The "THIRD SPEAKER," Mr. Browning himself, corrects both the material faith of the Old Testament, and the scientific doubt of the nineteenth century, by the idea of a more mystical and individual intercourse between God and man. Observers have noted in the Arctic Seas that the whole field of waters seem constantly hastening towards some central point of rock, to envelope it in their playfulness and their force; in the blackness they have borrowed from the nether world, or the radiance they have caught from heaven; then tearing it up by the roots, to sweep onwards towards another peak, and make it their centre for the time being. So do the forces of life and nature circle round the individual man, doing in each the work of experience, reproducing for each the Divine Face which is inspired by the spirit of creation. And, as the speaker declares, he needs no "Temple," because the world is that. Nor, as he implies, needs he look beyond the range of his own being for the lost Divinity.

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows!" (vol. vii. p. 255.)

"FEARS AND SCRUPLES" illustrates this personal religion in an opposite manner. It is the expression of a tender and very simple religious feeling, saddened by the obscurity which surrounds its object, and still more by the impossibility of proving to other minds that this object is a real one. It is described as the devotion to an unseen friend, known only by his letters and reported deeds, but whom one loves as by instinct, believes in without testimony, and trusts to as accepting the allegiance of the smaller being, and sure sooner or later to acknowledge it In the present case the days are going by. No sign of acknowledgment has been given. Sceptics assure the believer that his faith rests on letters which were forged, on actions which others equally have performed; he can only yearn for some word or token which would enable him to shut their mouth. But when some one hints that the friend is only concealing himself to test his power of vision, and will punish him if he does not see; and another objects that this would prove the friend a monster; he crushes the objector with a word: "and what if the friend be GOD?"

The next group is fuller and still more characteristic: for it displays the love of Art in its special conditions, and, at the same time, in its union with all the general human instincts in which artistic emotion can be merged. We find it in its relation to the general love of life in

"Fra Lippo Lippi." ("Men and Women." 1855.)

In its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in

"Abt Vogler." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

As a transformation of human tenderness in

"Pictor Ignotus." ("Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

In its directly sensuous effects in

"The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." ("Men and Women." Published as "The Tomb at Saint Praxed's" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[72]

In its associative power in

"A Toccata of Galuppi's." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

In its representative power in

"The Guardian-Angel: a Picture at Fano." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Eurydice to Orpheus: a Picture by Leighton." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"A Face." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"FRA LIPPO LIPPI" is a lively monologue, supposed to be uttered by that friar himself, on the occasion of a night frolic in which he has been surprised. Cosmo dei Medici had locked him up in one room of the palace till some pictures he was painting for him should be finished;[73] and on this particular night he has found the confinement intolerable. He has whipped his bed clothes into a rope, scrambled down from his window, and run after a girlish face which laughingly invited him from the street; and was about to return from the equivocal neighbourhood into which the fun had led him, when his monkish dress caught the attention of the guard, and he was captured and called to account. He proceeds to give a sketch of his life and opinions, which supplies a fair excuse for the escapade. The facts he relates are, including this one, historical.

Fra Lippo Lippi had no vocation for the priesthood. He was enticed into a Carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat. There he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the Prior, glad to turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint. But the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets. His first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks, and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and legs. His conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the Prior's ideal of Christian art. The men and women he painted were all true to life. The simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized each familar type. But the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding of the flesh; and the Prior clearly laid down his theory that painting was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image forth the soul.

Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly life. "He will never believe that the world, with all its life and beauty, is an unmeaning blank. He is sure, 'it means intensely and means good.' He is sure, too, that to reproduce what is beautiful in it is the mission of Art. If anyone objects, that the world being God's work, Art cannot improve on it, and the painter will best leave it alone: he answers that some things are the better for being painted; because, as we are made, we love them best when we see them so. The artist has lent his mind for us to see with. That is what Art means; what God wills in giving it to us."

Nevertheless (he continues) he rubbed out his men and women; and though now, with a Medici for his patron, he may paint as he likes, the old schooling sticks to him.[74] And he works away at his saints, till something comes to remind him that life is not a dream, and he kicks the traces, as he has done now. He ends with a half-joking promise to make the Church a gainer through his misconduct (supposing that the secret has been kept from her), by a beautiful picture which he will paint by way of atonement.

This picture, which he describes very humorously, is that of the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the "Belle Arti" at Florence.[75]

ABT VOGLER is depicted at the moment when this composer of the last century has "been extemporizing on the musical instrument of his invention." His emotion has not yet subsided; and it is that of the inspired musician, to whom harmonized sound is as the opening of a heavenly world. His touch upon the keys has been as potent to charm, as the utterance of that NAME which summoned into Solomon's presence the creatures of Earth, Heaven, and Hell, and made them subservient to his will. And the "slaves of the sound," whom he has conjured up, have built him a palace more evanescent than Solomon's, but, as he describes it, far more beautiful. They have laid its foundations below the earth. They have carried its transparent walls up to the sky. They have tipped each summit with meteoric fire. As earth strove upwards towards Heaven, Heaven, in this enchanted structure, has yearned downwards towards the earth. The great Dead came back; and those conceived for a happier future walked before their time. New births of life and splendour united far and near; the past, the present, and the to-come.

The vision has disappeared with the sounds which called it forth, and the musician feels sorrowfully that it cannot be recalled: for the effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common with each other. We can trace the processes of painting and verse; we can explain their results. Art, however triumphant, is subject to natural laws. But that which frames out of three notes of music "not a fourth sound, but a star" is the Will, which is above law.

And, therefore, so Abt Vogler consoles himself, the music persists, though it has passed from the sense of him who called it forth: for it is an echo of the eternal life; a pledge of the reality of every imagined good—of the continuance of whatever good has existed. Human passion and aspiration are music sent up to Heaven, to be continued and completed there. The secret of the scheme of creation is in the musician's hands.

Having recognized this, Abt Vogler can subside, proudly and patiently, on the common chord—the commonplace realities, of life.

"PICTOR IGNOTUS" (Florence, 15—), is the answer of an unknown painter to the praise which he hears lavished on another man. He admits its justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected touch has set free. He, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to his power of attaining it. But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments, share in the pettiness of their lives. He has remained obscure, that his creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "He paints Madonnas and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. There, where his pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall, blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." He asks himself, as he again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it entails.

"THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT SAINT PRAXED'S CHURCH" (Rome, 15—) displays the artistic emotion in its least moral form: the love of the merely beautiful as such; and it shows also how this may be degraded: by connecting it in the mind of the given person, with the passion for luxury, and the pride and jealousies of possession. The Bishop is at the point of death. His sons (nominally nephews) are about him; and he is urging on them anxious and minute directions for the tomb they are to place for him in St. Praxed's church.

This tomb, as the Bishop has planned it, is a miracle of costliness and beauty; for it is to secure him a double end: the indulgence of his own tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives, which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument; and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as for dear life, with those who are to inherit his wealth, and who may at their pleasure fulfil his last wishes or disregard them: that he may have jasper for his tomb—basalt (black antique) for its slab—the rosiest marble for its columns—the richest design for its bronze frieze! A certain ball of lapis-lazuli (such as never yet was seen) is to "poise" between his knees; and he gasps forth the secret of how he saved this from the burning of his church, and buried it out of sight in a vineyard, as if he were staking his very life on the revelation.

But in his heart he knows that his entreaties are useless: that his sons will keep all they can; and the tone of entreaty is dashed with all the petulance of foreseen disappointment. Weakness prevails at last. He resigns himself to the inevitable; blesses his undutiful sons; and dismisses them.

Other strongly dramatic details complete the picture.[76]

"A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S" is a fantastic little vision of bygone Venice, evoked by the music of an old Venetian master, and filling us with the sense of a joyous ephemeral existence, in which the glow of life is already struck by the shuddering chill of annihilation. This sense is created by the sounds, as Mr. Browning describes them: and their directly expressive power must stand for what it is worth. Still, the supposed effect is mainly that of association; and the listener's fancy the medium through which it acts.

"A FACE" describes a beautiful head and throat in its pictorial details—those which painting might reproduce.

"THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL" and "EURYDICE TO ORPHEUS" describe each an actual picture in the emotions it expresses or conveys.

The former represents an angel, standing with outstretched wings by a little child. The child is half kneeling on a kind of pedestal, while the angel joins its hands in prayer: its gaze directed upward towards the sky, from which cherubs are looking down. The picture was painted by Guercino, and is now in the church of St. Augustine, at Fano, on the Italian coast. Mr. Browning relates to an absent friend (who appears in the "Dramatic Romances" as Waring) how he saw it in the company of his own "angel;" and how it occurred to him to develop into a poem one of the thoughts which the picture had "struck out." The thought resolves itself into a feeling: the yearning for guidance and protection. The poet dreams himself in the place of that praying child. The angel wings cover his head: the angel hands upon his eyes press back the excess of thought which has made his brain too big. He feels how thankfully those eyes would rest on the "gracious face" instead of looking to the opening sky beyond it; and how purely beautiful the world would seem when that healing touch had been upon them.

The second was painted by F. Leighton. It represents Orpheus leading Eurydice away from the infernal regions, but with an implied variation on the story of her subsequent return to them. She was restored to Orpheus on the condition of his not looking at her till they had reached the upper world; and, as the legend goes, the condition proved too hard for him to fulfil. But the face of Leighton's Eurydice wears an intensity of longing which seems to challenge the forbidden look, and make her responsible for it. The poem thus interprets the expression, and translates it into words.

"ANDREA DEL SARTO" ("Men and Women," 1855) lays down the principle, asserted by Mr. Browning as far back as in "Sordello," that the soul of the true artist must exceed his technical powers; that in art, as in all else, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp." And on this ground the poem might be classed as critical. But it is still more an expression of feeling; the lament of an artist who has fallen short of his ideal—of a man who feels himself the slave of circumstance—of a lover who is sacrificing his moral, and in some degree his artistic, conscience to a woman who does not return his love. It is the harmonious utterance of a many-sided sadness which has become identified with even the pleasures of the man's life; and is hopeless, because he is resigned to it.

Andrea del Sarto was called the "faultless painter." His execution was as easy as it was perfect; and Michael Angelo is reported to have said to Raphael, of the insignificant little personage Andrea then was: that he would bring the sweat to his (Raphael's) brow, if urged on in like manner by popes and kings. But he lacked strength and loftiness of purpose; and as Mr. Browning depicts him, is painfully conscious of these deficiencies. He feels that even an ill-drawn picture of Raphael's—and he has such a one before him—has qualities of strength and inspiration which he cannot attain. His wife might have incited him to nobler work; but Lucrezia is not the woman from whom such incentives proceed; she values her husband's art for what it brings her. Remorse has added itself in his soul to the sense of artistic failure. He has not only abandoned the French Court, and, for Lucrezia's sake, broken his promise to return to it; he has cheated his kind friend and patron, Francis I., of the money with which he was entrusted by him for the purchase of works of art. He has allowed his parents to die of want. All this, and more, reflects itself in the monologue he is addressing to his wife, but no conscious reproach is conveyed by it. She has consented to sit by him at their window, with her hand in his, while he drinks in her beauty, and finds in it rest and inspiration at the same time. She will leave him presently for one she cares for more; but the spell is deepening upon him. The Fiesole hills are melting away in the twilight; the evening stillness is invading his whole soul. He scarcely even desires to fight against the inevitable. Yet there might be despair in his concluding words: "another chance may be given to him in heaven, with Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. But he will still have Lucrezia, and therefore they will still conquer him."

The facts adduced are all matter of history; though a later chronicle than that which Mr. Browning has used, is more favourable in its verdict on Andrea's wife.

The fiercer emotions also play a part, though seldom an exclusive one, in Mr. Browning's work. Jealousy forms the subject of

"THE LABORATORY." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[77]

"MY LAST DUCHESS." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "Italy" in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

The first of these shows the passion as distorted love: the frenzy of a woman who has been supplanted. The jealous wife (if wife she is) has come to the laboratory to obtain a dose of poison, which she means to administer to her rival; and she watches its preparation with an eager, ferocious joy, dashed only by the fear of its being inadequate. The quantity is minute; and it is (as we guess) the "magnificent" strength of that other one which has won him away.

In the second we find a jealousy which has no love in it; which means the exactingness of self-love, and the tyranny of possession. A widowed Duke of Ferrara is exhibiting the portrait of his former wife, to the envoy of some nobleman whose daughter he proposes to marry; and his comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plainly state what he will expect of her successor. "That earnest, impassioned, and yet smiling glance went alike to everyone. She who sent it, knew no distinction of things or persons. Everything pleased her: everyone could arouse her gratitude. And it seemed to her husband, from her manner of showing it, that she ranked his gift, the 'gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name,' with that of everyone else. It was below his dignity to complain of this state of things, so he put an end to it. He: 'gave commands;' and the smiles, too evenly dispensed, stopped all together." He does not fear to admit, as he does parenthetically, that there may have been some right on her side. This was below his concern. The Duke touches, in conclusion, on the dowry which he will expect with his second wife; and, with a suggestive carelessness, bids his guest remark—as they are about to descend the staircase—a rare work in bronze, which a noted sculptor has cast for him.

Hatred, born of jealousy, has its fullest expression in the "SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER" ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 to 1845): a venomous outbreak of jealous hatred, directed by one monk against another whom he is watching at some innocent occupation. The speaker has no ground of complaint against Brother Lawrence, except that his life is innocent: that he is orderly and clean, that he loves his garden, is free from debasing superstitions, and keeps his passions, if he has any, in check. But that, precisely, is a rebuke and an exasperation to the fierce, coarse nature of this other man; and he declares to himself, that if hate could kill, Brother Lawrence would not live long. Meanwhile, as we also hear, he spites him when he can, and fondly dreams of tripping him up somewhere, or somehow, on his way to the better world. He is turning over some pithy expedients, when the vesper bell cuts short his meditations.

WRATH, as inspired by a desperate sense of wrong, finds utterance in "THE CONFESSIONAL." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 to 1845.) A loved and loving girl has been made the instrument of her lover's destruction. He held a treasonable secret, which the Church was anxious to possess; and her priest has assured her that if this is fully revealed to him, he will, by prayer and fasting, purge its guilt from the young man's soul. She obtains the desired knowledge, reveals it, and joyfully anticipates the result. When next she sees her lover, he is on the scaffold. They have stifled her denunciations in a prison-cell. Her body is wrenched with torture, as her soul with anguish. She is scarcely human any more. But she hurls at them unceasingly a cry which will yet reach the world. "Their Pope and their saints, their heaven and their hell, their—everything they teach, and everything they say, is lies, and again lies."

"A FORGIVENESS" ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems," 1876) might serve equally as a study for jealousy, self-reproach, contempt, and revenge; the love which is made to underlie these feelings, and the forgiveness with which it will be crowned.

It is a story told in confession. He who tells it had once a wife, who was dearer to him than anything else in the world. He had also public duties, which he discharged with diligence and with success; but it was the thought of the wife's love which nerved him to the fulfilment of these duties, and which rewarded it.

One day he discovered that she was unfaithful to him. A man (whose face was but imperfectly concealed) was stealing away from his house as he returned to it; and the wife, confronting him at the same moment, bade him kill her, but spare the man she loved. He did not kill her—then: for she had turned his love into contempt. He despised her too much to inflict even a lesser punishment, which should compromise the dignity, or disturb the outward calmness, of his life. But from that moment their union was a form; and while he worked as those do who have something to forget, and she shared the position which his labours procured for him, an impassable, if unseen, gulf lay between them.

Three years had passed, when suddenly, one night, the wife begged to speak with her husband alone. Her request was granted; and then the truth broke forth. She loved—had loved—no one but him; but she was jealous of his devotion to the State. She imagined herself second to it in his affections; and it was the jealousy in her which had made her strive to arouse it in him. That other man had been nothing to her but a tool. Her secret, she now knew, was killing her. Conscience forbade her to elude her punishment by death. She therefore spoke.

"Would she write this?" he asked; and he dictated to her the confession she had just made, in the terms most humiliating to him who was intended to hear it.

"Could she but write it in her blood!" This, too, was possible. He put into her hand a dainty Eastern weapon, one prick of which, he said, would draw so much blood as was required. It did more than this, for it was poisoned. But, before she died, she knew that her explanation had raised her husband's contempt into hatred, and that the revenge of which she was now found worthy had quenched the hatred in forgiveness.

"She lies as erst beloved" (the narrative concludes) "in the church of him who hears this confession; whom his grate conceals as little as that cloak once did—whom vengeance overtakes at last."

The poisoned dagger, which was the instrument of revenge—the pledge of forgiveness—is spoken of as part of a collection preserved in the so-called study, which was the scene of the interview; and the speaker dwells at some length on the impression of deadly purpose combined with loving artistic care, which their varied form and fantastic richness convey. This collection is actually in Mr. Browning's possession; and he values it, perhaps, for the reason he imputes to its imagined owner: that those who are accustomed to the slower processes of thought, like to play with the suggestions of prompt (if murderous) action; as the soldier, tired of wielding the sword, will play with paper and pen.

HISTORICAL POEMS, OR POEMS FOUNDED ON FACT.

Many of Mr. Browning's poems are founded on fact, whether historical, or merely of known occurrence; but few of them can be classed by their historic quality, because it is seldom their most important. In "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," for instance, we have a chapter in recent history: but we only read it as an abstract discussion, to which a chapter in history has given rise; and in "Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper," and "Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial" (published in the same volume), we find two incidents, each of them true, and each full of historic significance; but which owe all their vitality to the critical and humorous spirit, in which Mr. Browning has described them. The small list of poems which are historical more than anything else, might be recruited from the Dramatic Idyls; but, for various reasons, this publication must stand alone; and even here, it is often difficult to disengage the actual fact, from the imaginary conditions in which it appears. Our present group is therefore reduced to—

"Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers." (1873.) "The Inn Album." (1875.) "The Two Poets of Croisic." (1878.) "Cenciaja." ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." 1876.)

We may also place here, as it is historical in character, "The Heretic's Tragedy; a Middle Age Interlude" ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

The real-life drama which Mr. Browning has reproduced under the title of "Red Cotton Night-cap Country," was enacted partly in Paris, partly in a retired corner of Normandy, where he spent the late summer of 1872; and ended in a trial which had been only a fortnight closed, when he supposes himself to be relating it. His whole story is true, except that in it which reality itself must have left to the imagination. Only the names of persons and places are fictitious.[78]

The principal actor in this drama, Leonce Miranda, was son and heir to a wealthy Spanish jeweller in the Place Vendome. He was southern by temperament as by descent; but a dash of the more mercantile Parisian spirit had come to him from his French mother; and while keenly susceptible to the incitements of both religious and earthly passion, he began life with the deliberate purpose of striking a compromise between them. At an early age he determined to live for this world now, and for the other when he was older; and in the meantime to be moderate in his enjoyments. In conformity with this plan he ran riot on Sunday; but worked diligently during the rest of the week. He bestowed his fancy on five women at once; but represented himself, when in their company, as a poor artist or musician, and wasted no money upon them.

One day, however, he fell in love. The object of his affections, Clara Mulhausen, or, as she first calls herself, "de Millefleurs," was an adventuress; but she did not at first allow him to find this out; and when he did so, her hold upon him had become too strong to be affected by the discovery. A succession of circumstances, which Mr. Browning describes, first cemented the bond, then destroyed its secrecy; and since Clara had a husband, and the position could not be legalized, Leonce Miranda had no choice but to accept the social interdict, and with her retire from Paris. He placed a substitute in the business, which had devolved on him through his father's death; and the pair took up their abode at Clairvaux, an ancient priory, which the father had bought. Here Miranda built and improved; indulged his amateur propensities for painting and music; remained devoted to his love, and was rewarded by her devotion. For five years they were very happy.

The first interruption to their happiness was a summons to Miranda, from his mother in Paris, to come and answer for his excessive expenditure. The immorality of his life she had condoned (a curious proof of this is given), for she hoped it would be its own cure. But "his architectural freaks, above all, a Belvedere which he had constructed in his grounds, were a reckless waste of substance which she could not witness without displeasure." She had immense influence with her son; and he took her rebuke so much to heart, that he only left her to fling himself into the Seine. He was brought out alive; but lay for a month at death's door, and made no progress towards recovery till he had been restored to Clara's care; and Clara was painfully winning him back to health, when the telegraphic wires flashed a second summons upon him. His presence was again demanded in the maternal home. "The business was urgent. Its nature he would learn on arrival."

He hastened to his mother's house, to find her a corpse—laid out with all the ghastly ceremonial which Catholic fancy could devise—and to be told that his misconduct had killed her. The tribe of cousins, who had planned the coup de theatre, were there to enjoy its result. This did not fail them. Miranda fainted away. As soon as consciousness returned, he made his act of atonement. He foreswore the illegal bond. He willed away his fortune to his kinsfolk; and would retain of it, from that moment, only a pittance for himself, and the means of honourable subsistence for Clara. They were to meet in the same house a week later, to arrange in what manner that sinful woman should be acquainted with the facts.

The day came. The cousins arrived. Miranda did not appear. He had broken down at the funeral in a fresh outburst of frenzied grief; but from this he had had time to recover. Someone peeped into his room. There he stood, by a blazing fire, a small empty coffer by his side, engaged in reading some letters which he had taken from it. Whose they were, and what the reading had told him, was quickly shown. He replaced them in the box, plunged this in the fire; and reiterating the words, "Burn, burn and purify my past!" held it there till both his hands had been consumed; no sign of pain escaping him. He was dragged away by main force, protesting against this hindrance to his salvation. "He was not yet purified. SHE was not yet burned out of him." In his bed he raved and struggled against the image which again rose before his eyes, which again grew and formed itself in his flesh.

The delirium was followed by three months of exhaustion. The moment the sick man could "totter" out of his room, he found his way to her whom he had abjured, and who was in Paris calmly awaiting his return to her. She came back with him. He introduced her to his kinsmen. "It was all right," he said; "Clara would henceforth be—his brother; he would still fulfil his bond." From this, however, he departed, in so far as not to content himself with a pittance. He sold his business to the "cousinry," and, as they considered, on hard terms. He and Clara then returned to Clairvaux.

And now, as Mr. Browning interprets the situation, his experience had entered on a new phase. He had tested the equal strength of the earthly and the heavenly powers, and he knew that he could elude neither, and that neither could be postponed to the other. He no longer strove to compromise between these opposing realities, but threw his whole being into the struggle to unite them. He adhered to his unlawful love. His acts of piety and charity became grotesque in their excessiveness. (Of these again particulars are given.) Two years went by; and then, one April morning, Miranda climbed his Belvedere, and was found, soon after, dead, on the turf below. There seemed no question of accident. The third attempt at suicide had succeeded.

On this fact, however, Mr. Browning puts a construction of his own. He asserts the poet's privilege of seeing into the man's mind; and makes him think before us in a long and impassioned soliloquy, which sets forth the hidden motive of his deed. As Mr. Browning conceives him, he did not mean to kill himself. He did so in a final, irresistible impulse to manifest his faith, and to test the foundations of it. It has had for its object, not the spiritual truths of Christianity, but its miraculous powers; and these powers have of late been symbolized to his mind by the Virgin of the Ravissante.[79] The conflict of despotisms has thus been waged between the natural woman and the supernatural: each a monarch in her way. As he looks from his tower towards the Church of the Ravissante, he apostrophizes her who is enthroned there.

He imagines her to have reproached him for his divided allegiance; and asserts, in answer, that he has been subject to her all his life. "He could not part with his soul's treasure. But he has, for her sake, lavished his earthly goods, burned away his flesh. If his sacrifice has been incomplete, it was because another power, mysterious and unnamed, but yet as absolute as she, had cast its spells about him. He would have resisted the Enchantress, if she, the Despot, had made a sign. But what token has he ever received, of her acceptance, her approbation? She exacts from her servants the surrender of both body and soul; the least deficiency in the offering neutralizes its sum. And what does she give in exchange for body and soul? Promises? Is a man to starve while the life-apple is withheld from him, if even husks are within his reach? Miracles? Will she make a finger grow on his maimed hand? Would he not be called a madman if he expected it?"

And yet he believes. He summons her to justify his belief. He claims of her a genuine miracle—a miracle of power, which will silence scepticism, and re-establish the royalty of the Church—a miracle of mercy, which will wipe away the past; reconcile duty and love; give Clara into his hands as his pure and lawful wife. "She is to carry him through the air to the space before her church as she was herself conveyed there...." Then come the leap and the catastrophe.

He had by a second will bequeathed all his possessions to the Church, reserving in them a life-interest for his virtual wife; and when the cousinry swooped down on what they thought their prey, Madame Mulhausen could receive them and their condolences with the indignant scorn which their greed and cruelty deserved. They disputed the will on the alleged plea of the testator's insanity. The trial was interrupted by the events of 1870, but finally settled in the lady's favour; the verdict being uncompromising as to her moral, as well as legal claim to the inheritance.

Mr. Browning had lately stood outside the grounds of Clairvaux, and seen its lady pass. She was insignificant in face and expression; and he was reduced to accounting for the power she had exercised, by that very fact. She seemed a blank surface, on which a man could inscribe, or fancy he was inscribing, himself; and it is a matter of fact that, whether from strength of will, or from the absence of it, she presented such a surface to her lover's hand. She humoured his every inclination, complied with his every wish. And because she did no more than this, and also no less, Mr. Browning pronounces her far from the best of women, but by no means one of the worst. The two had, after all, up to a certain point, redeemed each other.

The title of the book arose as follows. The narrative is addressed (as the volume is dedicated) to Miss Annie Thackeray; and its supposed occasion is that of a meeting which took place at St. Rambert—actually St. Aubin—between her and Mr. Browning, in the summer of 1872. She had laughingly called the district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country," from its sleepy appearance, and the universal white cap of even its male inhabitants. Mr. Browning, being acquainted with the tragedy of Clairvaux, thought "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" would be a more appropriate name; and adopted it for his story, as Miss Thackeray had adopted hers for one which she promised to write. But he represents himself as playing at first with the idea; and as leading the listener's mind, from the suggestions of white night-caps to those of the red one: and null the outward calmness of the neighbouring country, to the tragic possibilities which that calmness conceals.

The supplementary heading, "Turf and Towers," must have been inspired by the literal facts of the case; but it supplies an analogy for the contrasted influences which fought for Miranda's soul. The "tower" represents the militant or religious life. The "turf," the self-indulgent; and the figure appears and reappears at every stage of the man's career. The attempt at compromise is symbolized by a pavilion: a structure aping solidity, but only planted on the turf. The final attempt at union is spoken of as an underground passage connecting the two, and by which the fortress may be entered instead of scaled. The difficulty of making one's way through life amidst the ruins of old beliefs and the fanciful overgrowth in which time has clothed them; the equal danger of destroying too much and clearing away too little; also find their place in the allegory.

The possible friend and adviser, to whom Miranda is referred at vol. xii. p. 122, was M. Joseph Milsand, who always at that time passed the bathing season at St. Aubin.[80]

"THE INN ALBUM" is a tragedy in eight parts or scenes: the dialogue interspersed with description; and carried on by four persons not named. It is chiefly enacted in the parlour of a country inn; and the Inn "Album," in spite of its grotesque or prosaic character, becomes an important instrument in it.

Four years before the tragedy occurred—so we learn from the dialogue—a gentlemanly adventurer of uncertain age had won and abused the affections of a motherless girl, whom he thought too simple to resent the treachery. He was mistaken in this; for her nature was as proud as it was confiding; and her indignation when she learned that he had not intended marriage was such as to surprise him into offering it. She rejected the offer with contempt. He went his way, mortified and embittered. A month later she had buried herself in a secluded and squalid village, as wife of the old, poor, overworked, and hopelessly narrow-minded clergyman, whose cure it was. She abstained, however, for his own sake, from making any painful disclosures to her husband; and the daily and hourly expiation brought no peace with it; for she remained in her deceiver's power.

Three years went by. The elderly adventurer then fell in with a young, wealthy, and inexperienced man, who had loved the same woman, and whose honourable addresses had been declined for his sake; and he acquired over this youth an influence almost as strong as that which he had exercised over the young girl. He found him grieving over his disappointment, and undertook to teach him how to forget it; became his master in the art of dissipation; helped to empty his pockets while he filled his own; and finally induced him to form a mercenary engagement to a cousin whom he did not love. When the story opens, the young man has come to visit his bride-elect in her country home; and his Mephistopheles has followed him, under a transparent pretext, to secure a last chance of winning money from him at cards. The presence of the latter is to be a secret, because he is too ill-famed a personage to be admitted into the lady's house; so they have arrived on the eve of the appointed day, and put up at a village inn on the outskirts of the cousin's estate. There they have spent the night in play. There also the luck has turned; and the usual winner has lost ten thousand pounds. His friend insists on cancelling the debt. He affects to scout the idea. "The money shall, by some means or other, be paid."

The discussion is renewed with the same result, as they loiter near the station, at which the younger will presently make a feint of arriving; and for the first time he asks the elder why, with such abilities as his, he has made no mark in life. The latter replies that he found and lost his opportunity four years ago, in a woman, who, he feels more and more, would have quickened his energies to better ends. He then, with tolerable frankness, relates his story. The younger follows with his own. But, for a reason which explains itself at the time, the connection between the two escapes them.

The woman herself next appears on the scene, and with her, the girl cousin. They are friends of old; and the married one has emerged from her seclusion at the entreaty of the betrothed, to pass judgment on her intended husband. The young girl is not satisfied with her own feeling towards him whom she has promised to marry; though she has no misgiving as to his sentiments towards her. She is to bring him for inspection to the inn. And the friend, entering its parlour alone, is confronted by her former lover, who has temporarily returned there.

A stormy dialogue ensues. She denounces him as the destroyer, ever lying in wait for her soul. He taunts her with the malignant hatred with which for years past from the height of her own prosperity she has been weighing down his. She retorts in a powerful description of the love with which he once inspired her, of the living death in which she has been expiating her mistake. And as he listens, the old feeling in him revives, and he kneels to her, imploring that she will break her bonds, and secure their joint happiness by flying with him. She sees nothing, however, in this, but a second attempt to ensnare her; and is repulsing the entreaty with the scorn which she believes it to deserve, when the younger man bursts merrily into the room. A wave of angry pain passes over him as he recognizes the heroine of his own romance, and hastily infers from the circumstances in which he finds her, that he has been the victim of a double deception. The truth gradually shapes itself in his mind; but meanwhile the older man has grasped the situation, and determined to make capital of it—to avenge his rebuff and to rid himself of his debt at the same time. He begs the lady to leave the room for a few moments, handing her, for her entertainment, the inn "album," over which he and his friend were exchanging jokes a few hours ago; and in which he has, at this moment, inscribed some lines. The purport of these is that this young man loves her; and that unless she responds to his advances, the secret of her past life shall be revealed to her husband.

Alone with the younger man, he exhausts himself in coarse libels against the woman, of whom that morning only he was speaking, as the lost opportunity of his life; bids him ask of her what he desires, and have it; and calls on him to admit, that in preserving him from marrying her, and placing her nevertheless at his disposal, he will have earned his gratitude, and paid the value of the ten thousand pounds.

When the woman returns, the album in her hand, the calm of death is upon her. She has lived prepared for this emergency, provided also with the means of escaping from it. But she will not die without entreating her young admirer to shake off, before it is too late, the evil influence to which both, though in different ways, have succumbed; and her dignity, her kindness, the instinctive reverence, and now chivalrous pity, with which she has inspired him carry all before them. He renews his declaration; implores her to accept him as her husband, if she is free—her friend if she is not; her husband even if the relation she is living in be something less than marriage; to exact any delay, to impose any probation, so that in the end she accepts him.

She replies by putting her hand into his, to remain there, as she says, till death shall part them. The older man, who has just re-entered the room, congratulates them on having arrived at so sensible an understanding. The woman, now very pale, contrives to point to the fatal entry in the album which she still grasps; and asks her friend—after quoting the writer's words—how, but in her own way, the mouth of such a one could have been stopped.

"So," exclaims the youth. And he flies at the man's throat, and strangles him.

She has only time to thank her deliverer; to tell him why his devotion is unavailing—to provide for his safety by writing in the album from which he has torn the fatal page, that he has slain a man who would have outraged her: and that her last breath is spent in blessing him.

A merry voice is heard; and the young, light-hearted girl comes all unconscious to the scene of the tragedy. The curtain falls before she has entered upon it.

The betrayal of the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which occurred in the present century.

"THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC" is an extract from the history of two writers of verse, whose respective works obtained from circumstances a brilliant but short-lived renown. It forms part of a reminiscence, supposed to be conjured up by a wood fire near which the narrator, with his wife, is sitting. The fire, as he describes it, is made of ship-wood: for it burns in all the beautiful colours which denote the presence of metallic substances and salts; and as his fancy reconstructs the ship, it also raises the vision of a distant coast well known to his companion and to himself. He sees Le Croisic—the little town it is—the poor village it was[81]—with its storm-tossed sea—its sandy strip of land, good only for the production of salt—its solitary Menhir, which recalls, and in some degree perpetuates, the wild life and the barbarous Druid worship of old Breton times.[82] And in the bright-hued flames, which leap up and vanish before his bodily eyes, he sees also the two ephemeral reputations which flashed forth and expired there.

Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, was a rhymer, as his father had been before him. He became page to the Prince of Conde, and occupied his spare time by writing complimentary verse. One day, as he was hammering at an ode, a violent storm broke out; and the lightning shattered a ducal crown in marble which stood on a pedestal in the room in which he sat. Conde was regarded as future King of France: for Louis XIII. was childless, and his brother Gaston believed to be so; in consideration of this fact, men called him "Duke." Rene took the incident as an omen, and turned his ode into a prophecy which he delivered to his master as the utterance of God. "The Prince's hopes were at an end: a Dauphin would be born in the ensuing year." A Dauphin was born; and Rene, who had at first been terrified at his own boldness, received the title of Royal Poet, and the honours due to a seer. But he wrote little or no more; and he and the tiny volume which composed his works soon disappeared from sight.

The narrator, however, judges that this oblivion may not have been unsought, since one who had believed himself the object of a direct message from God, would have little taste for intercourse with his fellow men; and he suspends his story for a moment to ask himself how such a one would bear the weight of his experience; and how far the knowledge conveyed by it might be true. He decides (as we should expect) that a direct Revelation is forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our "simulated thunder-claps," all our "counterfeited truths," all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind: darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence. And so Rene Gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher than rhyming and its rewards.

Paul Desforges Maillard was born nearly a century later, and wrote society verses till the age of thirty, when the desire for wider fame took possession of him. He competed for a prize which the Academy had offered to the poet who should best commemorate the progress made by the art of navigation during the last reign. His poem was returned. It was offered, through the agency of a friend, to a paper called "The Mercury." The editor, La Roque, praised the work in florid terms, but said he dared not offend the Academy; he, too, returned the MS. Paul, mistaking the polite fiction for truth, wrote back an angry tirade against the editor's cowardice; and the latter, retorting in as frank a fashion, told the writer that his poem was execrable, and that it was only consideration for his feelings which had hitherto prevented his hearing so.

At this juncture Paul's sister interposed. He was wrong, she declared, to proceed in such a point-blank manner. In cases like these, it was only wile which conquered. He must resume his incognito, and try, this time, the effect of a feminine disguise. She picked out and copied the feeblest of his songs or sonnets, and sent it to La Roque, as from a girl-novice who humbly sued for his literary protection. She was known by another name than her brother's (Mr. Browning explains why); the travesty was therefore complete. The poem was accepted; then another and another. The lady's fame grew. La Roque made her, by letter, a declaration of love. Voltaire also placed himself at her feet.

Paul now refused to efface himself any longer. The clever sister urged in vain that it was her petticoats which had conquered, and not his verse. He went to Paris to claim his honours, and introduce himself as the admired poetess to La Roque and Voltaire. Voltaire bitterly resented the joke; La Roque affected to enjoy it; but nevertheless advised its perpetrator to get out of Paris as fast as possible. The trick had answered for once. It would not be wise to repeat it. Again Paul disregarded his sister's advice, and reprinted the poems in his own name. "They had been praised and more than praised. The world could not eat its own printed words!"

He discovered, however, that the world could eat its words; or, at least, forget them. The only fame—the speaker adds—which a great man cannot destroy, is that which he has had no hand in making. Paul's light, with his sister's, went out as did that of his predecessor.

Mr. Browning gives, in conclusion, a test by which the relative merit of any two real poets may be gauged. The greater is he who leads the happier life. To be a poet is to see and feel. To see and feel is to suffer. His is the truest poetic existence who enslaves his sufferings, and makes their strength his own. He who yokes them to his chariot shall win the race.[83]

"CENCIAJA" signifies matter relating to the "Cenci;"[84] and the poem describes an incident extraneous to the "Cenci" tragedy, but which strongly influenced its course. This incident was the murder of the widowed Marchesa dell' Oriolo, by her younger son, Paolo Santa Croce, who thus avenged her refusal to invest him with his elder brother's rights. He escaped the hands of justice, though only to perish in some other disastrous way. But the matricide had been committed on the very day which closed the trial of the Cenci family for the assassination of its Head; and it sealed Beatrice's fate. Her sentence seemed about to be remitted. The Pope now declared that she must die.

... "Paolo Santo Croce Murdered his mother also yestereve, And he is fled: she shall not flee at least!" (vol. xiv. p. 104.)

The elder son of the Marchesa, Onofrio Marchese dell' Oriolo, was arrested on the strength of an ambiguous scrap of writing, which appeared to implicate him in his brother's guilt; and subjected in prison to such a daily and day-long examination on the subject of this letter, that his mind gave way, and the desired avowal was extracted from him. He confessed to having implied, under reserves and conditions which practically neutralized the confession, his assent to his mother's death. He was beheaded accordingly; and the Governor of Rome, Taverna, who had conducted the inquisition, was rewarded by a Cardinal's hat. Other motives were, however, involved in the proceeding than the Pope's quickened zeal for justice. He had entrusted the case to his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini; and it was known that the Cardinal and the Marchese had courted the same lady, and the latter unwisely flaunted the possession of a ring which was his pledge of victory.

This story, with other details which I have not space to give, was taken from a contemporary Italian chronicle, of which some lines are literally transcribed.

The heretic of "THE HERETIC'S TRAGEDY" was Jacques du Bourg-Molay, last Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templars, and against whom preposterous accusations had been brought. This "Jacques," whom the speaker erroneously calls "John," and who might stand for any victim of middle-age fanaticism, was burned in Paris in 1314; and the "Interlude," we are told, "would seem to be a reminiscence of this event, as distorted by two centuries of refraction from Flemish brain to brain." The scene is carried on by one singer, in a succession of verses, and by a chorus which takes up the last and most significant words of each verse; the organ accompanying in a plagal cadence,[85] which completes its effect. The chant is preceded by an admonition from the abbot, which lays down its text: that God is unchanging, and His justice as infinite as His mercy; and singer and chorus both denounce the impious heresy of "John:" who admitted only the love, and sinned the "Unknown Sin," in his confidence in it. How the logs are fired; how the victim roasts; amidst what hideous and fantastic torments the damned soul "flares forth into the dark" is quaintly and powerfully described.

ROMANTIC POEMS.

The prevalence of thought in Mr. Browning's poetry has created in many minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's imagination, the thought and the thing—the idea and its image—grow up at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other.[86] He sees, therefore, the truths of Nature, as Nature herself gives them; while the thinker, who conceives an idea first, and finds an illustration for it afterwards, gives truth only as it presents itself to the human mind—in a more definite, but much narrower form. Mr. Browning often treats his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always conceived it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain.[87] This fact may be recognized in many of the smaller poems, which, for that reason, I shall find it impossible to class; but it is best displayed in a couple of longer ones, which I have placed under the head "Romantic." They are distinct from the majority of the "Dramatic Romances," although included in them. For with these the word "romantic" denotes an imaginary experience, which may be frankly supernatural, as in "The Boy and the Angel;" or only improbable, as in "Mesmerism;" or semi-historical and local, as in "In a Gondola;" or simply human, and possible anywhere and anywhen, as in "The Last Ride Together;" or in "Dis aliter Visum," and "James Lee's Wife," which might be classed with them. I am now using it to mark certain cases, in which the author's imagination has not brought itself to the test of any consistent experience, but simply presents us with certain groups of material and mental—of real and ideal possibilities, which we may each interpret for ourselves. They occur in

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"The Flight of the Duchess." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[88]

The first of these has been taken by some intelligent critics to be a moralizing allegory; the second, a moralizing fairy-tale. They are, therefore, a useful type both of Mr. Browning's poetic genius, and of the misunderstanding, to which its constantly intellectual employment has exposed him.

"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME," describes a brave knight performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have failed. The way through which he struggles is unknown to him; its features are hideous; a deadly sense of difficulty and danger hangs over every step; and though Childe Roland's courage is pledged to the undertaking, the thought of failure at last comes to him as a relief. He reaches the goal just as failure appears inevitable. The plain has suddenly closed in; weird and unsightly eminences encompass him on every side. In one flash he perceives that he is in a trap; in another, that the tower stands before him; while round it, against the hill-sides, are ranged the "lost adventurers" who have preceded him—their names and story clanging loudly and more loudly in his ears—their forms revealed with ghastly clearness in the last fires of the setting sun.

So far the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface discrepancies appear. The Tower is much nearer and more accessible than Childe Roland has thought; a sinister-looking man, of whom he asked the way, and who, as he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on the right track; and as he describes the country through which he passes, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself. We are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest, have not done so through the very act of attainment in it; and when, dauntless, Childe Roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom. We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy, built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind.[89]

But these picturesque impressions had, also, their ideal side, which Mr. Browning as spontaneously reproduced; and we may all recognize under the semblance of the enchanted country and the adventurous knight, a poetic vision of life: with its conflicts, contradictions, and mockeries; its difficulties which give way when they seem most insuperable; its successes which look like failures, and its failures which look like success. The thing we may not do is to imagine that an intended lesson is conveyed by it.

"THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS" is the adventure of a young girl, who was brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity of escape from it. A retainer of the Duke's, whose chivalry her position had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story of it.

The Duke had decreed a hunt. Custom prescribed that his wife should attend it. She had excused herself on the plea of her ill-health; and he was riding forth in no amiable mood, when an old gipsy woman, well known in the neighbourhood, accosted him with the usual prayer for alms. He was curtly dismissing her, when she mentioned her desire to pay her respects to the young Duchess. It then occurred to him that the sight of this ragged crone, and the chronicle of her woes, might be an excellent medicine for his "froward," ungrateful wife, and teach her to know when she was well off; and after speaking in confidence with the old woman, he bade him who recounts the adventure escort her into the lady's presence. The interview took place. The Duchess accompanied her visitor to the castle gate, ordered her palfrey to be saddled, mounted it with the gipsy behind her, and bounded away, never to return. The attendant had watched and obeyed her as in a dream. She left in his hand, in gratitude for what she knew he felt for her, a little plait of hair.

These are the real facts of the story. But we have also its ideal possibilities, as reflected by the imagination of the narrator. He had seen the gipsy metamorphosed as she received the Duke's command, from a ragged, decrepit crone into a stately woman, whose clothing bore the appearance of wealth; and as he mounted guard on the balcony which commanded the Duchess's room, he saw the wonder grow. A sound as of music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the Duchess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head upturned—her whole being expanding—as the gipsy's hands waved over her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods of life into her own. Then the music broke up into words, and he knew what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard what the gipsy said. She was telling the young Duchess that she was one of themselves—that she bore their mystic mark in the two veins which met and parted on her brow—that after fiery trial she should return to her tribe, and be shielded by their devotion for evermore. She was telling her how good a thing is love—how strong and beautiful the double existence of those whom love has welded together—how full of restful memories the old age of those who have lived in and for it—how sure and gentle their awakening into the better world.... Here the words again lost themselves in music, and he understood no more. When the two appeared at the castle gate, the gipsy had shrunk back into her original character; but the Duchess remained transformed. She had become, in her turn, a queen.

The suggestion of her gipsy origin forms a connecting link between the real and the ideal aspects of the Duchess's flight. We might imagine her fervid nature as being affected by the message of deliverance precisely in the manner described: while the beautified image of her deliverer transferred itself through some magnetic influence to the spectator's mind from her own. He does not, however, present himself as a probable subject for such impressions. He is a jovial, matter-of-fact person, in spite of the vein of sentiment which runs through him; and the imaginative part of his narrative was more probably the result of a huntsman's breakfast which had found its way into his brain. As in the case of Childe Roland, the poetic truth of the Duchess's romance is incompatible with rational explanation, and independent of it. Various dramatic details complete the story.

SATIRICAL OR HUMOROUS POEMS.

Humour is a constant characteristic of Mr. Browning's work,[90] and it sometimes takes the form of direct and intentional satire; but his sympathy with human beings and his hopeful view of their future destiny, are opposed to any development of the satirical mood. The impression of sympathy will even neutralize the satire, in poems in which the latter is directly and conciously conveyed: as, for instance, in "Caliban upon Setebos," and "The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." Of grim or serious satire, there is, I think, only one specimen among his works: the first part of

"Holy-Cross Day." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women," 1855.)

We may class as playful satires (which I give in the order of their importance):

"Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper." (1876.)

"Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial." ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." 1876.)

"Up at a Villa—Down in the City." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Another Way of Love." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

We have a purely humorous picture in

"Garden Fancies, II. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"HOLY-CROSS DAY" was the occasion of an "Annual Christian Sermon," which the Jews in Rome were forced to attend; and the poem which bears this title is prefaced by an extract from an imaginary "Diary by a Bishop's Secretary," dated 1600; and expatiating on the merciful purpose, and regenerating effect of this sermon. What the assembled Jews may have really felt about it, Mr. Browning sets forth in the words of one of the congregation.

This man describes the hustling and bustling, the crowding and packing—the suppressed stir as of human vermin imprisoned in a small space; the sham groans, and sham conversions which follow in their due course; and as he thus dwells on his national and personal degradation, his tone has the bitter irony of one who has both realized and accepted it. But the irony recoils on those who have inflicted the degradation—on the so-called Christians who would throttle the Jew's creed while they "gut" his purse, and make him the instrument of their own sins; and is soon lost in the emotion of a pathetic and solemn prayer; the supposed death-bed utterance of Rabbi Ben Ezra.

The prayer is an invocation to the justice, and to the sympathy of Christ. It claims His help against the enemies who are also His own. It concedes, as possible, that He was in truth the Messiah, crucified by the nation of which He claimed a crown. But it points to His Christian followers as inflicting on Him a still deeper outrage: a belief which the lips profess, and which the life derides and discredits. It urges, in the Jew's behalf, the ignorance, the fear, in which the deed was done; the bitter sufferings by which it has been expiated. It pleads his long endurance, as testimony to the fact, that he withstands Barabbas now, as he withstood Christ "then;" that he strives to wrest Christ's name from the "Devil's crew," though the shadow of His face be upon him. The invocation concludes with an expression of joyful confidence in God and the future.

(Giacomo) "PACCHIAROTTO" was a painter of Siena.[91] His story is told in the "Commentary on the Life of Sodoma" by the editors of Vasari; Florence, 1855; and this contains all, or nearly all, the incidents of Mr. Browning's "Pacchiarotto," as well as others of a similar kind but of later occurrence, which are not mentioned in it.

This painter was a restless, aggressive personage, with a craze for reform; and a conspicuous member of the "Bardotti:" a society of uncommissioned reformers, whose occupation was to cry down abuses, and prescribe wholesale theoretical measures for removing them. (Hence their title; which signifies "spare" horses or "freed" ones: they walk by the side of the waggon while others drudge at, and drag it along). But he discovered that men would not be reformed; and bethought himself, after a time, of a new manner of testifying to the truth. He selected a room in his own house, whitewashed it (we conclude); and, working in "distemper" or fresco, painted it with men and women of every condition and kind. He then harangued these on their various shortcomings. They answered him, as he imagined, in a humble and apologetic manner; and he then proceeded to denounce their excuses, and strip the mask from their sophistries and hypocrisies—doing so with every appearance of success.

But he presumed too much on his victory. A famine had broken out in Siena. The magistrates were, of course, held responsible for it. The Bardotti assembled, and prescribed the fitting remedies. Everything would come right if only the existing social order was turned topsy-turvy, and men were released from every tie. Pacchiarotto was conspicuous by his eloquence. But when he denounced the chief of the municipal force, and hinted that if the right man were in the right place, that officer would be he, all the other "spare horses" rushed upon him and he was obliged to run for his life. The first hiding-place which presented itself was a sepulchre, in which a corpse had just been laid. He squeezed himself into this, and crawled forth from it at at the end of two days, starving, covered with vermin, and thoroughly converted to the policy of living and letting live. The authentic part of the narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the Osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed. But Mr. Browning allows Fancy the just employment of telling how the Superior improved the occasion, and how his lesson was received.

"It is a great mistake," this reverend person assures his guest—though one from which his own youth has not been free—"to imagine that any one man can preach another out of his folly. If such endeavours could succeed, heaven would have begun on earth. Whereas, every man's task is to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his Master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it. Man, in short, is to be not the 'spare horse,' but the 'mill-horse' plodding patiently round and round on the same spot."

And Pacchiarotto replies that his monitor's arguments are, by his own account, doomed to be ineffectual: but that he is addressing himself to one already convinced. He (Pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but he has been convinced by a dead one. That corpse has seemed to ask him by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not all made on the same pattern: "Because, above, one's Jack and one—John." And the same grin has reminded him that this life is the rehearsal, not the real performance: just an hour's trial of who is fit, and who isn't, to play his part; that the parts are distributed by the author, whose purpose will be explained in proper time; and that when his brother has been cast for a fool's part, he is no sage who would persuade him to give it up. He is now going back to his paint-pot, and will mind his own business in future.

By an easy transition, Mr. Browning turns the laugh against his own critics, whom he professes to recognize on this May morning, as flocking into his garden in the guise of sweeps. He does not, he says, grudge them their fun or their one holiday of the year, the less so that their rattling and drumming may give him some inkling how music sounds; and he flings them, by way of a gift, the story he has just told, bidding them dance, and "dust" his "jacket" for a little while. But that done, he bids them clear off, lest his housemaid should compel them to do so. He has her authority for suspecting that in their professional character they bring more dirt into the house than they remove from it[92].

"FILIPPO BALDINUCCI" was the author of a history of art ("Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua"); and the incident which Mr. Browning relates as "a reminiscence of A.D. 1670," appears there in a notice of the life of the painter Buti. (Vol. iii. p. 422.)

The Jewish burial ground in Florence was a small field at the foot of the Monte Oliveto. A path ascending the hill skirted its upper end, and at an angle of this stood a shrine with one side blank, the other adorned by a painting of the Virgin Mary. The painting was intended to catch the eye of all believers who approached from the neighbouring city-gate (Porta San Friano or Frediano); and was therefore so turned that it overlooked the Jewish cemetery at the same time. The Jews, objecting to this, negotiated for its removal with the owner of the ground; and his steward, acting in his name, received a hundred ducats as the price of his promise that the Virgin should be transferred to the opposite side of the shrine. The task was undertaken by Buti, but carried on in the privacy of a curtained scaffolding; and when the curtains were withdrawn, it was seen that the picture had been transferred; but that a painting of the Crucifixion occupied its original place. Four Rabbis, the "sourest and ugliest" of the lot, were deputed to remonstrate with the steward; but this person coolly replied that they had no ground of complaint whatever. "His master had amply fulfilled his bond. Did they fancy their 'sordid' money had bought his freedom to do afterwards what he thought fit?" And he advised them to remove themselves before worse befell them. The Jews retired discomfited; and, as the writer hopes, took warning by what had happened, never again to tempt with their ill-earned wealth "the religious piety of good Christians."

Mr. Browning gives this story, with unimportant variations, in the manner of Baldinucci himself; and does full justice to the hostile and contemptuous spirit in which the attitude of the Jews is described by him. But he also heightens the unconscious self-satire of the narrative by infusing into this attitude a genuine dignity and pathos. He enlists all our sympathy by the Chief Rabbi's prayer that his people, so sorely tried in life, may be allowed rest from persecution in their graves; and he concludes with an imaginary incident which leaves them masters of the situation. On the day after what the historian calls this "pleasing occurrence," the son of the High Priest presented himself at Buti's shop, where he and the so-called "farmer" were still laughing over the event; and in tones of ominous mildness begged to purchase that pretty thing—the picture in oils, from which the fresco painting of the Virgin had been made. He was a Herculean young man, and Buti, who white and trembling had tried to slip out of his way, was so bewildered by the offer, that he asked only the proper price for his work. The farmer, however, broke forth in expressions of pious delight, "Mary had surely wrought a miracle, and converted the Jew!"

The Jew turned like a trodden worm. "Truly," he replied, "a miracle has been wrought, by a power which no canvas yet possessed, in that I have resisted the desire to throttle you. But my purchase of your picture is not due to a miracle. It means simply that I have been cured of my prejudices in respect to art. Christians hang up pictures of heathen gods. Their 'Titians' paint them. A cardinal will value his Leda or his Ganymede beyond everything else which he possesses. If I express wonder at this sacrifice of the truth, I am told that the truth of a picture is in its drawing and painting, and that these are valued precisely because they are true. Why then should not your Mary take her place among my Ledas and the rest; be judged as a picture, and, since—as I fear—Master Buti is not a Titian, laughed at accordingly?"

"So now," the speaker concludes, "Jews buy what pictures they like, and hang them up where they please, and,"—with an inward groan—"no, boy, you must not pelt them." This warning, which is supposed to be addressed by the historian in his old age to a nephew with a turn for throwing stones, reveals the motive of the story: a sudden remembrance of the good old pious time, when Jews might be pelted.

"UP AT A VILLA—DOWN IN THE CITY" is a lively description of the amusements of the city, and the dulness of villa life, as contrasted by an Italian of quality, who is bored to death in his country residence, but cannot afford the town. His account of the former gives a genuine impression of dreariness and monotony, for the villa is stuck on a mountain edge, where the summer is scorching and the winter bleak, where a "lean cypress" is the most conspicuous object in the foreground, and hills "smoked over" with "faint grey olive trees" fill in the back; where on hot days the silence is only broken by the shrill chirp of the cicala, and the whining of bees around some adjacent firs. But the other side of the picture, though sympathetically drawn, is a perfect parody of what it is meant to convey. For the speaker's ideal "city" might be a big village, with its primitive customs, and its life all concentrated in the market-place or square; and it is precisely in the square that he is ambitious to live. There the church-bells sound, and the diligence rattles in, and the travelling doctor draws teeth or gives pills; there the punch-show or the church procession displays itself, and the last proclamation of duke or archbishop is posted up. It is never too hot, because of the fountain always plashing in the centre; and the bright white houses, and green blinds, and painted shop-signs are a perpetual diversion to the eye.... But alas! the price of food is prohibitive; and a man must live where he can.

"ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE" is the complement to "One Way of Love," and displays the opposite mood. The one lover patiently gathers June roses in case they may catch his lady's eye. The other grows tired of such patience even when devoted to himself; he tires of June roses, which are always red and sweet. His lady-love is bantering him on this frame of mind. It is true, she says, that such monotony is trying to a man's temper: there is no comfort in anything that can't be quarrelled with; and the person she addresses is free to "go." She reminds him, however, that June may repair her bower which his hand has rifled, and the next time "consider" which of two courses she prefers: to bestow her flowers on one who will accept their sweetness, or use her lightnings to kill the spider who is weaving his films about them.

"SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS" is apparently the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form the subject of the poem. Some wag relates how he read it a month ago, having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself by dropping it through a crevice in a tree, and enjoying a picnic lunch and a chapter of "Rabelais" on the grass close by. To-day, in a fit of compunction, he has raked the "treatise" out; but meanwhile it has blistered in the sun, and run all colours in the rain. Toadstools have grown in it; and all the creatures that creep have towzed it and browsed on it, and devoted bits of it to their different domestic use. It is altogether a melancholy sight. So the wag thinks his victim has sufficiently suffered, and carries it back to his book-shelf, to "dry-rot" there in all the comfort it deserves.

DESCRIPTIVE POEMS.

Mr. Browning's poems abound in descriptive passages, and his power of word-painting is very vivid, as well as frequently employed. But we have here another instance of a quality diffused throughout his work, yet scarcely ever asserting itself in a distinct form. The reason is, that he deals with men and women first—with nature afterwards; and that the details of a landscape have little meaning for him, except in reference to the mental or dramatic situation of which they form a part. This is very apparent in such lyrics or romances as: "By the Fire-side," "In a Gondola," and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." We find three poems only which might have been written for the sake of the picturesque impressions which they convey:

"De Gustibus—" ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Home-Thoughts, from Abroad." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"The Englishman in Italy." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "England in Italy" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.) And even here we receive the picture with a lyric and dramatic colouring, which makes it much less one of facts than of associations. It is also to be remarked that, in these poems, the associations are of two opposite kinds, and Mr. Browning is in equal sympathy with both. He feels English scenery as an Englishman does: Italian, as an Italian might be supposed to, feel it.

"DE GUSTIBUS—" illustrates the difference of tastes by the respective attractions of these two kinds of scenery, and of the ideas and images connected with them. Some one is apostrophizing a friend, whose ghost he is convinced will be found haunting an English lane, with its adjoining corn-field and hazel coppice: where in the early summer the blackbird sings, and the bean-flower scents the air. And he declares at the same time that Italy is the land of his own love, whether his home there be a castle in the Apennine, or some house on its southern shore; among "wind-grieved" heights, or on the edge of an opaque blue sea: amidst a drought and stillness in which the very cicala dies, and the cypress seems to rust; and scorpions drop and crawl from the peeling walls ... and where "a bare-footed girl tumbles green melons on to the ground before you, as she gives news of the last attack on the Bourbon king."

"HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD" is a longing reminiscence of an English April and May, with their young leaves and their blossoms, their sunshine and their dew, their song of the chaffinch and their rapturous music of the thrush. Appreciation is heightened by contrast; and the buttercup—England's gift to her little children—is pronounced far brighter than the "gaudy melon-flower" which the exiled Englishman has at this moment before him.

"THE ENGLISHMAN IN ITALY" is a vivid picture of Italian peasant-life on the plain of Sorrento: the occasion being an outbreak of the well-known hot wind—the "scirocco"—which, in this case, has brought with it a storm of rain. A little frightened peasant girl has taken refuge by the side of the Englishman, who is apparently lodging in her mother's cottage. And he is diverting her attention by describing his impressions of the last twenty-four hours: how everything looked before the rain; how he knew while yet in bed that the rain had come, by the rattling down of the quail-nets,[93] which were to be tugged into shelter, while girls ran on to the housetops to fetch the drying figs; how the black churning waters forbade the fishermen to go to sea (what strange creatures they bring home when they do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet grass, which will appear with fried pumpkin at the labourer's supper; how, yesterday, he climbed Mount Calvano—that very brother of hers for his guide—his mule carrying him with dainty steps through the plain—past the woods—up a path ever wilder and stonier, where sorb and myrtle fall away, but lentisk and rosemary still cling to the face of the rock—the head and shoulders of some new mountain ever coming into view; how he emerged, at last, where there were mountains all around; below, the green sea; above, the crystal solitudes of heaven; and, down in that green sea, the slumbering Siren islands: the three which stand together, and the one which swam to meet them, but has always remained half-way. These, and other reminiscences, beguile the time till the storm has passed, and the sun breaks over the great mountain which the Englishman has just described. He and little "Fortu" can now go into the village, and see the preparations being made for to-morrow's feast—that of the Virgin of the Rosary—which primitive solemnity he also (by anticipation) describes. He concludes with a brief allusion to the political scirocco which is blackening the English sky, and will not vanish so quickly as this has done; and thus hints at a reason, if the reader desires one, for his temporary rustication in a foreign land.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 72: First in "Hood's Magazine."]

[Footnote 73: Two of these are now in the National Gallery; one presented to it by Sir Charles Eastlake, the other after his death by Lady Eastlake.]

[Footnote 74: Mr. Browning thus skilfully accounts for the discrepancy between the coarseness of his life and the refined beauty of much of his work.]

[Footnote 75: The painter spoken of as "hulking Tom" is the celebrated one known as "Masaccio" (Tommasaccio), who learned in the convent from Lippo Lippi, and has been wrongly supposed to be his teacher. He is also one of those who were credited with the work of Lippino, Lippo Lippi's son.]

[Footnote 76: The Bishop's tomb is entirely fictitious; but something which is made to stand for it is now shown to credulous sight-seers in St. Praxed's Church.]

[Footnote 77: First in "Hood's Magazine."]

[Footnote 78: These were correctly given in the MS., and appeared so in the first proofs of the book; but were changed from considerations of prudence.]

[Footnote 79: A feigned name for one of the three wonder working images which are worshipped in France.]

[Footnote 80: Mr. Browning allows me to give the true names of the persons and places concerned in the story.

Vol. xii. page 5. The Firm Miranda—Mellerio, Brothers. " " 7. St Rambert—St. Aubin. " " 7. Joyeux, Joyous-Gard—Lion, Lionesse. " " 8. Vire-Caen. " " 19. St. Rambertese—St. Aubinese " " 22. Londres—Douvres. " " 22. London—Dover. " " 22. La Roche—Courcelle. " " 22. Monlieu—Bernieres. " " 22. Villeneuve—Langrune. " " 22. Pons—Luc. " " 22. La Ravissante—La Delivrande. " " 25. Raimbaux—Bayeux. " " 25. Morillon—Hugonin. " " 25. Mirecourt—Bonnechose. " " 25. Miranda—Mellerio. " " 26. New York—Madrid. " " 30. Clairvaux—Tailleville. " " 31. Gonthier—Beny. " " 31. Rousseau—Voltaire. " " 31. Leonce—Antoine. " " 36. Of "Firm Miranda, London and New York"—"Mellerio Brothers"—Meller, people say. " " 53. Rare Vissante—Dell Yvrande. " " 53. Aldabert—Regnobert. " " 53. Eldebert—Ragnebert. " " 54. Mailleville—Beaudoin. " " 54. Chaumont—Quelen. " " 54. Vertgalant—Talleyrand. " " 59. Ravissantish—Delivrandish. " " 66. Clara de Millefleurs—Anna de Beaupre. " " 67. Coliseum Street—Miromesnil Street. " " 72. Sterner—Mayer. " " 72. Commercy—Larocy. " " 72. Sierck—Metz. " " 73. Muhlhausen—Debacker. " " 73. Carlino Centofanti—Miranda di Mongino. " " 73. Portugal—Italy. " " 88. Vaillant-Meriel. " " 96. Thirty-three—Twenty-five. " " 97. Beaumont—Pasquier. " " 107. Sceaux—Garges. " " 128. Luc de la Maison Rouge—Jean de la Becquetiere. " " 128. Claise—Vire. " " 129. Maude—Anne. " " 129. Dionysius—Eliezer. " " 129. Scolastica—Elizabeth. " " 136. Twentieth—Thirteenth. " " 152. Fricquot—Picot. ]

[Footnote 81: Le Croisic is in the Loire Inferieure, at the south-east corner of Brittany. It has now a good bathing establishment, and is much frequented by French people; but sardine-fishing and the crystallizing of sea-salt are still its standing occupations.]

[Footnote 82: The details of this worship as carried on in the island opposite Le Croisic, and which Mr. Browning describes, are mentioned by Strabo.]

[Footnote 83: The story of Paul Desforges Maillard forms the subject of a famous play, Piron's "Metromanie."]

[Footnote 84: It is also, and perhaps chiefly, in this case, a pun on the meaning of the plural noun "cenci," "rags," or "old rags." The cry of this, frequent in Rome, was at first mistaken by Shelley for a voice urging him to go on with his play. Mr. Browning has used it to indicate the comparative unimportance of his contribution to the Cenci story. The quoted Italian proverb means something to the same effect: that every trifle will press in for notice among worthier matters.]

[Footnote 85: That of the Gregorian chant: a cadence concluding on the dominant instead of the key-note.]

[Footnote 86: We have a conspicuous instance of this in "Pippa Passes."]

[Footnote 87: This spontaneous mode of conception may seem incompatible with the systematic adherence to a fixed class of subjects referred to in an earlier chapter. But it by no means is so. With Mr. Browning the spontaneous creative impulse conforms to the fixed rule.

The present remarks properly belong to that earlier chapter. But it was difficult to divide them from their illustrations.]

[Footnote 88: First in "Hood's Magazine."]

[Footnote 89: I may venture to state that these picturesque materials included a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room—welded together in the remembrance of the line from "King Lear" which forms the heading of the poem.]

[Footnote 90: Instances of it occur in the "Dramatic Idyls" and "Jocoseria;" and will be noticed later.]

[Footnote 91: Generally confounded with his contemporary and fellow-citizen, Girolamo del Pacchia.]

[Footnote 92: The (Baron) Kirkup mentioned at vol. xiv. page 5 was a Florence friend of Mr. Browning's, and a connoisseur in literature and art. He was ennobled by the King of Italy for his liberal views and for his services to Italian literature. It was he who discovered the portrait of Dante in the Bargello at Florence.]

[Footnote 93: Nets spread to catch quails as they fly to or from the other side of the Mediterranean. They are slung by rings on to poles, and stand sufficiently high for the quails to fly into them. This, and every other detail of the poem, are given from personal observation.]



NON-CLASSIFIED POEMS (CONTINUED).

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

Even so imperfect, not to say arbitrary, a classification as I have been able to attempt, excludes a number of Mr. Browning's minor poems; for its necessary condition was the presence of some distinctive mood of thought or feeling by which the poem could be classed; and in many, even of the most striking and most characteristic, this condition does not exist. In one group, for instance, the prevailing mood is either too slightly indicated, or too fugitive, or too complex, or even too fantastic, to be designated by any term but "poetic." Others, again, such as songs and legends, depict human emotion in too simple or too general a form, to be thought of as anything but "popular;" and a third group may be formed of dramatic pictures or episodes, which unite the qualities of the other two.

In the first of these groups we must place—

"The Lost Leader." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Nationality in Drinks." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published as "Claret and Tokay," without 3rd Part, in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Garden Fancies. I. The Flower's Name." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[94]

"Earth's Immortalities." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Home-Thoughts, from the Sea." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 or 1845.)

"My Star." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Misconceptions." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"A Pretty Woman." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"In a Year." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Women and Roses." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Before." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"After." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Memorabilia." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"The Last Ride Together." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"A Grammarian's Funeral." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Johannes Agricola in Meditation." ("Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"Confessions." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"May and Death." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Youth and Art." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"A Likeness." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Appearances." ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." 1876.)

"St. Martin's Summer." ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." 1876.)

"Prologue to 'La Saisiaz.'" 1878.

In the second group:—

"Cavalier Tunes." ("Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Song." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Incident of the French Camp." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as first part of "Camp and Cloister," in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"Count Gismond." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "France" in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"The Boy and the Angel." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[95]

"The Glove." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"The Twins." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Child's Story." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Herve Riel." ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems," written at Croisic, 1867. Published in the "Cornhill Magazine." 1871.)

In the third group:—

"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr." ("Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

"Meeting at Night." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published as "Night" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Parting at Morning." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published as "Morning" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.")

"The Patriot. An old Story." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Instans Tyrannus." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Mesmerism." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Time's Revenges." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"The Italian in England." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "Italy in England" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"Protus." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Apparent Failure." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Waring." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.) This poem is a personal effusion of feeling and reminiscence, which can stand for nothing but itself.

First Group.

"THE LOST LEADER" is a lament over the defection of a loved and honoured chief. It breathes a tender regret for the moral injury he has inflicted on himself; and a high courage, saddened by the thought of lost support and lost illusions, but not shaken by it. The language of the poem shows the lost "leader" to have been a poet. It was suggested by Wordsworth, in his abandonment (with Southey and others) of the liberal cause.

"NATIONALITY IN DRINKS." A fantastic little comment on the distinctive national drinks—Claret, Tokay, and Beer. The beer is being drunk off Cape Trafalgar to the health of Nelson, and introduces an authentic and appropriate anecdote of him. But the laughing little claret flask, which the speaker has on another occasion seen plunged for cooling into a black-faced pond, suggests to him the image of a "gay French lady," dropped, with straightened limbs, into the silent ocean of death; while the Hungarian Tokay (Tokayer Ausbruch), in its concentrated strength, seems to jump on to the table as a stout pigmy castle-warder, strutting and swaggering in his historic costume, and ready to defy twenty men at once if the occasion requires.

"THE FLOWER'S NAME. Garden Fancies," I. A lover's reminiscence of a garden in which he and his lady-love have walked together, and of a flower which she has consecrated by her touch and voice: its dreamy Spanish name, which she has breathed upon it, becoming part of the charm.

"EARTH'S IMMORTALITIES." A sad and subtle little satire on the vaunted permanence of love and fame. The poet's grave falls to pieces. The words: "love me for ever," appeal to us from a tombstone which records how Spring garlands are severed by the hand of June, and June's fever is quenched in winter's snow.

"HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA." An utterance of patriotic pride and gratitude, aroused in the mind of an Englishman, by the sudden appearance of Trafalgar in the blood-red glow of the southern setting sun.

"MY STAR" may be taken as a tribute to the personal element in love: the bright peculiar light in which the sympathetic soul reveals itself to the object of its sympathy.

"MISCONCEPTIONS" illustrates the false hopes which may be aroused in the breast of any devoted creature by an incidental and momentary acceptance of its devotion.

"A PRETTY WOMAN" is the picture of a simple, compliant, exquisitely pretty, and hopelessly shallow woman: incapable of love, though a mere nothing will win her liking. And the question is raised, whether such a creature is not perfect in itself, and would not be marred by any attempt to improve it, or extract from it a different use. The author decides in the affirmative. A rose is best "graced," not by reproducing its petals in precious stones for a king to preserve; not by plucking it to "smell, kiss, wear," and throw away; but by simply leaving it where it grows. A "pretty" woman is most appropriately treated when nothing is asked of her, but to be so.