Chapter XI: Part 11

"Now be grave for the rest of us, using the life overcast
To ripen our wine of the present (too new) in glooms of the past."

Down she stepped to a pallet where lay a face like a girl's,
Young, and pathetic with dying,--a deep black hole in the curls.

"Art thou from Tuscany, brother? and seest thou, dreaming in pain,
Thy mother stand in the piazza, searching the list of the slain?"

Kind as a mother herself, she touched his cheeks with her hands:
"Blessed is she who has borne thee, although she should weep as
she stands."

On she passed to a Frenchman, his arm carried off by a ball:
Kneeling: "O more than my brother! how shall I thank thee for all?

"Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line;
But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not thine.

"Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossest,
But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the
rest."

Ever she passed on her way, and came to a couch where pined
One with a face from Venetia, white with a hope out of mind.

Long she stood and gazed, and twice she tried at the name;
But two great crystal tears were all that faltered and came.

Only a tear for Venice? She turned as in passion and loss,
And stooped to his forehead and kissed it, as if she were kissing
the cross.

Faint with that strain of heart, she moved on then to another,
Stern and strong in his death: "And dost thou suffer, my brother?"

Holding his hands in hers: "Out of the Piedmont lion
Cometh the sweetness of freedom! sweetest to live or to die on."

Holding his cold rough hands: "Well, oh well have ye done
In noble, noble Piedmont, who would not be noble alone."

Back he fell while she spoke. She rose to her feet with a spring.
"That was a Piedmontese! and this is the court of the King!"

THE PROSPECT

Methinks we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view;
And thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain,--
The life beyond us and our souls in pain,--
We miss the prospect which we are called unto
By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong,
O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong;
That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.

DE PROFUNDIS

The face which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With daily love, is dimmed away--
And yet my days go on, go on.

The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone,
And every morning with "Good day"
Make each day good, is hushed away--
And yet my days go on, go on.

The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon,
The strongest on the longest day,
With steadfast love is caught away--
And yet my days go on, go on.

The world goes whispering to its own,
"This anguish pierces to the bone."
And tender friends go sighing round,
"What love can ever cure this wound?"
My days go on, my days go on.

The past rolls forward on the sun
And makes all night. O dreams begun,
Not to be ended! Ended bliss!
And life, that will not end in this!
My days go on, my 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.

I knock and cry--Undone, 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!

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!

THE CRY OF THE HUMAN

"There 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?"
The eyes grow dim with prophecy,
The voices, low and breathless--
"Till death us part!"--O 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!

ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST

Little 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 flash onward and keep measure,
Till the shepherds look behind.

"But my lover will not prize
All the glory that he rides in,
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 seem 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, 'Fare well,'
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 come 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!_

"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

WHAT'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.

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike 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,
Ungrateful, 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.

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 from out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants,
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

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!

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

Sweet, 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.

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!"

A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD

They 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

I 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!"

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

BY E.L. BURLINGAME

Robert 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 theorizing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grandmother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first generation 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 remarkable vivacity, with unbroken health--altogether a personality thoroughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all traditional 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 himself seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious 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,' 'Sordello,' 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 biographies, 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 end of his life. There in 1888 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 relations. 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 collected 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 intellectual 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" (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,' 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 counsel, 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 conceivably 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 contribution 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.

The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Browning'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 information,--though then, beyond a doubt, to only a small circle; and especially that 'Sordello,' a clear call to a 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 extraordinary 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 psychical surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the reader'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. Undoubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoyment--not only his admiration--of Browning; a suspicion 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 unjustifiable as to judge Goethe only by the second part of 'Faust.'

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 intricate shuttle is weaving--is always something in which the human being is vitally, not merely aesthetically 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 instructive; 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 sometimes 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 particular 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 germinal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulating 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 melody, 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 lines in 'A Toccata of Galuppi's,' not deficient in melody by any means:--

"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 disregard of the form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and quantity; and his subordination to the laws of his metre is extraordinary 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 onomatopoeia, and almost no note of the flute; no "moan of doves in immemorial elms" 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 themselves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more meditative 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 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.

"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.

ANDREA DEL SARTO

CALLED "THE FAULTLESS PAINTER"