Chapter 1

termination: 'Cenciaja'--a bundle of rags--a trifle. The proverb means, 'Every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,' and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the kind."]

25. THE AGAMEMNON OF ÆSCHYLUS.

[Published in October, 1877 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIII. pp. 259-357).]

Browning prefaces his transcript of the _Agamemnon_ with a brief introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:--

"If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship, is no violence: but I would be tolerant for once,--in the case of so immensely famous an original,--of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for Æschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially decline,--what may appear to brighten up a passage,--the employment of a new word for some old one--[Greek: phonos], or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners, recurring four times in three lines.... Further,--if I obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble Æschylus."

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of Æschylus. An incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in order to fully understand the English. Browning has anticipated, but not altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those passages which in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it: phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at "the ideas of the poet." It is a Titan's version of an Olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, _Academy_, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

[Published in May, 1878. _La Saisiaz_ (written November, 1877), pp. 1-82; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, pp. 83-201. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]

In _La Saisiaz_ Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He assumes two postulates, and two only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's existence continues.

"Without the want, Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant, Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away, All we have to do is surely not endure another day. This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy: life done-- Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none. 'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute; Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his own mind at least, he finds that

"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate. By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can; By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"

Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between "Fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and "Reason." He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty. If it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage. Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time? He ends, therefore, with a "hope--no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope," which amounts practically to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line--

"He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God!"

_The Two Poets of Croisic_ is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron with the matter of his _Métromanie_. The first of the "two poets" is one René Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Condé, afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII. His story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case. Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic, April 24, 1699: he died at the age of seventy-three. His memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than Voltaire. The first part of the story is told pretty literally in Browning's pages:--how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, assumed the title of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation. The sequel is somewhat altered. Voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion. Desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first representation of Piron's _Métromanie_, in which Voltaire's humiliation and the Croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.

In his graphic and condensed version of the tale, Browning has used a poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative. The poem is written in _ottava rima_, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. It is difficult to see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in Byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes. The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line. The result of the innovation is far from successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness. Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:--

"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope, Means recognizing fear; the keener sense Of all comprised within our actual scope Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense. Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence Just as indubitably: stars abound O'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground!

So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"

The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:--

"Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born!

Sky--what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!

World--how it walled about Life with disgrace Till God's own smile came out: That was thy face!"

27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.

[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp. 1-80).]

In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Léon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plébéiennes_. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:--

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of his life Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here. In _Martin Relph_ (which "embodies," says Mrs. Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. In that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony. In _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ (founded on a popular Russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold illustration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the mother, Loùscha, and again to Ivàn Ivànovitch. While the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for God." _Halbert and Hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit. In _Ned Bratts_ (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _Pheidippides_ (the legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to _Halbert and Hob_. There is hardly in Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his breast." _Martin Relph_, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the effective change from iambs to anapæsts gives their very motion.

"Was that--wind? Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs, Snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's Only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight! Still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out--look--learn The truth whatever it be? Pad, pad! At last, I turn-- 'Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in the sledge! An army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge: They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks ranged each side, Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide The four-footed steady advance. The foremost--none may pass: They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye--green-glowing brass! But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best: Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,--one reaches.... How utter the rest?"

The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "_How otherwise_? asked he."

_Ned Bratts_ takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous poems that _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ does among his narratives. It is a whole comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.

In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, _Pheidippides_, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.

"So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute Is still 'Rejoice!'--his word which brought rejoicing indeed. So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God loved so well He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began, So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute: 'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: At a summer Assizes holden at _Hartfort_, while the Judge was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old _Tod_ into the Court, cloathed in a green Suit with his Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and, being come in, he spake aloud as follows: _My Lord_, said he, _Here is the veryest Rogue that breaths upon the face of the earth, ... My Lord, there has not been a Robbery committed this many years, within so many miles of this place but I have either been at it or privy to it._

"The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the Justices, they agreed to Indict him; and so they did, of several felonious Actions; to all of which he heartily confessed Guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time....

"As for the truth of this Story, the Relator told me that he was at the same time himself in the Court, and stood within less than two yards of old _Tod_, when he heard him aloud to utter the words."--Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_, 1680.]

28. DRAMATIC IDYLS. Second Series.

[Published in July, 1880. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp. 81-163.]

The second series of _Dramatic Idyls_ is bound together, like the first, though somewhat less closely, by a leading idea, which, whether consciously or not, is hinted at in a pointed little prologue: the idea of the paradox of human action, and the apparent antagonism between motive and result. The volume differs considerably from its precursor, and it contains nothing quite equal to the best of the earlier poems. There is more variety, perhaps, but the human interest is less intense, the stories less moving and absorbing. With less humour, there is a much more pronounced element of the grotesque. And most prominent of all is that characteristic of Browning which a great critic has called agility of intellect.

The first poem, _Echetlos_, is full of heroical ardour and firm, manly vigour of movement. Like _Pheidippides_, it is a legend of Marathon. It sings of the mysterious helper who appeared to the Greeks, in rustic garb and armed with a plough.

"But one man kept no rank and his sole arm plied no spear, As a flashing came and went, and a form i' the van, the rear, Brightened the battle up, for he blazed now there, now here.

* * * * *

Did the steady phalanx falter? To the rescue, at the need, The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed, As he routed through the Sakian and rooted up the Mede."

After the battle, the man was nowhere to be seen, and inquiry was made of the oracle.

"How spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all! Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great deed ne'er grows small.'"

With _Echetlos_ may be mentioned the Virgilian legend of _Pan and Luna_, a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that

"Verse of five words, each a boon: Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon."

_Clive_, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject, treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series. The story deals with an episode in the life of Clive, when, as a young man, he first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught cheating at cards. The poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a subtle analysis and presentation of the character of Clive. Its structure is quite in Browning's best manner: a central situation, illumined by "what double and treble reflection and refraction!" Like Balzac (whose _Honorine_, for instance, is constructed on precisely similar lines) Browning often increases the effect of his picture by setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one, related to it in some subtle way. The story of _Clive_ obtains emphasis, and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in figure of the old veteran who tells the tale. Scarcely anything in the poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old man, sitting, like Colonel Newcome, solitary in his house among his memories, with his boy away: "I and Clive were friends."

The Arabian tale of _Muléykeh_ is the most perfect and pathetic piece in the volume. It is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably clear, simple, yet elevated style. The end is among the great heroic things in poetry. Hóseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare, Muléykeh the Pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped. Duhl, the son of Sheybán, who envies Hóseyn and has endeavoured by every means, but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal her. He enters Hóseyn's tent noiselessly by night, saddles Muléykeh, and gallops away. In an instant Hóseyn is on the back of Buhéyseh, the Pearl's sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit.

"And Hóseyn--his blood turns flame, he has learned long since to ride, And Buhéyseh does her part,--they gain--they are gaining fast On the fugitive pair, and Duhl has Ed-Dárraj to cross and quit, And to reach the ridge El-Sabán,--no safety till that be spied! And Buhéyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last, For the Pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit.

She shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange and queer: Buhéyseh is mad with hope--beat sister she shall and must, Though Duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank. She is near now, nose by tail--they are neck by croup--joy! fear! What folly makes Hóseyn shout 'Dog Duhl, Damned son of the Dust, Touch the right ear and press with your foot my Pearl's left flank!'

And Duhl was wise at the word, and Muléykeh as prompt perceived Who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey, And a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore. And Hóseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved, Looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may: Then he turned Buhéyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore.

And, lo, in the sunrise, still sat Hóseyn upon the ground Weeping: and neighbours came, the tribesmen of Bénu-Asád In the vale of green Er-Rass, and they questioned him of his grief; And he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, Duhl had wound His way to the nest, and how Duhl rode like an ape, so bad! And how Buhéyseh did wonders, yet Pearl remained with the thief.

And they jeered him, one and all: 'Poor Hóseyn is crazed past hope! How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite! To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl, And here were Muléykeh again, the eyed like an antelope, The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!' 'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hóseyn: 'You never have loved my Pearl!'"

There remain _Pietro of Abano_[56] and _Doctor_ ----. The latter, a Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning's poems: it is rather farce than humour. The former is a fine piece of genuine grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and clever phrasing and rhyming. It is written in an elaborate comic metre of Browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music. The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "Teutonic grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.

The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.

"Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,"

Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be foisted upon himself. Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable.

"'Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!' Indeed? Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The book referred to in it is his principal work, _Conciliator differentiarum quæ inter philosophos et medicos versantur_. Mantua, 1472.]

29. JOCOSERIA.

[Published in March, 1883 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, pp. 165-266).]

The name _Jocoseria_ (mentioned by Browning in its original connection, Melander's "Jocoseria," in the notes to _Paracelsus_) expresses very cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and fusion of grave and gay. The book is not, as a whole, so intense or so brilliant as the first and second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, but one or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by anything in either volume.

The longest poem, though by no means the best is the imaginary Rabbinical legend of _Jochanan Hakkadosh_ (John the Saint), which Browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[57] "to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing dispersedly, in fragments of Rabbinical writing, [the name, 'Collection of many Lies,' follows in Hebrew,] from which I might have helped myself more liberally." It is written in _terza rima_, like _Doctor_ ---- in the second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, and is supposed to be told by "the Jew aforesaid" in order to "make amends and justify our Mishna." That it may to some extent do, but it seems to me that its effectiveness as an example of the serio-grotesque style would have been heightened by some metre less sober and placid than the _terza rima_; by rhythm and rhyme as audacious and characteristic as the rhythm and the rhymes of _Pietro of Abano_, for instance.

_Ixion_, a far finer poem than _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, is, no doubt, an equally sincere utterance of personal belief. The poem is a monologue, in unrhymed hexameters and pentameters. It presents the old myth in a new light. Ixion is represented as the Prometheus of man's righteous revolt against the tyranny of an unjust God. The poem is conceived in a spirit of intense earnestness, and worked out with great vigour and splendour of diction. For passion and eloquence nothing in it surpasses the finely culminating last lines, of which I can but tear a few, only too barbarously, from their context:--

"What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture Pain--and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope? What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle? Back must I fall, confess 'Ever the weakness I fled'? No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed! Zeus was Zeus--not Man: wrecked by his weakness I whirl. Out of the wreck I rise--past Zeus to the Potency o'er him! I--to have hailed him my friend! I--to have clasped her--my love! Pallid birth of my pain,--where light, where light is, aspiring Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"

While _Ixion_ is the noblest and most heroically passionate of these poems, _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_, is the most pregnant and suggestive. Browning has rarely excelled it in certain qualities, hardly found in any other poet, of pungency, novelty, and penetrating bitter-sweetness.

"ADAM, LILITH, AND EVE.

One day it thundered and lightened. Two women, fairly frightened, Sank to their knees, transformed, transfixed, At the feet of the man who sat betwixt; And 'Mercy!' cried each, 'If I tell the truth Of a passage in my youth!'

Said This: 'Do you mind the morning I met your love with scorning? As the worst of the venom left my lips, I thought, "If, despite this lie, he strips The mask from my soul with a kiss--I crawl, His slave,--soul, body and all!"'

Said That: 'We stood to be married; The priest, or someone, tarried; "If Paradise-door prove locked?" smiled you. I thought, as I nodded, smiling too, "Did one, that's away, arrive--nor late Nor soon should unlock Hell's gate!"'

It ceased to lighten and thunder. Up started both in wonder, Looked round, and saw that the sky was clear, Then laughed, 'Confess you believed us, Dear!' 'I saw through the joke!' the man replied They seated themselves beside."

Much of the same power is shown in _Cristina and Monaldeschi_,[58] a dramatic monologue with all the old vigour of Browning's early work of that kind; not only keen and subtle, but charged with a sharp electrical quality, which from time to time darts out with a sudden and unexpected shock. The style and tone are infused with a peculiar fierce irony. The metre is rapid and stinging, like the words of the vindictive queen as she hurries her treacherous victim into the hands of the assassins. There is dramatic invention in the very cadence:

"Ah, but how each loved each, Marquis! Here's the gallery they trod Both together, he her god, She his idol,--lend your rod, Chamberlain!--ay, there they are--'_Quis Separabit_?'--plain those two Touching words come into view, Apposite for me and you!"

_Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli_, a dramatic lyric of three verses, the pathetic utterance of an unloved loving woman's heart, is not dissimilar in style to _Cristina and Monaldeschi_. It would be unjust to Fuseli to name him Bottom, but only fair to Mary Wollstonecraft to call her Titania.

Of the remaining poems, _Donald_ ("a true story, repeated to Mr. Browning by one who had heard it from its hero, the so-called Donald, himself,"[59]) is a ballad, not at all in Browning's best style, but certainly vigorous and striking, directed against the brutalising influences of sport, as _Tray_ was directed against the infinitely worse brutalities of ignorant and indiscriminate vivisection. Its noble human sympathies and popular style appeal to a ready audience. _Solomon and Balkis_, though by no means among the best of Browning's comic poems, is a witty enough little tale from that inexhaustible repository, the Talmud. It is a dialogue between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, not "solely" nor at all "of things sublime." _Pambo_ is a bit of pointed fun, a mock-modest apology to critics. Finally, besides a musical little love-song named _Wanting is--What?_ we have in _Never the Time and the Place_ one of the great love-songs, not easily to be excelled, even in the work of Browning, for strength of spiritual passion and intensity of exultant and certain hope.

"NEVER THE TIME AND THE PLACE.

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together! This path--how soft to pace! This May--what magic weather! Where is the loved one's face? In a dream that loved one's face meets mine, But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign! O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man! Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? This path so soft to pace shall lead Thro' the magic of May to herself indeed! Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers: we-- Oh, close, safe, warm, sleep I and she, --I and she!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 57: This note contains three burlesque sonnets whose chief interest is, that they are, with the exception of the unclaimed sonnet printed in the _Monthly Repository_ in 1834, the first sonnets ever published by Browning.]

[Footnote 58: One can scarcely read this poem without recalling the superb and not unsimilar episode in prose of another "great dramatic poet," Landor's Imaginary Conversation between the Empress Catherine and Princess Dashkof.]

[Footnote 59: Mrs. Orr, _Handbook_, p. 313.]

30. FERISHTAH'S FANCIES.

[Published in November, 1884 (_Poetical Works_, 1898, Vol. XVI. pp. 1-92).]

_Ferishtah's Fancies_ consists of twelve sections, each an argument in an allegory, Persian by presentment, modern or universal in intention.[60] Lightly laid in between the sections, like flowers between the leaves, are twelve lyrics, mostly love songs addressed to a beloved memory, each lyric having a close affinity with the preceding "Fancy." A humorous lyrical prologue, and a passionate lyrical epilogue, complete the work. We learn from Mrs. Orr, that

"The idea of _Ferishtah's Fancies_ grew out of a fable by Pilpay, which Mr. Browning read when a boy. He ... put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the Dervish who is first introduced as a learner should reappear in the character of a teacher. Ferishtah's 'fancies' are the familiar illustrations by which his teachings are enforced."[61]

The book is Browning's _West-Eastern Divan_, and it is written at nearly the same age as Goethe's. But, though there is a good deal of local colour in the setting, no attempt, as the motto warns us, is made to reproduce Eastern thought. The "Persian garments" are used for a disguise, not as a habit; perhaps for the very reason that the thoughts they drape are of such intense personal sincerity. The drapery, however, is perfectly transparent, and one may read "Robert Browning" for "Dervish Ferishtah" _passim_.

The first two fancies (_The Eagle_ and _The Melon-Seller_) give the lessons which Ferishtah learnt, and which determined him to become a Dervish: all the rest are his own lessons to others. These deal severally with faith (_Shah Abbas_), prayer (_The Family_), the Incarnation (_The Sun_), the meaning of evil and of pain (_Mihrab Shah_), punishment present and future (_A Camel-Driver_), asceticism (_Two Camels_), gratefulness to God for small benefits (_Cherries_), the direct personal relation existing between man and God (_Plot-Culture_), the uncertain value of knowledge contrasted with the sure gain of love (_A Pillar at Sebzevah_), and, finally, in _A Bean-Stripe: also Apple Eating_, the problem of life: is it more good than evil, or more evil than good? The work is a serious attempt to grapple with these great questions, and is as important on its ethical as on its artistic side. Each argument is conveyed by means of a parable, often brilliant, often quaint, always striking and serviceable, and always expressed in scrupulously clear and simple language. The teaching, put more plainly and definitely, perhaps, with less intellectual disguise than usual, is the old unconquered optimism which, in Browning, is so unmistakably a matter of temperament.

The most purely delightful poetry in the volume will be found in the delicate and musical love-songs which brighten its pages. They are snatches of spontaneous and exquisite song, bird-notes seldom heard except from the lips of youth. Perhaps the most perfect is the first.

"Round us the wild creatures, overhead the trees, Underfoot the moss-tracks,--life and love with these! I to wear a fawn-skin, thou to dress in flowers: All the long lone Summer-day, that greenwood life of ours!

Rich-pavilioned, rather,--still the world without,-- Inside--gold-roofed silk-walled silence round about! Queen it thou in purple,--I, at watch and ward Couched beneath the columns, gaze, thy slave, love's guard!

So, for us no world? Let throngs press thee to me! Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! God is soul, souls I and thou: with souls should souls have place."

"With souls should souls have place," is, with Browning, the condensed expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers of his lyric, he has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has gone up and down among men, listening to that human music, and observing that human or divine comedy. He has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen. If it should be asked whether such work will live, there can be only one answer, and he has already given it:

"It lives, If precious be the soul of man to man."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 60: This is emphasized by the ingenious motto from _King Lear_: "You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed."]

[Footnote 61: _Handbook_, p. 321.]

31. PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY.

[Published in January 1887. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XVI., pp. 93-275.]

The method of the _Parleying_ is something of a new departure, and at the same time something of a reversion. It is a reversion towards the dramatic form of the monologue; but it is a new departure owing to the precise form assumed, that of a "parleying" or colloquy of the author with his characters. The persons with whom Browning parleys are representative men selected from the England, Holland, and Italy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The parleying with _Bernard de Mandeville_ (born at Dort, in Holland, 1670; died in London, 1733; author of _The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits_) takes up the optimistic arguments already developed in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and elsewhere, and preaches, through the dubious medium of the enigmatic fabulist, trust in the ordering of the world, confidence in discerning a "soul of goodness in things evil." _Daniel Bartoli_ ("a learned and ingenius writer," born at Florence, 1608; died at Rome, 1685; the historian of the Order of Jesuits) serves to point a moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of a true tale recounted by Browning, the graphic and brilliant story of the duke and the druggist's daughter. The parleying with _Christopher Smart_ (the author of the _Song to David_, born at Shipborne, in Kent, 1722; died in the King's Bench, 1770) is a penetrating and characteristic study in one of the great poetic problems of the eighteenth century, the problem of a "void and null" verse-writer who, at one moment only of his life, sang, as Browning reminds him,

"A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang, And stations you for once on either hand With Milton and with Keats."

_George Bubb Dodington_ (Lord Melcombe, born 1691; died 1762) stands as type of the dishonest politician, and in the course of a colloquy, which is really a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out, a mock serious essay in the way of a Superior Rogues' Guide or Instructions for Knaves, receives at once castigation and instruction. The parleying with _Francis Furini_ (born at Florence, 1600; died 1649) deals with its hero as a man, as artist and as priest; it contains some of Browning's noblest writing on art; and it touches on current and, indeed, continual controversies in its splendidly vigorous onslaught on the decriers of that supreme art which aims at painting men and women as God made them. _Gerard de Lairesse_ (born at Liége, in Flanders, 1640; died at Amsterdam 1711; famed not only for his pictures, but for his _Treatise on the Art of Painting_, composed after he had become blind) gives his name to a discussion on the artistic interpretation of nature, its change and advancement, and the deeper and truer vision which has displaced the mythological fancies of earlier painters and poets. The parleying with _Charles Avison_ (born at Newcastle, 1710; died there, 1770), the more than half forgotten organist-composer, embodies an inquiry, critical or speculative, into the position and function of music. All these poems are written in decasyllabic rhymed verse, with varied arrangement of the rhymes. They are introduced by a dialogue between Apollo and the Fates, and concluded by another between John Fust and his friends, both written in lyrical measures, both uniting deep seriousness of intention with capricious humour of form; the one wild and stormy as the great "Dance of Furies" in Gluck's _Orfeo_; the other quaint and grimly and sublimely grotesque as an old German print. _Gerard de Lairesse_ contains a charming little "Spring Song" of three stanzas; and _Charles Avison_ a sounding train-bands' chorus, written to the air of one of Avison's marches.

The volume as a whole is full of weight, brilliance, and energy; and it is not less notable for its fineness of versification, its splendour of sound and colour, than for its depth and acuteness of thought and keen grasp of intricate argument. Indeed, the quality which more than any other distinguishes it from Browning's later work is the careful writing of the verse, and the elaborate beauty of certain passages. Much of Browning's later work would be ill represented by a selection of the "purple patches." His strength has always lain, but of late has lain much more exclusively, in the _ensemble_. Here, however, there is not merely one passage of more than a hundred and fifty lines, the like of which (I do not say in every sense the equal, but certainly the like of which) we must go back to _Sordello_ or to _Paracelsus_ to find; but, again and again, wherever we turn, we meet with more than usually fine and impressive passages, single lines of more than usually exquisite quality. The glory of the whole collection is certainly the "Walk," or description, in rivalry with Gerard de Lairesse, of a whole day's changes, from sunrise to sunset. To equal it in its own way, we must look a long way back in our Browning, and nowhere out of Browning. Where all is good, any preference must seem partial; but perhaps nothing in it is finer than this picture of morning.

"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree Stir themselves from the stupor of the night And every strangled branch resumes its right To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge, While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, Each grass-blade's glory-glitter. Had I known The torrent now turned river?--masterful Making its rush o'er tumbled ravage--stone And stub which barred the froths and foams: no bull Ever broke bounds in formidable sport More overwhelmingly, till lo, the spasm Sets him to dare that last mad leap: report Who may--his fortunes in the deathly chasm That swallows him in silence! Rather turn Whither, upon the upland, pedestalled Into the broad day-splendour, whom discern These eyes but thee, supreme one, rightly called Moon-maid in heaven above and, here below, Earth's huntress-queen? I note the garb succinct Saving from smirch that purity of snow From breast to knee--snow's self with just the tint Of the apple-blossom's heart-blush. Ah, the bow Slack-strung her fingers grasp, where, ivory-linked Horn curving blends with horn, a moonlike pair Which mimic the brow's crescent sparkling so-- As if a star's live restless fragment winked Proud yet repugnant, captive in such hair! What hope along the hillside, what far bliss Lets the crisp hair-plaits fall so low they kiss Those lucid shoulders? Must a morn so blithe Needs have its sorrow when the twang and hiss Tell that from out thy sheaf one shaft makes writhe Its victim, thou unerring Artemis? Why did the chamois stand so fair a mark, Arrested by the novel shape he dreamed Was bred of liquid marble in the dark Depths of the mountain's womb which ever teemed With novel births of wonder? Not one spark Of pity in that steel-grey glance which gleamed At the poor hoof's protesting as it stamped Idly the granite? Let me glide unseen From thy proud presence: well may'st thou be queen Of all those strange and sudden deaths which damped So oft Love's torch and Hymen's taper lit For happy marriage till the maidens paled And perished on the temple-step, assailed By--what except to envy must man's wit Impute that sure implacable release Of life from warmth and joy? But death means peace."

32. ASOLANDO: FANCIES AND FACTS.

[Dated 1890, but published December 12, 1889. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XVII., pp. iv., 131.]

_Asolando_ (a name taken from the invented verb _Asolare_, "to disport in the open air") was published on the day of Browning's death. He died in Venice, and his body was brought to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year. The Abbey was invisible in the fog, and, inside, dim yellow fog filled all the roof, above the gas and the candles. The coffin, carried high, came into the church to the sound of processional music, and as one waited near the grave one saw the coffin and the wreaths on it, over the heads of the people, and heard, in Dr. Bridge's setting, the words: "He giveth his beloved sleep."

Reading _Asolando_ once more, and remembering that coffin one had looked down upon in the Abbey, only then quite feeling that all was indeed over, it is perhaps natural that the book should come to seem almost consciously testamentary, as if certain things in it had been really meant for a final leave-taking. The Epilogue is a clear, brave looking-forward to death, as to an event now close at hand, and imagined as actually accomplished. It breaks through for once, as if at last the occasion demanded it, a reticence never thus broken through before, claiming, with a supreme self-confidence, calmly, as an acknowledged right, the "Well done" of the faithful servant at the end of the long day's labour. In _Reverie_, in _Rephan_, and in other poems, the teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is the same joyous readiness to "aspire yet never attain;" the same delight in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the "wild joy of living," in woman, in art, in scholarship; and in _Rosny_ we have the vision of a hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, "That is best."

To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. Something like metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank verse of _Development_, the lyrical verse of the _Prologue_, and the third of the _Bad Dreams_, with their subtle comments and surmises on the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. But it is life itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in the youngest of Browning's books. The book will be not less welcome to those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in short pieces, and that even _The Ring and the Book_ would scarcely be an equivalent for the fifty _Men and Women_ of those two incomparable volumes of 1855. Nor is _Asolando_ without a further attractiveness to those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace.

"Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,"

as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession of faith. It is, indeed, _la Nuance_, the last fine shade, that Browning has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, _Summum Bonum_, _Poetics_, _a Pearl, a Girl_, and the others, so young-hearted, so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of _Flute Music, with an Accompaniment_. Simple and eager in _Dubiety_, daintily, prettily pathetic in _Humility_, more intense in _Speculative_, in the fourteen lines called _Now_, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal."

"Now.

Out of your whole life give but a moment: All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it,--so you ignore, So you make perfect the present,--condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense-- Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me-- Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,-- This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet-- The moment eternal--just that and no more-- When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core, While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"

Here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy, "unbodied" and "embodied," of any, of every lover; in several of the poems a more developed story is told or indicated. One of the finest pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called _Inapprehensiveness_, which condenses a whole tragedy into its thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as _My Last Duchess_. Only Heine, Browning, and George Meredith in _Modern Love_, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing, in a tone of what I may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of matter so difficult to handle. The poem is a mere incident, such as happens every day: we are permitted to overhear a scrap of trivial conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the "babbling runnel" of light talk. A study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the _Bad Dreams_: how fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man's remorse for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes love and repentance alike too late! With these may be named that other electric little poem, _Which?_ a study in love's casuistries, reminding one slightly of the finest of all Browning's studies in that kind, _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_.

It is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found. Such a poem as _Imperante Augusto natus est_ (strong, impressive, effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is incomparable, the dramatic monologues of _Men and Women_, and in particular with the _Epistle of Karshish_. In _Beatrice Signorini_ we have one of the old studies in lovers' casuistries; and it is told with gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it: "The pretty incident I put in rhyme." In the _Ponte dell' Angela, Venice_, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely "hitched into rhyme" (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which it most resembles. But there is something not precisely similar to anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank, beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as _Summum Bonum_, in which exquisite expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection. In most of Browning's love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more or less exceptional. It is to this that they owe their singular, penetrating quality of charm. But there is a charm of another kind, and a more generally appreciated one,

"that commonplace Perfection of honest grace,"

which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own. In the lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. Here is a poem called _Speculative_:

"Others may need new life in Heaven-- Man, Nature, Art--made new, assume! Man with new mind old sense to leaven, Nature--new light to clear old gloom, Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray: 'Fugitive as precious-- Minutes which passed--return, remain! Let earth's old life once more enmesh us, You with old pleasure, me--old pain, So we but meet nor part again.'"

How hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal feeling! the lover's intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for herself, the "little human woman full of sin," for herself, unchanged, unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven. To the lover in _Summum Bonum_ all the delight of life has been granted; it lies in "the kiss of one girl," and that has been his. In the delicious little poem called _Humility_, the lover is content in being "proudly less," a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love's feast, laid for another. In _White Witchcraft_ love has outlived injury; in the first of the _Bad Dreams_ it has survived even heart-break.

"Last night I saw you in my sleep: And how your charm of face was changed! I asked 'Some love, some faith you keep?' You answered, 'Faith gone, love estranged.'

Whereat I woke--a twofold bliss: Waking was one, but next there came This other: 'Though I felt, for this, My heart break, I loved on the same.'"

Not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only Browning could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this last volume of a poet preeminently subtle. This characteristic of simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire, in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of _The Pope and the Net_, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it.

There are other light ballads, as different in merit as _Muckle-mouth Meg_ on the one hand and _The Cardinal and the Dog_ and _The Bean-Feast_ on the other, with snatches of moralising story, as cutting as _Arcades Ambo_, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging as _The Lady and the Painter_, which is a last word written for love of birds and of the beauty of nakedness. One among these poems, _The Cardinal and the Dog_, indistinguishable in style from the others, was written fifty years earlier. It is as if the poet, taking leave of that "British public" which had "loved him not," and to whose caprices he had never condescended, was, after all, anxious to "part friends." The result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained.

So far I wrote in 1889, when Browning was only just dead, and I went on, in words which I keep for their significance to-day, because time has already brought in its revenges, and Browning has conquered. That Browning, I said then, could ever become a popular poet, in the sense in which Tennyson is popular, must be seen by everyone to be an impossibility. His poetry is obviously written for his own pleasure, without reference to the tastes of the bulk of readers. The very titles of his poems, the barest outline of their prevailing subjects, can but terrify or bewilder an easy-going public, which prefers to take its verse somnolently, at the season of the day when the newspaper is too substantial, too exciting. To appreciate Browning you must read with your eyes wide open. His poetry is rarely obscure, but it is often hard. It deals by preference with hard matter, with "men and the ideas of men," with life and thought. Other poets before him have written with equally independent aims; but had Milton, had Wordsworth, a larger and more admiring audience in his own day? If the audience of Milton and of Wordsworth has widened, it would be the merest paradox to speak of either Milton or Wordsworth as a popular poet. By this time, every one at least knows them by name, though it would be a little unkind to consider too curiously how large a proportion of the people who know them by name have read many consecutive lines of _Paradise Lost_ or _The Excursion_. But to be so generally known by name is something, and it has not yet fallen to the lot of Browning. "Browning is dead," said a friend of mine, a hunting man, to another hunting man, a friend of his. "Dear me, is he?" said the other doubtfully; "did he 'come out' your way?" By the time Browning has been dead as long as Wordsworth, I do not think anyone will be found to make these remarks. Death, not only from the Christian standpoint, is the necessary pathway to immortality. As it is, Browning's fame has been steadily increasing, at first slowly enough, latterly with even a certain rapidity. From the first he has had the exceptional admiration of those whose admiration is alone really significant, whose applause can alone be really grateful to a self-respecting writer. No poet of our day, no poet, perhaps, of any day, has been more secure in the admiring fellowship of his comrades in letters. And of all the poets of our day, it is he whose influence seems to be most vital at the moment, most pregnant for the future. For the time, he has also an actual sort of church of his own. The churches pass, with the passing away of the worshippers; but the spirit remains, and must remain if it has once been so vivid to men, if it has once been a refuge, a promise of strength, a gift of consolation. And there has been all this, over and above its supreme poetic quality, in the vast and various work, Shakesperean in breadth, Shakesperean in penetration, of the poet whose last words, the appropriate epilogue of a lifetime, were these:

"At the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, --Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel --Being--who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed,--fight on, fare ever There as here!'"

APPENDIX

I

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BROWNING

The following list of the published writings of Robert Browning, in the order of their publication, has been compiled mainly from Dr. Furnivall's very complete and serviceable Browning Bibliography, contained in the first part of the Browning Society's Papers (pp. 21-71). Volumes of "Selections" are not noticed in this list: there have been many in England, some in Germany, and in the Tauchnitz Collection, and a large number in America, where an edition of the complete works was first published, in seven volumes, by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

1. PAULINE: a Fragment of a Confession. London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street. 1833, pp. 71.

2. PARACELSUS. By Robert Browning. London. Published by Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange. MDCCCXXXV., pp. xi., 216.

3. Five Poems contributed to _The Monthly Repository_ (edited by W.J. Fox), 1834-6; all signed "Z."--I. Sonnet ("Eyes, calm beside thee, Lady, couldst thou know!"), Vol. VIII., New Series, 1834, p. 712. Not reprinted. II. The King--(Vol. IX., New Series, pp. 707-8). Reprinted, with six fresh lines, and revised throughout, in _Pippa Passes_ (1841), where it is Pippa's song in Part III.-III., IV. Porphyria and Johannes Agricola. (Vol. X., pp. 43-6.) Reprinted in _Dramatic Lyrics_ (1842) under the title of _Madhouse Cells_.--V. Lines. (Vol. X., pp. 270-1.) Reprinted, revised, in _Dramatis Personæ_ (1864) as the first six stanzas of § VI. of _James Lee_.

4. STRAFFORD: an Historical Tragedy. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, Paternoster Row. 1837, pp. vi., 131.

5. SORDELLO. By Robert Browning. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXL., pp. iv., 253.

6. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. I.--PIPPA PASSES. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLI., pp. 16. (Price 6_d_., sewed.)

7. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. II.--KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII., pp. 20. (Price 1_s_., sewed).

8. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. III.--DRAMATIC LYRICS. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII., pp. 16, (Price 1_s_., sewed.)

Contents:--1. Cavalier Tunes: I. Marching Along; II. Give a Rouse; III. My Wife Gertrude [Boot and Saddle, 1863]. 2. Italy and France: I. Italy [My Last Duchess.--Ferrara, 1863]; II. France [Count Gismond.--Aix in Provence, 1863]. 3. Camp and Cloister: I. Camp (French) [Incident of the French Camp, 1863]; II. Cloister (Spanish) [Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, 1863]. 4. In a Gondola. 5. Artemis Prologuizes. 6. Waring. 7. Queen Worship: I. Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli; II. Cristina. 8. Madhouse Cells: I. [Johannes Agricola, 1863]; II. [Porphyria's Lover, 1863]. 9. Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr. 10. The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

9. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. IV--THE RETURN OF THE DRUSES. A Tragedy in Five Acts. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLIII., pp. 19. (Price 1_s_., sewed.)

10. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. V.--A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON. A Tragedy in Three Acts. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLIII., pp. 16. (Price 1_s_., sewed.)

11. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. VI.--COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY. A Play in Five Acts. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLIV., pp. 20. (Price 1_s_., sewed.)

12. Eight Poems contributed to _Hood's Magazine_, June 1844 to April 1845:--I. The Laboratory (Ancien Régime). (June 1844, Vol. I., No. vi., pp. 513-14). Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845), as the first of two poems called "France and Spain."--II., III. Claret and Tokay (_id._ p. 525). Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).--IV., V. Garden Fancies: 1. The Flower's Name; 2. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis. (July 1844, Vol. II., No. vii., pp. 45-48.) Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).--VI. The Boy and the Angel. (August 1844, Vol. II., No. viii., pp. 140-2.) Reprinted, revised, and with five fresh couplets, in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).--VII. The Tomb at St. Praxed's (Rome, 15--) (March 1845, Vol. III., No. iii., pp. 237-39). Reprinted in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845)--VIII. The Flight of the Duchess. (April 1845, Vol. III., No. iv., pp. 313-18.) Part first only, § 1-9; reprinted, with the remainder added, in _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845).

13. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. VII.--DRAMATIC ROMANCES AND LYRICS. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLV., pp. 24. (Price 2_s_., sewed.)

Contents:--1. How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. 2. Pictor Ignotus [Florence, 15--]. 3. Italy in England [The Italian in England, 1849]. 4. England in Italy, _Piano di Sorrento_ [The Englishman in Italy, 1849]. 5. The Lost Leader. 6. The Lost Mistress. 7. Home Thoughts from Abroad. 8. The Tomb at St. Praxed's [The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church, 1863]. 9. Garden Fancies: I. The Flower's Name; II Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis. 10. France and Spain: I. The Laboratory (_Ancien Régime_); II. The Confessional, 11. The Flight of the Duchess. 12. Earth's Immortalities. 13. Song. 14. The Boy and the Angel. 15. Night and Morning: I. Night [Meeting at Night, 1863], II. Morning [Parting at Morning, 1863], 16. Claret and Tokay [Nationality in Drinks, 1863]. 17. Saul. 18. Time's Revenges. 19. The Glove (Peter Ronsard _loquitur_).

14. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. VIII. and last.--LURIA; and A SOUL'S TRAGEDY. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLVI., pp. 32. (Price 2_s_. 6_d_., sewed.)

15. POEMS. By Robert Browning. In two volumes. A new edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand. 1849, pp. vii., 386; viii., 416. These two volumes contain _Paracelsus_ and _Bells and Pomegranates_.

16. CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY. A Poem. By Robert Browning. London: Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand. 1850, pp. iv., 142.

17. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an INTRODUCTORY ESSAY, by Robert Browning. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1852, pp. vi., 165. (Introductory Essay, pp., 1-44.)

These so-called Letters of Shelley proved to be forgeries, and the volume was suppressed. Browning's essay has been reprinted by the Browning Society, and, later, by the Shelley Society. See No. 58 below. Its value to students of Shelley is in no way impaired by its chance connection with the forged letters, to which it barely alludes.

18. TWO POEMS. By Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. London: Chapman and Hall. 1854, pp. 16.

This pamphlet contains "A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London," by E. B. B., and "The Twins," by R. B. The two poems were printed by Miss Arabella Barrett, Mrs. Browning's sister, for a bazaar in aid of a "Refuge for Young Destitute Girls," one of the earliest of its kind, founded by her in 1854.

19. CLEON. By Robert Browning. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 1855, pp. 23.

20. THE STATUE AND THE BUST. By Robert Browning. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 1855, pp. 22.

21. MEN AND WOMEN. By Robert Browning. In two volumes. London: Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly. 1855. Vol. I., pp. iv., 260; Vol. II., pp. iv., 241.

Vol. I. Contents:--1. Love among the Ruins. 2. A Lovers' Quarrel. 3. Evelyn Hope. 4. Up at a Villa--Down in the City (as distinguished by an Italian person of Quality). 5. A Woman's Last Word. 6. Fra Lippo Lippi. 7. A Toccata of Galuppi's. 8. By the Fire-side. 9. Any Wife to Any Husband. 10. An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. 11. Mesmerism. 12. A Serenade at the Villa. 13. My Star. 14. Instans Tyrannus. 15. A Pretty Woman. 16. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." 17. Respectability. 18. A Light Woman. 19. The Statue and the Bust. 20. Love in a Life. 21. Life in a Love. 22. How it Strikes a Contemporary. 23. The Last Ride Together. 24. The Patriot--_An Old Story_. 25. Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. 26. Bishop Blougram's Apology. 27. Memorabilia.

Vol. II. Contents:--1. Andrea del Sarto (Called the Faultless Painter). 2. Before. 3. After. 4. In Three Days. 5. In a Year. 6. Old Pictures in Florence. 7. In a Balcony. 8. Saul. 9. "De Gustibus." 10. Women and Roses. 11. Protus. 12. Holy-Cross Day. 13. The Guardian Angel: a Picture at Fano. 14. Cleon. 15. The Twins. 16. Popularity. 17. The Heretic's Tragedy: A Middle Age Interlude. 18. Two in the Campagna. 19. A Grammarian's Funeral. 20. One Way of Love. 21. Another Way of Love. 22. "Transcendentalism": a Poem in Twelve Books. 23. Misconceptions. 24. One Word More: To E. B. B.

22. Ben Karshook's Wisdom. (Five stanzas of four lines each, signed "Robert Browning," and dated "Rome, April 27, 1854")--_The Keepsake_. 1856. (Edited by Miss Power, and published by David Bogue, London.) P. 16.

This poem has never been reprinted by the author in any of his collected volumes, but is to be found in Furnivall's _Browning Bibliography_.

23. May and Death.--_The Keepsake_, 1857, p. 164. Reprinted, with some new readings, in _Dramatis Personæ_ (1864).

24. THE POETICAL WORKS of Robert Browning. Third edition. Vol. I., pp. x., 432. Lyrics, Romances, Men and Women. Vol. II., pp. 605. Tragedies and other Plays. Vol. III., pp. 465. Paracelsus, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, Sordello. London: Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly. 1863.

There are no new poems in this edition, but the pieces originally published under the titles of _Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Lyrics and Romances_, and _Men and Women_, are redistributed. This arrangement has been preserved in all subsequent editions. The table of contents below will thus show the present position of the poems.

Vol. I, Contents--LYRICS:--1. Cavalier Tunes. 2. The Lost Leader. 3. "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." 4. Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr. 5. Nationality in Drinks. 6. Garden Fancies.[62] 7. The Laboratory. 8. The Confessional. 9. Cristina. 10. The Lost Mistress. 11. Earth's Immortalities. 12. Meeting at Night. 13. Parting at Morning. 14. Song. 15. A Woman's Last Word. 16. Evelyn Hope. 17, Love among the Ruins. 18. A Lovers' Quarrel. 19. Up at a Villa--Down in the City. 20. A Toccata of Galuppi's. 21. Old Pictures in Florence, 22. "De Gustibus ----." 23. Home-Thoughts from Abroad. 24. Home-Thoughts from the Sea. 25. Saul. 26. My Star. 27. By the Fire-side. 28. Any Wife to Any Husband. 29. Two in the Campagna. 30. Misconceptions. 31. A Serenade at the Villa. 32. One Way of Love. 33. Another Way of Love. 34. A Pretty Woman. 35. Respectability. 36. Love in a Life. 37. Life in a Love. 38. In Three Days. 39. In a Year. 40. Women and Roses. 41. Before. 42. After. 43. The Guardian Angel. 44. Memorabilia. 45. Popularity. 46. Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.

ROMANCES:--1. Incident of the French Camp. 2. The Patriot. 3. My Last Duchess. 4. Count Gismond. 5. The Boy and the Angel. 6. Instans Tyrannus. 7. Mesmerism. 8. The Glove. 9. Time's Revenges. 10. The Italian in England. 11. The Englishman in Italy. 12. In a Gondola. 13. Waring. 14. The Twins. 15. A Light Woman. 16. The Last Ride Together. 17. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. 18. The Flight of the Duchess. 19. A Grammarian's Funeral. 20. Johannes Agricola in Meditation. 21. The Heretic's Tragedy. 22. Holy-Cross Day. 23. Protus. 24. The Statue and the Bust. 25. Porphyria's Lover. 26. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."

MEN AND WOMEN:--1. "Transcendentalism." 2. How it strikes a Contemporary. 3. Artemis Prologuizes. 4. An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. 5. Pictor Ignotus. 6. Fra Lippo Lippi. 7. Andrea del Sarto. 8. The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church. 9. Bishop Blougram's Apology. 10. Cleon. 11. Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli. 12. One Word More.

Vol. II. Contents--TRAGEDIES AND OTHER PLAYS:--1. Pippa Passes. 2. King Victor and King Charles. 3. The Return of the Druses. 4. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. 5. Colombe's Birthday. 6. Luria. 7. A Soul's Tragedy. 8. In a Balcony. 9. Strafford.

Vol. III. Contents:--1. Paracelsus, 2. Christmas Eve and Easter Day. 3. Sordello.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 62: The _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_ is here included as No. III. In the edition of 1868 it follows under a separate heading. This is the only point of difference between the two editions.]

25. GOLD HAIR: A Legend of Pornic. By Robert Browning. (With imprint--London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street and Charing Cross) 1864, pp. 15.

26. Prospice.--_Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XIII., June 1864, p. 694.

27. DRAMATIS PERSONÆ. By Robert Browning. London: Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly. 1864, pp. vi., 250.

Contents:--1. James Lee [James Lee's Wife, 1868]. 2. Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic. 3. The Worst of it. 4. Dîs aliter visum; or, Le Byron de nos jours. 5. Too Late. 6. Abt Vogler. 7. Rabbi ben Ezra. 8. A Death in the Desert. 9. Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island. 10. Confessions. 11. May and Death. 12. Prospice. 13. Youth and Art. 14. A Face. 15. A Likeness. 16. Mr Sludge "The Medium." 17. Apparent Failure. 18. Epilogue.

28. Orpheus and Eurydice.--_Catalogue of the Royal Academy_, 1864, p. 13. No. 217. A picture by F. Leighton.

Printed as prose. It is reprinted in _Poetical Works_, 1868, where it is included in _Dramatis Personæ_. The same volume contains a new stanza of eight lines, entitled "Deaf and Dumb: a Group by Woolner." This was written in 1862 for Woolner's partly-draped group of Constance and Arthur, the deaf and dumb children of Sir Thomas Fairbairn, which was exhibited in the International Exhibition of 1862.

29. THE POETICAL WORKS of Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 15 Waterloo Place. 1868. Vol. I., pp. viii., 310. Pauline--Paracelsus--Strafford. Vol. II., pp. iv., 287. Sordello--Pippa Passes. Vol. III., pp. iv., 305. King Victor and King Charles--Dramatic Lyrics--The Return of the Druses. Vol. IV., pp. iv., 321. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon--Colombe's Birthday--Dramatic Romances. Vol. V., pp. iv., 321. A Soul's Tragedy--Luria--Christmas Eve and Easter Day--Men and Women. Vol. VI., pp. iv., 233. In a Balcony--Dramatis Personæ. This edition retains the redistribution of the minor poems in the edition of 1863, already mentioned.

30. THE RING AND THE BOOK. By Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. In four volumes. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1868-9. Vol. I., pp. iv., 245; Vol. II., pp. iv., 251; Vol. III., pp. iv., 250; Vol. IV., pp. iv., 235.

31. Hervé Riel--_Cornhill Magazine_, March 1871, pp. 257-60. Reprinted in _Pacchiarotto, and other Poems_ (1876).

32. BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE: Including a Transcript from Euripides. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1871, pp. iv., 170.

33. PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU: SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1871, pp. iv., 148.

34. FIFINE AT THE FAIR. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1872, pp. xii., 171.

35. RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY: OR, TURF AND TOWERS. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1873, pp. iv., 282.

36. ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY: Including a Transcript from Euripides: Being the LAST ADVENTURE OF BALAUSTION. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1875, pp. viii., 366.

37. THE INN ALBUM. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1875, pp. iv., 211.

38. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other Poems. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1876, pp. viii., 241.

Contents:--1. Prologue. 2. Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper. 3. At the "Mermaid." 4. House. 5. Shop. 6. Pisgah-Sights (1, 2). 7. Fears and Scruples. 8. Natural Magic. 9. Magical Nature. 10. Bifurcation. 11. Numpholeptos. 12. Appearances. 13. St. Martin's Summer. 14. Hervé Riel. 15. A Forgiveness. 16. Cenciaja. 17. Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial (a Reminiscence of A.D. 1676). 18. Epilogue.

39. THE AGAMEMNON OF ÆSCHYLUS. Transcribed by Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1877, pp. xi. (Preface, v.-xi.), 148.

40. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1878, pp. viii., 201.

Contents:--1. Prologue, 2. La Saisiaz (pp. 5-82). The Two Poets of Croisic (pp. 87-191). Epilogue.

41. Song. ("The Blind Man to the Maiden said")--_The Hour will come_. By Wilhelmine von Hillern. Translated from the German by Clara Bell. London, 1879, Vol. II., p. 174. Not reprinted.

42. "Oh, Love, Love": Translation from the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides. (Eighteen lines, dated "Dec. 18, 1878"). Contributed to Prof. J.P. Mahaffy's _Euripides_ ("Classical Writers." Macmillan, 1879). P. 116.

43. DRAMATIC IDYLS. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1879, pp. vi., 143.

Contents:--1. Martin Relph. 2. Pheidippides. 3. Halbert and Hob. 4. Ivàn Ivànovitch. 5. Tray. 6. Ned Bratts.

44. DRAMATIC IDYLS. Second Series. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1880, pp. viii., 149.

Contents:--Prologue. 1. Echetlos. 2. Clive. 3. Muléykeh. 4. Pietro of Abano. 5. Doctor ----. 6. Pan and Luna. Epilogue.

45. Ten New Lines to "Epilogue."--_Scribner's Century Magazine_, November 1882, pp. 159-60. Lines written in an autograph album, October 14, 1880. Printed in the _Century_ without Browning's consent. Reprinted in the first issue of the Browning Society's Papers, Part III., p. 48, but withdrawn from the second issue.

46. JOCOSERIA. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1883, pp. viii., 143.

Contents:--1. Wanting is--What? 2. Donald. 3. Solomon and Balkis. 4. Cristina and Monaldeschi. 5. Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli. 6. Adam, Lilith, and Eve. 7. Ixion. 8. Jochanan Hakkadosh. 9. Never the Time and the Place. 10. Pambo.

47. Sonnet on Goldoni (dated "Venice, Nov. 27, 1883").--_Pall Mall Gazette_, December 8, 1883, p. 2. Written for the Album of the Committee of the Goldoni Monument at Venice, and inserted on the first page. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part V. p. 98.*

48. Paraphrase from Horace.--_Pall Mall Gazette_, December 13, 1883, p. 6. Four lines, written impromptu for Mr. Felix Moscheles. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part V., p. 99.*

49. Helen's Tower: Sonnet (Dated "April 26, 1870").--_Pall Mall Gazette_, December 28, 1883, p. 2. Reprinted in Browning Society's Papers, Part V., p. 97.* Written for the Earl of Dufferin, who built a tower in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, on a rock on his estate, at Clandeboye, Ireland, and originally printed in the later copies of a privately printed pamphlet called _Helen's Tower_. Lord Tennyson's lines, written on the same occasion, appeared a little previously in _The Leisure Hour_.

50. The Divine Order, and other Sermons and Addresses. By the late Thomas Jones. Edited by Brynmor Jones, LL.B. With INTRODUCTION by Robert Browning. London: W. Isbister. 1884. The introduction is on pp. xi.-xiii.

51. Sonnet on Rawdon Brown. (Dated "November 28, 1883").--_Century Magazine_, "Bric-à-brac" column, February 1884. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part V., p. 132.* Written at Venice, on an apocryphal story relating to the late Mr Rawdon Brown, who "went to Venice for a short visit, with a definite object in view, and ended by staying forty years."

52. The Founder of the Feast: Sonnet. (Dated "April 5, 1884").--_The World_, April 16, 1884. Inscribed by Browning in the Album presented to Mr Arthur Chappell, director of the St. James's Hall Saturday and Monday Popular Concerts. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part VII., p. 18.*

53. The Names: Sonnet on Shakespeare. (Dated "March 12, 1884").--_Shakespere Show Book_, May 29, 1884, p. 1. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part V., p. 105.*

54. FERISHTAH'S FANCIES. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1884, pp. viii., 143. Each blank verse "Fancy" is followed by a short lyric.

Contents:--Prologue. Ferishtah's Fancies: 1. The Eagle. 2. The Melon-seller. 3. Shah Abbas. 4. The Family. 5. The Sun. 6. Mihrab Shah. 7. A Camel-Driver. 8. Two Camels 9. Cherries. 10. Plot-Culture, 11. A Pillar at Sebzevah. 12. A Bean Stripe: also Apple-Eating. Epilogue.

55. Why I am a Liberal: Sonnet.--_Why I am a Liberal_, edited by Andrew Reid. London: Cassell and Co. 1885. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part VII., p. 92.*

54. Spring Song.--_The New Amphion_; being the book of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, University Press. 1886. The poem is on p. 1. Reprinted in _Parleyings_, p. 189.

55. Prefatory Note to _Poems_ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1887. Three pages, unnumbered.

56. Memorial Lines, for Memorial of the Queen's Jubilee, in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster. 1887. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers, Part X., p. 234.*

57. PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY: to wit, Bernard de Mandeville, Daniel Bartoli, Christopher Smart, George Bubb Dodington, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison. Introduced by a Dialogue between Apollo and the Fates, concluded by another between John Fust and his Friends. By Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 15 Waterloo Place. 1887, pp. viii., 268. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XVI., pp. 93-275.)

Contents:--Apollo and the Fates--a Prologue. Parleyings: 1. With Bernard de Mandeville. 2. With Daniel Bartoli. 3. With Christopher Avison. 4. With George Bubb Dodington. 5. With Francis Furini. 6. With Gerard de Lairesse. 7. With Charles Avison. Fust and his Friends--an Epilogue.

58. An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Robert Browning. Being a Reprint of the Introductory Essay prefixed to the volume of [25 spurious] Letters of Shelley, published by Edward Moxon in 1852. Edited by W. Tyas Harden. London: Published for the Shelley Society by Reeves and Turner, 196 Strand, 1888, pp. 27. See No. 17 above.

59. To Edward Fitzgerald. (Dated July 8, 1889).--_The Athenæum_, No. 3,220, July 13, 1889, p. 64. Reprinted in the Browning Society's Papers,