Mr. Browning knows himself a single point in the creative series of effect and cause: at the same moment one and the other: all behind and before him a blank. Or, more helpless still, he is the rush, floated by a current, of which the whence and whither are independent of it, and which may land it to strike root again, or cast it ashore a wreck. He asks himself, as he is whirled on his "brief, blind voyage" down the stream of life, which of these fates it has in store for him. Knowing this, that God and the soul exist—no less than this, and no more—he asks himself whether he is justified in believing that, because his present existence is beyond a doubt, its renewal is beyond doubt also: that the current, which has brought him thus far, will land him, not in destruction, but in another life.

"Everything," he declares, "in my experience—and I speak only of my own—testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. The strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. The soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. Help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have taken for such. Every sweet brings its bitter, every light its shade; love is cut short by death:"—

"I must say—or choke in silence—'Howsoever came my fate, 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! Such were God: and was it goodness that the good within my range Or had evil in admixture or grew evil's self by change? Wisdom—that becoming wise meant making slow and sure advance From a knowledge proved in error to acknowledged ignorance? Power? 'tis just the main assumption reason most revolts at! power Unavailing for bestowment on its creature of an hour, Man, of so much proper action rightly aimed and reaching aim, So much passion,—no defect there, no excess, but still the same,— As what constitutes existence, pure perfection bright as brief For yon worm, man's fellow-creature, on yon happier world—its leaf! No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute: Goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!" (vol. xiv. p. 183.)

"If we regard this life as final, we must relinquish our conception of the power of God: for His work is then open to human judgment, in the light of which it yields only imperfect results."

"But let us once assume that our present state is one of probation, intended by God as such: and every difficulty is solved. Evil is no longer a mark of failure in the execution of the Divine Scheme: it becomes essential to it; my experience indeed represents it as such. I cannot conceive evil as abolished without abrogation of the laws of life. For it is not only bound up with all the good of life; it is often its vehicle. Gain is enhanced by recent loss. Ignorance places us nearest to knowledge. Beauty is most precious, truth most potent, where ugliness and falsehood prevail; and what but the loss of Love teaches us what its true value has been?"

"May I then accept the conclusion that this life will be supplemented by a better one?"

Mr. Browning initiates his final inquiry by declaring that he will accept only the testimony of fact. He rejects surmise, he seeks no answer in the beauties or in the voices of nature; none in the minds of his fellow-men; none even in the depths of his sentient self with its "aspiration" and "reminiscence:" its plausible assurances that God would be "unjust," and man "wronged," if a second life were not granted to us.

And here he seems for a moment to deny, what he has elsewhere stated, and everywhere implied, in the poem: that his own spirit must be to him, despite its isolation and weakness, the one messenger of Divine truth.

But he is only saying the same thing in a different way. He rejects the spontaneous utterance of his own spirit; but relies on its conclusions. He rejects it as pleader; but constitutes it judge. And this distinction is carried out in a dialogue, in which Fancy speaks for the spontaneous self; Reason for the judicial—the one making its thrusts, and the other parrying them. The question at issue has, however, slightly shifted its ground; and we find ourselves asking: not, "is the Soul immortal?" but "what would be the consequence to life of its being proved so?"

FANCY. "The soul exists after death. I accept the surmise as certainty: and would see it put to use during life."

REASON. "The 'use' of it will be that the wise man will die at once: since death, in the absence of any supernatural law to the contrary, must be clear gain. The soul must fare better when it has ceased to be thwarted by the body; and we have no reason to suppose that the obstructions which have their purpose in this life would be renewed in a future one. Are we happy? death rescues our happiness from its otherwise certain decay. Are we sad? death cures the sadness. Is life simply for us a weary compromise between hope and fear, between failure and attainment? death is still the deliverer. It must come some day. Why not invoke it in a painless form when the first cloud appears upon our sky?"

FANCY. "Then I concede this much: the certainty of the future life shall be saddled with the injunction to live out the present, or accept a proportionate penalty."

REASON. "In that case the wise man will live. But whether the part he chooses in it be that of actor or of looker-on, he will endure his life with indifference. Relying on the promises of the future, he will take success or failure as it comes, and accept ignorance as a matter of course."

FANCY. "I concede more still. Man shall not only be compelled to live: he shall know the value of life. He shall know that every moment he spends in it is gain or loss for the life to come—that every act he performs involves reward or punishment in it."

REASON. "Then you abolish good and evil in their relation to man; for you abolish freedom of choice. No man is good because he obeys a law so obvious and so stringent as to leave him no choice; and such would be the moral law, if punishment were demonstrated as following upon the breach of it; reward on its fulfilment. Man is free, in his present state, to choose between good and evil—free therefore to be good; because he may believe, but has no demonstrated certainty, that his future welfare depends on it."

It is thus made clear that only in man's present state of limited knowledge is a life of probation conceivable; while only on the hypothesis that this life is one of probation, can that of a future existence be maintained. Mr. Browning ends where he began, with a hope, which is practically a belief, because to his mind the only thinkable approach to it.

A vivid description of the scenes amidst which the tragedy took place accompanies this discussion.

"CLEON" is a protest against the inadequacy of the earthly life; and the writer is supposed to be one of those Greek poets or thinkers to whom St. Paul alludes, in a line quoted from Aratus in the Acts, and which stands at the head of the poem. Cleon believes in Zeus under the attributes of the one God; but he sees nothing in his belief to warrant the hope of immortality; and his love of life is so intense and so untiring that this fact is very grievous to him.

He is stating his case to an imaginary king—Protus—his patron and friend; whose convictions are much the same as his own, but who thinks him in some degree removed from the common lot: since his achievements in philosophy and in art must procure him not only a more perfect existence, but in one sense a more lasting one. Cleon protests against this idea.

"He has," he admits, "done all which the King imputes to him. If he has not been a Homer, a Pheidias, or a Terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing a smaller man."

"But his life has not been the more perfect on that account. Perfection exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is unconscious, but also self-sufficing. To grow in consciousness is to grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather than advance, in the physical power of attaining it. Man's soul expands; his 'physical recipiency' remains for ever bounded."

"Nor are his works a source of life to him either now or for the future. The conception of youth and strength and wisdom is not its reality: the knowing (and depicting) what joy is, is not the possession of it. And the surviving of his work, when he himself is dead, is but a mockery the more."

It is all so horrible that he sometimes imagines another life, as unlimited in capability, as this in the desire, for joy, and dreams that Zeus has revealed it. "But he has not revealed it, and therefore it will not be." St. Paul is preaching at this very time, and Protus sends a letter to be forwarded to him; but Cleon does not admit that knowledge can reside in a "barbarian Jew;" and gently rebukes his royal friend for inclining to such doctrine, which, as he has gathered from one who heard it, "can be held by no sane man."

Cleon constantly uses the word soul as antithesis to body: but he uses it in its ancient rather than its modern sense, as expressing the sentient life, not the spiritual; and this perhaps explains the anomaly of his believing that it is independent of the lower physical powers, and yet not destined to survive them.

The EPISTLE of Karshish is addressed to a certain Abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the case of Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no other than God: who for love's sake had taken human form, and worked and died for men. Karshish regards the madness of this idea as beyond rational doubt: but he is perplexed and haunted by its consistency: by the manner in which this supposed vision of the Heavenly life has transformed, even inverted the man's judgment of earthly things. He combats the impression as best he can: recounts his scientific discoveries—the new plants, minerals, sicknesses, or cures to which his travels in Judea have introduced him; half apologizes for his digression from these more important matters; tries to excuse the hold which Lazarus has taken upon him by the circumstances in which they met; and breaks out at last in this agitated appeal to Abib and the truth:—

"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—

* * * * *

The madman saith He said so: it is strange." (vol. iv. p. 198.)

The solitary sage alluded to is of course imaginary. Like the doubtful messenger to whom the letter will be entrusted, he helps to mark the incidental character with which Karshish strives to invest his "experience."

"CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS" carries us into an opposite sphere of thought. It has for its text these words from Psalm 50: Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: and is the picture of an acute but half savage mind, building up the Deity on its own pattern. Caliban is much exercised by the government of the world, and by the probable nature of its ruler; and he has niched an hour from his tasks, on a summer noon, when Prospero and Miranda are taking his diligence upon trust, to go and sprawl full length in the mud of some cave, and talk the problem out. The attitude is described, as his reflections are carried on, in his own words; but he speaks as children do, in the third person.

Caliban worships Setebos, god of the Patagonians, as did his mother before him; but her creed was the higher of the two, because it included what his does not: the idea of a future life. He differs from her also in a more original way. For she held that a greater power than Setebos had made the world, leaving Setebos merely to "vex" it; while he contends that whoever made the world and its weakness, did so for the pleasure of vexing it himself; and that this greater power, the "Quiet," if it really exists, is above pain or pleasure, and had no motive for such a proceeding.

Setebos is thus, according to Caliban, a secondary divinity. He may have been created by the Quiet, or may have driven it off the field; but in either case his position is the same. He is one step nearer to the human nature which he cannot assume. He lives in the moon, Caliban thinks, and dislikes its "cold," while he cannot escape from it. To relieve his discomfort, half in impatience half in sport, he has made human beings; thus giving himself the pleasure of seeing others do what he cannot, and of mocking them as his playthings at the same time.

This theory of creation is derived from Caliban's own experience. In like manner, when he has got drunk on fermented fruits, and feels he would like to fly, he pinches up a clay bird, and sends it into the air; and if its leg snaps off, and it entreats him to stop the smarting, or make the leg grow again, he may give it two more, or he may break off the remaining one; just to show the thing that he can do with it what he likes.

He also presumes that Setebos is envious, because he is so; as for instance: if he made a pipe to catch birds with, and the pipe boasted: "I catch the birds. I make a cry which my maker can't make unless he blows through me," he would smash it on the spot.

For the rest he imagines that Setebos, like himself, is neither kind nor cruel, but simply acts on all possible occasions as his fancy prompts him. The one thing which would arouse his own hostility, and therefore that of Setebos, would be that any creature should think he is ever prompted by anything else; or that his adopting a certain course one day would be a reason for following it on the next.

Guided by these analogies—which he illustrates with much quaintness and variety—Caliban humours Setebos, always pretending to be envious of him, and never allowing himself to seem too happy. He moans in the sunlight, gets under holes to laugh, and only ventures to think aloud, when out of sight and hearing, as he is at the present moment. Thus sheltered, however, he makes too free with his tongue. He risks the expression of a hope that old age, or the Quiet, will some day make an end of his Creator, whom he loves none the better for being so like himself. And in another moment he is crouching in abject fear: for an awful thunderstorm has broken out. "That raven scudding away 'has told him all.'"

"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!" (vol. vii. p. 161.)

and will do anything to please him so that he escape this time.

The most impressive of the dramatic monologues, "A Death in the Desert," detaches itself from this double group. It is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic."

DIDACTIC POEMS.

The poems contained in this group are, taking them in the order of their importance,

"A Death in the Desert." Dramatis Personae. 1864. "Rabbi Ben Ezra." Dramatis Personae. 1864. "Deaf and Dumb: a group by Woolner." Dramatis Personae. 1864. "The Statue and the Bust." Dramatic Romances. Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" is the record of an imaginary last scene in the life of St. John. It is conceived in perfect harmony with the facts of the case: the great age which the Evangelist attained: the mystery which shrouded his death: the persecutions which had overtaken the Church: the heresies which already threatened to disturb it; but Mr. Browning has given to St. John a foreknowledge of that age of philosophic doubt in which its very foundations would be shaken; and has made him the exponent of his own belief—already hinted in "Easter Eve" and "Bishop Blougram:" to be fully set forth in "The Ring and the Book" and "La Saisiaz"—that such doubt is ordained for the maturer mind, as the test of faith, and its preserver.

The supposed last words of the Evangelist, and the circumstances in which they were spoken, are reported by loving simplicity as by one who heard them, and who puts forward this evidence of St. John's death against the current belief that he lingers yet upon earth. The account, first spoken, then written, has passed apparently from hand to hand, as one disciple after the other died the martyr's death; and we find the MS. in the possession of an unnamed person, and prefaced by him with a descriptive note, in which religious reverence and bibliographical interest are touchingly blended with each other.

St. John is dying in the desert, concealed in an inmost chamber of the rock. Four grown disciples and a boy are with him. He lies as if in sleep. But, as the end approaches, faint signs of consciousness appear about the mouth and eyes, and the patient and loving ministrations of those about him nurse the flickering vital spark into a flame.

St. John returns to life, feeling, as it were, the retreating soul forced back upon the ashes of his brain, and taxing the flesh to one supreme exertion. But he lives again in a far off time when "John" is dead, and there is no one left who saw. And he lives in a sense as of decrepit age, seeking a "foot-hold through a blank profound;" grasping at facts which snap beneath his touch; in strange lands, and among people yet unborn, who ask,

"Was John at all, and did he say he saw?" (vol vii. p. 128.)

and will believe nothing till the proof be proved.

This prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory of his former self. John knows himself the man who heard and saw—receiving the words of Christ from His own mouth, and enduring those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear, and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and those he guessed as points expanding into stars. And the life-long faith regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him; as he sees its children

"... stand conversing, each new face Either in fields, of yellow summer eves, On islets yet unnamed amid the sea; Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico Out of the crowd in some enormous town Where now the larks sing in a solitude: Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:...." (vol. vii. p. 134.)

and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his own life and work.

The subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own conviction—in his loving desire to impart it—he assumes a great deal of what he tries to prove. "He has seen it all—the miracle of that life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the constant presence of the Divine love; those things which not only were to him, but are. And he is called upon to prove it to those who cannot see: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength, while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the Heavenly light. He must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye."

"Life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. But the soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. For the flesh has little time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. Man needs no second proof of the worth of fire: once found, he would not part with it for gold. But the highest spiritual certainty is not like our conviction of a bodily fact; and though we know the worth of Christ as we know the preciousness of fire, we may not in like manner grasp this truth, acknowledging it in our lives. He—John—in whose sight his Lord had been transfigured, had walked upon the waters, and raised the dead to life: he, too, forsook Him when the 'noise' and 'torchlight,' and the 'sudden Roman faces,' and the 'violent hands' were upon them...."

The doubter, he imagines, will argue thus, taking "John's" Gospel for his starting-point:—

(a) "Your story is proved inaccurate, if not untrue. The doctrine which rests upon it is therefore unproved, except in so far as it is attested by the human heart. And this proof again is invalid. For the doctrine is that of Divine love; and we, who believe in love, because we ourselves possess it, may read it into a record in which it has no place. Man, in his mental infancy, read his own emotions and his own will into the forces of nature, as he clothed their supposed personal existence in his own face and form. But his growing understanding discarded the idea of these material gods. It now replaces the idea of the one Divine intelligence by that of universal law. God is proved to us as law—'named,' but 'not known.' A divinity, which we can recognize by like attributes to our own, is disproved by them."

(b) "And granting that there is truth in your teaching: why is this allowed to mislead us? Why are we left to hit or miss the truth, according as our insight is weak or strong, instead of being plainly told this thing was, or it was not? Does 'John' proceed with us as did the heathen bard, who drew a fictitious picture of the manner in which fire had been given to man; and left his readers to discover that the fact was not the fable itself, but only contained in it?"

And John replies:

(a) "Man is made for progress, and receives therefore, step by step, such spiritual assistance as is proportionate to his strength. The testimony of miracles is granted when it is needed to assist faith. It is withdrawn so soon as it would compel it. He who rejects God's love in Christ because he has learned the need of love, is as the lamp which overswims with oil, the stomach which flags from excess of food: his mind is being starved by the very abundance of what was meant to nourish it. Man was spiritually living, when he shrank appalled from the spectacle of Nature, and needed to be assured that there was a might beyond its might. But when he says, 'Since Might is everywhere, there is no need of Will;' though he knows from his own experience how Might may combine with Will, then is he spiritually dead. And man is spiritually living, when he asks if there be love

"Behind the will and might, as real as they?" (vol. vii. p. 140.)

But when he reasons: since love is everywhere, and we love and would be loved, we make the love which we recognize as Christ: and Christ was not; then is he spiritually dead. For the loss which comes through gain is death, and the sole death."

(b) The second objection he answers by reverting to his first statement. "Man is made for progress. He could not progress if his doubtings were at once changed to certainties, and all he struggles for at once found. He must yearn for truth, and grasp at error as a 'midway help' to it. He must learn and unlearn. He must creep from fancies on to fact; and correct to-day's facts by the light of to-morrow's knowledge. He must be as the sculptor, who evokes a life-like form from a lump of clay, ever seeing the reality in a series of false presentments; attaining it through them, God alone makes the live shape at a jet."

The tenderness which has underlain even John's remonstrances culminates in his closing words. "If there be a greater woe than this (the doubt) which he has lived to see, may he," he says, "be 'absent,' though it were for another hundred years, plucking the blind ones from the abyss."

"But he was dead." (vol. vii. p. 146.)

The record has a postscript, written not by the same person, but in his name, confronting the opinions of St. John with those of Cerinthus, his noted opponent in belief, into whose hands the MS. is also supposed to have fallen. It is chiefly interesting as heightening the historical effect of the poem.[62]

"RABBI BEN EZRA" is the expression of a religious philosophy which, being, from another point of view, Mr. Browning's own, has much in common with that which he has imputed to St. John; and, as "A Death in the Desert" only gave the words which the Evangelist might have spoken, so is "Rabbi Ben Ezra" only the possible utterance of that pious and learned Jew. But the Christian doctrine of the one poem brings into strong relief the pure Theism of the other; and the religious imagination in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is strongly touched with the gorgeous and solemn realism which distinguishes the Old Testament from the new.

The most striking feature of Rabbi Ben Ezra's philosophy is his estimate of age. According to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close. Age is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition.

"Spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth. It is well that youth should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the endeavour to improve what is. He would be a brute whose body could keep pace with his soul. The highest test of man's bodily powers is the distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must travel alone."

"But life in the flesh is good, showering gifts alike on sense and brain. It is right that at some period of its existence man's heart should beat in unison with it; that having seen God's power in the scheme of creation, he should also see the perfectness of His love; that he should thank Him for his manhood, for the power conferred on him to live and learn. And this boon must be granted by age, which gathers in the inheritance of youth."

"The inheritance is not one of earthly wisdom. Man learns to know the right and the good, but he does not learn how outwardly to apply the knowledge; for human judgments are formed to differ, and there is no one who can arbitrate between them. Man's failure or success must be sought in the unseen life—not in that which he has done, but in that which he has aspired to do."

"Nothing dies or changes which has truly BEEN. The flight of time is but the spinning of the potter's wheel to which we are as clay. This fleeing circumstance is but the machinery which stamps the soul (that vessel moulded for the Great Master's hand). And its latest impress is the best: though the base of the cup be adorned with laughing loves, while skull-like images constitute its rim."

"Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's-peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?" (vol. vii. p. 119)

"DEAF AND DUMB" conveys, in a single stanza, the crowning lesson of the life of Paracelsus, and indeed of every human life: for the sculptured figures to which it refers have supplied the poet with an example of the "glory" which may "arise" from "defect," the power from limitation. It needs, he says, the obstructing prism to set free the rainbow hues of the sunbeam. Only dumbness can give to love the full eloquence of the eyes; only deafness can impress love's yearnings on the movements of neck and face.

"THE STATUE AND THE BUST" is a warning against infirmity of purpose. Its lesson is embodied in a picturesque story, in which fact and fiction are combined.

In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First, representing him as riding away from the church, and with his head turned in the direction of the once Riccardi Palace, which occupies a corner of the square. Tradition asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner there, and whom he could only see at her window; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her.

In Mr. Browning's expanded version, the love is returned, and the lovers determine to fly together. But each day brings fresh motives for postponing the flight, and each day they exchange glances with each other—he passing by on his horse, she looking down from her window—and comfort themselves with the thought of the morrow. And as the days slip by, their love grows cooler, and they learn to be content with expectation. They realize at last that the love has been a dream, and that they have spent their youth in dreaming it; and in order that the dream may continue, and the memory of their lost youth be preserved, they cause, he his statue to be cast, she her bust to be moulded, and each placed in the attitude in which they have daily looked upon each other. They feel the irony of the proceeding, though they find satisfaction in it. Their image will do all that the reality has done.

Mr. Browning blames these lovers for not carrying out their intention, whether or not it could be pronounced a good one. "Man should carry his best energies into the game of life, whether the stake he is playing for be good or bad—a reality or a sham. As a test of energy, the one has no value above the other."

He leaves the "bust" in the region of fancy, by stating that it no longer exists. But he tells us that it was executed in "della Robbia" ware, specimens of which, still, at the time he wrote, adorned the outer cornice of the palace. The statue is one of the finest works of John of Bologna.

The partial darkening of the Via Larga by the over-hanging mass of the Riccardi (formerly Medici) Palace[63] is figuratively connected in the poem with the "crime" of two of its inmates: the "murder," by Cosimo dei Medici and his (grand) son Lorenzo, of the liberties of the Florentine Republic.

The smallness of this group, and its chiefly dramatic character, show how little direct teaching Mr. Browning's works contain. There is, however, direct instructiveness in another and larger group, which has too much in common with all three foregoing to be included in either, and will be best indicated by the term "critical." In certain respects, indeed, this applies to several, perhaps to most, of those which I have placed under other heads; and I use it rather to denote a lighter tone and more incidental treatment, than any radical difference of subject or intention.

CRITICAL POEMS.

"Old Pictures in Florence." } Dramatic Lyrics. "Respectability." } Published in "Men "Popularity." } and Women." "Master Hugues of Saxe-gotha." } 1855. "A Light Woman." Dramatic Romances. Published in "Men and Women." 1855. "Transcendentalism." ("Men and Women.") 1855. "How it Strikes a Contemporary." ("Men and Women.") 1855. "Dis aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours." ("Dramatis Personae.") 1864. "At the Mermaid." } "House." } "Shop." } "Pacchiarotto, and other "Pisgah Sights," I. and II. } Poems." 1876. "Bifurcation." } "Epilogue." }

The first and fourth of these are significant from the insight they give into Mr. Browning's conception of art. We must allow, in reading them, for the dramatic and therefore temporary mood in which they were written, and deduct certain utterances which seem inconsistent with the breadth of the author's views. But they reflect him truly in this essential fact, that he considers art as subordinate to life, and only valuable in so far as it expresses it. This means, not that his standard is realistic: but that it is entirely human; it could scarcely be otherwise in a mind so devoted to the study of human life; but these very poems display also, on Mr. Browning's part, a loving familiarity with the works of painters, sculptors, and musicians, and a practical understanding of them, which might easily have resulted in a partial acceptance of artistic standards as such, and of the policy of art for art; and it is only through the breadth and strength of his dramatic genius, that artistic sympathies in themselves so strong could be subjected to it.

In music, this position appears at first sight to be reversed; for Mr. Browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. Here, however, the poet in him comes into play. He leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. In this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. But this only means that, in his opinion, the relation of music to human life is different from that of plastic art: the one revealing the unknown, while the other embodies what is known.

"OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE" is a fanciful monologue, spoken as by one who is looking down upon Florence, through her magical atmosphere, from a villa on the neighbouring heights. The sight of her Campanile brings Giotto to his mind; and with Giotto comes a vision of all the dead Old Masters who mingle in spirit with her living men. He sees them each haunting the scene of his former labours in church or chapter-room, cloister or crypt; and he sees them grieving over the decay of their works, as these fade and moulder under the hand of time. He is also conscious that they do not grieve for themselves. Earthly praise or neglect cannot touch them more. But they have had a lesson to teach; and so long as the world has not learnt the lesson, their souls may not rest in heaven.

"Greek art had its lesson to teach, and it taught it. It reasserted the dignity of the human form. It re-stated the truth of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible, and to renounce the hope of attaining it. In this experience the first stage was progress; the second was stagnation. Progress began again, when men looked on these images of themselves and said: "we are not inferior to these. We are greater than they. For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to grow." The soul which has eternity within its grasp cannot express itself in a single glance; nor can its consciousness be petrified into an unchanging sorrow or joy. The painters who set aside Greek art undertook to vindicate the activity of the soul. They made its hopes and fears shine through the flesh, though the flesh they shone through were frayed and torn by the process. This was the work which they had to do; and which remains undone, while men speak of them as "Old Master" this, and "Early" the other, and do not dream that "Old" and "New" are fellows: "that all are links in the chain of the one progressive art life; the one spiritual revelation."

The speaker now relapses into the playful mood which his more serious reflections have scarcely interrupted. He thinks of the removable paintings which lie hidden in cloister or church, and which a sympathizing purchaser might rescue from decay; and he reproaches those melancholy ghosts for not guiding such purchasers to them. He, for instance, does not aspire to the works of the very great; but a number of lesser lights, whose name and quality he recites, might, he thinks, have lent themselves to the fulfilment of his artistic desires;[64] and he declares himself particularly hurt by the conduct of his old friend Giotto, who has allowed some picture he had been hunting through every church in Florence to fall into other hands. He concludes with an invocation to a future time when the Grand Duke will have been pitched across the Alps, when art and the Republic will revive together, and when Giotto's Campanile will be completed—which glorious consummation, though he may not live to see, he considers himself the first to predict.

Mr. Browning alludes, in the course of this monologue, to the two opposite theories of human probation: one confining it to this life, the other extending it through a series of future existences; and without pronouncing on their relative truth, he owns himself in sympathy with the former. He is tired and likes to think of rest. The sentiment is, however, not in harmony with his general views, and belongs to the dramatic aspect of the poem.[65]

MASTER HUGUES OF SAXE GOTHA, also a monologue, is christened after an imaginary composer; and consists of a running comment on one of his fugues, as performed by the organist of some unnamed church. The latter has just played it through: the scored brow and deep-set eyes of Master Hugues fixed on him, as he fancied, from the shade; and he now imagines he hears him say, "You have done justice to the notes of my piece, but you must grasp its meaning to understand where my merit lies;" so he plays the fugue again, listening for the meaning, and reading it as out of a book. From this literary or dramatic point of view, the impression received is as follows. Some one lays down a proposition, unimportant in itself, and not justly open to either praise or blame. Nevertheless a second person retorts on it, a third interposes, a fourth rejoins, and a fifth thrusts his nose into the matter. The five are fully launched into a quarrel. The quarrel grows broader and deeper. Number one restates his case somewhat differently. Number two takes it up on its new ground. Argument is followed by vociferation and abuse; a momentary self-restraint by a fresh outbreak of self-assertion. All tempers come into play, all modes of attack are employed, from pounding with a crowbar to pricking with a pin. And where all this time is music? Where is the gold of truth? Spun over and blackened by the tissue of jangling sounds, as is the ceiling of the old church by cobwebs.

"Is it your moral of Life? Such a web, simple and subtle, Weave we on earth here in impotent strife, Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle, Death ending all with a knife?" (vol. vi. p. 202)

The organist admires Master Hugues, and approaches his creations with an open mind; but he cannot help feeling that this mode of composition represents the tortuousness of existence, and that its "truth" spreads golden above and about us, whether we accept her or not. He ends by bidding Master Hugues and the five speakers clear the arena; and leave him to "unstop the full organ," and "blare out," in the "mode Palestrina," what another musician has had to say.

This scene in an organ loft has many humorous touches which would in any case forbid our taking it too seriously; and we must no more think of Mr. Browning as indifferent to the possible merits of a fugue than as indifferent to the beauties of a Greek statue. But the dramatic situation has in this, as in the foregoing case, a strong basis of personal truth.

Two more of these poems show the irony of circumstance as embodied in popular opinion.

"POPULARITY" is an expression of admiring tenderness for some person whom the supposed speaker knows and loves as a poet, though it is the coming, not the present age, which will bow to him as such. But the main idea of the poem is set forth in a comparison. The speaker "sees" his friend in the character of an ancient fisherman landing the Murex-fish on the Tyrian shore. "The 'murex' contains a dye of miraculous beauty; and this once extracted and bottled, Hobbs, Nobbs, and Co. may trade in it and feast; but the poet who (figuratively) brought the murex to land, and created its value, may, as Keats probably did, eat porridge all his life."

"HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY" describes a poet whose personality was not ignored, but mistaken; and the irony of circumstance is displayed both in the extent of this mistake, and the colour which circumstance has given to it. This poet is a mysterious personage, who constantly wanders through the city, seeing everything without appearing to use his eyes. His clothing, though old and worn, has been of the fashion of the Court. He writes long letters, which are obviously addressed to "our Lord the King," and "which, no doubt, have had to do with the disappearance of A., and the fate of B." He can be, people think, no other than a spy. A spy, we must admit, might proceed in much the same manner. Mr. Browning does, however, full justice to the excesses of popular imagination, once directed into a given channel, in the parallel touches which depict the portentous luxury in which the spy is supposed to live: the poor though decent garret in which the poet dies.

"TRANSCENDENTALISM" is addressed to a young poet, who is accused of presenting his ideas "naked," instead of draping them, in poetic fashion, in sights and sounds: in other words, of talking across his harp instead of singing to it. He acts on the supposition that, if the young want imagery, older men want rational thoughts. And his critic is declaring this a mistake. "Youth, indeed, would be wasted in studying the transcendental Jacob Boehme for the deeper meaning of things which life gives it to see and feel; but when youth is past, we need all the more to be made to see and feel. It is not a thinker like Boehme who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up."[66]

There is a strong vein of humour in the argument, which gives the impression of being consciously overstated. It is neverthess a genuine piece of criticism.

"AT THE MERMAID" and the "EPILOGUE" deal with public opinion in its general estimate of poets and poetry; and they expose its fallacies in a combative spirit, which would exclude them from a more rigorous definition of the term "critical." In the first of these Mr. Browning speaks under the mask of Shakespeare, and gives vent to the natural irritation of any great dramatist who sees his various characters identified with himself. He repudiates the idea that the writings of a dramatic poet reveal him as a man, however voluminous they may be; and on this ground he even rejects the transcendent title to fame which his contemporaries have adjudged to him. They know him in his work. They cannot, he says, know him in his life. He has never given them the opportunity of doing so. He has allowed no one to slip inside his soul, and "label" and "catalogue" what he found there.

This is truer for Shakespeare than for Mr. Browning, who has often addressed his public with comparative directness, and would be grieved to have it thought that in the long course of his writings he has never spoken from his heart. He would also be the first to admit that, in the course of his writings, the poet must, indirectly, reveal the man. But he has too often had to defend himself against the impression that whatever he wrote as a poet must directly reflect him as a man. He has too often had to repeat, that poetry is an art which "makes" not one which merely records; and that the feelings it conveys are no more necessarily supplied by direct experience than are its facts by the Cyclopaedia. And with the usual deduction for the dramatic mood, we may accept the retort as genuine.

I have departed in the case of this poem from the mere statement of contents, which is all that my plan admits of, or my readers usually can desire: because it expresses an indifference to general sympathy which belies the author's feeling in the matter. Mr. Browning speaks equally for himself and Shakespeare, when he derides another idea which he considers to be popular: that the fit condition of the poet is melancholy. "I," he declares, "have found life joyous, and I speak of it as such. Let those do otherwise who have wasted its opportunities, or been less richly endowed with them."

The "Epilogue" is a criticism on critics, and is spoken distinctly by Mr. Browning himself. He takes for his text a line from Mrs. Browning:[67]

"The poets pour us wine,"

and denounces those consumers of the wine of poetry, who expect it to combine strength and sweetness in an impossible degree. Body and bouquet, he affirms, may be found on the label of a bottle, but not in the vat from which the bottle was filled. "Mighty" and "mellow" may be born at once; but the one is for now, the other only for after-time. The earth, he declares, is his vineyard; his grape, the loves, the hates, and the thoughts of man; his wine, what these have made it. Bouquet may, he admits, be artificially given. Flowers grow everywhere which will supplement the flavour of the grape; and his life holds flowers of memory, which blossom with every spring. But he denies that his brew would be the more popular if he stripped his meadow to make it so. How much do his public drink of that which they profess to approve? They declare Shakespeare and Milton fit beverage for man and boy. "Look into their cellars, and see how many barrels are unbroached of the one brand, what drippings content them of the other. He will be true to his task, and to Him who set it."

"Wine, pulse in might from me! It may never emerge in must from vat, Never fill cask nor furnish can, Never end sweet, which strong began— God's gift to gladden the heart of man; But spirit's at proof, I promise that! No sparing of juice spoils what should be Fit brewage—mine for me." (vol. xiv. p. 148)

At the 18th stanza the figure is changed, and Mr. Browning speaks of his work (by implication) as a stretch of country which is moor above and mine below; and in which men will find—what they dig for.

"HOUSE" is written in much the same spirit as "At the Mermaid." It reminds us that the whole front of a dwelling must come down before the life within it can be gauged by the vulgar eye; however we may fancy that this or that poetic utterance has unlocked the door—that it opens to a "sonnet-key."[68]

"SHOP" is a criticism on those writers, poets or otherwise, who are so disproportionately absorbed by the material cares of existence as to place the good of literature in its money-making power; and depicts such in the character of the shopman who makes the shop his home, instead of leaving it for some mansion or villa as soon as business hours are past. "The flesh must live, but why should not the spirit have its dues also?"

"RESPECTABILITY" is a comment on the price paid for social position. A pair of lovers have been enjoying a harmless escapade; and one remarks to the other that, if their relation had been recognized by the world, they might have wasted their youth in the midst of proprieties which they would never have learned the danger and the pleasure of infringing. The situation is barely sketched in; but the sentiment of the poem is well marked, and connects it with the foregoing group.

"A LIGHT WOMAN," "DIS ALITER VISUM," and "BIFURCATION" raise questions of conduct.

A man desires to extricate his friend from the toils of "A LIGHT WOMAN;" and to this end he courts her himself. He is older and more renowned than her present victim, and trusts to her vanity to ensure his success.

But his attentions arouse in her something more. He discovers too late that he has won her heart. He can only cast it away, and a question therefore arises: he knows how he appears to his friend; he knows how he will appear to the woman whom his friend loved; "how does he appear to himself?" In other words, did the end for which he has acted justify the means employed? He doubts it.

"DIS ALITER VISUM" records the verdict of later days on a decision which recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. A man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be, on the point of offering her his hand. But caution checks the impulse. They drift asunder. He forms a connection with an opera-dancer. She makes a loveless marriage. Ten years later they meet again; and she reminds him of what passed between them, and taxes him with the ruin of four souls. He has thought only of the drawbacks to present enjoyment, which the unequal union would have involved; he never thought or cared how its bitter-sweetness might quicken the striving for eternity.

This criticism reflects the woman's point of view, and was probably intended to justify it. It does not follow that the author would not, in another dramatic mood, have justified the man, in his more practical estimate of the situation. Mr. Browning's poetic self is, however, expressed in the woman's belief: that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul. The stereotyped completeness of the lower existences supplies him here also with a warning.

The title of "BIFURCATION" refers to two paths in life, followed respectively by two lovers whom circumstances divide. The case is not unusual. The woman sacrifices love to duty, and expects her lover to content himself with her choice. Why not, she thinks? She will be constant to him; they will be united in the life to come. And meanwhile, she is choosing what for her is the smoother and safer path, while for him it is full of stumbling-blocks. Love's guidance is refused him, and he falls. Which of these two has been the sinner: he who sinned unwillingly, or she who caused the sin? We feel that Mr. Browning condemns the apparent saint.

"PISGAH SIGHTS. I." depicts life as it may seem to one who is leaving it; who is, as it were, "looking over the ball." As seen from this position, Good and Evil are reconciled, and even prove themselves indispensable to each other. The seer becomes aware that it is unwise to strive against the mixed nature of existence; vain to speculate on its cause. But the knowledge is bittersweet, for it comes too late.

"PISGAH SIGHTS. II." is a view of life as it might be, if the knowledge just described did not come too late; and shows that according to Mr. Browning's philosophy it would be no life at all. The speaker declares that if he had to live again, he would take everything as he found it. He would neither dive nor soar; he would strive neither to teach nor to reform. He would keep to the soft and shady paths; learn by quiet observation; and allow men of all kinds to pass him by, while he remained a fixture. He would gain the benefit of the distance with those below and above him, since he would be magnified for the one class, while seen from a softening point of view by the other. And so also he would admire the distant brightness, "the mightiness yonder," the more for keeping his own place. If seen too closely, the star might prove a glow-worm.

EMOTIONAL POEMS.

LOVE.

Those of Mr. Browning's poems which are directly prompted by thought have their counterpart in a large number which are specially inspired by emotion; and must be noticed as such. But this group will perhaps be the most artificial of all; for while thought is with him often uncoloured by feeling, he seldom expresses feeling as detached from thought. The majority, for instance, of his love poems are introduced by the title "dramatic," and describe love as bound up with such varieties of life and character, that questions of life and character are necessarily raised by them; the emotion thus conveyed being really more intense, because more individual, than could be given in any purely lyric effusion not warmed by the poet's own life. Some few, however, are genuine lyrics, whether regarded as personal utterances or not; and in the case of two or three of these, the personal utterance is unmistakable.

Under the head of LYRICAL LOVE POEMS must be placed

"One Word More," to E. B. B. ("Men and Women." 1855.) "Prospice." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.) "Numpholeptos." } "Prologue." } "Pacchiarotto and other Poems." "Natural Magic." } 1876. "Magical Nature." } "Introduction." } "The Two Poets of Croisic." "A Tale." } 1878.

"ONE WORD MORE" is a message of love, as direct as it is beautiful; but as such it also expresses an idea which makes it a fitting object of study. Most men and women lay their highest gift at the feet of him or of her they love, and with it such honour as the world may render it. They value both, as making them more worthy of those they love, and for their sake rejoice in the possession. Mr. Browning feels otherwise. According to him the gifts by which we are known to the world have lost graciousness through its contact. Their exercise is marred by its remembered churlishness and ingratitude. Every artist, he declares, longs "once" and for "one only," to utter himself in a language distinct from his art; to "gain" in this manner, "the man's joy," while escaping "the artist's sorrow." So Raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of sonnets to be seen only by one. Dante, poet of the "Inferno," drew an angel in memory of the one (of Beatrice). He—Mr. Browning—has only his verse to offer. But as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to paint flowerets on his lady's missal—as he who blows through bronze may also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may he lend his talent to a different use. He has completed his volume of "Men" and "Women." He dedicates it to her to whom this poem is addressed. But his special offering to her is not the book itself, in which he speaks with the mouth of fifty other persons, but the word of dedication—the "One Word More"—in which he speaks to her from his own. The dramatic turns lyric poet for the one only.

And what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. The moon, he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant above the hills of Florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely hurrying to her death over London house-tops. But for the "moonstruck mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may be—unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among the rest of mankind. So she, who is his moon of poets, has also her world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest;

"But the best is when I glide from out them, Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, Come out on the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, Where I hush and bless myself with silence." (vol. iv. p. 305.)

"PROSPICE" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of re-union with one whom death has sent before. We cannot doubt that this poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart.

"NUMPHOLEPTOS" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic, circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. It is the almost despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity; and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its experiences. This woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the "fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. She stands, in passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of earthly existence. These radiate from her, many-hued with passion and adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. She bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that it promises love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. He rebels at last, but the rebellion is momentary. He renews his hopeless quest.

"PROLOGUE" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of Mr. Browning's study, and was before him when he wrote.

"NATURAL MAGIC" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment, summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life.

"MAGICAL NATURE" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying the hand of time.

The INTRODUCTION to the "TWO POETS OF CROISIC," (reprinted under the title of "Apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "Natural Magic." The "TALE" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. Its circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it exists in Latin or Greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. A famous poet was singing to his lyre. One of its strings snapped. The melody would have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the lyre and chirped the missing note. The note, thus sounded, was more beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. The poet, in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. They were thus immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had crowned.

Love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life.

The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love; and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling it is made to illustrate.

It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having first, in several instances, contributed to that work.

DRAMATIC LOVE POEMS.

"Cristina." (Love as the special gain of life.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"Evelyn Hope." (Love as conquering Time.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Love among the Ruins." (Love as the one lasting reality.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A Lover's Quarrel." (Love as the great harmony which triumphs over smaller discords.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"By the Fireside." (Love in its ideal maturity.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Any Wife to any Husband." (Love in its ideal of constancy.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Two in the Campagna." (Love as an unsatisfied yearning.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Love in a Life." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Life in a Love." (Love as indomitable purpose.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"The Lost Mistress." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"A Woman's last Word." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A Serenade at the Villa." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"One Way of Love." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli." (Love as the completeness of self-surrender.) "Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"In Three Days." (Love as the intensity of expectant hope.) "Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"In a Gondola." (Love as the intensity of a precarious joy.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"Porphyria's Lover." (Love as the tyranny of spiritual appropriation.) "Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.

"James Lee's Wife." (Love as saddened by the presentiment and the consciousness of change.) "Dramatis Personae." 1864

"The Worst of it." (Love as the completeness of self-effacement.) "Dramatis Personnae." 1864.

"Too Late." (Love as the sense of a loss which death has rendered irrevocable.) "Dramatis Personae." 1864.

The two first of these are inspired by the belief in the distinctness and continuity of the soul's life; and represent love as a condition of the soul with which positive experience has very little to do; but in all the others it is treated as part of this experience, and subject for the time being to its laws. The situation sketched—for it is nothing more—in "CRISTINA" is that of a man and woman whom a glance has united, and who both have recognized in this union the predestined object of their life. The knowledge has only flashed on the woman's mind, to be extinguished by worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. But the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. She has spiritually lost him, but he has gained her; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (This poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) It is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with this world.

"EVELYN HOPE" is the utterance of a love which has missed its fruition in this life, but confidently anticipates it for a life to come. The beloved is a young girl. The lover is three times her age, and was a stranger to her; she is lying dead. But God, he is convinced, creates love to reward love: and no matter what worlds must be traversed, what lives lived, what knowledge gained or lost, before that moment is reached, Evelyn Hope will, in the end, be given to him.

"LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, fabulous in magnificence and in strength. A ruined turret marks the site of a mighty tower, from which the king of that city overlooked his domains, or, with his court, watched the racing chariots as they encircled it in their course. In that turret, in the evening grey, amidst the tinkling of the sheep, a yellow-haired maiden is waiting for him she loves; and as they bury sight and speech in each other's arms, he bids the human heart shut in the centuries, with their triumphs and their follies, their glories and their sins, for "Love is best."

"A LOVER'S QUARREL" describes, not the quarrel itself, but the impression it leaves on him who has unwittingly provoked it: one of amazement as well as sorrow, that such a thing could have occurred. The speaker, apostrophizing his absent love, reminds her how happy they have been together, with no society but their own; no pleasures but those of sympathy; no amusements but those which their common fancy supplied; and he asks her if it be possible that so perfect a union can be destroyed by a hasty word with which his deeper self has had nothing to do. He believes this so little that he is sure she will, in some way, come back to him; and then they will part no more.

A vein of playfulness runs through this monologue, which represents the lovers before their quarrel as more like children enjoying a long holiday, than a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities of life. It conveys, nevertheless, a truth deeply rooted in the author's mind: that the foundation of a real love can never be shaken.

"BY THE FIRESIDE" is a retrospect, in which the speaker is carried from middle-age to youth, and from his, probably English, fireside to the little Alpine gorge in which he confessed his love; and he summons the wife who received and sanctioned the avowal to share with him the joy of its remembrance. He describes the scene of his declaration, the conflict of feeling which its risks involved, the generous frankness with which she cut the conflict short. He dwells on the blessings which their union has brought to him, and which make his youth seem barren by the richness of his maturer years; and he asks her if there exist another woman, with whom he could thus have retraced the descending path of life, and found nothing to regret in what he had left behind. He declares that their mutual love has been for him that crisis in the life of the soul to which all experience tends—the predestined test of its quality. It is his title to honour as well as his guarantee of everlasting joy.

The subtler realities of life and love are reflected throughout the poem in picturesque impressions often no less subtle, and the whole is dramatic, i.e., imaginary, as far as conception goes; but the obvious genuineness of the sentiment is confirmed by the allusion to the "perfect wife" who,

"Reading by firelight, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it," (vol. vi. p. 132.)

is known to all of us.

"ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND" might be the lament of any woman about to die, who believes that her husband will remain true to her in heart, but will lack courage to be so in his life. She anticipates the excuses he will offer for seeking temporary solace in the society of other women; but these all, to her mind, resolve themselves into a confession of weakness; and it grieves her that such a confession should proceed from one, in all other respects, so much stronger than she. "Were she the survivor, it would be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!" Her grief is unselfish. The wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is "three parts" overcome will break down under this final test. She accepts it, however, as the inevitable.

"TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA." The sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words:

"Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn." (vol. vi. p. 153.)

For its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary: ever seeking to grasp the Infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it. The sufferer is a man. He longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again. He asks the meaning of it all—where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. The Campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery grasses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of passion and of peace. The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. His doom is endless change. The tired, tantalized spirit must accept it.

"LOVE IN A LIFE" represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her.

"LIFE IN A LOVE" might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him. She may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life.

"THE LOST MISTRESS" is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship. Its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness.

"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD" is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender. She has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention. What, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her Divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her Eden? She begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears—a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.

"A SERENADE AT THE VILLA" has a tinge of melancholy humour, which makes it the more pathetic. A lover has been serenading the lady of his affections through a sultry night, in which Earth seemed to turn painfully in her sleep, and the silent darkness was unbroken, except by an occasional flash of lightning, and a few drops of thundery rain. He wishes his music may have told her that whenever life is dark or difficult there will be one near to help and guide her: one whose patience will never tire, and who will serve her best when there are none to witness his devotion. But her villa looks very dark; its closed windows are very obdurate. The gate ground its teeth as it let him pass. And he fears she only said to herself, that if the silence of a thundery night was oppressive, such noise was a worse infliction.

"ONE WAY OF LOVE." This lover has strewn the roses of a month's gathering on his lady's path, only for the chance of her seeing them: as he has conquered the difficulties of the lute, only for the chance of her liking its sound; thrown his whole life into a love, which is hers to accept or reject. She cares for none of these things. So the roses may lie, the lute-string break. The lover can still say, "Blest is he who wins her."

"RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI" is a pathetic declaration, in which the lover compares himself to a sunflower, and proclaims it as his badge. The French poet Rudel loves the "Lady of Tripoli;"[69] and she is dear to him as is the sun to that foolish flower, which by constant contemplation has grown into its very resemblance. And he bids a pilgrim tell her that, as bees bask on the sunflower, men are attracted by his song; but, as the sunflower looks ever towards the sun, so does he, disregarding men's applause, look towards the East, and her.

"IN THREE DAYS" is a note of joyful expectation, and doubtless a pure lyric, though classed as dramatic-lyrical. The lover will see his love in three days; and his complex sense of the delay, as meaning both all this time, and only this, is leavened by the joyful consciousness that the reunion will be as absolute as the union has been. He knows that life is full of chance and change. The possibilities of three days are a great deal to encounter, very little to have escaped. Unsuspected dangers may lurk in the coming year. But—he will see her in three days; and in that thought he can laugh all misgiving and all fear to scorn.

"IN A GONDOLA" is a love scene, beginning with a serenade from a gondola, and continued by the two lovers in it, after the Venetian fashion of the olden time. They are escaping, as they think, the vigilance of a certain "Three"—one of whom we may conjecture to be the lady's husband or father—and have already regained her home, and fixed the signal for to-morrow's meeting, when the lover is surprised and stabbed. As they glide through the canals of the city, by its dark or illuminated palaces, each concealing perhaps some drama of love or crime—the sense of danger never absent from them,—the tense emotion relieves itself in playful though impassioned fancies, in which the man and the woman vie with each other. But when the blow has fallen, the light tone gives way, on the lover's side, to one of solemn joy in the happiness which has been realized.

"... The Three, I do not scorn To death, because they never lived: but I Have lived indeed, and so—(yet one more kiss)—can die!" (vol. v. p. 77.)

"PORPHYRIA'S LOVER" is an episode which, with one of the poems of "Men and Women," "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," first appeared under the head of "Madhouse Cells."[70] Porphyria is deeply attached to her "lover," but has not courage to break the ties of an artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity.

"JAMES LEE'S WIFE" is the study of a female character developed by circumstances, and also impressing itself on them; the circumstances being those of an unfortunate marriage, in which the love has been mutual, but the constancy is all on the woman's side. "James Lee" is (as we understand) a man of shallow nature, whose wife's earnestness repels him when its novelty has ceased to charm. The "Wife" is keenly alive to his change of feeling towards her: and even anticipates it, in melancholy forebodings which probably hasten its course.

I.

JAMES LEE'S WIFE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW.

Love carries already the seed of doubt. The wife addresses her husband, who is approaching from outside, in words of anxious tenderness. The season is changing; coming winter is in the air. Will his love change too?

II.

BY THE FIRESIDE.

The note of apprehension deepens. The fire they are sitting by is supplied by ship-wood. It suggests the dangers of the sea, the sailor's longing for land and home. "But the life in port has its dangers too. There are worms which gnaw the ship in harbour, as the heart in sleep. Did some woman before her, in this very house perhaps, begin love's voyage full sail, and then suddenly see the ship's planks start, and hell open beneath the man she loves?"

III.

IN THE DOORWAY.

She remonstrates with her fear. Winter is drawing nearer: nature becoming cold and bare. But they two have all the necessaries of life, and love besides. The human spirit (the spirit of love) was meant by God to resist change, to put its life into the darkness and the cold. It should fear neither.

IV.

ALONG THE BEACH.

The fear has become a certainty. The wife reasons with her husband as they walk together. "He wanted her love, and she gave it to him. He has it, and yet is not content. Why so? She is not blind to his faults, but she does not love him the less for them. She has taken him as he was, with the good seed in him and the bad, waiting patiently for the good to bring its harvest; enduring patiently when the harvest failed. Whether praiseworthy or blameworthy, he has been her world!"

"That is what condemns her in his eyes: she loves too well; she watches too patiently. His nature is impatient of bondage. Such devotion as hers is a bond."

V.

ON THE CLIFF.

She reflects on the power of love. A cricket and a butterfly settle down before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. The barren surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. Just so will love settle on the low or barren in life, and transform it.

VI.

READING A BOOK UNDER THE CLIFF.

She has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation. She accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. We discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some verses are introduced.[71] The author apostrophizes a moaning wind which appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily, its sighs are trying to convey. James Lee's wife regards the mood here expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. Such a one, she says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the promise of its beauty.

"Nothing can be as it has been before; Better, so call it, only not the same. To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, And keep it changeless! such our claim; So answered,—Never more!"

She who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the soul; if it be sent to us in probation. She cannot answer. God alone knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words.

VII.

AMONG THE ROCKS.

She accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. A sunny autumn morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of self-effacement awakens in her. As earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it. Its rewards must be sought in heaven.

VIII.

BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.

She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a hand—enraptured with its delicate beauty—thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she must be loved or die."

IX.

ON DECK.

She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.

We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the situation.

"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament—"the worst of it" all—is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.

The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her epitaph.

"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: The classification of this poem is open to the obvious objection that it is not a monologue; but a dialogue or alternation of monologues, in which the second speaker, Balaustion (who is also the narrator), is, for the time being, as real as the first. Its conception is, however, expressed in the first title; and the arguments and descriptions which Balaustion supplies only contribute to the vividness with which Aristophanes and his defence are brought before us. "Aristophanes' Apology" is identical in spirit with the other poems of this group.]

[Footnote 33: This incident is founded on fact. It is related in Plutarch's Lives, that after the defeat of Nicias, all those of the captives who could recite something from Euripides were kindly treated by the Syracusans.]

[Footnote 34: The name signifies celebration of the festival of the Thesmophoria. This was held by women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine.]

[Footnote 35: The chorus of each new play was supplied to its author by the Government, when considered worth the outlay. Sketches of this and other plays alluded to in the course of the work may be read in the first volume of Mahaffy's "History of Classical Greek Literature."]

[Footnote 36: The plays were performed at the lesser and greater festivals of Bacchus; this, the Lenaia, being the smaller one. Hence, the presence of priest as well as archon at the ensuing banquet]

[Footnote 37: The failure here alluded to is his Ploutos or Plutus—an inoffensive but tame comedy written when Aristophanes was advanced in years, and of which the ill-success has been imputed to this fact. Mr. Browning, however, treats it as a proof that the author's ingrained habit of coarse fun had unfitted him for the more serious treatment of human life.]

[Footnote 38: Figures placed above the entrance of Athenian houses, and symbolizing the double life. It was held as sacrilege to deface them, as had been recently and mysteriously done.]

[Footnote 39: Introducing him into the play, as in the disguise of a disreputable woman.]

[Footnote 40: Aristophanes' comedy of the "Clouds" was written especially at Socrates, who stood up unconcernedly in the theatre that the many strangers present might understand what was intended.]

[Footnote 41: Mr. Mahaffy's description of the "Clouds" contains an account of this defeat, which sets forth the amusing conceit and sophistry of Aristophanes' explanation of it. He alludes here to the prevailing custom of several dramatic writers competing for a prize.]

[Footnote 42: Whirligig is a parody of the word "vortex." Vortex itself is used in derision of Socrates, who is represented in the "Clouds" as setting up this non-rational force in the place of Zeus—the clouds themselves being subordinate divinities.]

[Footnote 43: Saperdion was a famous Hetaira, the Empousa, a mythological monster. Kimberic or Cimberic means transparent.]

[Footnote 44: A pure libel on this play, which is noted for its novel and successful attempt to represent humour without indecency. Aristophanes here alludes to the prevailing custom of concluding every group of three tragedies with a play in which the chorus consisted of Satyrs: a custom which Euripides broke through.]

[Footnote 45: The inverted commas include here, as elsewhere in the Apology, only the very condensed substance of Mr. Browning's words.]

[Footnote 46: Tin-islands. Scilly Islands, loosely speaking, Great Britain.]

[Footnote 47: A demagogue of bad character attacked by Aristophanes: a big fellow and great coward.]

[Footnote 48: White was the Greek colour of victory. This passage, not easily paraphrased, is a poetic recognition of the latent sympathy of Aristophanes with the good cause.]

[Footnote 49: A game said to be of Sicilian origin and played in many ways. Details of it may be found in Becker's "Charikles," vol. ii.]

[Footnote 50: Thamyris of Thrace, said to have been blinded by the Muses for contending with them in song. The incident is given in the "Iliad," and was treated again by Sophocles, as Aristophanes also relates.]

[Footnote 51: This also is historical.]

[Footnote 52: Grote's "History of Greece," vol. iii. p. 265.]

[Footnote 53: Eidothee or Eidothea, is the daughter of Proteus—the old man of the sea. A legend concerning her is found in the 4th book of the Odyssey.]

[Footnote 54: There is such a monument at Pornic.]

[Footnote 55: These words are taken from a line in the Prometheus of AEschylus.]

[Footnote 56: Mr. Browning desires me to say that he has been wrong in associating this custom with the little temple by the river Clitumnus which he describes from personal knowledge. That to which the tradition refers stood by the lake of Nemi.]

[Footnote 57: The Cardinal himself reviewed this poem, not disapprovingly, in a catholic publication of the time]

[Footnote 58: This refers to the popular Neapolitan belief that a crystallized drop of the blood of the patron saint, Januarius, is miraculously liquefied on given occasions.]

[Footnote 59: The "Iketides" (Suppliants), mentioned in Section XVIII., is a Tragedy by AEschylus, the earliest extant: and of which the text is especially incomplete: hence, halting, and "maimed."]

[Footnote 60: This poem, like "Aristophanes' Apology," belongs in spirit more than in form to its particular group. Each contains a dialogue, and in the present case we have a defence, though not a specious one of the judgment attained]

[Footnote 61: We recognize the cogito ergo sum of Descartes.]

[Footnote 62: The narrator, in a parenthetic statement, imputes a doctrine to St. John, which is an unconscious approach on Mr. Browning's part to the "animism" of some ancient and mediaeval philosophies. It carries the idea of the Trinity into the individual life, by subjecting this to three souls, the lowest of which reigns over the body, and is that which "Does:" the second and third being respectively that which "Knows" and "Is." The reference to the "glossa of Theotypas" is part of the fiction.]

[Footnote 63: The present Riccardi palace in the Via Larga was built by Cosmo dei Medici in 1430; and remained in the possession of the Medici till 1659, when it was sold to Marchese Riccardi. The original Riccardi palace in the Piazza S. S. Annunziata is now (since 1870) Palazzo Antinori.

In my first edition, the "crime" is wrongly interpreted as the murder of Alexander, Duke of Florence, in 1536; and the confusion, I regret to find, increased by a wrong figure (8 for 5), which has slipped into the date.]

[Footnote 64: Mr. Browning possesses or possessed pictures by all the artists mentioned in this connection.]

[Footnote 65: (Verses 26, 27, 28.) "Bigordi" is the family name of Domenico called "Ghirlandajo," from the family trade of wreath-making. "Sandro" stands for Alessandro Botticelli. "Lippino" was son of Fra Lippo Lippi. Mr. Browning alludes to him as "wronged," because others were credited with some of his best work. "Lorenzo Monaco" (the monk) was a contemporary, or nearly so, of Fra Angelico, but more severe in manner. "Pollajolo" was both painter and sculptor. "Margheritone of Arezzo" was one of the earlier Old Masters, and died, as Vasari states, "infastidito" (deeply annoyed), by the success of Giotto and the "new school." Hence the funeral garb in which Mr. Browning depicts him.]

[Footnote 66: The "magic" symbolized is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or "mage," is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself.

"Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadt in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day to say Mass in Halberstadt, in Mayntz, and in Cologne" ("Heywood's Hierarchy," bk. iv., p. 253).

The "prestigious feat" of causing flowers to appear in winter was a common one. "In the year 876, the Emperor Lewis then reigning, there was one Zedechias, by religion a Jew, by profession a physician, but indeed a magician. In the midst of winter, in the Emperor's palace, he suddenly caused a most pleasant and delightful garden to appear, with all sorts of trees, plants, herbs, and flowers, together with the singing of all sorts of birds, to be seen and heard." (Delrio, "Disquisitio Magicae," bk. i., chap, iv., and elsewhere; and many other authorities.)]

[Footnote 67: "Wine of Cyprus." The quotation heading the poem qualifies it as 'wine for the superiors in age and station.']

[Footnote 68: Such as Wordsworth assumed to have been in use with Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 69: This is told in the tales of the Troubadours.]

[Footnote 70: Published, simultaneously, in Mr. Fox's "Monthly Repository." The song in "Pippa Passes" beginning "A king lived long ago," and the verses introduced in "James Lee's Wife," were also first published in this Magazine, edited by the generous and very earliest encourager of Mr. Browning's boyish attempts at poetry.]

[Footnote 71: These verses were written when Mr. Browning was twenty-three.]



EMOTIONAL POEMS (CONTINUED).

RELIGIOUS, ARTISTIC, AND EXPRESSIVE OF THE FIERCER EMOTIONS.

The emotions which, after that of love, are most strongly represented in Mr. Browning's works are the RELIGIOUS and the ARTISTIC: emotions closely allied in every nature in which they happen to co-exist, and which are so in their proper degree in Mr. Browning's; the proof of this being that two poems which I have placed in the Artistic group almost equally fit into the Religious. But the religious poems impress us more by their beauty than by their number, if we limit it to those which are directly inspired by this particular emotion. Religious questions have occupied, as we have seen, some of Mr. Browning's most important reflective poems. Religious belief forms the undercurrent of many of the emotional poems. And it was natural therefore, that religious feeling should not often lay hold of him in a more exclusive form. It does so only in three cases; those of

"Saul." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in part in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics," 1845; wholly, in "Men and Women," 1855.)

"Epilogue." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Fears and Scruples." ("Pacchiarotto and other Poems." 1876.)

The religious sentiment in "SAUL" anticipates Christianity. It begins with the expression of an exalted human tenderness, and ends in a prophetic vision of Divine Love, as manifested in Christ. The speaker is David. He has been sent into the presence of Saul to sing and play to him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting its transformation.

David tells his story, re-enacting the scene which it describes, in strong, simple, picturesque words which rise naturally into the language of prophecy. He tells how first he tried the influence of pastoral tunes: those which call the sheep back to the pen, and stir the sense of insect and bird; how he passed to the song of the reapers—their challenge to mutual help and fellowship; to the warrior's march; the burial and marriage chants; the chorus of the Levites advancing towards the altar; and how at this moment Saul sent forth a groan, though the lights which leapt from the jewels of his turban were his only sign of motion. Then—the tale continues—David changes his theme. He sings of the goodness of human life, as attested by the joyousness of youth, the gratitude of old age. He sings of labour and success, of hope and fulfilment, of high ambitions and of great deeds; of the great king in whom are centred all the gifts and the powers of human nature—of Saul himself. And at these words the tense body relaxes, the arms cross themselves on the breast. But the eyes of Saul still gaze vacantly before him, without consciousness of life, without desire for it.

David's song has poured forth the full cup of material existence; he has yet to infuse into it that draught of "Soul Wine" which shall make it desirable. In a fresh burst of inspiration, he challenges his hearer to follow him beyond the grave. "The tree is known by its fruits; life by its results. Life, like the palm fruit, must be crushed before its wine can flow. Saul will die. But his passion and his power will thrill the generations to come. His achievements will live in the hearts of his people; for whom their record, though covering the whole face of a rock, will still seem incomplete." And as the "Soul Wine" works, as the vision of this earthly immortality unfolds itself before the sufferer's sight, he becomes a king again. The old attitude and expression assert themselves. The hand is gently laid on the young singer's forehead; the eyes fix themselves in grave scrutiny upon him.

Then the heart of David goes out to the suffering monarch in filial, pitying tenderness; and he yearns to give him more than this present life—a new life equal to it in goodness, and which shall be everlasting.

And the yearning converts itself into prophecy. What he, as man, can desire for his fellow-man, God will surely give. What he would suffer for those he loves, surely God would suffer. Human nature in its power of love would otherwise outstrip the Divine. He cries for the weakness to be engrafted upon strength, the human to be manifested in the Divine. And exulting in the consciousness that his cry is answered, he hails the advent of Christ. He bids Saul "see" that a Face like his who now speaks to him awaits him at the threshold of an eternal life; that a Hand like his hand opens to him its gates.

David's prophecy has rung through the universe; and as he seeks his home in the darkness, unseen "cohorts" press everywhere upon him. A tumultuous expectation is filling earth and hell and heaven. The Hand guides him through the tumult. He sees it die out in the birth of the young day. But the hushed voices of nature attest the new dispensation. The seal of the new promise is on the face of the earth.

The EPILOGUE is spoken by three different persons, and embodies as many phases of the religious life. The "FIRST SPEAKER, as David," represents the old Testament Theism, with its solemn celebrations, its pompous worship, and the strong material faith which bowed down the thousands as one man, before the visible glory of the Lord.

The "SECOND SPEAKER, as Renan" represents nineteenth-century scepticism, and the longing of the heart for the old belief which scientific reason has dispelled. This belief is symbolized by a "Face" which once looked down from heights of glory upon men; by a star which shone down upon them in responsive life and love. The face has vanished into darkness. The star, gradually receding, has lost itself in the multitude of the lesser lights of heaven. And centuries roll past while the forsaken watchers vainly question the heavenly vault for the sign of love no longer visible there.

This lament assumes that Theism, having grown into Christianity, must disappear with it; and the pathetic sense of bereavement gives way to shuddering awe, as the farther significance of the sceptical position reveals itself. Man becomes the summit of creation; the sole successor to the vacant throne of God.