You don't understand
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak:
And that cartoon, the second from the door -
It is the thing, Love!
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak:
And that cartoon, the second from the door -
It is the thing, Love!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
2553 (#111) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
>
## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
8
freschi
ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two. At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
## p. 2560 (#120) ###########################################
2560
ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
## p. 2561 (#121) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr. Birrell (it is worth while to quote him again, as
one who has not merged the appreciator in the adulator) calls (The
Ring and the Book «a huge novel in 20,000 lines— told after the
method not of Scott, but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a
dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of
view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and description: you
are let off nothing. ” But he adds later :-“If you are prepared for
this, you will have your reward; for the style, though rugged and
involved, is throughout, with the exception of the speeches of coun-
sel, eloquent and at times superb: and as for the matter — if your
interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost professional; if
nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or suffered, or con-
ceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for you; if you are
fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection you will prize
(The Ring and the Book) as the surgeon prizes the last great con-
tribution to comparative anatomy or pathology. ”
This is the key of the matter: the reader who has learned,
through his greater work, to follow with interest the very analytic
exercises, and as it were tours de force of Browning's mind, will prize
(The Ring and the Book' and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'; even
he will prize but little the two Adventures of Balaustion,' (Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau,' “The Inn Album,' and one or two others of
the latest works in the same genre. But he can well do without
them, and still have the inexhaustible left.
V-161
## p. 2562 (#122) ###########################################
2562
ROBERT BROWNING
.
a
The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Brown-
ing's poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and
is not easy to comprehend even now for those who have the whole
body of his work before them. It is intelligible enough that the
“crude preliminary sketch” (Pauline) should have given only the
bare hint of a poet to the few dozen people who saw that it was out
of the common; that Paracelsus) should have carried the informa-
tion,- though then, beyond a doubt, to only a small circle; and
especially that (Sordello,' a clear call to few, should have
sounded to even an intelligent many like an exercise in intricacy,
and to the world at large like something to which it is useless to
listen. Or, to look at the other end of his career, it is not extraor-
dinary that the work of his last period — 'The Ring and the Book,'.
(Red Cotton Nightcap Country,'— those wonderful minute studies of
human motive, made with the highly specialized skill of the psy-
chical surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the read-
er's following power — should always remain more or less esoteric
literature. But when it is remembered that between these lie : the
most vivid and intensely dramatic series of short poems in English, --
those grouped in the unfortunately diverse editions of his works
under the rubrics Men and Women, Dramatic Lyrics,' Dramatic
Romances,' Dramatis Personæ,and the rest, as well as larger
masterpieces of the broad appeal of Pippa Passes,' (A Blot on the
'Scutcheon,' or 'In a Balcony,'— it is hard to understand, and will
be still harder fifty years hence, why Browning has not become the
familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly larger body of readers. Un-
doubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note
of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoy-
ment — not only his admiration – of Browning; a uspicion showing
not only the persistence of the Sordello-born tradition of obscurity,
but the harm worked by those commentators who approach him as a
problem. Not all commentators share this reproach; but as Browning
makes Bishop Blougram say: -
“Even your prime men who appraise their kind
Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self —
Confuse themselves - )
and beyond question such persons are largely responsible for the fact
that for some time to come, every one who speaks of Browning to a
general audience will feel that he has some cant to clear away. If
he can make them read this body of intensely human, essentially
simple and direct dramatic and lyrical work, he will help to bring
about the time when the once popular attitude will seem as unjusti-
fiable as to judge Goethe only by the second part of Faust. "
1
.
.
## p. 2563 (#123) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2563
The first great characteristic of Browning's poetry is undoubtedly
the essential, elemental quality of its humanity-a trait in which it
is surpassed by no other English poetry but that of Shakespeare. It
can be subtile_to a degree almost fantastic (as can Shakespeare's
to an extent that familiarity makes us forget); but this is in method.
The stuff of it - the texture of the fabric which the swift and intri-
cate shuttle is weaving — is always something in which the human
being is vitally, not merely æsthetically interested. It deals with no
shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a
part of vital problems -- a statement which may provoke the scoffer,
but will be found to be true.
A second characteristic, which, if not a necessary result of this
first, would at least be impossible without it, is the extent to which
Browning's poetry produces its effect by suggestion rather than by
elaboration; by stimulating thought, emotion, and the aesthetic sense,
instead of seeking to satisfy any one of these - especially instead of
contenting itself with only soothing the last. The comparison of
his poetry with — for instance — Tennyson's, in this respect, is instruct-
ive, if it is possibly unjust to both.
And a third trait in Browning — to make an end of a dangerously
categorical attempt to characterize him — follows logically from this
second; its extreme compactness and concentration. Browning some-
times dwells long even dallies -over an idea, as does Shakespeare;
turns it, shows its every facet; and even then it is noticeable, as
with the greater master, that every individual phrase with which he
does so is practically exhaustive of the suggestiveness of that partic-
ular aspect.
But commonly he crowds idea upon idea even in his
lyrics, and — strangely enough — without losing the lyric quality; each
thought pressed down to its very essence, and each with that ger-
minal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulat-
ing things to be had from literature. His figures especially are apt
and telling in the very minimum of words; they say it all, like the
unsurpassable Shakespearean example of “the dyer's hand”; and
the more you think of them, the more you see that not a word could
be added or taken away.
It may be said that this quality of compactness is common to all
genius, and of the very essence of all true poetry; but Browning
manifested it in a way of his own, such as to suggest that he
believed in the subordination of all other qualities to it; even of mel-
ody, for instance, as may be said by his critics and admitted in
many cases by even his strongest admirers. But all things are not
given to one, even among the giants; and Browning's force with its
measure of melody (which is often great) has its place among others'
melody with its measure of force. Open at random: here are two
## p. 2564 (#124) ###########################################
2564
ROBERT BROWNING
lines in A Toccata of Galuppi's,' not deficient in melody by any
means:
I
( Dear dead women - with such hair, too: what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? – I feel chilly and grown old. »
This is not Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies, nor even Tennyson's
Dream of Fair Women’; but a master can still say a good deal in
two lines.
What is called the “roughness” of Browning's verse is at all
events never the roughness that comes from mismanagement or dis-
regard of the form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and
quantity; and his subordination to the laws of his metre is extraor- /
dinary in its minuteness. Of ringing lines there are many; of
broadly sonorous or softly melodious ones but few; and especially (if
one chooses to go into details of technic) he seems curiously without
that use of the broad vowels which underlies the melody of so many
great passages of English poetry. Except in the one remarkable
instance of How we Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix,'
there is little onomatopeia, and almost no note of the flute; no
moan of doves in immemorial elins” or “lucent sirops tinct with
cinnamon. ” On the other hand, in his management of metres like
that of Love Among the Ruins,' for instance, he shows a different
side; the pure lyrics in Pippa Passes) and elsewhere sing them-
selves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more medi-
tative poems, like (By the Fireside. )
The vividness and vigor and truth of Browning's embodiments of
character come, it is needless to say, from the same power that has
ſ created all great dramatic work,— the capacity for incarnating not
a quality or an ideal, but the mixture and balance of qualities that
make up the real human being. There is not a walking phantom
among them, or a lay-figure to hang sentiment on. A writer in the
New Review said recently that of all the poets he remembered, only
Shakespeare and Browning never drew a prig. It is this complete
absence of the false note that gives to certain of Browning's poems
the finality which is felt in all consummate works of art, great and
small; the sense that they convey, if not the last word, at least the
last necessary word, on their subject. Andrea del Sarto ) is in its
way the whole problem of the artist-ideal, the weak will and the
inner failure, in all times and guises; and at the other end of the
gamut, nobody will ever need again to set forth Bishop Blougram's
attitude, or even that of Mr. Sludge the Medium. Of the informing,
almost exuberant vitality of all the lyric and dramatic poems, it is
needless to speak; that fairly leaps to meet the reader at every page
of them, and a quality of it is their essential optimism.
## p. 2565 (#125) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2565
-1
}
«What is he buzzing in my ears?
Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I! »
The world was never a vale of tears to Robert Browning, man or
poet; but a world of men and women, with plenty of red corpuscles
in their blood.
E. L. Aurlin
ANDREA DEL SARTO
CALLED “The FAULTLESS PAINTER »
B
Ut do not let us quarrel any more;
No, my Lucrezia! bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart ?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it ? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him, — but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think, -
This evening more than usual: and it seems
As if— forgive now - should you let me sit
Here by the window, with your hand in mine,
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through,
I might get up to-morrow to my work
Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.
To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!
Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
And mine, the man's bared breast she curls inside.
Don't count the time lost, neither: you must serve
For each of the five pictures we require;
It saves a model. So! keep looking so
My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!
How could you ever prick those perfect ears,
Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet –
My face, my moon, my everybody's moon,
## p. 2566 (#126) ###########################################
2566
ROBERT BROWNING
Which everybody looks on and calls his,
And I suppose is looked on by in turn,
While she looks — no one's: very dear, no less.
You smile? why, there's my picture ready made;
There's what we painters call our harmony!
A common grayness silvers everything,
All in a twilight, you and I alike –
You at the point of your first pride in me
(That's gone, you know) — but I at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape,
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight piece, Love, we are in God's hand.
How strange now looks the life he makes us lead;
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!
This chamber, for example — turn your head -
All that's behind us!
You don't understand
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak:
And that cartoon, the second from the door -
It is the thing, Love! so such things should be;
Behold Madonna't I am bold to say,
I can do with my pencil what I know,
What I see, what at bottom of my heart
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep-
Do easily, too — when I say perfectly,
I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge,
Who listened to the Legate's talk last week;
And just as much they used to say in France.
At any rate 'tis easy, all of it!
No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives -
I Dream ? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive you don't know how the others strive
d
## p. 2567 (#127) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2567
éces
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, -
Yet do much less, so much less, Some One says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed, beating, stuffed, and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world.
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.
the sudden blood of these men! at a word —
Praise them, it boils; or blame them, it boils too.
I, painting from myself and to thyself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello's outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken: what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered: what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care ?
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain;
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o'erlooked the world! » No doubt.
Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me. )
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art — for it gives way:
That arm is wrongly put — and there again –
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak; its soul is right;
He meant right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:
But all the play, the insight, and the stretch
Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
## p. 2568 (#128) ###########################################
2568
ROBERT BROWNING
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Rafael, I and you.
Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think —
More than I merit, yes, by many tiines.
But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow,
And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth
And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird
The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare —
Had you, with these, these same, but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
«God and the glory! never care for gain.
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three! ”
I might have done it for you.
So it seems:
Perhaps not. All is as God overrules.
Beside, incentives come from the soul's self;
The rest avail not. Why do I need you?
What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo ?
In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power-
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end,
God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.
'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict,
That I am something underrated here,
Poor this long while, - despised, to speak the truth.
I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,
For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.
The best is when they pass and look aside;
But they speak sometimes: I must bear it all.
Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,
And that long festal year at Fontainebleau!
I surely then could sometimes leave the ground,
Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear,
In that humane great monarch's golden look, -
One finger in his beard or twisted curl
Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile,
One arm about my shoulder, around my neck,
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,
I painting proudly with his breath on me,
All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,
Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls
Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts, —
.
C
## p. 2569 (#129) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
क f
2569
And best of all, this, this, this face beyond,
This in the background, waiting on my work,
To crown the issue with a last reward!
A good time, was it not, my kingly days,
And had you not grown restless
but I know-
'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said;
Too live the life grew, golden and not gray;
And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt
Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.
How could it end in any other way?
You called me, and I came home to your heart.
The triumph was to have ended there; then, if
I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost ?
Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,
You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!
“Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;
The Roman's is the better when you pray,
But still the other Virgin was his wife ».
Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge
Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows
My better fortune, I resolve to think.
For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives,
Said one day Agnolo, his very self,
To Rafael - I have known it all these years -
(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts
Upon a palace wall for Rome to see,
Too lifted up in heart because of it)
«Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub
Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,
Who, were he set to plan and execute
As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,
Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!
To Rafael's ! -- and indeed the arm is wrong.
I hardly dare
yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here — quick, thus the line should go!
Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out!
Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth,
(What he ? why, who but Michel Agnolo ?
Do you forget already words like those ? )
If really there was such a chance so lost, —
Is, whether you're - not grateful — but more pleased.
Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night,
Elle
## p. 2570 (#130) ###########################################
2570
ROBERT BROWNING
I should work better - do you comprehend ?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more.
See, it is settled dusk now: there's a star;
Morello's gone, the watch lights show the wall,
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.
Come from the window, love, - come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with. God is just.
King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights
When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,
The walls become illumined, brick from brick
Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,
That gold of his I did cement them with!
Let us but love each other. Must you go?
That cousin here again ? he waits outside ?
Must see you - you, and not with me? Those loans ?
More gaming debts to pay ? you smiled for that?
Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend ?
While hand and eye and something of a heart
Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth?
I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit
The gray remainder of the evening out,
Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly
How I could paint were I but back in France,
One picture, just one more — the Virgin's face,
Not yours this time! I want you at my side
To hear them — that is, Michel Agnolo —
Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.
Will you ? To-morrow satisfy your friend.
I take the subjects for his corridor,
Finish the portrait out of hand - there, there,
And throw him in another thing or two
If he demurs: the whole should prove enough
To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside,
What's better, and what's all I care about,
Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!
Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,
The cousin! what does he to please you more ?
I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less,
Since there my past life lies, why alter it ?
The very wrong to Francis! -it is true
I took his coin, was tempted and complied,
## p. 2571 (#131) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2571
And built this house and sinned, and all is said.
My father and my mother died of want.
Well, had I riches of my own ? you see
How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died;
And I have labored somewhat in my time
And not been paid profusely. Some good son
Paint my two hundred pictures - let him try!
No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have ?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel's reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo, and me
To cover the three first without a wife,
While I have mine! So still they overcome
Because there's still Lucrezia,- as I choose.
Again the cousin's whistle! Go, my love.
A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S
GALUPPI, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and
blind:
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
O
Have you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings ?
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the
kings,
(rings?
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by — what
you call -
Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of gland — it's as if I saw it all.
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red, -
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head ?
## p. 2572 (#132) ###########################################
2572
ROBERT BROWNING
Well, and it was graceful of them: they'd break talk off and afford –
She to bite her mask's black velvet, he to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord!
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on
sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — «Must
we die ? »
Those commiserating sevenths “Life might last! we can but try! ”
“Were you happy? ” “Yes. ” - -“And are you still as happy ? ”
« Yes. And you ? ”-
« Then, more kisses! ” “Did I stop them, when a million seemed so
few ? »
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!
Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
undone,
Death stepped tacitly, and took them where they never see the sun.
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned.
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal — where a soul can be discerned.
« Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,- you'll not die, it cannot be !
“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
crop;
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop ?
“Dust and ashes! So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too — what's become of all the
gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
## p. 2573 (#133) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2573
CONFESSIONS
WHAT
HAT is he buzzing in my ears?
« Now that I come to die
Do I view the world as a vale of tears ? »
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I viewed again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,- is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden wall: is the curtain blue,
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labeled Ether »
Is the house o'ertopping all.
At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune.
Only, there was a way — you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house “The Lodge. ”
What right had a lounger up their lane ?
But by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to O's,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic there,
By the rim of the bottle labeled “Ether,”
And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir - used to meet :
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
## p. 2574 (#134) ###########################################
2574
ROBERT BROWNING
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS
WHERE
THERE the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles,
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop-
Was the site once of a city great and gay
(So they say);
Of our country's very capital, its prince,
Ages since,
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
Now,-- the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see;
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to (else they run
Into one).
Where the domed and daring palace shot in spires
Up like fires
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all,
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,
Twelve abreast.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as this summer-time o'erspreads
And imbeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone –
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
Now,- the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
## p. 2575 (#135) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2575
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks —
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.
And I know — while thus the quiet-colored eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray
Melt away
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
[dumb,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless,
Till I come.
But he looked upon the city every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,- and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force -
Gold, of course.
O heart! O blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
## p. 2576 (#136) ###########################################
2576
ROBERT BROWNING
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL
SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN EUROPE
L
Et us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes,
Each in its tether,
Sleeping safe in the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels:
Clouds overcome it;
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights!
Wait ye the warning ?
Our low life was the level's and the night's:
He's for the morning.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
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## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
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ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two. At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
## p. 2560 (#120) ###########################################
2560
ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
## p. 2561 (#121) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr. Birrell (it is worth while to quote him again, as
one who has not merged the appreciator in the adulator) calls (The
Ring and the Book «a huge novel in 20,000 lines— told after the
method not of Scott, but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a
dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of
view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and description: you
are let off nothing. ” But he adds later :-“If you are prepared for
this, you will have your reward; for the style, though rugged and
involved, is throughout, with the exception of the speeches of coun-
sel, eloquent and at times superb: and as for the matter — if your
interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost professional; if
nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or suffered, or con-
ceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for you; if you are
fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection you will prize
(The Ring and the Book) as the surgeon prizes the last great con-
tribution to comparative anatomy or pathology. ”
This is the key of the matter: the reader who has learned,
through his greater work, to follow with interest the very analytic
exercises, and as it were tours de force of Browning's mind, will prize
(The Ring and the Book' and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'; even
he will prize but little the two Adventures of Balaustion,' (Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau,' “The Inn Album,' and one or two others of
the latest works in the same genre. But he can well do without
them, and still have the inexhaustible left.
V-161
## p. 2562 (#122) ###########################################
2562
ROBERT BROWNING
.
a
The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Brown-
ing's poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and
is not easy to comprehend even now for those who have the whole
body of his work before them. It is intelligible enough that the
“crude preliminary sketch” (Pauline) should have given only the
bare hint of a poet to the few dozen people who saw that it was out
of the common; that Paracelsus) should have carried the informa-
tion,- though then, beyond a doubt, to only a small circle; and
especially that (Sordello,' a clear call to few, should have
sounded to even an intelligent many like an exercise in intricacy,
and to the world at large like something to which it is useless to
listen. Or, to look at the other end of his career, it is not extraor-
dinary that the work of his last period — 'The Ring and the Book,'.
(Red Cotton Nightcap Country,'— those wonderful minute studies of
human motive, made with the highly specialized skill of the psy-
chical surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the read-
er's following power — should always remain more or less esoteric
literature. But when it is remembered that between these lie : the
most vivid and intensely dramatic series of short poems in English, --
those grouped in the unfortunately diverse editions of his works
under the rubrics Men and Women, Dramatic Lyrics,' Dramatic
Romances,' Dramatis Personæ,and the rest, as well as larger
masterpieces of the broad appeal of Pippa Passes,' (A Blot on the
'Scutcheon,' or 'In a Balcony,'— it is hard to understand, and will
be still harder fifty years hence, why Browning has not become the
familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly larger body of readers. Un-
doubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note
of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoy-
ment — not only his admiration – of Browning; a uspicion showing
not only the persistence of the Sordello-born tradition of obscurity,
but the harm worked by those commentators who approach him as a
problem. Not all commentators share this reproach; but as Browning
makes Bishop Blougram say: -
“Even your prime men who appraise their kind
Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self —
Confuse themselves - )
and beyond question such persons are largely responsible for the fact
that for some time to come, every one who speaks of Browning to a
general audience will feel that he has some cant to clear away. If
he can make them read this body of intensely human, essentially
simple and direct dramatic and lyrical work, he will help to bring
about the time when the once popular attitude will seem as unjusti-
fiable as to judge Goethe only by the second part of Faust. "
1
.
.
## p. 2563 (#123) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2563
The first great characteristic of Browning's poetry is undoubtedly
the essential, elemental quality of its humanity-a trait in which it
is surpassed by no other English poetry but that of Shakespeare. It
can be subtile_to a degree almost fantastic (as can Shakespeare's
to an extent that familiarity makes us forget); but this is in method.
The stuff of it - the texture of the fabric which the swift and intri-
cate shuttle is weaving — is always something in which the human
being is vitally, not merely æsthetically interested. It deals with no
shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a
part of vital problems -- a statement which may provoke the scoffer,
but will be found to be true.
A second characteristic, which, if not a necessary result of this
first, would at least be impossible without it, is the extent to which
Browning's poetry produces its effect by suggestion rather than by
elaboration; by stimulating thought, emotion, and the aesthetic sense,
instead of seeking to satisfy any one of these - especially instead of
contenting itself with only soothing the last. The comparison of
his poetry with — for instance — Tennyson's, in this respect, is instruct-
ive, if it is possibly unjust to both.
And a third trait in Browning — to make an end of a dangerously
categorical attempt to characterize him — follows logically from this
second; its extreme compactness and concentration. Browning some-
times dwells long even dallies -over an idea, as does Shakespeare;
turns it, shows its every facet; and even then it is noticeable, as
with the greater master, that every individual phrase with which he
does so is practically exhaustive of the suggestiveness of that partic-
ular aspect.
But commonly he crowds idea upon idea even in his
lyrics, and — strangely enough — without losing the lyric quality; each
thought pressed down to its very essence, and each with that ger-
minal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulat-
ing things to be had from literature. His figures especially are apt
and telling in the very minimum of words; they say it all, like the
unsurpassable Shakespearean example of “the dyer's hand”; and
the more you think of them, the more you see that not a word could
be added or taken away.
It may be said that this quality of compactness is common to all
genius, and of the very essence of all true poetry; but Browning
manifested it in a way of his own, such as to suggest that he
believed in the subordination of all other qualities to it; even of mel-
ody, for instance, as may be said by his critics and admitted in
many cases by even his strongest admirers. But all things are not
given to one, even among the giants; and Browning's force with its
measure of melody (which is often great) has its place among others'
melody with its measure of force. Open at random: here are two
## p. 2564 (#124) ###########################################
2564
ROBERT BROWNING
lines in A Toccata of Galuppi's,' not deficient in melody by any
means:
I
( Dear dead women - with such hair, too: what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? – I feel chilly and grown old. »
This is not Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies, nor even Tennyson's
Dream of Fair Women’; but a master can still say a good deal in
two lines.
What is called the “roughness” of Browning's verse is at all
events never the roughness that comes from mismanagement or dis-
regard of the form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and
quantity; and his subordination to the laws of his metre is extraor- /
dinary in its minuteness. Of ringing lines there are many; of
broadly sonorous or softly melodious ones but few; and especially (if
one chooses to go into details of technic) he seems curiously without
that use of the broad vowels which underlies the melody of so many
great passages of English poetry. Except in the one remarkable
instance of How we Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix,'
there is little onomatopeia, and almost no note of the flute; no
moan of doves in immemorial elins” or “lucent sirops tinct with
cinnamon. ” On the other hand, in his management of metres like
that of Love Among the Ruins,' for instance, he shows a different
side; the pure lyrics in Pippa Passes) and elsewhere sing them-
selves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more medi-
tative poems, like (By the Fireside. )
The vividness and vigor and truth of Browning's embodiments of
character come, it is needless to say, from the same power that has
ſ created all great dramatic work,— the capacity for incarnating not
a quality or an ideal, but the mixture and balance of qualities that
make up the real human being. There is not a walking phantom
among them, or a lay-figure to hang sentiment on. A writer in the
New Review said recently that of all the poets he remembered, only
Shakespeare and Browning never drew a prig. It is this complete
absence of the false note that gives to certain of Browning's poems
the finality which is felt in all consummate works of art, great and
small; the sense that they convey, if not the last word, at least the
last necessary word, on their subject. Andrea del Sarto ) is in its
way the whole problem of the artist-ideal, the weak will and the
inner failure, in all times and guises; and at the other end of the
gamut, nobody will ever need again to set forth Bishop Blougram's
attitude, or even that of Mr. Sludge the Medium. Of the informing,
almost exuberant vitality of all the lyric and dramatic poems, it is
needless to speak; that fairly leaps to meet the reader at every page
of them, and a quality of it is their essential optimism.
## p. 2565 (#125) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2565
-1
}
«What is he buzzing in my ears?
Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I! »
The world was never a vale of tears to Robert Browning, man or
poet; but a world of men and women, with plenty of red corpuscles
in their blood.
E. L. Aurlin
ANDREA DEL SARTO
CALLED “The FAULTLESS PAINTER »
B
Ut do not let us quarrel any more;
No, my Lucrezia! bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart ?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it ? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him, — but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think, -
This evening more than usual: and it seems
As if— forgive now - should you let me sit
Here by the window, with your hand in mine,
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through,
I might get up to-morrow to my work
Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.
To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!
Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
And mine, the man's bared breast she curls inside.
Don't count the time lost, neither: you must serve
For each of the five pictures we require;
It saves a model. So! keep looking so
My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!
How could you ever prick those perfect ears,
Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet –
My face, my moon, my everybody's moon,
## p. 2566 (#126) ###########################################
2566
ROBERT BROWNING
Which everybody looks on and calls his,
And I suppose is looked on by in turn,
While she looks — no one's: very dear, no less.
You smile? why, there's my picture ready made;
There's what we painters call our harmony!
A common grayness silvers everything,
All in a twilight, you and I alike –
You at the point of your first pride in me
(That's gone, you know) — but I at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape,
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight piece, Love, we are in God's hand.
How strange now looks the life he makes us lead;
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!
This chamber, for example — turn your head -
All that's behind us!
You don't understand
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak:
And that cartoon, the second from the door -
It is the thing, Love! so such things should be;
Behold Madonna't I am bold to say,
I can do with my pencil what I know,
What I see, what at bottom of my heart
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep-
Do easily, too — when I say perfectly,
I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge,
Who listened to the Legate's talk last week;
And just as much they used to say in France.
At any rate 'tis easy, all of it!
No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives -
I Dream ? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive you don't know how the others strive
d
## p. 2567 (#127) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2567
éces
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, -
Yet do much less, so much less, Some One says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed, beating, stuffed, and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world.
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.
the sudden blood of these men! at a word —
Praise them, it boils; or blame them, it boils too.
I, painting from myself and to thyself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello's outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken: what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered: what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care ?
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain;
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o'erlooked the world! » No doubt.
Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me. )
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art — for it gives way:
That arm is wrongly put — and there again –
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak; its soul is right;
He meant right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:
But all the play, the insight, and the stretch
Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
## p. 2568 (#128) ###########################################
2568
ROBERT BROWNING
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Rafael, I and you.
Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think —
More than I merit, yes, by many tiines.
But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow,
And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth
And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird
The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare —
Had you, with these, these same, but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
«God and the glory! never care for gain.
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three! ”
I might have done it for you.
So it seems:
Perhaps not. All is as God overrules.
Beside, incentives come from the soul's self;
The rest avail not. Why do I need you?
What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo ?
In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power-
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end,
God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.
'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict,
That I am something underrated here,
Poor this long while, - despised, to speak the truth.
I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,
For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.
The best is when they pass and look aside;
But they speak sometimes: I must bear it all.
Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,
And that long festal year at Fontainebleau!
I surely then could sometimes leave the ground,
Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear,
In that humane great monarch's golden look, -
One finger in his beard or twisted curl
Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile,
One arm about my shoulder, around my neck,
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,
I painting proudly with his breath on me,
All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,
Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls
Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts, —
.
C
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ROBERT BROWNING
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2569
And best of all, this, this, this face beyond,
This in the background, waiting on my work,
To crown the issue with a last reward!
A good time, was it not, my kingly days,
And had you not grown restless
but I know-
'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said;
Too live the life grew, golden and not gray;
And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt
Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.
How could it end in any other way?
You called me, and I came home to your heart.
The triumph was to have ended there; then, if
I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost ?
Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,
You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!
“Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;
The Roman's is the better when you pray,
But still the other Virgin was his wife ».
Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge
Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows
My better fortune, I resolve to think.
For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives,
Said one day Agnolo, his very self,
To Rafael - I have known it all these years -
(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts
Upon a palace wall for Rome to see,
Too lifted up in heart because of it)
«Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub
Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,
Who, were he set to plan and execute
As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,
Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!
To Rafael's ! -- and indeed the arm is wrong.
I hardly dare
yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here — quick, thus the line should go!
Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out!
Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth,
(What he ? why, who but Michel Agnolo ?
Do you forget already words like those ? )
If really there was such a chance so lost, —
Is, whether you're - not grateful — but more pleased.
Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night,
Elle
## p. 2570 (#130) ###########################################
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ROBERT BROWNING
I should work better - do you comprehend ?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more.
See, it is settled dusk now: there's a star;
Morello's gone, the watch lights show the wall,
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.
Come from the window, love, - come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with. God is just.
King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights
When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,
The walls become illumined, brick from brick
Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,
That gold of his I did cement them with!
Let us but love each other. Must you go?
That cousin here again ? he waits outside ?
Must see you - you, and not with me? Those loans ?
More gaming debts to pay ? you smiled for that?
Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend ?
While hand and eye and something of a heart
Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth?
I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit
The gray remainder of the evening out,
Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly
How I could paint were I but back in France,
One picture, just one more — the Virgin's face,
Not yours this time! I want you at my side
To hear them — that is, Michel Agnolo —
Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.
Will you ? To-morrow satisfy your friend.
I take the subjects for his corridor,
Finish the portrait out of hand - there, there,
And throw him in another thing or two
If he demurs: the whole should prove enough
To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside,
What's better, and what's all I care about,
Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!
Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,
The cousin! what does he to please you more ?
I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less,
Since there my past life lies, why alter it ?
The very wrong to Francis! -it is true
I took his coin, was tempted and complied,
## p. 2571 (#131) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2571
And built this house and sinned, and all is said.
My father and my mother died of want.
Well, had I riches of my own ? you see
How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died;
And I have labored somewhat in my time
And not been paid profusely. Some good son
Paint my two hundred pictures - let him try!
No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have ?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel's reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo, and me
To cover the three first without a wife,
While I have mine! So still they overcome
Because there's still Lucrezia,- as I choose.
Again the cousin's whistle! Go, my love.
A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S
GALUPPI, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and
blind:
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
O
Have you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings ?
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the
kings,
(rings?
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by — what
you call -
Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of gland — it's as if I saw it all.
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red, -
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head ?
## p. 2572 (#132) ###########################################
2572
ROBERT BROWNING
Well, and it was graceful of them: they'd break talk off and afford –
She to bite her mask's black velvet, he to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord!
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on
sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — «Must
we die ? »
Those commiserating sevenths “Life might last! we can but try! ”
“Were you happy? ” “Yes. ” - -“And are you still as happy ? ”
« Yes. And you ? ”-
« Then, more kisses! ” “Did I stop them, when a million seemed so
few ? »
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!
Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
undone,
Death stepped tacitly, and took them where they never see the sun.
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned.
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal — where a soul can be discerned.
« Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,- you'll not die, it cannot be !
“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
crop;
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop ?
“Dust and ashes! So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too — what's become of all the
gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
## p. 2573 (#133) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2573
CONFESSIONS
WHAT
HAT is he buzzing in my ears?
« Now that I come to die
Do I view the world as a vale of tears ? »
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I viewed again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,- is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden wall: is the curtain blue,
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labeled Ether »
Is the house o'ertopping all.
At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune.
Only, there was a way — you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house “The Lodge. ”
What right had a lounger up their lane ?
But by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help,—their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to O's,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic there,
By the rim of the bottle labeled “Ether,”
And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir - used to meet :
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
## p. 2574 (#134) ###########################################
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ROBERT BROWNING
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS
WHERE
THERE the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles,
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop-
Was the site once of a city great and gay
(So they say);
Of our country's very capital, its prince,
Ages since,
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
Now,-- the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see;
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to (else they run
Into one).
Where the domed and daring palace shot in spires
Up like fires
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all,
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,
Twelve abreast.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as this summer-time o'erspreads
And imbeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone –
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
Now,- the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
## p. 2575 (#135) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2575
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks —
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.
And I know — while thus the quiet-colored eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray
Melt away
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
[dumb,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless,
Till I come.
But he looked upon the city every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,- and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force -
Gold, of course.
O heart! O blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
## p. 2576 (#136) ###########################################
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ROBERT BROWNING
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL
SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN EUROPE
L
Et us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes,
Each in its tether,
Sleeping safe in the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels:
Clouds overcome it;
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights!
Wait ye the warning ?
Our low life was the level's and the night's:
He's for the morning.
