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.
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.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
Ended bliss !
And life, that will not end in this!
My days go on, iny days go on.
Breath freezes on my lips to moan:
As one alone, once not alone,
I sit and knock at Nature's door,
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor,
Whose desolated days go on.
## p. 2545 (#103) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2545
I knock and cry – L’ndone, undone!
Is there no help, no comfort — none ?
No gleaning in the wide wheat-plains
Where others drive their loaded wains ?
My vacant days go on, go on.
This Nature, though the snows be down,
Thinks kindly of the bird of June.
The little red hip on the tree
Is ripe for such. What is for me,
Whose days so winterly go on?
No bird am I to sing in June,
And dare not ask an equal boon.
Good nests and berries red are Nature's
To give away to better creatures -
And yet my days go on, go on.
I ask less kindness to be done -
Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cool deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on.
Only to lift the turf unmown
From off the earth where it has grown,
Some cubit-space, and say, Behold,
Creep in, poor Heart, beneath that fold,
Forgetting how the days go on. ”
A Voice reproves me thereupon,
More sweet than Nature's, when the drone
Of bees is sweetest, and more deep,
Than when the rivers overleap
The shuddering pines, and thunder on.
God's Voice, not Nature's - night and noon
He sits upon the great white throne,
And listens for the creature's praise.
What babble we of days and days ?
The Dayspring he, whose days go on!
He reigns above, he reigns alone:
Systems burn out and leave his throne:
Fair mists of seraphs melt and fall
Around him, changeless amid all
Ancient of days, whose days go on!
V -160
## p. 2546 (#104) ###########################################
2546
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
He reigns below, he reigns alone —
And having life in love forgone
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,
He reigns the jealous God. Who mourns
Or rules with him, while days go on?
By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear him charge his saints that none
Among the creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against him with despair,
However darkly days go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown:
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee,
Whose days eternally go on!
For us,
whatever's undergone,
Thou knowest, willest what is done.
Grief may be joy misunderstood:
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever's lost, it first was won!
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here
That Heaven's new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on!
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on!
And, having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops some pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling - so I! THY DAYS GO ON!
## p. 2547 (#105) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2547
THE CRY OF THE HUMAN
THER
HERE is no God,” the foolish saith,
But none, «There is no sorrow ;)
And nature oft the cry of faith
In bitter need will borrow:
Eyes which the preacher could not school
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne'er said, “God be praised. ”
Be pitiful, o God.
The tempest stretches from the steep
The shadow of its coming;
The beasts grow tame, and near us creep,
As help were in the human:
Yet while the cloud-wheels roll and grind,
We spirits tremble under!
The hills have echoes; but we find
No answer for the thunder.
Be pitiful, O God!
The battle hurtles on the plains-
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest - honor.
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit:
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay,- and spirit, spirit.
Be pitiful, O God!
We meet together at the feast -
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
We name delight, and pledge it round
“It shall be ours to-morrow ! »
God's seraphs! do your voices sound
As sad in naming sorrow ?
Be pitiful, O God!
We sit together, with the skies,
The steadfast skies, above us;
We look into each other's eyes,
“And how long will you love us? ”
## p. 2548 (#106) ###########################################
2548
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless -
« Till death us part! ” – 0 words, to be
Our best for love the deathless!
Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed
Of one loved and departed -
Our tears drop on the lips that said
Last night, "Be stronger-hearted!
O God, - to clasp those fingers close,
And yet to feel so lonely! -
To see a light upon such brows,
Which is the daylight only!
Be pitiful, O God!
The happy children come to us,
And look up in our faces;
They ask us Was it thus, and thus,
When we were in their places ?
We cannot speak — we see anew
The hills we used to live in,
And feel our mother's smile press through
The kisses she is giving.
Be pitiful, O God!
We pray together at the kirk,
For mercy, mercy, solely –
Hands weary with the evil work,
We lift them to the Holy!
The corpse is calm below our knee-
Its spirit bright before Thee -
Between them, worse than either, we
Without the rest of glory!
Be pitiful, O God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull
Men whisper, “He is dying; »
We cry no more, “Be pitiful! ” —
We have no strength for crying:
No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine,
Look up and triumph rather –
Lo! in the depth of God's Divine,
The Son adjures the Father -
BE PITIFUL, O God!
## p. 2549 (#107) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2549
ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST
L
ITTLE Ellie sits alone
'Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by;
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water's flow -
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly uses
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done,
And the sweetest pleasure chooses,
For her future within reach.
Little Ellie in her smile
Chooseth — “I will have a lover,
Riding on a steed of steeds!
He shall love me without guile;
And to him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds.
(And the steed shall be red-roan,
And the lover shall be noble,
With an eye that takes the breath,
And the lute he plays upon
Shall strike ladies into trouble,
As his sword strikes men to death.
“And the steed it shall be shod
All in silver, housed in azure,
And the mane shall swim the wind:
And the hoofs along the sod
Shall Aash onward and keep measure,
Till the shepherds look behind.
«But my lover will not prize
All the glory that he rides in,
## p. 2550 (#108) ###########################################
2550
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
When he gazes in my face.
He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes
Build the shrine my soul abides in;
And I kneel here for thy grace. '
« Then, ay, then — he shall kneel low,
With the red-roan steed anear him,
Which shall seein to understand-
Till I answer, Rise and go!
For the world must love and fear him
Whom I gift with heart and hand. ”
« Then he will arise so pale,
I shall feel my own lips tremble
With a yes I must not say —
Nathless maiden-brave, Farewell,'
I will utter, and dissemble --
Light to-morrow with to-day. '
«Then he'll ride among the hills
To the wide world past the river,
There to put away all wrong:
To make straight distorted wills,
And to empty the broad quiver
Which the wicked bear along.
« Three times shall a young foot-page
Swim the stream and climb the mountain
And kneel down beside my feet –
Lo! my master sends this gage,
Lady, for thy pity's counting!
What wilt thou exchange for it? '
"And the first time I will send
A white rosebud for a guerdon,
And the second time, a glove:
But the third time — I may bend
From my pride, and answer —Pardon-
If he comes to take my love. '
«Then the young foot-page will run
Then my lover will ride faster,
Till he kneeleth at my knee:
I am a duke's eldest son!
Thousand serfs do call me master,-
But, O Love, I love but thee! ! )
## p. 2551 (#109) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2551
“He will kiss me on the mouth
Then; and lead me as a lover
Through the crowds that praise his deeds;
And when soul-tied by one troth,
Unto him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds. ”
Little Ellie, with her smile
Not yet ended, rose up gayly,
Tied the bonnet, donned the shoe --
And went homeward, round a mile,
Just to see, as she did daily,
What more eggs were with the two.
Pushing through the elm-tree copse
Winding by the stream, light-hearted,
Where the osier pathway leads -
Past the boughs she stoops - and stops!
Lo! the wild swan had deserted -
And a rat had gnawed the reeds.
Ellie went home sad and slow:
If she found the lover ever,
With his red-roan steed of steeds,
Sooth I know not! but I know
She could never show him --- never,
That swan's nest among the reeds!
THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
W*Tjänte-rose by May-dew impearled :
THAT's the best thing in the world ?
June-rose by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain,
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when so you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
Something out of it, I think.
## p. 2552 (#110) ###########################################
2552
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
U
(NLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart !
l'nlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head; on mine the dew:
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems, where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch, too poor
For hand of thine ? and canst thou think, and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up, and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps — as thou must sing – alone, aloof.
WHAT can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them on the outside of the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? Am I cold,
C'ngrateful, that for these most manifold
High gifts, I render nothing back at all ?
Not so; not cold, but very poor instead.
Ask God, who knows. For frequent tears have run
The colors from my life, and left so dead
And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.
## p. 2553 (#111) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
>
## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
8
freschi
ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two.
At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
## p. 2560 (#120) ###########################################
2560
ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
## p. 2561 (#121) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr. 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!
And life, that will not end in this!
My days go on, iny days go on.
Breath freezes on my lips to moan:
As one alone, once not alone,
I sit and knock at Nature's door,
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor,
Whose desolated days go on.
## p. 2545 (#103) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2545
I knock and cry – L’ndone, undone!
Is there no help, no comfort — none ?
No gleaning in the wide wheat-plains
Where others drive their loaded wains ?
My vacant days go on, go on.
This Nature, though the snows be down,
Thinks kindly of the bird of June.
The little red hip on the tree
Is ripe for such. What is for me,
Whose days so winterly go on?
No bird am I to sing in June,
And dare not ask an equal boon.
Good nests and berries red are Nature's
To give away to better creatures -
And yet my days go on, go on.
I ask less kindness to be done -
Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon
(Too early worn and grimed) with sweet
Cool deathly touch to these tired feet,
Till days go out which now go on.
Only to lift the turf unmown
From off the earth where it has grown,
Some cubit-space, and say, Behold,
Creep in, poor Heart, beneath that fold,
Forgetting how the days go on. ”
A Voice reproves me thereupon,
More sweet than Nature's, when the drone
Of bees is sweetest, and more deep,
Than when the rivers overleap
The shuddering pines, and thunder on.
God's Voice, not Nature's - night and noon
He sits upon the great white throne,
And listens for the creature's praise.
What babble we of days and days ?
The Dayspring he, whose days go on!
He reigns above, he reigns alone:
Systems burn out and leave his throne:
Fair mists of seraphs melt and fall
Around him, changeless amid all
Ancient of days, whose days go on!
V -160
## p. 2546 (#104) ###########################################
2546
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
He reigns below, he reigns alone —
And having life in love forgone
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns,
He reigns the jealous God. Who mourns
Or rules with him, while days go on?
By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear him charge his saints that none
Among the creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against him with despair,
However darkly days go on.
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown:
No mortal grief deserves that crown.
O supreme Love, chief misery,
The sharp regalia are for Thee,
Whose days eternally go on!
For us,
whatever's undergone,
Thou knowest, willest what is done.
Grief may be joy misunderstood:
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever's lost, it first was won!
We will not struggle nor impugn.
Perhaps the cup was broken here
That Heaven's new wine might show more clear.
I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on!
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on!
And, having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops some pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling - so I! THY DAYS GO ON!
## p. 2547 (#105) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2547
THE CRY OF THE HUMAN
THER
HERE is no God,” the foolish saith,
But none, «There is no sorrow ;)
And nature oft the cry of faith
In bitter need will borrow:
Eyes which the preacher could not school
By wayside graves are raised;
And lips say, “God be pitiful,”
Who ne'er said, “God be praised. ”
Be pitiful, o God.
The tempest stretches from the steep
The shadow of its coming;
The beasts grow tame, and near us creep,
As help were in the human:
Yet while the cloud-wheels roll and grind,
We spirits tremble under!
The hills have echoes; but we find
No answer for the thunder.
Be pitiful, O God!
The battle hurtles on the plains-
Earth feels new scythes upon her:
We reap our brothers for the wains,
And call the harvest - honor.
Draw face to face, front line to line,
One image all inherit:
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign,
Clay, clay,- and spirit, spirit.
Be pitiful, O God!
We meet together at the feast -
To private mirth betake us —
We stare down in the winecup, lest
Some vacant chair should shake us!
We name delight, and pledge it round
“It shall be ours to-morrow ! »
God's seraphs! do your voices sound
As sad in naming sorrow ?
Be pitiful, O God!
We sit together, with the skies,
The steadfast skies, above us;
We look into each other's eyes,
“And how long will you love us? ”
## p. 2548 (#106) ###########################################
2548
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless -
« Till death us part! ” – 0 words, to be
Our best for love the deathless!
Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed
Of one loved and departed -
Our tears drop on the lips that said
Last night, "Be stronger-hearted!
O God, - to clasp those fingers close,
And yet to feel so lonely! -
To see a light upon such brows,
Which is the daylight only!
Be pitiful, O God!
The happy children come to us,
And look up in our faces;
They ask us Was it thus, and thus,
When we were in their places ?
We cannot speak — we see anew
The hills we used to live in,
And feel our mother's smile press through
The kisses she is giving.
Be pitiful, O God!
We pray together at the kirk,
For mercy, mercy, solely –
Hands weary with the evil work,
We lift them to the Holy!
The corpse is calm below our knee-
Its spirit bright before Thee -
Between them, worse than either, we
Without the rest of glory!
Be pitiful, O God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull
Men whisper, “He is dying; »
We cry no more, “Be pitiful! ” —
We have no strength for crying:
No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine,
Look up and triumph rather –
Lo! in the depth of God's Divine,
The Son adjures the Father -
BE PITIFUL, O God!
## p. 2549 (#107) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2549
ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST
L
ITTLE Ellie sits alone
'Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by;
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water's flow -
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly uses
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done,
And the sweetest pleasure chooses,
For her future within reach.
Little Ellie in her smile
Chooseth — “I will have a lover,
Riding on a steed of steeds!
He shall love me without guile;
And to him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds.
(And the steed shall be red-roan,
And the lover shall be noble,
With an eye that takes the breath,
And the lute he plays upon
Shall strike ladies into trouble,
As his sword strikes men to death.
“And the steed it shall be shod
All in silver, housed in azure,
And the mane shall swim the wind:
And the hoofs along the sod
Shall Aash onward and keep measure,
Till the shepherds look behind.
«But my lover will not prize
All the glory that he rides in,
## p. 2550 (#108) ###########################################
2550
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
When he gazes in my face.
He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes
Build the shrine my soul abides in;
And I kneel here for thy grace. '
« Then, ay, then — he shall kneel low,
With the red-roan steed anear him,
Which shall seein to understand-
Till I answer, Rise and go!
For the world must love and fear him
Whom I gift with heart and hand. ”
« Then he will arise so pale,
I shall feel my own lips tremble
With a yes I must not say —
Nathless maiden-brave, Farewell,'
I will utter, and dissemble --
Light to-morrow with to-day. '
«Then he'll ride among the hills
To the wide world past the river,
There to put away all wrong:
To make straight distorted wills,
And to empty the broad quiver
Which the wicked bear along.
« Three times shall a young foot-page
Swim the stream and climb the mountain
And kneel down beside my feet –
Lo! my master sends this gage,
Lady, for thy pity's counting!
What wilt thou exchange for it? '
"And the first time I will send
A white rosebud for a guerdon,
And the second time, a glove:
But the third time — I may bend
From my pride, and answer —Pardon-
If he comes to take my love. '
«Then the young foot-page will run
Then my lover will ride faster,
Till he kneeleth at my knee:
I am a duke's eldest son!
Thousand serfs do call me master,-
But, O Love, I love but thee! ! )
## p. 2551 (#109) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2551
“He will kiss me on the mouth
Then; and lead me as a lover
Through the crowds that praise his deeds;
And when soul-tied by one troth,
Unto him I will discover
That swan's nest among the reeds. ”
Little Ellie, with her smile
Not yet ended, rose up gayly,
Tied the bonnet, donned the shoe --
And went homeward, round a mile,
Just to see, as she did daily,
What more eggs were with the two.
Pushing through the elm-tree copse
Winding by the stream, light-hearted,
Where the osier pathway leads -
Past the boughs she stoops - and stops!
Lo! the wild swan had deserted -
And a rat had gnawed the reeds.
Ellie went home sad and slow:
If she found the lover ever,
With his red-roan steed of steeds,
Sooth I know not! but I know
She could never show him --- never,
That swan's nest among the reeds!
THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
W*Tjänte-rose by May-dew impearled :
THAT's the best thing in the world ?
June-rose by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain,
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when so you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
Something out of it, I think.
## p. 2552 (#110) ###########################################
2552
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
U
(NLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart !
l'nlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head; on mine the dew:
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems, where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch, too poor
For hand of thine ? and canst thou think, and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up, and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps — as thou must sing – alone, aloof.
WHAT can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them on the outside of the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? Am I cold,
C'ngrateful, that for these most manifold
High gifts, I render nothing back at all ?
Not so; not cold, but very poor instead.
Ask God, who knows. For frequent tears have run
The colors from my life, and left so dead
And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.
## p. 2553 (#111) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2553
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day :)
For these things in themselves, beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list! ”
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here plainer to my sight
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown
With sanctifying sweetness did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud, and said “My love, my own! ”
I LIVED with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then thou didst come to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and froin out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
## p. 2554 (#112) ###########################################
2554
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow,
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand-why, thus I drink
Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace
To look through and behind this mask of me,
(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly
With their rains! ) and behold my soul's true face,
The dim and weary witness of life's race;
Because thou hast the faith and love to see,
Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,
The patient angel waiting for his place
In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe,
Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood,
Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,
Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed, -
Nothing repels thee. - Dearest, teach me so
To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts,
With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all
Who paused a little near the prison-wall,
To hear my music in its louder parts,
Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's
Or temple's occupation, beyond call.
But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall,
When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's
Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot,
To hearken what I said between my tears,
Instruct me how to thank thee! - Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
## p. 2555 (#113) ###########################################
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
2555
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
WEET, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there's a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
S"
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman's foot ?
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, - "Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, – but more! »
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-
« Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that Heart
I trod upon, ages ago! ”
## p. 2556 (#114) ###########################################
2556
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
THE
HEY say that God lives very high!
But if you look above the pines
You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines
You never see him in the gold,
Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face-
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid
On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,
Half-waking me at night; and said
«Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser ? »
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
1
THINK we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint
Round our aspirant souls.
But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop
For a few days consumed in loss and taint ?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted, -
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? - At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God! ”
## p. 2556 (#115) ###########################################
1
>
## p. 2556 (#116) ###########################################
De
8
freschi
ROBERT BROWNING.
## p. 2557 (#117) ###########################################
2557
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
ī
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812,
the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the
Bank of England - the one for more than forty and the
other for full fifty years.
His surroundings were apparently typical
of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but
undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theoriz-
ing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-
mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first gen-
eration to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and
adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family
of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of
the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only
question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished
to go to a university, then to become an artist - both ambitions
repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's
career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of
routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work;
to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional
scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remark-
able vivacity, with unbroken health - altogether a personality thor-
oughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well
have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all tra-
ditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He
left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at
home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London
University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for
these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed
that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely
not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early
age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of
making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled him-
self seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into
everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious
## p. 2558 (#118) ###########################################
2558
ROBERT BROWNING
intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his
biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth
and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had
written Pauline at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus) at twenty-two.
At
eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition
in his chosen career from his father, whose kindness we must seek,”
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable
assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing
readiness to support him in his literary career. Paracelsus,' “Sor-
dello,' and the whole of Bells and Pomegranates) were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return. ” An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
(Pauline.
From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline) was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biogra-
phies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his
different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of
personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament
contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse,
like Tennyson: but while healthily social and a man of the world
about him, he was not one of whom people tell reminiscences” of
consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of
his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that
he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in
living in his works and escaping the ripping up of the personal
chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and
again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became
engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning
through a friend, - her cousin,—and through letters from Browning
expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been
for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse;
but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge
of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her
sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they
lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional
absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died
there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some
time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned
there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his
summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About
1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the
thejend of his life.
There|in1888
## p. 2559 (#119) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2559
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the
12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published
poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of
the time of life at which he wrote it, — very young, full of excesses
of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression - the
“confession of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the
ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its rela-
tions. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:-
I am made up of an intensest life
• a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all — »
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy-except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his col-
lected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme
repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.
In Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years
later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking
for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer,
alchemist, conjuror,— compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of
truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer, - Browning makes of it the
history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intel-
lectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to
the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of
its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from
its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.
«Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power – I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I thought should be preserved, increased.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love. "
Paracelsus) is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it
is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were
to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history,
told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents”
## p. 2560 (#120) ###########################################
2560
ROBERT BROWNING
(to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement,
as to constitute a form virtually new.
This was to be notably the method of (Sordello,' which appeared
in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend
Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to Sordello' in his collected
works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:- «The
historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a
background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else is worth study. ” This poem, with
its historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and
Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that
defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth
of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most
complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation,
it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to
Browning through it, and send him back. - if he begins, as is likely,
with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task, — baffled
by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it
contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:
“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.
(Sordello) is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties,
essayed a high thing. For his subject
(He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years. )
«He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity,
and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at
him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little
book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then
able to read could not understand. ”
With (Sordello, however, ended for many years — until he may
perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and
more powerful form in «The Ring and the Book) and others - this
type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and
now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English
literature.
Four years before the publication of Sordello) he had written
one play, (Strafford, of which the name sufficiently indicates the
subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by
Macready;— the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic
form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always
in chronological order. They were “The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,'
## p. 2561 (#121) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2561
perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; Colombe's
Birthday'; King Victor and King Charles; The Return of the
Druses'; Luria'; (A Soul's Tragedy'; In a Balcony); and, — though
less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,- perhaps the
finest dramatic poem of them all, Pippa Passes, which, among the
earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all
Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and
1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater
number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally
recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to
rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible
and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest
description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would
be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points
of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is
necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-
called narrative poems, The Ring and the Book,' with its vast
length, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, its fellow in method if
not in extent. Mr. 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!
