAn incidental greatness character’dHer unconsider’d ways.But all my praiseAmelia thought too slight for Millicent,And on my lovelier-freighted arm she leant,For more attent;And the tea-rose I gave,To deck her breast, she dropp’d upon the grave.‘And this was her’s,’ said I, decoring with a bandOf mildest pearls Amelia’s milder hand.‘Nay, I will wear it forhersake,’ she said:For dear to maidens are their rivals dead.And so,She seated on the black yew’s tortured root,I on the carpet of sere shreds below,And nigh the little mound where lay that other,I kiss’d her lips three times without dispute,And, with bold worship suddenly aglow,I lifted to my lips a sandall’d foot,And kiss’d it three times thrice without dispute.Upon my head her fingers fell like snow,Her lamb-like hands about my neck she wreathed.Her arms like slumber o’er my shoulders crept,And with her bosom, whence the azalea breathed,She did my face full favourably smother,To hide the heaving secret that she wept!Now would I keep my promise to her Mother;Now I arose, and raised her to her feet,My best Amelia, fresh-born from a kiss,Moth-like, full-blown in birthdew shuddering sweet,With great, kind eyes, in whose brown shadeBright Venus and her Baby play’d!At inmost heart well pleased with one another,What time the slant sun lowThrough the plough’d field does each clod sharply shew,And softly fillsWith shade the dimples of our homeward hills,With little said,We left the ‘wilder’d garden of the dead,And gain’d the gorse-lit shoulder of the downThat keeps the north-wind from the nestling town,And caught, once more, the vision of the wave,Where, on the horizon’s dip,A many-sailed shipPursued alone her distant purpose grave;And, by steep steps rock-hewn, to the dim streetI led her sacred feet;And so the Daughter gave,Soft, moth-like, sweet,Showy as damask-rose and shy as musk,Back to her Mother, anxious in the dusk.And now ‘Good-night!’Me shall the phantom months no more affright.For heaven’s gates to open well waits heWho keeps himself the key. Felicity!Who ope’st to none that knocks, yet, laughing weak,Yield’st all to Love that will not seek,And who, though won, wilt droop and die,Unless wide doors bespeak thee free,How safe’s the bond of thee and me,Since thee I cherish and defy!Is’t Love or Friendship, Dearest, we obey?Ah, thou art young, and I am gray;But happy man is he who knowsHow well time goes,With no unkind intruder by,Between such friends as thou and I!’Twould wrong thy favour, Sweet, were I to say,’Tis best by far,When best things are not possible,To make the best of those that are;For, though it be not May,Sure, few delights of Spring excelThe beauty of this mild September day!So with me walk,And view the dreaming field and bossy Autumn wood,And how in humble russet goesThe Spouse of Honour, fair Repose,Far from a world whence love is fledAnd truth is dying because joy is dead;And, if we hear the roaring wheelOf God’s remoter service, public zeal,Let us to stiller place retireAnd glad admireHow, near Him, sounds of working ceaseIn little fervour and much peace;And let us talkOf holy things in happy mood,Learnt of thy blest twin-sister, Certitude;Or let’s about our neighbours chat,Well praising this, less praising that,And judging outer strangers byThose gentle and unsanction’d linesTo which remorse of equityOf old hath moved the School divines.Or linger where this willow bends,And let us, till the melody be caught,Harken that sudden, singing thought,On which unguess’d increase to life perchance depends.He ne’er hears twice the same who hearsThe songs of heaven’s unanimous spheres,And this may be the song to make, at last, amendsFor many sighs and boons in vain long sought!Now, careless, let us stray, or stopTo see the partridge from the covey drop,Or, while the evening air’s like yellow wine,From the pure stream take outThe playful trout,That jerks with rasping check the struggled line;Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks,The labourers stir themselves amainTo feed with hasty sheaves of grainThe deaf’ning engine’s boisterous maw,And snatch again,From to-and-fro tormenting racks,The toss’d and hustled straw;Whilst others tend the shedded wheatThat fills yon row of shuddering sacks,Or shift them quick, and bind them neat,And dogs and boys with sticksWait, murderous, for the rats that leave the ruin’d ricks;And, all the bags being fill’d and rank’d fivefold, they pourThe treasure on the barn’s clean floor,And take them back for more,Until the whole bared harvest beauteous liesUnder our pleased and prosperous eyes.Then let us give our idlest hourTo the world’s wisdom and its power;Hear famous Golden-Tongue refuseTo gander sauce that’s good for goose,Or the great Clever Party conHow many grains of sifted sand,Heap’d, make a likely house to stand,How many fools one Solomon.Science, beyond all other lustEndow’d with appetite for dust,We glance at where it grunts, well-sty’d,And pass upon the other side.Pass also by, in pensive mood,Taught by thy kind twin-sister, Certitude,Yon puzzled crowd, whose tired intentHunts like a pack without a scent.And now come home,Where none of our mild daysCan fail, though simple, to confessThe magic of mysteriousness;For there ’bide charming Wonders three,Besides, Sweet, thee,To comprehend whose commonest ways,Ev’n could that be,Were coward’s ’vantage and no true man’s praise. Say, did his sisters wonder what could Joseph seeIn a mild, silent little Maid like thee?And was it awful, in that narrow house,With God for Babe and Spouse?Nay, like thy simple, female sort, each oneApt to find Him in Husband and in Son,Nothing to thee came strange in this.Thy wonder was but wondrous bliss:Wondrous, for, thoughTrue Virgin lives not but does know,(Howbeit none ever yet confess’d,)That God lies really in her breast,Of thine He made His special nest!And soAll mothers worship little feet,And kiss the very ground they’ve trod;But, ah, thy little Baby sweetWho was indeed thy God! The Heavens repeat no other Song,And, plainly or in parable,The Angels trust, in each man’s tongue,The Treasure’s safety to its size.In shameful HellThe Lily in last corruption lies,Where known ’tis, rotten-lily-wise,By the strange foulness of the smell.Earth, that, in this arcanum, spiesProof of high kinship unconceiv’d,By all desired and disbeliev’d,Shews fancies, in each thing that is,Which nothing mean, not meaning this,Yea, does from her own law, to hint it, err,As ’twere a trust too huge for her.Maiden and Youth pipe wondrous clearThe tune they are the last to hear.’Tis the strange gem in Pleasure’s cup.Physician and Philosopher,In search of acorns, plough it up,But count it nothing ’mong their gains;Nay, call it pearl, they’d answer, ‘Lo,Blest Land where pearls as large as pumpkins grow!’And would not even rend you for your pains.To tell men truth, yet keep them darkAnd shooting still beside the mark,God, as in jest, gave to their wish,The Sign of Jonah and the Fish.’Tis the name new, on the white stone,To none but them that have it known;And even these can scarce believe, but cry,‘When turn’d was Sion’s captivity,Then were we, yea, and yet we seemLike them that dream!’In Spirit ’tis a punctual rayOf peace that sheds more light than day;In Will and Mind’Tis the easy path so hard to find;In Heart, a pain not to be told,Were words mere honey, milk, and gold;I’ the Body ’tis the bag of the bee;In all, the present, thousandfold amendsMade to the sad, astonish’d lifeOf him that leaves house, child, and wife,And on God’s ’hest, almost despairing, wends,As little guessing as the herdWhat a strange Phoenix of a birdBuilds in this tree,But only intending all that He intends.To this, the Life of them that live,If God would not, thus far, give tongue,Ah, why did He his secret giveTo one that has the gift of song?But all He does He doubtless means,And, if the Mystery that smites Prophets dumbHere, to the grace-couch’d eyes of some,Shapes to its living face the clinging shroud,Perchance the Skies grow tired of screens,And ’tis His Advent in the Cloud. With fetters gold her captivated feetLay, sunny sweet;In that palm was the poppy, Sleep; in thisThe apple, Bliss;Against the mild side of his Spouse and MotherOne small God throve, and in’t, meseem’d, another.By these a Death-in-Life did foully breatheOut of a face that was one grate of teeth.Lift, O kind Angels, lift her eyelids loth,Lest he devour her and her Godlets both! Whate’er thou dost thou’rt dear.Uncertain troubles sanctifyThat magic well-spring of the willing tear,Thine eye.Thy jealous fear,With not the rustle of a rival near;Thy careless disregard of allMy tenderest care;Thy dumb despairWhen thy keen wit my worship may construeInto contempt of thy divinity;They please me too!But should it once befallThese accidental charms to disappear,Leaving withalThy sometime self the same throughout the year,So glowing, grave and shy,Kind, talkative and dearAs now thou sitt’st to plyThe fireside tuneOf that neat engine deft at which thou sew’stWith fingers mild and foot like the new moon,O, then what cross of any further fateCould my content abate?Forget, then, (but I knowThou canst not so,)Thy customs of some praediluvian state.I am no Bullfinch, fair my Butterfly,That thou should’st tryThose zigzag courses, in the welkin clear;Nor cruel Boy that, fledd’st thou straightOr paused, mayhapMight catch thee, for thy colours, with his cap. ‘What, no crown won,These two whole years,By man of fortitude beyond his peers,In Thrace or Macedon?’‘No, none.But what deep trouble does my Lycon feel,And hide ’neath chat about the commonweal?’‘Glaucé but now the third time did againThe thing which I forbade.  I had to box her ears.’Twas ill to see her both blue eyesSettled in tearsDespairing on the skies,And the poor lip all pucker’d into pain;Yet, for her sake, from kisses to refrain!’‘Ho, Timocles, take downThat crown.No, not that common one for blood with extreme valour spilt,But yonder, with the berries gilt.’Tis, Lycon, thy just meed.To inflict unmovedAnd firm to bear the woes of the BelovedIs fortitude indeed.’ No praise to me!My joy ’twas to be nothing but the glassThro’ which the general boon of Heaven should pass,To focus upon thee.Nor is’t thy blameThou first should’st glow, and, after, fade i’ the flame.It takes more mightThan God has given thee, Dear, so long to feel delight.Shall I, alas,Reproach thee with thy change and my regret?Blind fumblers that we beAbout the portals of felicity!The wind of words would scatter, tears would washQuite out the little heatBeneath the silent and chill-seeming ash,Perchance, still slumbering sweet. {29}In this year the middle and upper classes were disfranchised by Mr. Disraeli’s Government, and the finaldestruction of the liberties of England by the Act of 1884 rendered inevitable. {35}The Alabama Treaty. {62}This Piece was written in the year 1874, soon after the publication of an incendiary pamphlet by Mr. Gladstone against the English Catholics, occasioned by the Vatican Council.