We meet
together
at the feast -
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
Let them hear each other breathing
For a moment, mouth to mouth;
Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth;
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals;
Let them prove their living souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!
Still all day the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark;
And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
IX
Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,
To look up to Him, and pray;
So the blessed One who blesseth all the others
Will bless them another day.
They answer, “Who is God, that he should hear us
While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred ?
When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us
Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word;
## p. 2538 (#96) ############################################
2538
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)
Strangers speaking at the door.
Is it likely God, with angels singing round him,
Hears our weeping any more?
X
“Two words, indeed, of praying we remember;
And at midnight's hour of harm,
'Our Father, looking upward in the chamber,
We say softly for a charm.
We know no other words except Our Father';
And we think that, in some pause of angels' song,
God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,
And hold both within his right hand, which is strong.
(Our Father! ) If he heard us, he would surely
(For they call him good and mild)
Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,
"Come and rest with me, my child. '
XI
« But no! ” say the children, weeping faster,
«He is speechless as a stone;
And they tell us, of his image is the master
Who commands us to work on.
Go to! ” say the children, -"up in heaven,
Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find.
Do not mock us: Grief has made us unbelieving:
We look up for God; but tears have made us blind. ”
Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,
O my brothers, what ye preach ?
For God's possible is taught by his world's loving —
And the children doubt of each.
XII
And well may the children weep before you!
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;
They sink in man's despair, without its calm;
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom;
Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm ;
Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly
The harvest of its memories cannot reap;
## p. 2539 (#97) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2539
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly –
Let them weep! let them weep!
XIII
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see.
For they mind you of their angels in high places,
With eyes turned on Deity.
«How long,” they say, how long, () cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world on a child's heart, -
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath! ”
MOTHER AND POET
(On Laura Savio of Turin, a poetess and patriot, whose sons were killed
at Ancona and Gaeta. ]
D*
EAD! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast,
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me!
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said:
But this woman, this, who is agonized here,
The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head
Forever instead.
What art can a woman be good at ? Oh, vain!
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain ?
Ah, boys, how you hurt! you were strong as you prest,
And I proud by that test.
What art's for a woman ? To hold on her knees
Both darlings! to feel all their arms round her throat
Cling, strangle a little! to sew by degrees,
And 'broider the long-clothes and neat little coat;
To dream and to dote.
## p. 2540 (#98) ############################################
2540
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
.
To teach them.
It stings there! I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at need.
I prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.
And when their eyes flashed . . O my beautiful eyes! . . .
I exulted; nay, let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise [kneels.
When one sits quite alone! Then one weeps, then one
God, how the house feels!
At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled
With my kisses, of camp-life and glory, and how
They both loved me; and soon, coming home to be spoiled,
In return would fan off every fly from my brow
With their green laurel-bough.
(
There was triumph at Turin: 'Ancona was free ! »
And some one came out of the cheers in the street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.
My Guido was dead! I fell down at his feet,
While they cheered in the street.
I bore it; friends soothed me; my grief looked sublime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained
To the height he had gained.
And letters still came; shorter, sadder, more strong,
Writ now but in one hand :- "I was not to faint,
One loved me for two; would be with me ere long :
And Viva l'Italia he died for, our saint,
Who forbids our complaint. ”
My Nanni would add, “he was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turned off the balls, — was imprest
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how 'twas impossible, quite dispossest,
To live on for the rest. ”
On which, without pause, up the telegraph-line
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta, — "Shot.
Tell his mother. ” Ah, ah! “his,” “their” mother, not «mine »:
No voice says, "My mother," again to me. What!
You think Guido forgot ?
1
## p. 2541 (#99) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2541
Are souls straight so happy, that, dizzy with heaven,
They drop earth's affections, conceive not of woe?
I think not! Themselves were too lately forgiven
Through that Love and that Sorrow which reconciled so
The Above and Below.
O Christ of the seven wounds, who look'dst through the dark
To the face of thy mother! Consider, I pray,
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,-
Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,
And no last word to say!
Both boys dead ? but that's out of nature. We all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.
'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall;
And when Italy's made, for what end is it done,
If we have not a son ?
Ah, ah, ah! when Gaeta's taken, what then?
When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport
Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of men;
When the guns of Cavalli with final retort
Have cut the game short;
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee;
(red:
When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and
When you have your country from mountain to sea,
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head,
(And I have my dead) –
What then? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low
And burn your lights faintly! My country is there,
Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow:
My Italy's THERE, with my brave civic pair,
To disfranchise despair!
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this, and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Both! both my boys! If in keeping the feast
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at me! !
## p. 2542 (#100) ###########################################
2542
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A COURT LADY
H
Er hair was tawny with gold; her eyes with purple were dark;
Her cheeks' pale opal burnt with a red and restless spark.
Never was lady of Milan nobler in naine and in race;
Never was lady of Italy fairer to see in the face.
Never was lady on earth more true as woman and wife,
Larger in judgment and instinct, prouder in manners and life.
She stood in the early morning, and said to her maidens, Bring
That silken robe made ready to wear at the court of the King.
“Bring me the clasps of diamond, lucid, clear of the mote;
Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the small at the throat.
“Diamonds to fasten the hair, and diamonds to fasten the sleeves,
Laces to drop from their rays, like a powder of snow from the eaves. ”
Gorgeous she entered the sunlight, which gathered her up in a flame,
While, straight in her open carriage, she to the hospital came.
In she went at the door, and gazing from end to end, --
« Many and low are the pallets; but each is the place of a friend. ”
Up she passed through the wards, and stood at a young man's bed;
Bloody the band on his brow, and livid the droop of his head.
« Art thou a Lombard, my brother ? Happy art thou! ” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him: he dreamed in her face — and died.
Pale with his passing soul, she went on still to a second:
He was a grave hard man, whose years by dungeons were reckoned.
Wounds in his body were sore, wounds in his life were sorer.
« Art thou a Romagnole ? ” Her eyes drove lightnings before her.
« Austrian and priest had joined to double and tighten the cord
Able to bind thee, O strong one, free by the stroke of a sword.
"Now be grave for the rest of us, using the life overcast
To ripen our wine of the present (too new) in glooms of the past. ”
Down she stepped to a pallet where lay a face like a girl's,
Young, and pathetic with dying,-a deep black hole in the curls.
"Art thou from Tuscany, brother? and seest thou, dreaming in pain,
Thy mother stand in the piazza, searching the list of the slain ? )
## p. 2543 (#101) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2543
(
Kind as a mother herself, she touched his cheeks with her hands:
Blessed is she who has borne thee, although she should weep as
she stands.
On she passed to a Frenchman, his arm carried off by a ball:
Kneeling: “O more than my brother! how shall I thank thee for all ?
“Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line;
But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not thine.
“Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossest,
But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the
rest. »
Ever she passed on her way, and came to a couch where pined
One with a face from Venetia, white with a hope out of mind.
Long she stood and gazed, and twice she tried at the name;
But two great crystal tears were all that faltered and came.
Only a tear for Venice? She turned as in passion and loss,
And stooped to his forehead and kissed it, as if she were kissing
the cross.
Faint with that strain of heart, she moved on then to another,
Stern and strong in his death: “And dost thou suffer, my brother ? ”
Holding his hands in hers: “Out of the Piedmont lion
Cometh the sweetness of freedom! sweetest to live or to die on. ”
Holding his cold rough hands: “Well, oh well have ye done
In noble, noble Piedmont, who would not be noble alone. ”
Back he fell while she spoke. She rose to her feet with a spring.
« That was a Piedmontese! and this is the court of the King ! »
THE PROSPECT
ETHINKS we do as fretful children do,
M *Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view;
And thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain, -
The life beyond us and our souls in pain. -
We miss the prospect which we are called unto
## p. 2544 (#102) ###########################################
2544
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong,
O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong;
That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.
DE PROFUNDIS
T"
HE face which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With daily love, is dimmed away -
And yet iny days go on, go on.
The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone,
And every morning with “Good day )
Make each day good, is hushed away —
And yet my days go on, go on.
The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon,
The strongest on the longest day,
With steadfast love is caught away –
And yet my days go on, go on.
The world goes whispering to its own,
« This anguish pierces to the bone. ”
And tender friends go sighing round,
( What love can ever cure this wound ? »
My days go on, my days go on.
The past rolls forward on the sun
And makes all night. O dreams begun,
Not to be ended! Ended bliss !
And life, that will not end in this!
My days go on, iny days go on.
Breath freezes on my lips to moan:
As one alone, once not alone,
I sit and knock at Nature's door,
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor,
Whose desolated days go on.
## p. 2545 (#103) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2545
I knock and cry – L’ndone, undone!
Is there no help, no comfort — none ?
No gleaning in the wide wheat-plains
Where others drive their loaded wains ?
My vacant days go on, go on.
This Nature, though the snows be down,
Thinks kindly of the bird of June.
The little red hip on the tree
Is ripe for such. What is for me,
Whose days so winterly go on?
No bird am I to sing in June,
And dare not ask an equal boon.
Good nests and berries red are Nature's
To give away to better creatures -
And yet my days go on, go on.
I ask less kindness to be done -
Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cool deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on.
Only to lift the turf unmown
From off the earth where it has grown,
Some cubit-space, and say, Behold,
Creep in, poor Heart, beneath that fold,
Forgetting how the days go on. ”
A Voice reproves me thereupon,
More sweet than Nature's, when the drone
Of bees is sweetest, and more deep,
Than when the rivers overleap
The shuddering pines, and thunder on.
God's Voice, not Nature's - night and noon
He sits upon the great white throne,
And listens for the creature's praise.
What babble we of days and days ?
The Dayspring he, whose days go on!
He reigns above, he reigns alone:
Systems burn out and leave his throne:
Fair mists of seraphs melt and fall
Around him, changeless amid all
Ancient of days, whose days go on!
V -160
## p. 2546 (#104) ###########################################
2546
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
He reigns below, he reigns alone —
And having life in love forgone
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,
He reigns the jealous God. Who mourns
Or rules with him, while days go on?
By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear him charge his saints that none
Among the creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against him with despair,
However darkly days go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown:
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee,
Whose days eternally go on!
For us,
whatever's undergone,
Thou knowest, willest what is done.
Grief may be joy misunderstood:
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever's lost, it first was won!
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here
That Heaven's new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on!
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on!
And, having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops some pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling - so I! THY DAYS GO ON!
## p. 2547 (#105) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2547
THE CRY OF THE HUMAN
THER
HERE is no God,” the foolish saith,
But none, «There is no sorrow ;)
And nature oft the cry of faith
In bitter need will borrow:
Eyes which the preacher could not school
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne'er said, “God be praised. ”
Be pitiful, o God.
The tempest stretches from the steep
The shadow of its coming;
The beasts grow tame, and near us creep,
As help were in the human:
Yet while the cloud-wheels roll and grind,
We spirits tremble under!
The hills have echoes; but we find
No answer for the thunder.
Be pitiful, O God!
The battle hurtles on the plains-
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest - honor.
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit:
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay,- and spirit, spirit.
Be pitiful, O God!
We meet together at the feast -
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
We name delight, and pledge it round
“It shall be ours to-morrow ! »
God's seraphs! do your voices sound
As sad in naming sorrow ?
Be pitiful, O God!
We sit together, with the skies,
The steadfast skies, above us;
We look into each other's eyes,
“And how long will you love us? ”
## p. 2548 (#106) ###########################################
2548
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless -
« Till death us part! ” – 0 words, to be
Our best for love the deathless!
Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed
Of one loved and departed -
Our tears drop on the lips that said
Last night, "Be stronger-hearted!
O God, - to clasp those fingers close,
And yet to feel so lonely! -
To see a light upon such brows,
Which is the daylight only!
Be pitiful, O God!
The happy children come to us,
And look up in our faces;
They ask us Was it thus, and thus,
When we were in their places ?
We cannot speak — we see anew
The hills we used to live in,
And feel our mother's smile press through
The kisses she is giving.
Be pitiful, O God!
We pray together at the kirk,
For mercy, mercy, solely –
Hands weary with the evil work,
We lift them to the Holy!
The corpse is calm below our knee-
Its spirit bright before Thee -
Between them, worse than either, we
Without the rest of glory!
Be pitiful, O God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull
Men whisper, “He is dying; »
We cry no more, “Be pitiful! ” —
We have no strength for crying:
No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine,
Look up and triumph rather –
Lo! in the depth of God's Divine,
The Son adjures the Father -
BE PITIFUL, O God!
## p. 2549 (#107) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2549
ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST
L
ITTLE Ellie sits alone
'Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by;
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water's flow -
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly uses
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done,
And the sweetest pleasure chooses,
For her future within reach.
Little Ellie in her smile
Chooseth — “I will have a lover,
Riding on a steed of steeds!
He shall love me without guile;
And to him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds.
(And the steed shall be red-roan,
And the lover shall be noble,
With an eye that takes the breath,
And the lute he plays upon
Shall strike ladies into trouble,
As his sword strikes men to death.
“And the steed it shall be shod
All in silver, housed in azure,
And the mane shall swim the wind:
And the hoofs along the sod
Shall Aash onward and keep measure,
Till the shepherds look behind.
«But my lover will not prize
All the glory that he rides in,
## p. 2550 (#108) ###########################################
2550
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
When he gazes in my face.
He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes
Build the shrine my soul abides in;
And I kneel here for thy grace. '
« Then, ay, then — he shall kneel low,
With the red-roan steed anear him,
Which shall seein to understand-
Till I answer, Rise and go!
For the world must love and fear him
Whom I gift with heart and hand. ”
« Then he will arise so pale,
I shall feel my own lips tremble
With a yes I must not say —
Nathless maiden-brave, Farewell,'
I will utter, and dissemble --
Light to-morrow with to-day. '
«Then he'll ride among the hills
To the wide world past the river,
There to put away all wrong:
To make straight distorted wills,
And to empty the broad quiver
Which the wicked bear along.
« Three times shall a young foot-page
Swim the stream and climb the mountain
And kneel down beside my feet –
Lo! my master sends this gage,
Lady, for thy pity's counting!
What wilt thou exchange for it? '
"And the first time I will send
A white rosebud for a guerdon,
And the second time, a glove:
But the third time — I may bend
From my pride, and answer —Pardon-
If he comes to take my love. '
«Then the young foot-page will run
Then my lover will ride faster,
Till he kneeleth at my knee:
I am a duke's eldest son!
Thousand serfs do call me master,-
But, O Love, I love but thee! ! )
## p. 2551 (#109) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2551
“He will kiss me on the mouth
Then; and lead me as a lover
Through the crowds that praise his deeds;
And when soul-tied by one troth,
Unto him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds. ”
Little Ellie, with her smile
Not yet ended, rose up gayly,
Tied the bonnet, donned the shoe --
And went homeward, round a mile,
Just to see, as she did daily,
What more eggs were with the two.
Pushing through the elm-tree copse
Winding by the stream, light-hearted,
Where the osier pathway leads -
Past the boughs she stoops - and stops!
Lo! the wild swan had deserted -
And a rat had gnawed the reeds.
Ellie went home sad and slow:
If she found the lover ever,
With his red-roan steed of steeds,
Sooth I know not! but I know
She could never show him --- never,
That swan's nest among the reeds!
THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
W*Tjänte-rose by May-dew impearled :
THAT's the best thing in the world ?
June-rose by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain,
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when so you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
Something out of it, I think.
## p. 2552 (#110) ###########################################
2552
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
U
(NLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart !
l'nlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head; on mine the dew:
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems, where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch, too poor
For hand of thine ? and canst thou think, and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up, and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps — as thou must sing – alone, aloof.
WHAT can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them on the outside of the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? Am I cold,
C'ngrateful, that for these most manifold
High gifts, I render nothing back at all ?
Not so; not cold, but very poor instead.
Ask God, who knows. For frequent tears have run
The colors from my life, and left so dead
And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.
## p. 2553 (#111) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
>
## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
8
freschi
ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two. At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
## p. 2560 (#120) ###########################################
2560
ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
## p. 2561 (#121) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr.
For a moment, mouth to mouth;
Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth;
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals;
Let them prove their living souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!
Still all day the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark;
And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
IX
Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,
To look up to Him, and pray;
So the blessed One who blesseth all the others
Will bless them another day.
They answer, “Who is God, that he should hear us
While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred ?
When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us
Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word;
## p. 2538 (#96) ############################################
2538
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)
Strangers speaking at the door.
Is it likely God, with angels singing round him,
Hears our weeping any more?
X
“Two words, indeed, of praying we remember;
And at midnight's hour of harm,
'Our Father, looking upward in the chamber,
We say softly for a charm.
We know no other words except Our Father';
And we think that, in some pause of angels' song,
God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,
And hold both within his right hand, which is strong.
(Our Father! ) If he heard us, he would surely
(For they call him good and mild)
Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,
"Come and rest with me, my child. '
XI
« But no! ” say the children, weeping faster,
«He is speechless as a stone;
And they tell us, of his image is the master
Who commands us to work on.
Go to! ” say the children, -"up in heaven,
Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find.
Do not mock us: Grief has made us unbelieving:
We look up for God; but tears have made us blind. ”
Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,
O my brothers, what ye preach ?
For God's possible is taught by his world's loving —
And the children doubt of each.
XII
And well may the children weep before you!
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;
They sink in man's despair, without its calm;
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom;
Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm ;
Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly
The harvest of its memories cannot reap;
## p. 2539 (#97) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2539
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly –
Let them weep! let them weep!
XIII
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see.
For they mind you of their angels in high places,
With eyes turned on Deity.
«How long,” they say, how long, () cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world on a child's heart, -
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath! ”
MOTHER AND POET
(On Laura Savio of Turin, a poetess and patriot, whose sons were killed
at Ancona and Gaeta. ]
D*
EAD! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast,
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me!
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said:
But this woman, this, who is agonized here,
The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head
Forever instead.
What art can a woman be good at ? Oh, vain!
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain ?
Ah, boys, how you hurt! you were strong as you prest,
And I proud by that test.
What art's for a woman ? To hold on her knees
Both darlings! to feel all their arms round her throat
Cling, strangle a little! to sew by degrees,
And 'broider the long-clothes and neat little coat;
To dream and to dote.
## p. 2540 (#98) ############################################
2540
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
.
To teach them.
It stings there! I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at need.
I prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.
And when their eyes flashed . . O my beautiful eyes! . . .
I exulted; nay, let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise [kneels.
When one sits quite alone! Then one weeps, then one
God, how the house feels!
At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled
With my kisses, of camp-life and glory, and how
They both loved me; and soon, coming home to be spoiled,
In return would fan off every fly from my brow
With their green laurel-bough.
(
There was triumph at Turin: 'Ancona was free ! »
And some one came out of the cheers in the street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.
My Guido was dead! I fell down at his feet,
While they cheered in the street.
I bore it; friends soothed me; my grief looked sublime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained
To the height he had gained.
And letters still came; shorter, sadder, more strong,
Writ now but in one hand :- "I was not to faint,
One loved me for two; would be with me ere long :
And Viva l'Italia he died for, our saint,
Who forbids our complaint. ”
My Nanni would add, “he was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turned off the balls, — was imprest
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how 'twas impossible, quite dispossest,
To live on for the rest. ”
On which, without pause, up the telegraph-line
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta, — "Shot.
Tell his mother. ” Ah, ah! “his,” “their” mother, not «mine »:
No voice says, "My mother," again to me. What!
You think Guido forgot ?
1
## p. 2541 (#99) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2541
Are souls straight so happy, that, dizzy with heaven,
They drop earth's affections, conceive not of woe?
I think not! Themselves were too lately forgiven
Through that Love and that Sorrow which reconciled so
The Above and Below.
O Christ of the seven wounds, who look'dst through the dark
To the face of thy mother! Consider, I pray,
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,-
Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,
And no last word to say!
Both boys dead ? but that's out of nature. We all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.
'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall;
And when Italy's made, for what end is it done,
If we have not a son ?
Ah, ah, ah! when Gaeta's taken, what then?
When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport
Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of men;
When the guns of Cavalli with final retort
Have cut the game short;
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee;
(red:
When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and
When you have your country from mountain to sea,
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head,
(And I have my dead) –
What then? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low
And burn your lights faintly! My country is there,
Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow:
My Italy's THERE, with my brave civic pair,
To disfranchise despair!
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this, and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Both! both my boys! If in keeping the feast
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at me! !
## p. 2542 (#100) ###########################################
2542
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A COURT LADY
H
Er hair was tawny with gold; her eyes with purple were dark;
Her cheeks' pale opal burnt with a red and restless spark.
Never was lady of Milan nobler in naine and in race;
Never was lady of Italy fairer to see in the face.
Never was lady on earth more true as woman and wife,
Larger in judgment and instinct, prouder in manners and life.
She stood in the early morning, and said to her maidens, Bring
That silken robe made ready to wear at the court of the King.
“Bring me the clasps of diamond, lucid, clear of the mote;
Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the small at the throat.
“Diamonds to fasten the hair, and diamonds to fasten the sleeves,
Laces to drop from their rays, like a powder of snow from the eaves. ”
Gorgeous she entered the sunlight, which gathered her up in a flame,
While, straight in her open carriage, she to the hospital came.
In she went at the door, and gazing from end to end, --
« Many and low are the pallets; but each is the place of a friend. ”
Up she passed through the wards, and stood at a young man's bed;
Bloody the band on his brow, and livid the droop of his head.
« Art thou a Lombard, my brother ? Happy art thou! ” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him: he dreamed in her face — and died.
Pale with his passing soul, she went on still to a second:
He was a grave hard man, whose years by dungeons were reckoned.
Wounds in his body were sore, wounds in his life were sorer.
« Art thou a Romagnole ? ” Her eyes drove lightnings before her.
« Austrian and priest had joined to double and tighten the cord
Able to bind thee, O strong one, free by the stroke of a sword.
"Now be grave for the rest of us, using the life overcast
To ripen our wine of the present (too new) in glooms of the past. ”
Down she stepped to a pallet where lay a face like a girl's,
Young, and pathetic with dying,-a deep black hole in the curls.
"Art thou from Tuscany, brother? and seest thou, dreaming in pain,
Thy mother stand in the piazza, searching the list of the slain ? )
## p. 2543 (#101) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2543
(
Kind as a mother herself, she touched his cheeks with her hands:
Blessed is she who has borne thee, although she should weep as
she stands.
On she passed to a Frenchman, his arm carried off by a ball:
Kneeling: “O more than my brother! how shall I thank thee for all ?
“Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line;
But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not thine.
“Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossest,
But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the
rest. »
Ever she passed on her way, and came to a couch where pined
One with a face from Venetia, white with a hope out of mind.
Long she stood and gazed, and twice she tried at the name;
But two great crystal tears were all that faltered and came.
Only a tear for Venice? She turned as in passion and loss,
And stooped to his forehead and kissed it, as if she were kissing
the cross.
Faint with that strain of heart, she moved on then to another,
Stern and strong in his death: “And dost thou suffer, my brother ? ”
Holding his hands in hers: “Out of the Piedmont lion
Cometh the sweetness of freedom! sweetest to live or to die on. ”
Holding his cold rough hands: “Well, oh well have ye done
In noble, noble Piedmont, who would not be noble alone. ”
Back he fell while she spoke. She rose to her feet with a spring.
« That was a Piedmontese! and this is the court of the King ! »
THE PROSPECT
ETHINKS we do as fretful children do,
M *Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view;
And thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain, -
The life beyond us and our souls in pain. -
We miss the prospect which we are called unto
## p. 2544 (#102) ###########################################
2544
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong,
O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong;
That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.
DE PROFUNDIS
T"
HE face which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With daily love, is dimmed away -
And yet iny days go on, go on.
The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone,
And every morning with “Good day )
Make each day good, is hushed away —
And yet my days go on, go on.
The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon,
The strongest on the longest day,
With steadfast love is caught away –
And yet my days go on, go on.
The world goes whispering to its own,
« This anguish pierces to the bone. ”
And tender friends go sighing round,
( What love can ever cure this wound ? »
My days go on, my days go on.
The past rolls forward on the sun
And makes all night. O dreams begun,
Not to be ended! Ended bliss !
And life, that will not end in this!
My days go on, iny days go on.
Breath freezes on my lips to moan:
As one alone, once not alone,
I sit and knock at Nature's door,
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor,
Whose desolated days go on.
## p. 2545 (#103) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2545
I knock and cry – L’ndone, undone!
Is there no help, no comfort — none ?
No gleaning in the wide wheat-plains
Where others drive their loaded wains ?
My vacant days go on, go on.
This Nature, though the snows be down,
Thinks kindly of the bird of June.
The little red hip on the tree
Is ripe for such. What is for me,
Whose days so winterly go on?
No bird am I to sing in June,
And dare not ask an equal boon.
Good nests and berries red are Nature's
To give away to better creatures -
And yet my days go on, go on.
I ask less kindness to be done -
Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cool deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on.
Only to lift the turf unmown
From off the earth where it has grown,
Some cubit-space, and say, Behold,
Creep in, poor Heart, beneath that fold,
Forgetting how the days go on. ”
A Voice reproves me thereupon,
More sweet than Nature's, when the drone
Of bees is sweetest, and more deep,
Than when the rivers overleap
The shuddering pines, and thunder on.
God's Voice, not Nature's - night and noon
He sits upon the great white throne,
And listens for the creature's praise.
What babble we of days and days ?
The Dayspring he, whose days go on!
He reigns above, he reigns alone:
Systems burn out and leave his throne:
Fair mists of seraphs melt and fall
Around him, changeless amid all
Ancient of days, whose days go on!
V -160
## p. 2546 (#104) ###########################################
2546
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
He reigns below, he reigns alone —
And having life in love forgone
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,
He reigns the jealous God. Who mourns
Or rules with him, while days go on?
By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear him charge his saints that none
Among the creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against him with despair,
However darkly days go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown:
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee,
Whose days eternally go on!
For us,
whatever's undergone,
Thou knowest, willest what is done.
Grief may be joy misunderstood:
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever's lost, it first was won!
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here
That Heaven's new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on!
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on!
And, having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops some pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling - so I! THY DAYS GO ON!
## p. 2547 (#105) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2547
THE CRY OF THE HUMAN
THER
HERE is no God,” the foolish saith,
But none, «There is no sorrow ;)
And nature oft the cry of faith
In bitter need will borrow:
Eyes which the preacher could not school
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne'er said, “God be praised. ”
Be pitiful, o God.
The tempest stretches from the steep
The shadow of its coming;
The beasts grow tame, and near us creep,
As help were in the human:
Yet while the cloud-wheels roll and grind,
We spirits tremble under!
The hills have echoes; but we find
No answer for the thunder.
Be pitiful, O God!
The battle hurtles on the plains-
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest - honor.
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit:
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay,- and spirit, spirit.
Be pitiful, O God!
We meet together at the feast -
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
We name delight, and pledge it round
“It shall be ours to-morrow ! »
God's seraphs! do your voices sound
As sad in naming sorrow ?
Be pitiful, O God!
We sit together, with the skies,
The steadfast skies, above us;
We look into each other's eyes,
“And how long will you love us? ”
## p. 2548 (#106) ###########################################
2548
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless -
« Till death us part! ” – 0 words, to be
Our best for love the deathless!
Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed
Of one loved and departed -
Our tears drop on the lips that said
Last night, "Be stronger-hearted!
O God, - to clasp those fingers close,
And yet to feel so lonely! -
To see a light upon such brows,
Which is the daylight only!
Be pitiful, O God!
The happy children come to us,
And look up in our faces;
They ask us Was it thus, and thus,
When we were in their places ?
We cannot speak — we see anew
The hills we used to live in,
And feel our mother's smile press through
The kisses she is giving.
Be pitiful, O God!
We pray together at the kirk,
For mercy, mercy, solely –
Hands weary with the evil work,
We lift them to the Holy!
The corpse is calm below our knee-
Its spirit bright before Thee -
Between them, worse than either, we
Without the rest of glory!
Be pitiful, O God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull
Men whisper, “He is dying; »
We cry no more, “Be pitiful! ” —
We have no strength for crying:
No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine,
Look up and triumph rather –
Lo! in the depth of God's Divine,
The Son adjures the Father -
BE PITIFUL, O God!
## p. 2549 (#107) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2549
ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST
L
ITTLE Ellie sits alone
'Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by;
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water's flow -
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly uses
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done,
And the sweetest pleasure chooses,
For her future within reach.
Little Ellie in her smile
Chooseth — “I will have a lover,
Riding on a steed of steeds!
He shall love me without guile;
And to him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds.
(And the steed shall be red-roan,
And the lover shall be noble,
With an eye that takes the breath,
And the lute he plays upon
Shall strike ladies into trouble,
As his sword strikes men to death.
“And the steed it shall be shod
All in silver, housed in azure,
And the mane shall swim the wind:
And the hoofs along the sod
Shall Aash onward and keep measure,
Till the shepherds look behind.
«But my lover will not prize
All the glory that he rides in,
## p. 2550 (#108) ###########################################
2550
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
When he gazes in my face.
He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes
Build the shrine my soul abides in;
And I kneel here for thy grace. '
« Then, ay, then — he shall kneel low,
With the red-roan steed anear him,
Which shall seein to understand-
Till I answer, Rise and go!
For the world must love and fear him
Whom I gift with heart and hand. ”
« Then he will arise so pale,
I shall feel my own lips tremble
With a yes I must not say —
Nathless maiden-brave, Farewell,'
I will utter, and dissemble --
Light to-morrow with to-day. '
«Then he'll ride among the hills
To the wide world past the river,
There to put away all wrong:
To make straight distorted wills,
And to empty the broad quiver
Which the wicked bear along.
« Three times shall a young foot-page
Swim the stream and climb the mountain
And kneel down beside my feet –
Lo! my master sends this gage,
Lady, for thy pity's counting!
What wilt thou exchange for it? '
"And the first time I will send
A white rosebud for a guerdon,
And the second time, a glove:
But the third time — I may bend
From my pride, and answer —Pardon-
If he comes to take my love. '
«Then the young foot-page will run
Then my lover will ride faster,
Till he kneeleth at my knee:
I am a duke's eldest son!
Thousand serfs do call me master,-
But, O Love, I love but thee! ! )
## p. 2551 (#109) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2551
“He will kiss me on the mouth
Then; and lead me as a lover
Through the crowds that praise his deeds;
And when soul-tied by one troth,
Unto him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds. ”
Little Ellie, with her smile
Not yet ended, rose up gayly,
Tied the bonnet, donned the shoe --
And went homeward, round a mile,
Just to see, as she did daily,
What more eggs were with the two.
Pushing through the elm-tree copse
Winding by the stream, light-hearted,
Where the osier pathway leads -
Past the boughs she stoops - and stops!
Lo! the wild swan had deserted -
And a rat had gnawed the reeds.
Ellie went home sad and slow:
If she found the lover ever,
With his red-roan steed of steeds,
Sooth I know not! but I know
She could never show him --- never,
That swan's nest among the reeds!
THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
W*Tjänte-rose by May-dew impearled :
THAT's the best thing in the world ?
June-rose by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain,
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when so you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
Something out of it, I think.
## p. 2552 (#110) ###########################################
2552
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
U
(NLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart !
l'nlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head; on mine the dew:
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems, where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch, too poor
For hand of thine ? and canst thou think, and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up, and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps — as thou must sing – alone, aloof.
WHAT can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them on the outside of the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? Am I cold,
C'ngrateful, that for these most manifold
High gifts, I render nothing back at all ?
Not so; not cold, but very poor instead.
Ask God, who knows. For frequent tears have run
The colors from my life, and left so dead
And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.
## p. 2553 (#111) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
>
## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
8
freschi
ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two. At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
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ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
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ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr.
