The life and personality of
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning seem to
explain her poetry.
explain her poetry.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
In things of this nature silence commendeth history:
'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never
rise a Pancirollus, nor remain any register but that of hell
never
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1
1
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2511
WILLIAM BROWNE
(1591-1643)
MONG the English poets famous for their imaginative interpre-
tation of nature, high rank must be given to William
Browne, who belongs in the list headed by Spenser, and
including Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, George
Wither, and Phineas Fletcher. Although he shows skill and charm
of style in various kinds of verse, his name rests chiefly upon his
largest work, Britannia's Pastorals. This is much wider in
scope
than the title suggests, if one follows the definition given by Pope in
his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. ' He says:— “A Pastoral is an
imitation of the action of a shepherd or one considered under that
character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or , narrated, or
mixed of both; the fable simple, the manners not too polite nor too
rustic; the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and pas-
sion.
If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this
Idea along with us: that Pastoral is an image of what they call the
Golden Age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shep-
herds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to
have been when the best of men followed the employment.
We must therefore use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful,
and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life,
and in concealing its miseries. ”
In his (Shepherd's Pipe, a series of Eclogues,' Browne follows
this plan; but Britannia's Pastorals) contains rambling stories of
Hamadryads and Oreads; figures which are too shadowy to seem
real, yet stand in exquisite woodland landscapes. When the story
passes to the yellow sands and «froth-girt rocks,” washed by the
crisped and curling waves from Neptune's silver, ever-shaking
breast, or when it touches the mysteries of the ocean world, over
which «Thetis drives her silver throne,” the poet's fancy is as deli-
cate as when he revels in the earthy smell of the woods, where the
leaves, golden and green, hide from sight the feathered choir; where
glow the hips of scarlet berries; where is heard the dropping of
nuts; and where the active bright-eyed squirrels leap from tree to
tree.
The loves, hardships, and adventures of Marina, Celadyne, Red-
mond, Fida, Philocel, Aletheia, Metanoia, and Amintas do not hold
the reader from delight in descriptions of the blackbird and dove
## p. 2512 (#72) ############################################
2512
WILLIAM BROWNE
calling from the dewy branches; crystal streams lisping through
banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild
thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks on which
the elms and alders throw long shadows; circles of green grass
made by dancing elves; rounded hills shut in by oaks, pines, birches,
and laurel, where shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired
satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and
mint are freshened daily by nymphs pouring out gentle streams
from crystal urns. Every now and then, huntsmen in green dash
through his sombre woods with their hounds in full cry; anglers are
seated by still pools, shepherds dance around the May-pole, and
shepherdesses gather flowers for garlands. Gloomy caves appear,
surrounded by hawthorn and holly that "outdares cold winter's ire,”
and sheltering old hermits, skilled in simples and the secret power
of herbs. Sometimes the poet describes a choir where the tiny wren
sings the treble, Robin Redbreast the mean, the thrush the tenor,
and the nightingale the counter-tenor, while droning bees fill in the
bass; and shows us fairy haunts and customs with a delicacy only
equaled by Drayton and Herrick.
Several lyric songs of high order are scattered through the Pas-
torals, and the famous Palinode on Man' is imbedded in the Third
Book as follows:
1
1
“I truly know
How men are born and whither they shall go;
I know that like to silkworms of one year,
Or like a kind and wrongèd lover's tear,
Or on the pathless waves a rudder's dint,
Or like the little sparkles of a flint,
Or like to thin round cakes with cost perfum'd,
Or fireworks only made to be consum'd:
I know that such is man, and all that trust
In that weak piece of animated dust.
The silkworm droops, the lover's tears soon shed,
The ship's way quickly lost, the sparkle dead;
The cake burns out in haste, the firework's done,
And man as soon as these as quickly gone. "
5
Little is known of Browne's life. He was a native of Tavistock,
Devonshire; born, it is thought, in 1591, the son of Thomas Browne,
who is supposed by Prince in his 'Worthies of Devon' to have be-
longed to a knightly family. According to Wood, who says he had
a great mind in a little body,” he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford,
«about the beginning of the reign of James I. Leaving Oxford
without a degree, he was admitted in 1612 to the Inner Temple,
London, and a little later he is discovered at Oxford, engaged as
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WILLIAM BROWNE
2513
He ap-
private tutor to Robert Dormer, afterward Earl of Carnarvon. In
1624 he received his degree of Master of Arts from Oxford.
pears to have settled in Dorking, and after 1640 nothing more is
heard of him. Wood thinks he died in 1645, but there is an entry in
the Tavistock register, dated March 27th, 1643, and reading “William
Browne was buried” on that day. That he was devoted to the
streams, dales, and downs of his native Devonshire is shown in the
Pastorals, where he sings:
“Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Show me who can, so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills;
Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines;
Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines. ”
And in another place he says:-
«And Tavy in my rhymes
Challenge a due; let it thy glory be
That famous Drake and I were born by thee. ”
The First Book of Britannia's Pastorals) was written before its
author was twenty, and was published in 1631. The Second Book
appeared in 1616, and both were reprinted in 1625. The Third Book
was not published during Browne's life. The (Shepherd's Pipe was
published in 1614, and The Inner Temple Masque,' written on the
story of Ulysses and Circe, for representation in 1614, was first pub-
lished in Thomas Davies's edition of Browne's works (3 vols. , 1772).
Two critical editions of value have been brought out in recent years:
one by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1868-69); and the other by Gordon
Goodwin and A. H. Bullen (1894).
"In the third song of the Second Book,” says Mr. Bullen in his
preface, -
« There is a description of a delightful grove, perfumed with Codoriferous
buds and herbs of price,' where fruits hang in gallant clusters from the trees,
and birds tune their notes to the music of running water; so fair a pleas-
aunce
(that you are fain
Where you last walked to turn and walk again. ”
A generous reader might apply that description to Browne's poetry; he might
urge that the breezes which blew down these leafy alleys and over those trim
parterres were not more grateful than the fragrance exhaled from the Pas-
torals) ; that the brooks and birds babble and twitter in the printed page
not less blithely than in that western Paradise. What so pleasant as to read
of May-games, true-love knots, and shepherds piping in the shade ? of pixies
and fairy-circles ? of rustic bridals and junketings? of angling, hunting the
V-158
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2514
WILLIAM BROWNE
squirrel, nut-gathering? Of such subjects William Browne treats, singing
like the shepherd in the Arcadia,' as though he would never grow old. He
was a happy poet. It was his good fortune to grow up among wholesome
surroundings whose gracious influences sank into his spirit. He loved the
hills and dales round Tavistock, and lovingly described them in his verse.
Frequently he indulges in descriptions of sunrise and sunset; they leave no
vivid impression, but charm the reader by their quiet beauty. It cannot be
denied that his fondness for simple, homely images sometimes led him into
sheer fatuity; and candid admirers must also admit that, despite his study
of simplicity, he could not refrain from hunting (as the manner was) after
far-fetched outrageous conceits. ”
1
Browne is a poet's poet. Drayton, Wither, Herbert, and John
Davies of Hereford, wrote his praises. Mrs. Browning includes him
in her "Vision of Poets,' where she says:-
1
«Drayton and Browne,— with smiles they drew
From outward Nature, still kept new
From their own inward nature true. ”
$
Milton studied him carefully, and just as his influence is per-
ceived in the work of Keats, so is it found in Comus' and in
Lycidas. Browne acknowledges Spenser and Sidney as his masters,
and his work shows that he loved Chaucer and Shakespeare.
CIRCE'S CHARM
Song from the Inner Temple Masque)
SM
On of Erebus and night,
Hie away; and aim thy flight
Where consort none other fowl
Than the bat and sullen owl;
Where upon thy limber grass,
Poppy and mandragoras,
With like simples not a few,
Hang forever drops of dew;
Where flows Lethe without coil
Softly like a stream of oil.
Hie thee hither, gentle sleep:
With this Greek no longer keep.
Thrice I charge thee by my wand,
Thrice with moly froin my hand
Do I touch Ulysses's eyes,
And with the jaspis: then arise,
Sagest Greek!
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WILLIAM BROWNE
2515
THE HUNTED SQUIRREL
From Britannia's Pastorals)
WHEN as a nimble squirrel from the wood
T Ranging the hedges for this fiber food
Sits pertly on a bough. his brown nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking;
Till with their crooks and bags a sort of boys
To share with him come with so great a noise
That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke,
And for his life leap to a neighbor oak,
Thence to a beach, thence to a row of ashes;
Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes
The boys run dabbling through thick and thin;
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin;
This, torn and tattered, hath with much ado
Got by the briars; and that hath lost his shoe;
This drops his band; that headlong falls for haste;
Another cries behind for being last:
With sticks and stones and many a sounding holloa
The little fool with no small sport they follow,
Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray
Gets to the woods and hides him in his dray.
AS CAREFUL MERCHANTS DO EXPECTING STAND
From Britannia's Pastorals)
A
S CAREFUL merchants do expecting stand,
After long time and merry gales of wind,
Upon the place where their brave ships must land,
So wait I for the vessel of my mind.
Upon a great adventure is it bound,
Whose safe return will valued be at more
Than all the wealthy prizes which have crowned
The golden wishes of an age before.
Out of the East jewels of worth she brings;
The unvalued diamond of her sparkling eye
Wants in the treasures of all Europe's kings;
And were it mine, they nor their crowns should buy.
The sapphires ringed on her panting breast
Run as rich veins of ore about the mold,
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2516
WILLIAM BROWNE
And are in sickness with a pale possessed;
So true for them I should disvalue gold.
The melting rubies on her cherry lip
Are of such power to hold, that as one day
Cupid flew thirsty by, he stooped to sip:
And, fastened there, could never get away.
The sweets of Candy are no sweets to me
Where hers I taste: nor the perfumes of price,
Robbed from the happy shrubs of Araby,
As her sweet breath so powerful to entice.
O hasten then! and if thou be not gone
Unto that wicked traffic through the main,
My powerful sigh shall quickly drive thee on,
And then begin to draw thee back again.
If, in the mean, rude waves have it opprest,
It shall suffice, I ventured at the best.
SONG OF THE SIRENS
From "The Inner Temple Masque)
STEF
TEER hither, steer your winged pines,
All beaten mariners!
Here lie love's undiscovered mines,
A prey to passengers:
Perfumes far sweeter than the best
Which make the Phoenix's urn and nest.
Fear not your ships,
Nor any to oppose you save our lips,
But come on shore,
Where no joy dies till love hath gotten more.
For swelling waves our panting breasts,
Where never storms arise,
Exchange, and be awhile our guests:
For stars, gaze on our eyes.
The compass love shall hourly sing,
And as he goes about the ring,
We will not miss
To tell each point he nameth with a kiss.
Then come on shore,
Where no joy dies till love hath gotten more.
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WILLIAM BROWNE
2517
AN EPISTLE ON PARTING
From Epistles!
D“
EAR soul, the time is come, and we must part;
Yet, ere I go, in these lines read my heart:
A heart so just, so loving, and so true,
So full of sorrow and so full of you,
That all I speak or write or pray or mean, —
And, which is all I can, all that I dream,-
Is not without a sigh, a thought of you,
And as your beauties are, so are they true.
Seven summers now are fully spent and gone,
Since first I loved, loved you, and you alone;
And should mine eyes as many hundreds see,
Yet none but you should claim a right in me;
A right so placed that time shall never hear
Of one so vowed, or any loved so dear.
When I am gone, if ever prayers moved you,
Relate to none that I so well have loved you:
For all that know your beauty and desert,
Would swear he never loved that knew to part.
Why part we then ? That spring, which but this day
Met some sweet river, in his bed can play,
And with a dimpled cheek smile at their bliss,
Who never know what separation is.
The amorous vine with wanton interlaces
Clips still the rough elm in her kind embraces:
Doves with their doves sit billing in the groves,
And woo the lesser birds to sing their loves:
Whilst hapless we in griefful absence sit,
Yet dare not ask a hand to lessen it.
SONNETS TO CÆLIA
F
AIREST, when by the rules of palmistry,
You took my hand to try if you could guess,
By lines therein, if any wight there be
Ordained to make me know some happiness:
I wished that those characters could explain,
Whom I will never wrong with hope to win;
Or that by them a copy might be ta'en,
By you alone what thoughts I have within.
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2518
WILLIAM BROWNE
Put since the hand of nature did not set
(As providently loath to have it known)
The means to find that hidden alphabet,
Mine eyes shall be the interpreters alone:
By them conceive my thoughts, and tell me, fair,
If now you see her that doth love me, there.
.
WERE 't not for you, here should my pen have rest,
And take a long leave of sweet poesy;
Britannia's swains, and rivers far by west,
Should hear no more my oaten melody.
Yet shall the song I sung of them awhile
L'nperfect lie, and make no further known
The happy loves of this our pleasant Isle,
Till I have left some record of mine own.
You are the subject now, and, writing you,
I well may versify, not poetize:
Here needs no fiction; for the graces true
And virtues clip not with base flatteries.
Here should I write what you deserve of praise;
Others might wear, but I should win, the bays.
1
FAIREST, when I am gone, as now the glass
Of Time is marked how long I have to stay,
Let me entreat you, ere from hence I pass,
Perhaps from you for ever more away,-
Think that no common love hath fired my breast,
No base desire, but virtue truly known,
Which I may love, and wish to have possessed,
Were you the highest as fairest of any one.
'Tis not your lovely eye enforcing flames,
Nor beauteous red beneath a snowy skin,
That so much binds me yours, or makes your fame's,
As the pure light and beauty shrined within:
Yet outward parts I must affect of duty,
As for the smell we like the rose's beauty.
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2519
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
(1820-1872)
His poet,
prominent among those who gained their chief
inspiration from the stirring events of the Civil War, was
born in Providence, Rhode Island, February 6th, 1820, and
died in East Hartford, Connecticut, October 31st, 1872.
He was
graduated at Trinity College, Hartford, studied law, and was admitted
to the bar; but instead of the legal profession adopted that of a
teacher, and made his home in Hartford, which was the residence of
his uncle, the Bishop of Connecticut. Although Mr. Brownell soon
became known as a writer of verse, both grave and humorous, it
was not till the coming on of the Civil War that his muse found
truest and noblest expression. With a poet's sensitiveness he fore-
saw the coming storm, and predicted it in verse that has the ring of
an ancient prophet; and when the crash came he sang of the great
deeds of warriors in the old heroic strain. Many of these poems,
like (Annus Memorabilis) and (Coming,' were born of the great pas-
sion of patriotism which took possession of him, and were regarded
only as the visions of a heated imagination. But when the storm
burst it was seen that he had the true vision. As the dreadful
drama unrolled, Brownell rose to greater issues, and became the war-
poet par excellence, the vigorous chronicler of great actions.
He was fond of the sea, and ardently longed for the opportunity
to witness, if not to participate in, a sea-fight. His desire was
gratified in a singular way. He had printed in a Hartford paper a
very felicitous versification of Farragut's General Orders in the
fight at the mouth of the Mississippi. This attracted Farragut's
attention, and he took steps to learn the name of the author. When
it was given, Commodore Farragut (he was not then Admiral) offered
Mr. Brownell the position of master's-mate on board the Hartford,
and attached the poet to him in the character of a private secretary.
Thus he was present at the fight of Mobile Bay. After the war he
accompanied the Admiral in his cruise in European waters.
Although Brownell was best known to the country by his descript-
ive poems, The River Fight) and (The Bay Fight, which appear
in his volume of collected works, War Lyrics,' his title to be consid-
ered a true poet does not rest upon these only. He was unequal in
his performance and occasionally was betrayed by a grotesque humor
into disregard of dignity and finish; but he had both the vision and
the lyric grace of the builder of lasting verse.
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2520
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
ANNUS MEMORABILIS
STA
(CONGRESS, 1860-61)
TAND strong and calm as Fate! not a breath of scorn or hate —
Of taunt for the base, or of menace for the strong –
Since our fortunes must be sealed on that old and famous Field
Where the Right is set in battle with the Wrong.
'Tis coming, with the loom of Khamsin or Simoom,
The tempest that shall try if we are of God or no
Its roar is in the sky, — and they there be which cry,
“Let us cower, and the storm may over-blow. ”
Now, nay! stand firm and fast! (that was a spiteful blast! )
This is not a war of men, but of Angels Good and I11 –
'Tis hell that storms at heaven -- 'tis the black and deadly Seven,
Sworn 'gainst the Shining Ones to work their damned will!
How the Ether glooms and burns, as the tide of combat turns,
And the smoke and dust above it whirl and float!
It eddies and it streams — and, certes, oft it seems
As the Sins had the Seraphs fairly by the throat.
But we all have read in that Legend grand and dread),
How Michael and his host met the Serpent and his crew
Naught has reached us of the Fight -- but if I have dreamed aright,
'Twas a loud one and a long, as ever thundered through!
Right stiffly, past a doubt, the Dragon fought it out,
And his Angels, each and all, did for Tophet their devoir —
There was creak of iron wings, and whirl of scorpion stings,
Hiss of bifid tongues, and the Pit in full uproar!
But, naught thereof enscrolled, in one brief line 'tis told
(Calm as dew the Apocalyptic Pen),
That on the Infinite Shore their place was found no more.
God send the like on this our earth! Amen.
Copyrighted by Houghton, Miffin and Company, Boston.
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WORDS FOR THE (HALLELUJAH CHORUS)
O"
LD John Brown lies a-moldering in the grave,
Old John Brown lies slumbering in his grave
But John Brown's soul is marching with the brave,
His soul is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on.
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HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
2521
He has gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord;
He is sworn as a private in the ranks of the Lord, –
He shall stand at Armageddon with his brave old sword,
When Heaven is marching on.
He shall file in front where the lines of battle form,
He shall face to front when the squares of battle form -
Time with the column, and charge in the storm,
Where men are marching on.
Ah, foul Tyrants! do ye hear him where he comes ?
Ah, black traitors! do ye know him as he comes,
In thunder of the cannon and roll of the drums,
As we go marching on?
Men may die, and molder in the dust
Men may die, and arise again from dust,
Shoulder to shoulder, in the ranks of the Just,
When Heaven is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on.
COMING
(APRIL, 1861)
WOR
ORLD, are thou 'ware a storm ?
Hark to the ominous sound;
How the far-off gales their battle form,
And the great sea-swells feel ground!
It comes, the Typhoon of Death --
Nearer and nearer it comes!
The horizon thunder of cannon-breath
And the roar of angry drums!
Hurtle, Terror sublime !
Swoop o'er the Land to-day —
So the mist of wrong and crime,
The breath of our Evil Time
Be swept, as by fire, away!
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2522
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
PSYCHAURA
THE
He wind of an autumn midnight
Is moaning around my door -
The curtains wave at the window,
The carpet lifts on the floor.
There are sounds like startled footfalls
In the distant chambers now,
And the touching of airy fingers
Is busy on hand and brow.
'Tis thus, in the Soul's dark dwelling –
By the moody host unsought-
Through the chambers of memory wander
The invisible airs of thought.
For it bloweth where it listeth,
With a murmur loud or low;
Whence it cometh - whither it goeth -
None tell us, and none may know.
Now wearying round the portals
Of the vacant, desolate mind —
As the doors of a ruined mansion,
That creak in the cold night wind.
And anon an awful memory
Sweeps over it fierce and high-
Like the roar of a mountain forest
When the midnight gale goes by.
Then its voice subsides in wailing,
And, ere the dawning of day,
Murmuring fainter and fainter,
In the distance dies away.
SUSPIRIA NOCTIS
EADING, and reading -- little is the gain
R. Long dwelling with the minds of dead men leaves.
List rather to the melancholy rain,
Drop-dropping from the eaves.
Still the old tale - how hardly worth the telling!
Hark to the wind ! - again that mournful sound,
That all night long, around this lonely dwelling,
Moans like a dying hound.
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2523
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(1809-1861)
is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of
Miss Mitford and her “dear young friend Miss Barrett,
when the -esses of "authoresses” and “poetesses” and “edi-
tresses” and “hermitesses” make the pages sibilant; when Books of
Beauty,' and Keepsakes, and the extraordinary methods of “Fin-
den's Tableaux” make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr.
Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford “to the giraffes and the Diorama,”
called for “Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who reads
Greek as I do French, who has published
some translations from Æschylus, and some
most striking poems,” « Our sweet Miss
Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is
to think of her. » Of her own life Mrs.
Browning writes:-“As to stories, my story
amounts to the knife-grinder's, with noth-
ing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a
cage would have as good a story; most of
my events and nearly all my intense pleas-
ure have passed in my thoughts. ”
She was born at Burn Hall, Durham,
on March 6th, 1809, and passed a happy MRS. BROWNING
childhood and youth in her father's coun-
try house at Hope End, Herefordshire. She was remarkably pre-
cocious, reading Homer in the original at eight years of age. She
said that in those days “the Greeks were her demigods. She
dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her black pony. ” I
wrote verses very early, at eight years old and earlier. But what
is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained
with me. ” At seventeen years of age she published the “Essay on
Mind,' and translated the Prometheus) of Æschylus.
later the family removed to London, and here Elizabeth, on account
of her continued delicate health, was kept in her room for months
at a time. The shock following on the death of her brother, who
was drowned before her eyes in Torquay, whither she had gone for
rest, completely shattered her physically. Now her life of seclusion in
her London home began. For years she lay upon a couch in a large,
comfortably darkened room, seeing only the immediate members
Some years
## p. 2524 (#84) ############################################
2524
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
of her family and a few privileged friends, and spending her days
in writing and study, “reading,” Miss Mitford says, “almost every
book worth reading in almost every language. ” Here Robert Brown-
ing met her. They were married in 1846, against the will of her
father. Going abroad immediately, they finally settled in Florence
at the Casa Guidi, made famous by her poem bearing the same
name. Their home became the centre of attraction to visitors in
Florence, and many of the finest minds in the literary and artistic
world were among their friends. Hawthorne, who visited them,
describes Mrs. Browning as "a pale, small person, scarcely embodied
at all, at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender
fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity
of voice. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her
cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another
figure in the world, and her black ringlets cluster down in her neck
and make her face look whiter. ” She died in Florence on the 30th
of June, 1861, and the citizens of Florence placed a tablet to her
memory on the walls of Casa Guidi.
The life and personality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seem to
explain her poetry. It is a life “without a catastrophe,” except per-
haps to her devoted father. And it is to this father's devotion that
some of Mrs. Browning's poetical sins are due; for by him she was
so pampered and shielded from every outside touch, that all the
woes common to humanity grew for her into awful tragedies. Her
life was abnormal and unreal,- an unreality that passed more or less
into everything she did. Indeed, her resuscitation after meeting
Robert Browning would mount into a miracle, unless it were real-
ized that nothing in her former life had been quite as wofuļ as it
seemed. That Mrs. Browning was "a woman of real genius,” even
Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter Sav-
age Landor said, “With the exception of Burns, he (Shelley) and
Keats were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other
poet since Milton. I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing comes next. ” This is very high praise from very high authority,
but none too high for Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true
lyric ring, that spontaneity of thought and expression which comes
when the singer forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful
under the stress of the moment's inspiration. All of Mrs. Browning's
work is buoyed up by her luxurious and overflowing imagination.
With all its imperfections of technique, its lapses of taste and faults
of expression, it always remains poetry, throbbing with passion and
emotion and rich in color and sound. She wrote because she must.
Her own assertions notwithstanding, one cannot think of Mrs. Brown-
ing as sitting down in cold blood to compose a poem according to
## p. 2527 (#85) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2527
Tennyson's own. ” The fine thought and haunting beauty of A
Musical Instrument,' with its matchless climax, need not be dwelt on.
During her fifteen years' residence in Florence she threw herself
with great enthusiasm into Italian affairs, and wrote some political
poems of varying merit, whose interest necessarily faded away when
the occasion passed. But among those poems inspired by the strug-
gle for freedom, Casa Guidi Windows' comes close to the Sonnets
from the Portuguese' and Aurora Leigh,' and holds an enduring
place for its high poetry, its musical, sonorous verse, and the sus-
tained intellectual vigor of composition. Her volume of Last
Poems' contains, among much inferior matter, some of her finest
and most touching work, as (A Musical Instrument,' The Forced
Recruit,' and Mother and Poet. Peter Bayne says of her in his
"Great English women':- In melodiousness and splendor of poetic
gift Mrs. Browning stands
first among women.
not have the knowledge of life, the insight into character, the com-
prehensiveness of some, but we must all agree that a poet's far
more essential qualities are hers: usefulness, fervor, a noble aspira-
tion, and above all a tender, far-reaching nature, loving and beloved,
and touching the hearts of her readers with some virtue from its
depths. She seemed even in her life something of a spirit; and her
view of life's sorrow and shame, of its hearty and eternal hope, is
something like that which one might imagine a spirit's to be. ”
Whether political, or sociological, or mystical, or sentimental, or
impossible, there is about all that Mrs. Browning has written an
enduring charm of picturesqueness, of romance, and of a pure enthu-
siasm for art. “Art for Art,” she cries,
She may
.
“And good for God, himself the essential Good !
We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail. »
This was her achievement - her hands did not fail!
Her husband's words will furnish, perhaps, the best conclusion to
this slight study:- “You are wrong,” he said, “quite wrong — she
has genius; I am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine a
clever sort of angel who plots and plans, and tries to build up
something,— he wants to make you see it as he sees it, shows you
one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your
head the thing he wants you to understand; and whilst this bother
is going on, God Almighty turns you off a little star - that's the dif-
ference between us. The true creative power is hers, not mine. ”
## p. 2528 (#86) ############################################
2528
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
W**
HAT was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep, cool bed of the river.
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river ! )
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor, dry, empty thing
In holes as he sat by the river.
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)
“The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed. ”
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan,
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, ( great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
## p. 2529 (#87) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2529
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
MY HEART AND I
E
NOUGH! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I.
You see we're tired, my heart and I.
We dealt with books, we trusted men,
And in our own blood drenched the pen,
As if such colors could not fly.
We walked too straight for fortune's end,
We loved too true to keep a friend:
At last we're tired, my heart and I.
How tired we feel, my heart and I!
We seem of no use in the world;
Our fancies hang gray and uncurled
About men's eyes indifferently;
Our voice, which thrilled you so, will let
You sleep; our tears are only wet:
What do we here, my heart and I?
So tired, so tired, my heart and I!
It was not thus in that old time
When Ralph sat with me 'neath the lime
To watch the sunset from the sky.
“Dear love, you're looking tired,” he said;
I, smiling at him, shook my head:
'Tis now we're tired, my heart and I.
So tired, so tired, my heart and I!
Though now none takes me on his arm
To fold me close and kiss me warm
Till each quick breath end in a sigh
Of happy languor. Now, alone,
We lean upon this graveyard stone,
Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I.
V-159
## p. 2530 (#88) ############################################
2530
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Tired out we are, my heart and I.
Suppose the world brought diadems
To tempt us, crusted with loose gems
Of powers and pleasures? Let it try.
We scarcely care to look at even
A pretty child, or God's blue heaven,
We feel so tired, my heart and I.
Yet who complains ? My heart and I ?
In this abundant earth, no doubt,
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by!
And if, before the days grew rough,
We once were loved, used, — well enough
I think we've fared, my heart and I.
FROM (CATARINA TO CAMOENS)
ON
[Dying in his absence abroad, and referring to the poem in which he
recorded the sweetness of her eyes. ]
N THE door you will not enter
I have gazed too long: adieu!
Hope withdraws her peradventure );
Death is near me,- and not you !
Come, O lover,
Close and cover
These poor eyes you called, I ween,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! »
When I heard you sing that burden
In my vernal days and bowers,
Other praises disregarding,
I but hearkened that of yours,
Only saying
In heart-playing,
“Blessèd eyes mine eyes have been,
If the sweetest his have seen ! »
But all changes. At this vesper
Cold the sun shines down the door.
If you stood there, would you whisper,
“Love, I love you,” as before,-
Death pervading
Now and shading
Eyes you sang of, that yestreen,
As the sweetest ever seen ?
1
## p. 2531 (#89) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2531
Yes, I think, were you beside them,
Near the bed I die upon,
Though their beauty you denied them,
As you stood there looking down,
You would truly
Call them duly,
For the love's sake found therein,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
And if you looked down upon them,
And if they looked up to you,
All the light which has foregone them
Would be gathered back anew;
They would truly
Be as duly
Love-transformed to beauty's sheen,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
But, ah me! you only see me,
In your thoughts of loving man,
Smiling soft, perhaps, and dreamy,
Through the wavings of my fan;
And unweeting
Go repeating
In your revery serene,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
O my poet, O my prophet!
When you praised their sweetness so,
Did you think, in singing of it,
That it might be near to go?
Had you fancies
From their glances,
That the grave would quickly screen
«Sweetest eyes were ever seen”?
No reply. The fountain's warble
In the courtyard sounds alone.
As the water to the marble
So my heart falls with a moan
From love-sighing
To this dying.
Death forerunneth Love to win
« Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
Will you come? When I'm departed
Where all sweetnesses are hid,
## p. 2532 (#90) ############################################
2532
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Where thy voice, my tender-hearted,
Will not lift up either lid,
Cry, O lover,
Love is over!
Cry, beneath the cypress green,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
When the Angelus is ringing,
Near the convent will you walk,
And recall the choral singing
Which brought angels down our talk ?
Spirit-shriven
I viewed heaven,
Till you smiled — "Is earth unclean,
Sweetest eyes were ever seen ?
When beneath the palace-lattice
You ride slow as you have done,
And you see a face there that is
Not the old familiar one,
Will you oftly
Murmur softly,
“Here ye watched me morn and e'en,
Sweetest eyes were ever seen”?
When the palace-ladies, sitting
Round your gittern, shall have said,
Poets, sing those verses written
For the lady who is dead,”
Will you tremble,
Yet dissemble,
Or sing hoarse, with tears between,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen ” ?
“Sweetest eyes! ) How sweet in flowings
The repeated cadence is!
Though you sang a hundred poems,
Still the best one would be this.
I can hear it
"Twixt my spirit
And the earth-noise intervene,-
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
But — but now — yet unremoved
Up to heaven they glisten fast;
You may cast away, beloved,
In your future all my past:
## p. 2533 (#91) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2533
Such old phrases
May be praises
For some fairer bosom-queen-
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
Eyes of mine, what are ye doing ?
Faithless, faithless, praised amiss
If a tear be, on your showing,
Dropped for any hope of his!
Death has boldness
Besides coldness,
If unworthy tears demean
« Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
I will look out to his future;
I will bless it till it shine.
Should he ever be a suitor
Unto sweeter eyes than mine,
Sunshine gild them,
Angels shield them,
Whatsoever eyes terrene
Be the sweetest his have seen.
THE SLEEP
«He giveth his beloved sleep. ) — Ps. cxxvii. 2
O"
F ALL the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward into souls afar
Along the Psalmist's music deep,
Now tell me if that any is,
For gift or grace, surpassing this —
“He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
What would we give to our beloved ?
The hero's heart to be unmoved,
The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,
The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
The monarch's crown to light the brows? -
He giveth his beloved sleep.
What do we give to our beloved ?
A little faith all undisproved,
A little dust to overweep,
And bitter memories to make
The whole earth blasted for our sake.
He giveth his beloved sleep.
## p. 2534 (#92) ############################################
2534
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(c
Sleep soft, beloved! ” we sometimes say,
Who have no tune to charm away
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep;
But never doleful dream again
Shall break the happy slumber when
He giveth his beloved sleep.
O earth, so full of dreary noises !
O men with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And giveth his beloved sleep.
His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still,
Though on its slope men sow and reap;
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He giveth his beloved sleep.
Ay, men may wonder while they scan
A living, thinking, feeling man
Confirmed in such a rest to keep;
But angels say,- and through the word
I think their happy smile is heard, -
“He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
For me, my heart that erst did go
Most like a tired child at a show,
That sees through tears the mummers leap,
Would now its wearied vision close,
Would childlike on His love repose
Who giveth his beloved sleep.
And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let one most loving of you all
Say, “Not a tear must o'er her fall!
He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
## p. 2535 (#93) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2535
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN
I
Dº
O ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years ?
They are leaning their young heads against their
mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west:
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
They are weeping bitterly.
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
II
Do you question the young children in their sorrow,
Why their tears are falling so ?
The old man may weep for his To-morrow
Which is lost in Long-Ago;
The old tree is leafless in the forest;
The old year is ending in the frost;
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest;
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland ?
III
They look up with their pale and sunken faces;
And their looks are sad to see,
For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy.
«Your old earth,” they say, is very dreary;
Our young feet,” they say, are very weak;
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary;
Our grave-rest is very far to seek.
Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children,
For the outside earth is cold,
## p. 2536 (#94) ############################################
2536
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
And we young ones stand without in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old. ”
IV
« True,” say the children, it may happen
That we die before our time:
Little Alice died last year; her grave is shapen
Like a snowball in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her:
Was no room for any work in the close clay,
From the sleep wherein lieth none will wake her,
Crying, “Get up, little Alice! it is day. '
If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,
With your ear down, little Alice never cries.
Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,
For the smile has time for growing in her eyes;
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in
The shroud by the kirk-chime.
It is good when it happens,” say the children,
« That we die before our time. ”
Alas, alas, the children! They are seeking
Death in life, as best to have.
They are binding up their hearts away from breaking
With a cerement from the grave.
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city;
Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;
Pluck your handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty;
Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through.
But they answer, «Are your cowslips of the meadows
Like our weeds anear the mine?
Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,
From your pleasures fair and fine.
VI
“For oh! ” say the children, we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them, and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping;
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
## p. 2537 (#95) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2537
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
For all day we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground;
Or all day we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
VII
« For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn, our heads with puises burning,
And the walls turn in their places.
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, –
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And all day the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
O ye wheels) (breaking out in a mad moaning),
'Stop! be silent for to-day! ) »
VIII
Ay, be silent! 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!
'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never
rise a Pancirollus, nor remain any register but that of hell
never
1
1
1
## p. 2511 (#71) ############################################
2511
WILLIAM BROWNE
(1591-1643)
MONG the English poets famous for their imaginative interpre-
tation of nature, high rank must be given to William
Browne, who belongs in the list headed by Spenser, and
including Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton, George
Wither, and Phineas Fletcher. Although he shows skill and charm
of style in various kinds of verse, his name rests chiefly upon his
largest work, Britannia's Pastorals. This is much wider in
scope
than the title suggests, if one follows the definition given by Pope in
his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. ' He says:— “A Pastoral is an
imitation of the action of a shepherd or one considered under that
character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or , narrated, or
mixed of both; the fable simple, the manners not too polite nor too
rustic; the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and pas-
sion.
If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this
Idea along with us: that Pastoral is an image of what they call the
Golden Age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shep-
herds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to
have been when the best of men followed the employment.
We must therefore use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful,
and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life,
and in concealing its miseries. ”
In his (Shepherd's Pipe, a series of Eclogues,' Browne follows
this plan; but Britannia's Pastorals) contains rambling stories of
Hamadryads and Oreads; figures which are too shadowy to seem
real, yet stand in exquisite woodland landscapes. When the story
passes to the yellow sands and «froth-girt rocks,” washed by the
crisped and curling waves from Neptune's silver, ever-shaking
breast, or when it touches the mysteries of the ocean world, over
which «Thetis drives her silver throne,” the poet's fancy is as deli-
cate as when he revels in the earthy smell of the woods, where the
leaves, golden and green, hide from sight the feathered choir; where
glow the hips of scarlet berries; where is heard the dropping of
nuts; and where the active bright-eyed squirrels leap from tree to
tree.
The loves, hardships, and adventures of Marina, Celadyne, Red-
mond, Fida, Philocel, Aletheia, Metanoia, and Amintas do not hold
the reader from delight in descriptions of the blackbird and dove
## p. 2512 (#72) ############################################
2512
WILLIAM BROWNE
calling from the dewy branches; crystal streams lisping through
banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild
thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks on which
the elms and alders throw long shadows; circles of green grass
made by dancing elves; rounded hills shut in by oaks, pines, birches,
and laurel, where shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired
satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and
mint are freshened daily by nymphs pouring out gentle streams
from crystal urns. Every now and then, huntsmen in green dash
through his sombre woods with their hounds in full cry; anglers are
seated by still pools, shepherds dance around the May-pole, and
shepherdesses gather flowers for garlands. Gloomy caves appear,
surrounded by hawthorn and holly that "outdares cold winter's ire,”
and sheltering old hermits, skilled in simples and the secret power
of herbs. Sometimes the poet describes a choir where the tiny wren
sings the treble, Robin Redbreast the mean, the thrush the tenor,
and the nightingale the counter-tenor, while droning bees fill in the
bass; and shows us fairy haunts and customs with a delicacy only
equaled by Drayton and Herrick.
Several lyric songs of high order are scattered through the Pas-
torals, and the famous Palinode on Man' is imbedded in the Third
Book as follows:
1
1
“I truly know
How men are born and whither they shall go;
I know that like to silkworms of one year,
Or like a kind and wrongèd lover's tear,
Or on the pathless waves a rudder's dint,
Or like the little sparkles of a flint,
Or like to thin round cakes with cost perfum'd,
Or fireworks only made to be consum'd:
I know that such is man, and all that trust
In that weak piece of animated dust.
The silkworm droops, the lover's tears soon shed,
The ship's way quickly lost, the sparkle dead;
The cake burns out in haste, the firework's done,
And man as soon as these as quickly gone. "
5
Little is known of Browne's life. He was a native of Tavistock,
Devonshire; born, it is thought, in 1591, the son of Thomas Browne,
who is supposed by Prince in his 'Worthies of Devon' to have be-
longed to a knightly family. According to Wood, who says he had
a great mind in a little body,” he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford,
«about the beginning of the reign of James I. Leaving Oxford
without a degree, he was admitted in 1612 to the Inner Temple,
London, and a little later he is discovered at Oxford, engaged as
## p. 2513 (#73) ############################################
WILLIAM BROWNE
2513
He ap-
private tutor to Robert Dormer, afterward Earl of Carnarvon. In
1624 he received his degree of Master of Arts from Oxford.
pears to have settled in Dorking, and after 1640 nothing more is
heard of him. Wood thinks he died in 1645, but there is an entry in
the Tavistock register, dated March 27th, 1643, and reading “William
Browne was buried” on that day. That he was devoted to the
streams, dales, and downs of his native Devonshire is shown in the
Pastorals, where he sings:
“Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Show me who can, so many crystal rills,
Such sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills;
Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines;
Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines. ”
And in another place he says:-
«And Tavy in my rhymes
Challenge a due; let it thy glory be
That famous Drake and I were born by thee. ”
The First Book of Britannia's Pastorals) was written before its
author was twenty, and was published in 1631. The Second Book
appeared in 1616, and both were reprinted in 1625. The Third Book
was not published during Browne's life. The (Shepherd's Pipe was
published in 1614, and The Inner Temple Masque,' written on the
story of Ulysses and Circe, for representation in 1614, was first pub-
lished in Thomas Davies's edition of Browne's works (3 vols. , 1772).
Two critical editions of value have been brought out in recent years:
one by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1868-69); and the other by Gordon
Goodwin and A. H. Bullen (1894).
"In the third song of the Second Book,” says Mr. Bullen in his
preface, -
« There is a description of a delightful grove, perfumed with Codoriferous
buds and herbs of price,' where fruits hang in gallant clusters from the trees,
and birds tune their notes to the music of running water; so fair a pleas-
aunce
(that you are fain
Where you last walked to turn and walk again. ”
A generous reader might apply that description to Browne's poetry; he might
urge that the breezes which blew down these leafy alleys and over those trim
parterres were not more grateful than the fragrance exhaled from the Pas-
torals) ; that the brooks and birds babble and twitter in the printed page
not less blithely than in that western Paradise. What so pleasant as to read
of May-games, true-love knots, and shepherds piping in the shade ? of pixies
and fairy-circles ? of rustic bridals and junketings? of angling, hunting the
V-158
## p. 2514 (#74) ############################################
2514
WILLIAM BROWNE
squirrel, nut-gathering? Of such subjects William Browne treats, singing
like the shepherd in the Arcadia,' as though he would never grow old. He
was a happy poet. It was his good fortune to grow up among wholesome
surroundings whose gracious influences sank into his spirit. He loved the
hills and dales round Tavistock, and lovingly described them in his verse.
Frequently he indulges in descriptions of sunrise and sunset; they leave no
vivid impression, but charm the reader by their quiet beauty. It cannot be
denied that his fondness for simple, homely images sometimes led him into
sheer fatuity; and candid admirers must also admit that, despite his study
of simplicity, he could not refrain from hunting (as the manner was) after
far-fetched outrageous conceits. ”
1
Browne is a poet's poet. Drayton, Wither, Herbert, and John
Davies of Hereford, wrote his praises. Mrs. Browning includes him
in her "Vision of Poets,' where she says:-
1
«Drayton and Browne,— with smiles they drew
From outward Nature, still kept new
From their own inward nature true. ”
$
Milton studied him carefully, and just as his influence is per-
ceived in the work of Keats, so is it found in Comus' and in
Lycidas. Browne acknowledges Spenser and Sidney as his masters,
and his work shows that he loved Chaucer and Shakespeare.
CIRCE'S CHARM
Song from the Inner Temple Masque)
SM
On of Erebus and night,
Hie away; and aim thy flight
Where consort none other fowl
Than the bat and sullen owl;
Where upon thy limber grass,
Poppy and mandragoras,
With like simples not a few,
Hang forever drops of dew;
Where flows Lethe without coil
Softly like a stream of oil.
Hie thee hither, gentle sleep:
With this Greek no longer keep.
Thrice I charge thee by my wand,
Thrice with moly froin my hand
Do I touch Ulysses's eyes,
And with the jaspis: then arise,
Sagest Greek!
1
## p. 2515 (#75) ############################################
WILLIAM BROWNE
2515
THE HUNTED SQUIRREL
From Britannia's Pastorals)
WHEN as a nimble squirrel from the wood
T Ranging the hedges for this fiber food
Sits pertly on a bough. his brown nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking;
Till with their crooks and bags a sort of boys
To share with him come with so great a noise
That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke,
And for his life leap to a neighbor oak,
Thence to a beach, thence to a row of ashes;
Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes
The boys run dabbling through thick and thin;
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin;
This, torn and tattered, hath with much ado
Got by the briars; and that hath lost his shoe;
This drops his band; that headlong falls for haste;
Another cries behind for being last:
With sticks and stones and many a sounding holloa
The little fool with no small sport they follow,
Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray
Gets to the woods and hides him in his dray.
AS CAREFUL MERCHANTS DO EXPECTING STAND
From Britannia's Pastorals)
A
S CAREFUL merchants do expecting stand,
After long time and merry gales of wind,
Upon the place where their brave ships must land,
So wait I for the vessel of my mind.
Upon a great adventure is it bound,
Whose safe return will valued be at more
Than all the wealthy prizes which have crowned
The golden wishes of an age before.
Out of the East jewels of worth she brings;
The unvalued diamond of her sparkling eye
Wants in the treasures of all Europe's kings;
And were it mine, they nor their crowns should buy.
The sapphires ringed on her panting breast
Run as rich veins of ore about the mold,
## p. 2516 (#76) ############################################
2516
WILLIAM BROWNE
And are in sickness with a pale possessed;
So true for them I should disvalue gold.
The melting rubies on her cherry lip
Are of such power to hold, that as one day
Cupid flew thirsty by, he stooped to sip:
And, fastened there, could never get away.
The sweets of Candy are no sweets to me
Where hers I taste: nor the perfumes of price,
Robbed from the happy shrubs of Araby,
As her sweet breath so powerful to entice.
O hasten then! and if thou be not gone
Unto that wicked traffic through the main,
My powerful sigh shall quickly drive thee on,
And then begin to draw thee back again.
If, in the mean, rude waves have it opprest,
It shall suffice, I ventured at the best.
SONG OF THE SIRENS
From "The Inner Temple Masque)
STEF
TEER hither, steer your winged pines,
All beaten mariners!
Here lie love's undiscovered mines,
A prey to passengers:
Perfumes far sweeter than the best
Which make the Phoenix's urn and nest.
Fear not your ships,
Nor any to oppose you save our lips,
But come on shore,
Where no joy dies till love hath gotten more.
For swelling waves our panting breasts,
Where never storms arise,
Exchange, and be awhile our guests:
For stars, gaze on our eyes.
The compass love shall hourly sing,
And as he goes about the ring,
We will not miss
To tell each point he nameth with a kiss.
Then come on shore,
Where no joy dies till love hath gotten more.
1
## p. 2517 (#77) ############################################
WILLIAM BROWNE
2517
AN EPISTLE ON PARTING
From Epistles!
D“
EAR soul, the time is come, and we must part;
Yet, ere I go, in these lines read my heart:
A heart so just, so loving, and so true,
So full of sorrow and so full of you,
That all I speak or write or pray or mean, —
And, which is all I can, all that I dream,-
Is not without a sigh, a thought of you,
And as your beauties are, so are they true.
Seven summers now are fully spent and gone,
Since first I loved, loved you, and you alone;
And should mine eyes as many hundreds see,
Yet none but you should claim a right in me;
A right so placed that time shall never hear
Of one so vowed, or any loved so dear.
When I am gone, if ever prayers moved you,
Relate to none that I so well have loved you:
For all that know your beauty and desert,
Would swear he never loved that knew to part.
Why part we then ? That spring, which but this day
Met some sweet river, in his bed can play,
And with a dimpled cheek smile at their bliss,
Who never know what separation is.
The amorous vine with wanton interlaces
Clips still the rough elm in her kind embraces:
Doves with their doves sit billing in the groves,
And woo the lesser birds to sing their loves:
Whilst hapless we in griefful absence sit,
Yet dare not ask a hand to lessen it.
SONNETS TO CÆLIA
F
AIREST, when by the rules of palmistry,
You took my hand to try if you could guess,
By lines therein, if any wight there be
Ordained to make me know some happiness:
I wished that those characters could explain,
Whom I will never wrong with hope to win;
Or that by them a copy might be ta'en,
By you alone what thoughts I have within.
## p. 2518 (#78) ############################################
2518
WILLIAM BROWNE
Put since the hand of nature did not set
(As providently loath to have it known)
The means to find that hidden alphabet,
Mine eyes shall be the interpreters alone:
By them conceive my thoughts, and tell me, fair,
If now you see her that doth love me, there.
.
WERE 't not for you, here should my pen have rest,
And take a long leave of sweet poesy;
Britannia's swains, and rivers far by west,
Should hear no more my oaten melody.
Yet shall the song I sung of them awhile
L'nperfect lie, and make no further known
The happy loves of this our pleasant Isle,
Till I have left some record of mine own.
You are the subject now, and, writing you,
I well may versify, not poetize:
Here needs no fiction; for the graces true
And virtues clip not with base flatteries.
Here should I write what you deserve of praise;
Others might wear, but I should win, the bays.
1
FAIREST, when I am gone, as now the glass
Of Time is marked how long I have to stay,
Let me entreat you, ere from hence I pass,
Perhaps from you for ever more away,-
Think that no common love hath fired my breast,
No base desire, but virtue truly known,
Which I may love, and wish to have possessed,
Were you the highest as fairest of any one.
'Tis not your lovely eye enforcing flames,
Nor beauteous red beneath a snowy skin,
That so much binds me yours, or makes your fame's,
As the pure light and beauty shrined within:
Yet outward parts I must affect of duty,
As for the smell we like the rose's beauty.
## p. 2519 (#79) ############################################
2519
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
(1820-1872)
His poet,
prominent among those who gained their chief
inspiration from the stirring events of the Civil War, was
born in Providence, Rhode Island, February 6th, 1820, and
died in East Hartford, Connecticut, October 31st, 1872.
He was
graduated at Trinity College, Hartford, studied law, and was admitted
to the bar; but instead of the legal profession adopted that of a
teacher, and made his home in Hartford, which was the residence of
his uncle, the Bishop of Connecticut. Although Mr. Brownell soon
became known as a writer of verse, both grave and humorous, it
was not till the coming on of the Civil War that his muse found
truest and noblest expression. With a poet's sensitiveness he fore-
saw the coming storm, and predicted it in verse that has the ring of
an ancient prophet; and when the crash came he sang of the great
deeds of warriors in the old heroic strain. Many of these poems,
like (Annus Memorabilis) and (Coming,' were born of the great pas-
sion of patriotism which took possession of him, and were regarded
only as the visions of a heated imagination. But when the storm
burst it was seen that he had the true vision. As the dreadful
drama unrolled, Brownell rose to greater issues, and became the war-
poet par excellence, the vigorous chronicler of great actions.
He was fond of the sea, and ardently longed for the opportunity
to witness, if not to participate in, a sea-fight. His desire was
gratified in a singular way. He had printed in a Hartford paper a
very felicitous versification of Farragut's General Orders in the
fight at the mouth of the Mississippi. This attracted Farragut's
attention, and he took steps to learn the name of the author. When
it was given, Commodore Farragut (he was not then Admiral) offered
Mr. Brownell the position of master's-mate on board the Hartford,
and attached the poet to him in the character of a private secretary.
Thus he was present at the fight of Mobile Bay. After the war he
accompanied the Admiral in his cruise in European waters.
Although Brownell was best known to the country by his descript-
ive poems, The River Fight) and (The Bay Fight, which appear
in his volume of collected works, War Lyrics,' his title to be consid-
ered a true poet does not rest upon these only. He was unequal in
his performance and occasionally was betrayed by a grotesque humor
into disregard of dignity and finish; but he had both the vision and
the lyric grace of the builder of lasting verse.
## p. 2520 (#80) ############################################
2520
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
ANNUS MEMORABILIS
STA
(CONGRESS, 1860-61)
TAND strong and calm as Fate! not a breath of scorn or hate —
Of taunt for the base, or of menace for the strong –
Since our fortunes must be sealed on that old and famous Field
Where the Right is set in battle with the Wrong.
'Tis coming, with the loom of Khamsin or Simoom,
The tempest that shall try if we are of God or no
Its roar is in the sky, — and they there be which cry,
“Let us cower, and the storm may over-blow. ”
Now, nay! stand firm and fast! (that was a spiteful blast! )
This is not a war of men, but of Angels Good and I11 –
'Tis hell that storms at heaven -- 'tis the black and deadly Seven,
Sworn 'gainst the Shining Ones to work their damned will!
How the Ether glooms and burns, as the tide of combat turns,
And the smoke and dust above it whirl and float!
It eddies and it streams — and, certes, oft it seems
As the Sins had the Seraphs fairly by the throat.
But we all have read in that Legend grand and dread),
How Michael and his host met the Serpent and his crew
Naught has reached us of the Fight -- but if I have dreamed aright,
'Twas a loud one and a long, as ever thundered through!
Right stiffly, past a doubt, the Dragon fought it out,
And his Angels, each and all, did for Tophet their devoir —
There was creak of iron wings, and whirl of scorpion stings,
Hiss of bifid tongues, and the Pit in full uproar!
But, naught thereof enscrolled, in one brief line 'tis told
(Calm as dew the Apocalyptic Pen),
That on the Infinite Shore their place was found no more.
God send the like on this our earth! Amen.
Copyrighted by Houghton, Miffin and Company, Boston.
1
1
WORDS FOR THE (HALLELUJAH CHORUS)
O"
LD John Brown lies a-moldering in the grave,
Old John Brown lies slumbering in his grave
But John Brown's soul is marching with the brave,
His soul is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on.
1
## p. 2521 (#81) ############################################
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
2521
He has gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord;
He is sworn as a private in the ranks of the Lord, –
He shall stand at Armageddon with his brave old sword,
When Heaven is marching on.
He shall file in front where the lines of battle form,
He shall face to front when the squares of battle form -
Time with the column, and charge in the storm,
Where men are marching on.
Ah, foul Tyrants! do ye hear him where he comes ?
Ah, black traitors! do ye know him as he comes,
In thunder of the cannon and roll of the drums,
As we go marching on?
Men may die, and molder in the dust
Men may die, and arise again from dust,
Shoulder to shoulder, in the ranks of the Just,
When Heaven is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on.
COMING
(APRIL, 1861)
WOR
ORLD, are thou 'ware a storm ?
Hark to the ominous sound;
How the far-off gales their battle form,
And the great sea-swells feel ground!
It comes, the Typhoon of Death --
Nearer and nearer it comes!
The horizon thunder of cannon-breath
And the roar of angry drums!
Hurtle, Terror sublime !
Swoop o'er the Land to-day —
So the mist of wrong and crime,
The breath of our Evil Time
Be swept, as by fire, away!
## p. 2522 (#82) ############################################
2522
HENRY HOWARD BROWNELL
PSYCHAURA
THE
He wind of an autumn midnight
Is moaning around my door -
The curtains wave at the window,
The carpet lifts on the floor.
There are sounds like startled footfalls
In the distant chambers now,
And the touching of airy fingers
Is busy on hand and brow.
'Tis thus, in the Soul's dark dwelling –
By the moody host unsought-
Through the chambers of memory wander
The invisible airs of thought.
For it bloweth where it listeth,
With a murmur loud or low;
Whence it cometh - whither it goeth -
None tell us, and none may know.
Now wearying round the portals
Of the vacant, desolate mind —
As the doors of a ruined mansion,
That creak in the cold night wind.
And anon an awful memory
Sweeps over it fierce and high-
Like the roar of a mountain forest
When the midnight gale goes by.
Then its voice subsides in wailing,
And, ere the dawning of day,
Murmuring fainter and fainter,
In the distance dies away.
SUSPIRIA NOCTIS
EADING, and reading -- little is the gain
R. Long dwelling with the minds of dead men leaves.
List rather to the melancholy rain,
Drop-dropping from the eaves.
Still the old tale - how hardly worth the telling!
Hark to the wind ! - again that mournful sound,
That all night long, around this lonely dwelling,
Moans like a dying hound.
## p. 2523 (#83) ############################################
2523
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(1809-1861)
is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of
Miss Mitford and her “dear young friend Miss Barrett,
when the -esses of "authoresses” and “poetesses” and “edi-
tresses” and “hermitesses” make the pages sibilant; when Books of
Beauty,' and Keepsakes, and the extraordinary methods of “Fin-
den's Tableaux” make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr.
Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford “to the giraffes and the Diorama,”
called for “Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who reads
Greek as I do French, who has published
some translations from Æschylus, and some
most striking poems,” « Our sweet Miss
Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is
to think of her. » Of her own life Mrs.
Browning writes:-“As to stories, my story
amounts to the knife-grinder's, with noth-
ing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a
cage would have as good a story; most of
my events and nearly all my intense pleas-
ure have passed in my thoughts. ”
She was born at Burn Hall, Durham,
on March 6th, 1809, and passed a happy MRS. BROWNING
childhood and youth in her father's coun-
try house at Hope End, Herefordshire. She was remarkably pre-
cocious, reading Homer in the original at eight years of age. She
said that in those days “the Greeks were her demigods. She
dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her black pony. ” I
wrote verses very early, at eight years old and earlier. But what
is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained
with me. ” At seventeen years of age she published the “Essay on
Mind,' and translated the Prometheus) of Æschylus.
later the family removed to London, and here Elizabeth, on account
of her continued delicate health, was kept in her room for months
at a time. The shock following on the death of her brother, who
was drowned before her eyes in Torquay, whither she had gone for
rest, completely shattered her physically. Now her life of seclusion in
her London home began. For years she lay upon a couch in a large,
comfortably darkened room, seeing only the immediate members
Some years
## p. 2524 (#84) ############################################
2524
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
of her family and a few privileged friends, and spending her days
in writing and study, “reading,” Miss Mitford says, “almost every
book worth reading in almost every language. ” Here Robert Brown-
ing met her. They were married in 1846, against the will of her
father. Going abroad immediately, they finally settled in Florence
at the Casa Guidi, made famous by her poem bearing the same
name. Their home became the centre of attraction to visitors in
Florence, and many of the finest minds in the literary and artistic
world were among their friends. Hawthorne, who visited them,
describes Mrs. Browning as "a pale, small person, scarcely embodied
at all, at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender
fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity
of voice. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her
cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another
figure in the world, and her black ringlets cluster down in her neck
and make her face look whiter. ” She died in Florence on the 30th
of June, 1861, and the citizens of Florence placed a tablet to her
memory on the walls of Casa Guidi.
The life and personality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seem to
explain her poetry. It is a life “without a catastrophe,” except per-
haps to her devoted father. And it is to this father's devotion that
some of Mrs. Browning's poetical sins are due; for by him she was
so pampered and shielded from every outside touch, that all the
woes common to humanity grew for her into awful tragedies. Her
life was abnormal and unreal,- an unreality that passed more or less
into everything she did. Indeed, her resuscitation after meeting
Robert Browning would mount into a miracle, unless it were real-
ized that nothing in her former life had been quite as wofuļ as it
seemed. That Mrs. Browning was "a woman of real genius,” even
Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter Sav-
age Landor said, “With the exception of Burns, he (Shelley) and
Keats were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other
poet since Milton. I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing comes next. ” This is very high praise from very high authority,
but none too high for Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true
lyric ring, that spontaneity of thought and expression which comes
when the singer forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful
under the stress of the moment's inspiration. All of Mrs. Browning's
work is buoyed up by her luxurious and overflowing imagination.
With all its imperfections of technique, its lapses of taste and faults
of expression, it always remains poetry, throbbing with passion and
emotion and rich in color and sound. She wrote because she must.
Her own assertions notwithstanding, one cannot think of Mrs. Brown-
ing as sitting down in cold blood to compose a poem according to
## p. 2527 (#85) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2527
Tennyson's own. ” The fine thought and haunting beauty of A
Musical Instrument,' with its matchless climax, need not be dwelt on.
During her fifteen years' residence in Florence she threw herself
with great enthusiasm into Italian affairs, and wrote some political
poems of varying merit, whose interest necessarily faded away when
the occasion passed. But among those poems inspired by the strug-
gle for freedom, Casa Guidi Windows' comes close to the Sonnets
from the Portuguese' and Aurora Leigh,' and holds an enduring
place for its high poetry, its musical, sonorous verse, and the sus-
tained intellectual vigor of composition. Her volume of Last
Poems' contains, among much inferior matter, some of her finest
and most touching work, as (A Musical Instrument,' The Forced
Recruit,' and Mother and Poet. Peter Bayne says of her in his
"Great English women':- In melodiousness and splendor of poetic
gift Mrs. Browning stands
first among women.
not have the knowledge of life, the insight into character, the com-
prehensiveness of some, but we must all agree that a poet's far
more essential qualities are hers: usefulness, fervor, a noble aspira-
tion, and above all a tender, far-reaching nature, loving and beloved,
and touching the hearts of her readers with some virtue from its
depths. She seemed even in her life something of a spirit; and her
view of life's sorrow and shame, of its hearty and eternal hope, is
something like that which one might imagine a spirit's to be. ”
Whether political, or sociological, or mystical, or sentimental, or
impossible, there is about all that Mrs. Browning has written an
enduring charm of picturesqueness, of romance, and of a pure enthu-
siasm for art. “Art for Art,” she cries,
She may
.
“And good for God, himself the essential Good !
We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail. »
This was her achievement - her hands did not fail!
Her husband's words will furnish, perhaps, the best conclusion to
this slight study:- “You are wrong,” he said, “quite wrong — she
has genius; I am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine a
clever sort of angel who plots and plans, and tries to build up
something,— he wants to make you see it as he sees it, shows you
one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your
head the thing he wants you to understand; and whilst this bother
is going on, God Almighty turns you off a little star - that's the dif-
ference between us. The true creative power is hers, not mine. ”
## p. 2528 (#86) ############################################
2528
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
W**
HAT was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep, cool bed of the river.
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river ! )
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor, dry, empty thing
In holes as he sat by the river.
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)
“The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed. ”
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan,
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, ( great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
## p. 2529 (#87) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2529
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
MY HEART AND I
E
NOUGH! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I.
You see we're tired, my heart and I.
We dealt with books, we trusted men,
And in our own blood drenched the pen,
As if such colors could not fly.
We walked too straight for fortune's end,
We loved too true to keep a friend:
At last we're tired, my heart and I.
How tired we feel, my heart and I!
We seem of no use in the world;
Our fancies hang gray and uncurled
About men's eyes indifferently;
Our voice, which thrilled you so, will let
You sleep; our tears are only wet:
What do we here, my heart and I?
So tired, so tired, my heart and I!
It was not thus in that old time
When Ralph sat with me 'neath the lime
To watch the sunset from the sky.
“Dear love, you're looking tired,” he said;
I, smiling at him, shook my head:
'Tis now we're tired, my heart and I.
So tired, so tired, my heart and I!
Though now none takes me on his arm
To fold me close and kiss me warm
Till each quick breath end in a sigh
Of happy languor. Now, alone,
We lean upon this graveyard stone,
Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I.
V-159
## p. 2530 (#88) ############################################
2530
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Tired out we are, my heart and I.
Suppose the world brought diadems
To tempt us, crusted with loose gems
Of powers and pleasures? Let it try.
We scarcely care to look at even
A pretty child, or God's blue heaven,
We feel so tired, my heart and I.
Yet who complains ? My heart and I ?
In this abundant earth, no doubt,
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by!
And if, before the days grew rough,
We once were loved, used, — well enough
I think we've fared, my heart and I.
FROM (CATARINA TO CAMOENS)
ON
[Dying in his absence abroad, and referring to the poem in which he
recorded the sweetness of her eyes. ]
N THE door you will not enter
I have gazed too long: adieu!
Hope withdraws her peradventure );
Death is near me,- and not you !
Come, O lover,
Close and cover
These poor eyes you called, I ween,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! »
When I heard you sing that burden
In my vernal days and bowers,
Other praises disregarding,
I but hearkened that of yours,
Only saying
In heart-playing,
“Blessèd eyes mine eyes have been,
If the sweetest his have seen ! »
But all changes. At this vesper
Cold the sun shines down the door.
If you stood there, would you whisper,
“Love, I love you,” as before,-
Death pervading
Now and shading
Eyes you sang of, that yestreen,
As the sweetest ever seen ?
1
## p. 2531 (#89) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2531
Yes, I think, were you beside them,
Near the bed I die upon,
Though their beauty you denied them,
As you stood there looking down,
You would truly
Call them duly,
For the love's sake found therein,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
And if you looked down upon them,
And if they looked up to you,
All the light which has foregone them
Would be gathered back anew;
They would truly
Be as duly
Love-transformed to beauty's sheen,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
But, ah me! you only see me,
In your thoughts of loving man,
Smiling soft, perhaps, and dreamy,
Through the wavings of my fan;
And unweeting
Go repeating
In your revery serene,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
O my poet, O my prophet!
When you praised their sweetness so,
Did you think, in singing of it,
That it might be near to go?
Had you fancies
From their glances,
That the grave would quickly screen
«Sweetest eyes were ever seen”?
No reply. The fountain's warble
In the courtyard sounds alone.
As the water to the marble
So my heart falls with a moan
From love-sighing
To this dying.
Death forerunneth Love to win
« Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
Will you come? When I'm departed
Where all sweetnesses are hid,
## p. 2532 (#90) ############################################
2532
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Where thy voice, my tender-hearted,
Will not lift up either lid,
Cry, O lover,
Love is over!
Cry, beneath the cypress green,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
When the Angelus is ringing,
Near the convent will you walk,
And recall the choral singing
Which brought angels down our talk ?
Spirit-shriven
I viewed heaven,
Till you smiled — "Is earth unclean,
Sweetest eyes were ever seen ?
When beneath the palace-lattice
You ride slow as you have done,
And you see a face there that is
Not the old familiar one,
Will you oftly
Murmur softly,
“Here ye watched me morn and e'en,
Sweetest eyes were ever seen”?
When the palace-ladies, sitting
Round your gittern, shall have said,
Poets, sing those verses written
For the lady who is dead,”
Will you tremble,
Yet dissemble,
Or sing hoarse, with tears between,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen ” ?
“Sweetest eyes! ) How sweet in flowings
The repeated cadence is!
Though you sang a hundred poems,
Still the best one would be this.
I can hear it
"Twixt my spirit
And the earth-noise intervene,-
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
But — but now — yet unremoved
Up to heaven they glisten fast;
You may cast away, beloved,
In your future all my past:
## p. 2533 (#91) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2533
Such old phrases
May be praises
For some fairer bosom-queen-
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen! ”
Eyes of mine, what are ye doing ?
Faithless, faithless, praised amiss
If a tear be, on your showing,
Dropped for any hope of his!
Death has boldness
Besides coldness,
If unworthy tears demean
« Sweetest eyes were ever seen. ”
I will look out to his future;
I will bless it till it shine.
Should he ever be a suitor
Unto sweeter eyes than mine,
Sunshine gild them,
Angels shield them,
Whatsoever eyes terrene
Be the sweetest his have seen.
THE SLEEP
«He giveth his beloved sleep. ) — Ps. cxxvii. 2
O"
F ALL the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward into souls afar
Along the Psalmist's music deep,
Now tell me if that any is,
For gift or grace, surpassing this —
“He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
What would we give to our beloved ?
The hero's heart to be unmoved,
The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,
The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
The monarch's crown to light the brows? -
He giveth his beloved sleep.
What do we give to our beloved ?
A little faith all undisproved,
A little dust to overweep,
And bitter memories to make
The whole earth blasted for our sake.
He giveth his beloved sleep.
## p. 2534 (#92) ############################################
2534
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(c
Sleep soft, beloved! ” we sometimes say,
Who have no tune to charm away
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep;
But never doleful dream again
Shall break the happy slumber when
He giveth his beloved sleep.
O earth, so full of dreary noises !
O men with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And giveth his beloved sleep.
His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still,
Though on its slope men sow and reap;
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He giveth his beloved sleep.
Ay, men may wonder while they scan
A living, thinking, feeling man
Confirmed in such a rest to keep;
But angels say,- and through the word
I think their happy smile is heard, -
“He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
For me, my heart that erst did go
Most like a tired child at a show,
That sees through tears the mummers leap,
Would now its wearied vision close,
Would childlike on His love repose
Who giveth his beloved sleep.
And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let one most loving of you all
Say, “Not a tear must o'er her fall!
He giveth his beloved sleep. ”
## p. 2535 (#93) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2535
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN
I
Dº
O ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years ?
They are leaning their young heads against their
mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west:
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
They are weeping bitterly.
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
II
Do you question the young children in their sorrow,
Why their tears are falling so ?
The old man may weep for his To-morrow
Which is lost in Long-Ago;
The old tree is leafless in the forest;
The old year is ending in the frost;
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest;
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland ?
III
They look up with their pale and sunken faces;
And their looks are sad to see,
For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy.
«Your old earth,” they say, is very dreary;
Our young feet,” they say, are very weak;
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary;
Our grave-rest is very far to seek.
Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children,
For the outside earth is cold,
## p. 2536 (#94) ############################################
2536
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
And we young ones stand without in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old. ”
IV
« True,” say the children, it may happen
That we die before our time:
Little Alice died last year; her grave is shapen
Like a snowball in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her:
Was no room for any work in the close clay,
From the sleep wherein lieth none will wake her,
Crying, “Get up, little Alice! it is day. '
If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,
With your ear down, little Alice never cries.
Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,
For the smile has time for growing in her eyes;
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in
The shroud by the kirk-chime.
It is good when it happens,” say the children,
« That we die before our time. ”
Alas, alas, the children! They are seeking
Death in life, as best to have.
They are binding up their hearts away from breaking
With a cerement from the grave.
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city;
Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do;
Pluck your handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty;
Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through.
But they answer, «Are your cowslips of the meadows
Like our weeds anear the mine?
Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,
From your pleasures fair and fine.
VI
“For oh! ” say the children, we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them, and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping;
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
## p. 2537 (#95) ############################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2537
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow;
For all day we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground;
Or all day we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
VII
« For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn, our heads with puises burning,
And the walls turn in their places.
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, –
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And all day the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
O ye wheels) (breaking out in a mad moaning),
'Stop! be silent for to-day! ) »
VIII
Ay, be silent! 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) ############################################
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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!
