But do not let us quarrel any more,_An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

No, my Lucrezia! bear with me for once:

Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.

You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?

I’ll work then for your friend’s friend, never fear,

Treat his own subject after his own way,

Fix his own time, accept too his own price,

And shut the money into this small hand

When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?

Oh, I’ll content him,--but to-morrow, Love! {10}

I often am much wearier than you think,

This evening more than usual: and it seems

As if--forgive now--should you let me sit

Here by the window, with your hand in mine,

And look a half hour forth on Fiesole,

Both of one mind, as married people use,

Quietly, quietly the evening through,

I might get up to-morrow to my work

Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.

To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! {20}

Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

And mine, the man’s bared breast she curls inside.

Don’t count the time lost, neither; you must serve

For each of the five pictures we require:

It saves a model. So! keep looking so--

My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!

--How could you ever prick those perfect ears,

Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet--

My face, my moon, my everybody’s moon,

Which everybody looks on and calls his, {30}

And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn,

While she looks--no one’s: very dear, no less.

You smile? why, there’s my picture ready made,

That’s what we painters call our harmony!

A common grayness silvers every thing,--

All in a twilight, you and I alike

--You, at the point of your first pride in me

(That’s gone, you know)--but I, at every point;

My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down

To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. {40}

There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top;

That length of convent-wall across the way

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;

The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,

And autumn grows, autumn in every thing.

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape,

As if I saw alike my work and self

And all that I was born to be and do,

A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God’s hand.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; {50}

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!

This chamber, for example--turn your head--

All that’s behind us! You don’t understand

Nor care to understand about my art,

But you can hear at least when people speak:

And that cartoon, the second from the door

--It is the thing, Love! so such things should be:

Behold Madonna!--I am bold to say.

I can do with my pencil what I know, {60}

What I see, what at bottom of my heart

I wish for, if I ever wish so deep--

Do easily, too--when I say, perfectly,

I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge,

Who listened to the Legate’s talk last week;

And just as much they used to say in France.

At any rate ‘tis easy, all of it!

No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:

I do what many dream of, all their lives,

--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, {70}

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such

On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,

Who strive--you don’t know how the others strive

To paint a little thing like that you smeared

Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,

(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!

Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.

There burns a truer light of God in them,

In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, {80}

Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt

This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine.

Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,

Reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me,

Enter and take their place there sure enough,

Though they come back and cannot tell the world.

My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.

The sudden blood of these men! at a word--

Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too.

I, painting from myself and to myself, {90}

Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame

Or their praise either. Somebody remarks

Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,

His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,

Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?

Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray,

Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

I know both what I want and what might gain; {100}

And yet how profitless to know, to sigh

“Had I been two, another and myself,

Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.

Yonder’s a work now, of that famous youth

The Urbinate who died five years ago.

[‘Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)

Well, I can fancy how he did it all,

Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,

Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,

Above and through his art--for it gives way; {110}

That arm is wrongly put--and there again--

A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,

Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,

He means right--that, a child may understand.

Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:

But all the play, the insight and the stretch--

Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?

Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,

We might have risen to Rafael, I and you.

Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think-- {120}

More than I merit, yes, by many times.

But had you--oh, with the same perfect brow,

And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,

And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird

The fowler’s pipe, and follows to the snare--

Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!

Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged

“God and the glory! never care for gain.

The present by the future, what is that?

Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo! {130}

Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!”

I might have done it for you. So it seems:

Perhaps not. All is as God over-rules.

Beside, incentives come from the soul’s self;

The rest avail not. Why do I need you?

What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?

In this world, who can do a thing, will not;

And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:

Yet the will’s somewhat--somewhat, too, the power--

And thus we half-men struggle. At the end, {140}

God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.

‘Tis safer for me, if the award be strict,

That I am something underrated here,

Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth.

I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,

For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.

The best is when they pass and look aside;

But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all.

Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,

And that long festal year at Fontainebleau! {150}

I surely then could sometimes leave the ground,

Put on the glory, Rafael’s daily wear,

In that humane great monarch’s golden look,--

One finger in his beard or twisted curl

Over his mouth’s good mark that made the smile,

One arm about my shoulder, round my neck,

The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,

I painting proudly with his breath on me,

All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,

Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls {160}

Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,--

And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond,

This in the background, waiting on my work,

To crown the issue with a last reward!

A good time, was it not, my kingly days?

And had you not grown restless. . .but I know--

‘Tis done and past; ‘twas right, my instinct said;

Too live the life grew, golden and not gray:

And I’m the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt

Out of the grange whose four walls make his world. {170}

How could it end in any other way?

You called me, and I came home to your heart.

The triumph was, to have ended there; then, if

I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost?

Let my hands frame your face in your hair’s gold,

You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!

“Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;

The Roman’s is the better when you pray,

But still the other’s Virgin was his wife”--

Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge {180}

Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows

My better fortune, I resolve to think.

For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives,

Said one day Agnolo, his very self,

To Rafael. . .I have known it all these years. . .

(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts

Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see,

Too lifted up in heart because of it)

“Friend, there’s a certain sorry little scrub

Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how, {190}

Who, were he set to plan and execute

As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,

Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!”

To Rafael’s!--And indeed the arm is wrong.

I hardly dare. . .yet, only you to see,

Give the chalk here--quick, thus the line should go!

Ay, but the soul! he’s Rafael! rub it out!

Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth,

(What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo?

Do you forget already words like those?) {200}

If really there was such a chance so lost,--

Is, whether you’re--not grateful--but more pleased.

Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed!

This hour has been an hour! Another smile?

If you would sit thus by me every night

I should work better, do you comprehend?

I mean that I should earn more, give you more.

See, it is settled dusk now; there’s a star;

Morello’s gone, the watch-lights show the wall,

The cue-owls speak the name we call them by. {210}

Come from the window, love,--come in, at last,

Inside the melancholy little house

We built to be so gay with. God is just.

King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights

When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,

The walls become illumined, brick from brick

Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,

That gold of his I did cement them with!

Let us but love each other. Must you go?

That cousin here again? he waits outside? {220}

Must see you--you, and not with me? Those loans?

More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?

Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?

While hand and eye and something of a heart

Are left me, work’s my ware, and what’s it worth?

I’ll pay my fancy. Only let me sit

The gray remainder of the evening out,

Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly

How I could paint, were I but back in France,

One picture, just one more--the Virgin’s face, {230}

Not your’s this time! I want you at my side

To hear them--that is, Michel Agnolo--

Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.

Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend.

I take the subjects for his corridor,

Finish the potrait out of hand--there, there,

And throw him in another thing or two

If he demurs; the whole should prove enough

To pay for this same cousin’s freak. Beside,

What’s better and what’s all I care about, {240}

Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!

Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,

The cousin! what does he to please you more?

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.

I regret little, I would change still less.

Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

The very wrong to Francis!--it is true

I took his coin, was tempted and complied,

And built this house and sinned, and all is said.

My father and my mother died of want. {250}

Well, had I riches of my own? you see

How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.

They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died:

And I have labored somewhat in my time

And not been paid profusely. Some good son

Paint my two hundred pictures--let him try!

No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,

You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.

This must suffice me here. What would one have?

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-- {260}

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo, and me

To cover--the three first without a wife,

While I have mine! So--still they overcome

Because there’s still Lucrezia,--as I choose.

Again the cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.

29. My face, my moon:

“Once, like the moon, I made

The ever-shifting currents of the blood

According to my humor ebb and flow.”

--Cleopatra, in Tennyson’s ‘A Dream of Fair Women’.

“You are the powerful moon of my blood’s sea,

To make it ebb or flow into my face

As your looks change.”

--Ford and Decker’s ‘Witch of Edmonton’.

35. A common grayness: Andrea del Sarto was distinguished

for his skill in chiaro-oscuro.

82. low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand: “Andrea del Sarto’s was,

after all, but the ‘low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand’,

and therefore his perfect art does not touch our hearts like that

of Fra Bartolommeo, who occupies about the same position with regard to

the great masters of the century as Andrea del Sarto. Fra Bartolommeo

spoke from his heart. He was moved by the spirit, so to speak,

to express his pure and holy thoughts in beautiful language,

and the ideal that presented itself to his mind, and from which he,

equally with Raphael, worked, approached almost as closely as Raphael’s

to that abstract beauty after which they both longed. Andrea del Sarto

had no such longing: he was content with the loveliness of earth.

This he could understand and imitate in its fullest perfection,

and therefore he troubled himself but little about

the ‘wondrous paterne’ laid up in heaven. Many of his Madonnas

have greater beauty, strictly speaking, than those of Bartolommeo,

or even of Raphael; but we miss in them that mysterious

spiritual loveliness that gives the latter their chief charm.”

--Heaton’s History of Painting.

93. Morello: the highest of the spurs of the Apennines

to the north of Florence.

96. Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?: it’s beyond

their criticism.

105. The Urbinate: Raphael Santi, born 1483, in Urbino.

Andrea sees in Raphael, whose technique was inferior to his own,

his superior, as he reached above and through his art--

for it gives way.

106. George Vasari: see note under St. 9 of ‘Old Pictures

in Florence’.

120. Nay, Love, you did give all I asked: it must be understood

that his wife has replied with pique, to what he said

in the two preceding lines.

129. by the future: when placed by, in comparison with, the future.

130. Agnolo: Michael Angelo (more correctly, Agnolo) Buonarotti.

See note under St. 30 of ‘Old Pictures in Florence’.

146. For fear of chancing on the Paris lords: by reason of

his breaking the faith he had pledged to Francis I. of France,

and using for his own purposes, or his wife’s, the money with which

the king had entrusted him to purchase works of art in Italy.

149-165. That Francis, that first time: he thinks with regret

of the king and of his honored and inspiring stay at his court.

161. by those hearts: along with, by the aid of.

173. The triumph was. . .there: i.e., in your heart.

174. ere the triumph: in France.

177. Rafael did this, . . .was his wife: a remark ascribed to

some critic.

198. If he spoke the truth: i.e., about himself.

199. What he: do you ask?

202. all I care for. . .is whether you’re.

209. Morello’s gone: its outlines are lost in the dusk. See v. 93.

218. That gold of his: see note to v. 146.

220. That cousin here again?: one of Lucrezia’s gallants

is referred to, to pay whose gaming debts, it appears,

she has obtained money of her husband. It must be understood

that this gallant whistles here. See last verse of the monologue.

263. Leonard: Leonardo da Vinci.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!

You need not clap your torches to my face.

Zooks, what’s to blame? you think you see a monk!

What, ‘tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,

And here you catch me at an alley’s end

Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up,

Do,--harry out, if you must show your zeal,

Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,

And nip each softling of a wee white mouse, {10}

‘Weke, weke’, that’s crept to keep him company!

Aha! you know your betters? Then, you’ll take

Your hand away that’s fiddling on my throat,

And please to know me likewise. Who am I?

Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend

Three streets off--he’s a certain. . .how d’ye call?

Master--a. . .Cosimo of the Medici,

I’ the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best!

Remember and tell me, the day you’re hanged,

How you affected such a gullet’s-gripe! {20}

But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves

Pick up a manner, nor discredit you:

Zooks, are we pilchards, that they sweep the streets

And count fair prize what comes into their net?

He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!

Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends.

Lord, I’m not angry! Bid your hangdogs go

Drink out this quarter-florin to the health

Of the munificent House that harbors me

(And many more beside, lads! more beside!) {30}

And all’s come square again. I’d like his face--

His, elbowing on his comrade in the door

With the pike and lantern,--for the slave that holds

John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair

With one hand (“Look you, now”, as who should say)

And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!

It’s not your chance to have a bit of chalk,

A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!

Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so.

What, brother Lippo’s doings, up and down, {40}

You know them, and they take you? like enough!

I saw the proper twinkle in your eye--

‘Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.

Let’s sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.

Here’s spring come, and the nights one makes up bands

To roam the town and sing out carnival,

And I’ve been three weeks shut within my mew,

A-painting for the great man, saints and saints

And saints again. I could not paint all night--

Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air. {50}

There came a hurry of feet and little feet,

A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song--

‘Flower o’ the broom,

Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!

Flower o’ the quince,

I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?

Flower o’ the thyme’--and so on. Round they went.

Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter

Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,--three slim shapes,

And a face that looked up. . .zooks, sir, flesh and blood, {60}

That’s all I’m made of! Into shreds it went,

Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,

All the bed-furniture--a dozen knots,

There was a ladder! Down I let myself,

Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,

And after them. I came up with the fun

Hard by Saint Lawrence, hail fellow, well met,--

‘Flower o’ the rose,

If I’ve been merry, what matter who knows?’

And so, as I was stealing back again, {70}

To get to bed and have a bit of sleep

Ere I rise up to-morrow and go work

On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast

With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,

You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see!

Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head--

Mine’s shaved--a monk, you say--the sting’s in that!

If Master Cosimo announced himself,

Mum’s the word naturally; but a monk!

Come, what am I a beast for? tell us, now! {80}

I was a baby when my mother died

And father died and left me in the street.

I starved there, God knows how, a year or two

On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,

Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,

My stomach being empty as your hat,

The wind doubled me up and down I went.

Old aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand

(Its fellow was a stinger, as I knew),

And so along the wall, over the bridge, {90}

By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,

While I stood munching my first bread that month:

“So, boy, you’re minded,” quoth the good fat father

Wiping his own mouth, ‘twas refection-time,--

“To quit this very miserable world?

Will you renounce”. . ."the mouthful of bread?” thought I;

By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me;

I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,

Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking-house,

Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici {100}

Have given their hearts to--all at eight years old.

Well, sir, I found in time, you may be sure,

‘Twas not for nothing--the good bellyful,

The warm serge and the rope that goes all round,

And day-long blessed idleness beside!

“Let’s see what the urchin’s fit for”--that came next.

Not overmuch their way, I must confess.

Such a to-do! They tried me with their books:

Lord, they’d have taught me Latin in pure waste!

‘Flower o’ the clove, {110}

All the Latin I construe is, “Amo” I love!’

But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets

Eight years together as my fortune was,

Watching folk’s faces to know who will fling

The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,

And who will curse or kick him for his pains,--

Which gentleman processional and fine,

Holding a candle to the Sacrament,

Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch

The droppings of the wax to sell again, {120}

Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped,--

How say I?--nay, which dog bites, which lets drop

His bone from the heap of offal in the street,--

Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,

He learns the look of things, and none the less

For admonition from the hunger-pinch.

I had a store of such remarks, be sure,

Which, after I found leisure, turned to use:

I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,

Scrawled them within the antiphonary’s marge, {130}

Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,

Found eyes and nose and chin for A’s and B’s,

And made a string of pictures of the world

Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,

On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black.

“Nay,” quoth the Prior, “turn him out, d’ye say?

In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark.

What if at last we get our man of parts,

We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese

And Preaching Friars, to do our church up fine {140}

And put the front on it that ought to be!”

And hereupon he bade me daub away.

Thank you! my head being crammed, the walls a blank,

Never was such prompt disemburdening.

First every sort of monk, the black and white,

I drew them, fat and lean: then, folks at church,

From good old gossips waiting to confess

Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,--

To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,

Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there {150}

With the little children round him in a row

Of admiration, half for his beard, and half

For that white anger of his victim’s son

Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,

Signing himself with the other because of Christ

(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this

After the passion of a thousand years),

Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head

(Which the intense eyes looked through), came at eve

On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf, {160}

Her pair of ear-rings and a bunch of flowers

(The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone.

I painted all, then cried, “‘Tis ask and have;

Choose, for more’s ready!”--laid the ladder flat,

And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall.

The monks closed in a circle and praised loud

Till checked, taught what to see and not to see,

Being simple bodies,--“That’s the very man!

Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!

That woman’s like the Prior’s niece who comes {170}

To care about his asthma: it’s the life!”

But there my triumph’s straw-fire flared and funked;

Their betters took their turn to see and say:

The prior and the learned pulled a face

And stopped all that in no time. “How? what’s here?

Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!

Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true

As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s game!

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay, {180}

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men--

Man’s soul, and it’s a fire, smoke. . .no, it’s not. . .

It’s vapor done up like a new-born babe--

(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth),

It’s. . .well, what matters talking, it’s the soul!

Give us no more of body than shows soul!

Here’s Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God,

That sets us praising,--why not stop with him? {190}

Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head

With wonder at lines, colors, and what not?

Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!

Rub all out, try at it a second time!

Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,

She’s just my niece. . .Herodias, I would say,--

Who went and danced, and got men’s heads cut off!

Have it all out!” Now, is this sense, I ask?

A fine way to paint soul, by painting body

So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further {200}

And can’t fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white

When what you put for yellow’s simply black,

And any sort of meaning looks intense

When all beside itself means and looks naught.

Why can’t a painter lift each foot in turn,

Left foot and right foot, go a double step,

Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,

Both in their order? Take the prettiest face,

The Prior’s niece. . .patron-saint--is it so pretty

You can’t discover if it means hope, fear, {210}

Sorrow or joy? won’t beauty go with these?

Suppose I’ve made her eyes all right and blue,

Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flash,

And then add soul and heighten them threefold?

Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all--

(I never saw it--put the case the same--)

If you get simple beauty and naught else,

You get about the best thing God invents:

That’s somewhat: and you’ll find the soul you have missed,

Within yourself, when you return him thanks. {220}

“Rub all out!” Well, well, there’s my life, in short,

And so the thing has gone on ever since.

I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds:

You should not take a fellow eight years old

And make him swear to never kiss the girls.

I’m my own master, paint now as I please--

Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house!

Lord, it’s fast holding by the rings in front--

Those great rings serve more purposes than just

To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse! {230}

And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes

Are peeping o’er my shoulder as I work,

The heads shake still--“It’s art’s decline, my son!

You’re not of the true painters, great and old;

Brother Angelico’s the man, you’ll find;

Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:

Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third!”

‘Flower o’ the pine,

You keep your mistr. . .manners, and I’ll stick to mine!’

I’m not the third, then: bless us, they must know! {240}

Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,

They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage,

Clinch my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint

To please them--sometimes do, and sometimes don’t;

For, doing most, there’s pretty sure to come

A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints--

A laugh, a cry, the business of the world--

(‘Flower o’ the peach,

Death for us all, and his own life for each!’)

And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, {250}

The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,

And I do these wild things in sheer despite,

And play the fooleries you catch me at,

In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass

After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,

Although the miller does not preach to him

The only good of grass is to make chaff.

What would men have? Do they like grass or no--

May they or mayn’t they? all I want’s the thing

Settled forever one way. As it is, {260}

You tell too many lies and hurt yourself:

You don’t like what you only like too much,

You do like what, if given you at your word,

You find abundantly detestable.

For me, I think I speak as I was taught;

I always see the garden, and God there

A-making man’s wife: and, my lesson learned,

The value and significance of flesh,

I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.

You understand me: I’m a beast, I know. {270}

But see, now--why, I see as certainly

As that the morning-star’s about to shine,

What will hap some day. We’ve a youngster here

Comes to our convent, studies what I do,

Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop:

His name is Guidi--he’ll not mind the monks--

They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk--

He picks my practice up--he’ll paint apace,

I hope so--though I never live so long,

I know what’s sure to follow. You be judge! {280}

You speak no Latin more than I, belike;

However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world

--The beauty and the wonder and the power,

The shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades,

Changes, surprises,--and God made it all!

--For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,

For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,

The mountain round it and the sky above,

Much more the figures of man, woman, child,

These are the frame to? What’s it all about? {290}

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,

Wondered at? oh, this last of course!--you say.

But why not do as well as say,--paint these

Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

God’s works--paint any one, and count it crime

To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works

Are here already; nature is complete:

Suppose you reproduce her--(which you can’t)

There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.”

For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love {300}

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted--better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now

Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,

And trust me but you should, though! How much more

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place, {310}

Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh,

It makes me mad to see what men shall do

And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

“Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer!”

Strikes in the Prior: “when your meaning’s plain

It does not say to folks--remember matins,

Or, mind your fast next Friday!” Why, for this

What need of art at all? A skull and bones, {320}

Two bits of stick nailed cross-wise, or, what’s best,

A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.

I painted a Saint Laurence six months since

At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style:

“How looks my painting, now the scaffold’s down?”

I ask a brother: “Hugely,” he returns--

“Already not one phiz of your three slaves

Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,

But’s scratched and prodded to our heart’s content,

The pious people have so eased their own {330}

With coming to say prayers there in a rage:

We get on fast to see the bricks beneath.

Expect another job this time next year,

For pity and religion grow i’ the crowd--

Your painting serves its purpose!” Hang the fools!

--That is--you’ll not mistake an idle word

Spoke in a huff by a poor monk, Got wot,

Tasting the air this spicy night which turns

The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine!

Oh, the church knows! don’t misreport me, now! {340}

It’s natural a poor monk out of bounds

Should have his apt word to excuse himself:

And hearken how I plot to make amends.

I have bethought me: I shall paint a piece

. . .There’s for you! Give me six months, then go, see

Something in Sant’ Ambrogio’s! Bless the nuns!

They want a cast o’ my office. I shall paint

God in the midst, Madonna and her babe,

Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,

Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet {350}

As puff on puff of grated orris-root

When ladies crowd to church at midsummer.

And then i’ the front, of course a saint or two--

Saint John, because he saves the Florentines,

Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white

The convent’s friends and gives them a long day,

And Job, I must have him there past mistake,

The man of Uz (and Us without the z,

Painters who need his patience). Well, all these

Secured at their devotion, up shall come {360}

Out of a corner when you least expect,

As one by a dark stair into a great light,

Music and talking, who but Lippo! I!--

Mazed, motionless, and moon-struck--I’m the man!

Back I shrink--what is this I see and hear?

I, caught up with my monk’s things by mistake,

My old serge gown and rope that goes all round,

I, in this presence, this pure company!

Where’s a hole, where’s a corner for escape?

Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing {370}

Forward, puts out a soft palm--“Not so fast!”

--Addresses the celestial presence, “nay--

He made you and devised you, after all,

Though he’s none of you! could Saint John there, draw--

His camel-hair make up a painting-brush?

We come to brother Lippo for all that,

Iste perfecit opus!” So, all smile--

I shuffle sideways with my blushing face

Under the cover of a hundred wings

Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay {380}

And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,

Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops

The hot-head husband! Thus I scuttle off

To some safe bench behind, not letting go

The palm of her, the little lily thing

That spoke the good word for me in the nick,

Like the Prior’s niece. . .Saint Lucy, I would say.

And so all’s saved for me, and for the church

A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!

Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights! {390}

The street’s hushed, and I know my own way back,

Don’t fear me! There’s the gray beginning. Zooks!

17. Cosimo of the Medici: Cosimo, or Cosmo, de’ Medici,

surnamed the Elder, a celebrated Florentine statesman,

and a patron of learning and the arts; b. 1389, d. 1464.

23. pilchards: a kind of fish.

34. John Baptist’s head: an imaginary picture.

67. Saint Lawrence: church of San Lorenzo, in Florence, famous for

the tombs of the Medici, adorned with Michel Angelo’s Day and Night,

Morning and Evening, etc. See ‘Hawthorne’s Italian Note-Books’.

88. Old aunt Lapaccia: Mona Lapaccia, his father’s sister.

121. the Eight: ‘gli Otto di guerra’, surnamed ‘i Santi’, the Saints;

a magistracy composed of Eight citizens, instituted by the Florentines,

during their war with the Church, in 1376, for the administration

of the city government. Two were chosen from the ‘Signori’,

three, from the ‘Mediocri’ (Middle Classes), and three,

from the ‘Bassi’ (Lower Classes). For their subsequent history,

see ‘Le Istorie Fiorentine di Niccolo Machiavelli’.

122. How say I?:--nay, worse than that, which dog bites, etc.

127. remarks: observations.

139. Camaldolese: monks of the celebrated convent of Camaldoli.

143. Thank you!: there’s a remark interposed here by one of the men,

perhaps “YOU’RE no dauber”, to which he replies, “Thank you”.

145 et seq. The realistic painter, who disdains nothing, is shown here.

189. Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337): a pupil of Cimabue, and regarded

as the principal reviver of art in Italy. He was a personal friend

of Dante. See note under ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, St. 2.

223. I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds: all the editions

are so punctuated; but it seems the comma should be after “man”,

connecting “no doubt” with “I’ve broken bounds”.

235. “Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico (1387-1455).

Angelico was incomparably the greatest of the distinctively

mediaeval school, whose ‘dicta’ the Prior in the poem has all at

his tongue’s end. To ‘paint the souls of men’, to ‘make them forget

there’s such a thing as flesh’, was the end of his art. And,

side by side with Angelico, Masaccio painted. His short life

taught him a different lesson--‘the value and significance of flesh’.

He would paint by preference the BODIES of men, and would give us

NO MORE OF SOUL than the body can reveal. So he ‘laboured’,

saith the chronicler, ‘in nakeds’, and his frescoes mark

an epoch in art.”--Ernest Bradford (B. S. Illustrations).

“One artist in the seclusion of his cloister, remained true

to the traditions and mode of expression of the middle ages, into which,

nevertheless, the incomparable beauty and feeling of his nature

breathed fresh life. Fra Giovanni Angelico, called da Fiesole

from the place of his birth, occupies an entirely exceptional position.

He is the late-blooming flower of an almost by-gone time

amid the pulsations of a new life. Never, in the whole range

of pictorial art, have the inspired fervor of Christian feeling,

the angelic beauty and purity of which the soul is capable, been so

gloriously interpreted as in his works. The exquisite atmosphere

of an almost supernaturally ideal life surrounds his pictures,

irradiates the rosy features of his youthful faces, or greets us,

like the peace of God, in the dignified figures of his devout old men.

His prevailing themes are the humility of soul of those who

have joyfully accepted the will of God, and the tranquil Sabbath calm

of those who are lovingly consecrated to the service of the Highest.

The movement and the changing course of life, the energy of passion

and action concern him not.”--‘Outlines of the History of Art’.

By Dr. Wilh. Luebke.

236. Lorenzo Monaco: a monk of the order of Camaldoli;

a conservative artist of the time, who adhered to the manner

of Taddeo Gaddi and his disciples, but Fra Angelico appears likewise

to have influenced him.

238. Flower o’ the pine, etc.: this snatch of song applies

to what he has just been talking about: you have your own notions

of art, and I have mine.

276. Tommaso Guidi (1401-1428), better known as Masaccio,

i.e., Tommasaccio, Slovenly or Hulking Tom. “From his time,

and forward,” says Mr. Ernest Radford (B. S. Illustrations),

“religious painting in the old sense was at an end. Painters no longer

attempted to transcend nature, but to copy her, and to copy her

in her loveliest aspects. The breach between the old order and the new

was complete.” The poet makes him learn of Lippi, not,

as Vasari states, Lippi of him.

“When Browning wrote this poem, he knew that the mastership or pupilship

of Fra Lippo to Masaccio (called ‘Guidi’ in the poem), and vice versa,

was a moot point; but in making Fra Lippi the master,

he followed the best authority he had access to, the last edition

of Vasari, as he stated in a Letter to the ‘Pall Mall’ at the time,

in answer to M. Etienne {a writer in the ‘Revue des deux Mondes’.}

Since then, he finds that the latest enquirer into the subject,

Morelli, believes the fact is the other way, and that Fra Lippo

was the pupil.”--B. Soc. Papers, Pt. II, p. 160.

The letter to the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ I have not seen.

M. Etienne’s Article is in Tome 85, pp. 704-735, of the ‘Revue des

Deux Mondes’, 1870, and the letter probably appeared soon after

its publication. What edition of Vasari is referred to,

in the above note, as the last, is uncertain; but in Vasari’s

own editions of 1550 and 1568, and in Mrs. Foster’s translation, 1855,

Lippi is made the pupil, and not the master, of Masaccio.

323. Saint Laurence: suffered martyrdom in the reign of

the Emperor Valerian, A.D. 258. He was broiled to death on a gridiron.

327. Already not one phiz of your three slaves. . .but’s scratched:

the people are so indignant at what they are doing,

in the life-like picture.

336. That is--: he fears he has spoken too plainly,

and will be reported.

339. Chianti: a wine named from the part of Italy so called.

345. There’s for you: he tips them.

346. Sant’ Ambrogio’s: a convent in Florence.

354. Saint John: John the Baptist is meant; see v. 375.

355. Saint Ambrose: born about 340; made archbishop of Milan in 374;

died 397; instituted the ‘Ambrosian Chant’.

377. Iste perfecit opus!: this is on a scroll, in the picture,

held by the “sweet angelic slip of a thing”.

389. The picture referred to is ‘The Coronation of the Virgin’,

in the ‘Accademia delle Belle Arti’, in Florence. There is a photograph

of it in ‘Illustrations to Browning’s Poems’, Part I., published by

the Browning Society, with an interesting description of the picture,

by Mr. Ernest Radford. There’s no “babe” in the picture.

392. Zooks!: it’s high time I was back and in bed,

that my night-larking be not known.

A Face.

If one could have that little head of hers

Painted upon a background of pale gold,

Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!

No shade encroaching on the matchless mould

Of those two lips, which should be opening soft

In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,

For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft

Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s

Burthen of honey-colored buds, to kiss

And capture ‘twixt the lips apart for this. {10}

Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,

How it should waver, on the pale gold ground,

Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!

I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts

Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb

Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb:

But these are only massed there, I should think,

Waiting to see some wonder momently

Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky

(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by), {20}

All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye

Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.

1. If one could have: Oh, if one could only have, etc.

9, 10. to kiss and capture: gerundives: to be kissed and captured.

14. Correggio: Antonio Allegri da Correggio, born 1494, died 1534.

“He was the first master--the Venetians notwithstanding--

to take a scheme of color and chiaro-scuro as the ‘raison d’etre’

of a complete composition, and his brush, responding to the idea,

blends light and shade in delicious harmony.”--Woltmann and Woermann’s

‘History of Painting’.

The Bishop orders his Tomb.

{Rome, 15--.}

* The tomb is imaginary; though it is said to be pointed

out to visitors to Saint Praxed’s who desire particularly

to see it.

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!

Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?

Nephews--sons mine. . .ah God, I know not! Well--

She, men would have to be your mother once,

Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!

What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,

Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,

And as she died so must we die ourselves,

And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.

Life, how and what is it? As here I lie {10}

In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,

Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask

“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.

Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;

And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought

With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:

--Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;

Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South

He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!

Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence {20}

One sees the pulpit on the epistle-side,

And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,

And up into the aery dome where live

The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk;

And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,

And ‘neath my tabernacle take my rest,

With those nine columns round me, two and two,

The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe

As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. {30}

--Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,

Put me where I may look at him! True peach,

Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!

Draw close: that conflagration of my church

--What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!

My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig

The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,

Drop water gently till the surface sink,

And if ye find. . . Ah God, I know not, I! . . .

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, {40}

And corded up in a tight olive-frail,

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,

Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,

Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast. . .

Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,

That brave Frascati villa with its bath,

So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,

Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands

Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,

For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! {50}

Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:

Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?

Did I say, basalt for my slab, sons? Black--

‘Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else

Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?

The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,

Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,

The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,

Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan {60}

Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,

And Moses with the tables. . .but I know

Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,

Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope

To revel down my villas while I gasp

Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine

Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!

Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!

‘Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve

My bath must needs be left behind, alas! {70}

One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,

There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world--

And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray

Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,

And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?

--That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,

Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,

No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line--

Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!

And then how I shall lie through centuries, {80}

And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,

And see God made and eaten all day long,

And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,

Dying in state and by such slow degrees,

I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,

And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,

And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop

Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s work: {90}

And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts

Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,

About the life before I lived this life,

And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests,

Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,

Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,

And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,

And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,

--Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?

No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! {100}

Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.

All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope

My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?

Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,

They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,

Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,

Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase

With grapes, and add a visor and a Term,

And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx

That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, {110}

To comfort me on my entablature

Whereon I am to lie till I must ask

“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!

For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude

To death: ye wish it--God, ye wish it! Stone--

Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat

As if the corpse they keep were oozing through--

And no more lapis to delight the world!

Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,

But in a row: and, going, turn your backs {120}

--Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,

And leave me in my church, the church for peace,

That I may watch at leisure if he leers--

Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,

As still he envied me, so fair she was!

1. Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!: “The Bishop on his death-bed

has reached Solomon’s conclusion that ‘all is vanity’. So he proceeds

to specify his particular vanity in the choice of a tombstone.”

--N. Brit. Rev. 34, p. 367. “In ‘The Palace of Art’, Mr. Tennyson

has shown the despair and isolation of a soul surrounded by

all luxuries of beauty, and living in and for them; but in the end

the soul is redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of earth.

Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of isolation and such despair

are by no means inevitable; there is a death in life which consists in

tranquil satisfaction, a calm pride in the soul’s dwelling among

the world’s gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty. . . .

So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders

his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world

simply because the world is passing out of his reach,

the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite

towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb,

and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail

to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of

Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed

cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color.”

--Edward Dowden.

46. Frascati: a town of central Italy, near the site of

the ancient Tusculum, ten or twelve miles S. E. of Rome;

it has many fine old villas.

53. Did I say, basalt for my slab, sons?: Note how all things else,

even such reflections as are expressed in the two preceding verses,

are incidental with the Bishop; his poor, art-besotted mind turns

abruptly to the black basalt which he craves for the slab of his tomb;

and see vv. 101, 102.

66. travertine: see note to v. 67 of ‘Pictor Ignotus’.

71. pistachio-nut: or, green almond.

79. Ulpian: Domitius Ulpianus, one of the greatest of Roman jurists,

and chief adviser of the emperor, Alexander Severus; born about 170,

died 228; belongs to the Brazen age of Roman literature.

95. Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount: the poor dying Bishop,

in the disorder of his mind, makes a ‘lapsus linguae’ here; see v. 59.

99. elucescebat: “he was beginning to shine forth”; a late Latin word

not found in the Ciceronian vocabulary, and therefore condemned

by the Bishop; this word is, perhaps, what is meant by the “gaudy ware”

in the second line of Gandolf’s epitaph, referred to in v. 78.

A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!

I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;

But, although I take your meaning, ‘tis with such a heavy mind!

St. 1. Galuppi, Baldassaro (rather Baldassare): b. 1703, in Burano,

an island near Venice, and thence called Buranello; d. 1785;

a distinguished composer, whose operas, about fifty in number,

and mostly comic, were at one time the most popular in Italy;

Galuppi is regarded as the father of the Italian comic opera.

Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.

What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,

Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

St. 2. Saint Mark’s: see Ruskin’s description of this

glorious basilica, in ‘The Stones of Venice’.

Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ‘tis arched by. . .

what you call

. . .Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:

I was never out of England--it’s as if I saw it all.

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?

Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,--

On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,

O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?

Well, and it was graceful of them: they’d break talk off and afford

--She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,

While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

St. 6. Toccatas: the Toccata was a form of musical composition

for the organ or harpsichord, somewhat in the free and brilliant style

of the modern fantasia or capriccio;

clavichord: “a keyed stringed instrument, now superseded by

the pianoforte {now called a piano}.”--Webster.

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,

Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions--“Must we die?”

Those commiserating sevenths--“Life might last! we can but try!”

St. 7. The musical technicalities used in this stanza,

any musician can explain and illustrate.

“Were you happy?”--“Yes.”--“And are you still as happy?”--“Yes.

And you?”

--“Then, more kisses!”--“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”

Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!

St. 8. The questions in this stanza must be supposed to be caused

by the effect upon the revellers of the “plaintive lesser thirds”,

the “diminished sixths”, the “commiserating sevenths”, etc.,

of the preceding stanza.

So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!

“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!

I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”

10.

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,

Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,

Death stepped tacitly, and took them where they never see the sun.

11.

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,

While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,

In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.

St. 11. While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s

close reserve: the secret of the soul’s immortality.

12.

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:

“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned.

13.

“Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,

Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;

Butterflies may dread extinction,--you’ll not die, it cannot be!

St. 13. The idea is involved in this stanza that the soul’s

continued existence is dependent on its development in this life;

the ironic character of the stanza is indicated by the merely

intellectual subjects named, physics, geology, mathematics,

which do not of themselves, necessarily, contribute to

SOUL-development. All from the 2d verse of the 12th stanza

down to “Dust and ashes” in the 15th, is what the music,

“like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned”,

says to the speaker, in the monologue, of the men and women for whom

life meant simply a butterfly enjoyment.

14.

“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,

Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

15.

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.

Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what’s become of all the gold

Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

Abt Vogler.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the Musical Instrument

of his Invention.)

Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,

Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,

Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed

Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,

Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,

Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--

Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,

And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!

St. 1. The leading sentence, “Would that the structure brave”, etc.,

is interrupted by the comparison, “as when Solomon willed”, etc.,

and continued in the 2d stanza, “Would it might tarry like his”, etc.;

the construction of the comparison is, “as when Solomon willed

that armies of angels, legions of devils, etc., should rush into sight

and pile him a palace straight”; the reference is to the legends

of the Koran in regard to Solomon’s magical powers.

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,

This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!

Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,

Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!

And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,

Burrow a while and build, broad on the roots of things,

Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,

Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.

St. 2. the beautiful building of mine: “Of all our senses,

hearing seems to be the most poetical; and because it requires

most imagination. We do not simply listen to sounds,

but whether they be articulate or inarticulate, we are constantly

translating them into the language of sight, with which we are

better acquainted; and this is a work of the imaginative faculty.”

--‘Poetics: an Essay on Poetry’. By E. S. Dallas.

The idea expressed in the above extract is beautifully embodied

in the following lines from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’:--

“It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome, with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who HEARD should SEE them there”, etc.

And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,

Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,

Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,

Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:

For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,

When a great illumination surprises a festal night--

Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)

Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,

Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;

And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,

As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:

Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,

Not a point nor peak but found, but fixed its wandering star;

Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,

For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,

Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,

Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,

Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;

Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,

But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:

What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;

And what is,--shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,

All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,

All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,

Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth.

Had I written the same, made verse--still, effect proceeds from cause,

Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;

It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,

Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list enrolled:--

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, lo, they are!

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught;

It is everywhere in the world--loud, soft, and all is said:

Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought,

And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;

Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;

For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,

That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.

Never to be again! But many more of the kind

As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind

To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;

The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;

What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

10.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist,

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

11.

And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence

For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;

The rest may reason and welcome; ‘tis we musicians know.

St. 11. And what is our failure here: “As long as effort

is directed to the highest, that aim, though it is out of reach,

is the standard of hope. The existence of a capacity,

cherished and quickened, is a pledge that it will find scope.

The punishment of the man who has fixed all his thoughts upon earth,

a punishment felt on reflection to be overwhelming in view of

possibilities of humanity, is the completest gratification of desires

unworthily limited:--

“‘Thou art shut

Out of the heaven of spirit; glut

Thy sense upon the world: ‘tis thine

For ever--take it!’ (‘Easter Day’, xx.).

On the other hand, the soul which has found in success not rest

but a starting-point, which refuses to see in the first-fruits

of a partial victory the fulness of its rightful triumph,

has ever before it a sustaining and elevating vision:--

“‘What stops my despair?

This:--‘tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man

Would do!’ (‘Saul’, 18).

“‘What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me;

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.’”

(‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, 7).--Rev. Prof. Westcott on Browning’s

View of Life (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, iv., 405, 406).

12.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes,

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,

Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,

The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

“Touch him ne’er so lightly.”

{Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls. Second Series.}

* See ‘Pages from an Album’, in ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’

(Scribner’s), for November 1882, pp. 159, 160, where is given

a fac-simile of the poet’s Ms. of these verses and of the ten verses

he afterwards added, in response, it seems, to a carping critic.

“Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he broke:

Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,

Not one flower dust fell but straight its fall awoke

Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed

Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!”

Indeed?

Rock’s the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:

Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage

Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:

Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age

Knows and names a pine, a nation’s heritage.

Memorabilia.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you,

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,

And also you are living after;

And the memory I started at--

My starting moves your laughter!

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world, no doubt,

Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone

‘Mid the blank miles round about:

For there I picked up on the heather

And there I put inside my breast

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!

Well, I forget the rest.

How it strikes a Contemporary.

I only knew one poet in my life:

And this, or something like it, was his way.

You saw go up and down Valladolid,

A man of mark, to know next time you saw.

His very serviceable suit of black

Was courtly once and conscientious still,

And many might have worn it, though none did:

The cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads,

Had purpose, and the ruff, significance.

He walked, and tapped the pavement with his cane, {10}

Scenting the world, looking it full in face:

An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.

They turned up, now, the alley by the church,

That leads no whither; now, they breathed themselves

On the main promenade just at the wrong time.

You’d come upon his scrutinizing hat,

Making a peaked shade blacker than itself

Against the single window spared some house

Intact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,--

Or else surprise the ferrel of his stick {20}

Trying the mortar’s temper ‘tween the chinks

Of some new shop a-building, French and fine.

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,

The man who slices lemons into drink,

The coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boys

That volunteer to help him turn its winch.

He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,

And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,

And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall.

He took such cognizance of men and things, {30}

If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;

If any cursed a woman, he took note;

Yet stared at nobody,--you stared at him,

And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,

He seemed to know you and expect as much.

So, next time that a neighbor’s tongue was loosed,

It marked the shameful and notorious fact,

We had among us, not so much a spy,

As a recording chief-inquisitor,

The town’s true master if the town but knew! {40}

We merely kept a governor for form,

While this man walked about and took account

Of all thought, said and acted, then went home,

And wrote it fully to our Lord the King

Who has an itch to know things, he knows why,

And reads them in his bedroom of a night.

Oh, you might smile! there wanted not a touch,

A tang of. . .well, it was not wholly ease,

As back into your mind the man’s look came.

Stricken in years a little, such a brow {50}

His eyes had to live under!--clear as flint

On either side o’ the formidable nose

Curved, cut and colored like an eagle’s claw.

Had he to do with A.’s surprising fate?

When altogether old B. disappeared,

And young C. got his mistress,--was’t our friend,

His letter to the King, that did it all?

What paid the bloodless man for so much pains?

Our Lord the King has favorites manifold,

And shifts his ministry some once a month; {60}

Our city gets new governors at whiles,--

But never word or sign, that I could hear,

Notified, to this man about the streets,

The King’s approval of those letters conned

The last thing duly at the dead of night.

Did the man love his office? Frowned our Lord,

Exhorting when none heard--“Beseech me not!

Too far above my people,--beneath me!

I set the watch,--how should the people know?

Forget them, keep me all the more in mind!” {70}

Was some such understanding ‘twixt the two?

I found no truth in one report at least--

That if you tracked him to his home, down lanes

Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,

You found he ate his supper in a room

Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,

And twenty naked girls to change his plate!

Poor man, he lived another kind of life

In that new stuccoed third house by the bridge,

Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! {80}

The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat,

Leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog’s back,

Playing a decent cribbage with his maid

(Jacynth, you’re sure her name was) o’er the cheese

And fruit, three red halves of starved winter-pears,

Or treat of radishes in April. Nine,

Ten, struck the church clock, straight to bed went he.

My father, like the man of sense he was,

Would point him out to me a dozen times;

“St--St,” he’d whisper, “the Corregidor!” {90}

I had been used to think that personage

Was one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt,

And feathers like a forest in his hat,

Who blew a trumpet and proclaimed the news,

Announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn,

And memorized the miracle in vogue!

He had a great observance from us boys;

We were in error; that was not the man.

I’d like now, yet had haply been afraid,

To have just looked, when this man came to die, {100}

And seen who lined the clean gay garret sides,

And stood about the neat low truckle-bed,

With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.

Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,

Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,

Doing the King’s work all the dim day long,

In his old coat and up to knees in mud,

Smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,--

And, now the day was won, relieved at once!

No further show or need of that old coat, {110}

You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the while

How sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!

A second, and the angels alter that.

Well, I could never write a verse,--could you?

Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.

“Transcendentalism”:

A Poem in Twelve Books.

* Transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books. It must be understood

that the poet addressed has written a long poem under this title,

and a brother-poet, while admitting that it contains “true thoughts,

good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up”, raises the objection

that they are naked, instead of being draped, as they should be,

in sights and sounds.

Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?

‘Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:

Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts

Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.

--True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!

But why such long prolusion and display,

Such turning and adjustment of the harp,

And taking it upon your breast, at length,

Only to speak dry words across its strings?

Stark-naked thought is in request enough: {10}

Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!

The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,

Which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp--

Exchange our harp for that,--who hinders you?

But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;

Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse;

Boys seek for images and melody,

Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.

Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, ‘tis true;

We see and hear and do not wonder much: {20}

If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!

As German Boehme never cared for plants

Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,

He noticed all at once that plants could speak,

Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.

That day the daisy had an eye indeed--

Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!

We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.

But by the time youth slips a stage or two

While reading prose in that tough book he wrote, {30}

(Collating and emendating the same

And settling on the sense most to our mind)

We shut the clasps and find life’s summer past.

Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss--

Another Boehme with a tougher book

And subtler meanings of what roses say,--

Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,

John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?

He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,

And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, {40}

Over us, under, round us every side,

Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs

And musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,--

Buries us with a glory, young once more,

Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

So come, the harp back to your heart again!

You are a poem, though your poem’s naught.

The best of all you showed before, believe,

Was your own boy-face o’er the finer chords

Bent, following the cherub at the top {50}

That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.

22. German Boehme: Jacob Boehme (or Behmen), a shoemaker

and a famous theosophist, b. 1575, at Old Seidenberg,

a village near Goerlitz; d. 1624. The 24th verse of the poem,

“He noticed all at once that plants could speak”, may refer to

a remarkable experience of Boehme, related in Dr. Hans Lassen Martensen’s

‘Jacob Boehme: his life and teaching, or studies in theosophy:

translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans’, London, 1885:

“Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish,

which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendor

that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if

he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things.

He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it

from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked

that he gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass,

and that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.”

Martensen, in his biography, follows that by Frankenberg,

in which the experience may be given more in detail.

37-40. him of Halberstadt, John: “It is not a thinker like Boehme,

who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician

like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up.”

“The ‘magic’ symbolized, is that of genuine poetry; but the magician,

or ‘Mage’, is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him

was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself.

‘Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadht in Germany,

after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible,

was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse,

and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day,

to say mass in Halberstadht, in Mayntz, and in Cologne’

(‘Heywood’s Hierarchy’, Bk. IV., p. 253). The ‘prestigious feat’

of causing flowers to appear in winter, was a common one.”

--Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s ‘Handbook to the works of Robert Browning’,

p. 209.

It may be said that the advice given in this poem, Browning has not

sufficiently followed in his own poetry. On this point, a writer in

the ‘British Quarterly Review’ (Vol. 23, p. 162) justly remarks:

“Browning’s thought is always that of a poet. Subtle, nimble,

and powerful as is the intellect, and various as is the learning,

all is manifested through the imagination, and comes forth

shaped and tinted by it. Thus, even in the foregoing passages

{cited from ‘Transcendentalism’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’},

where the matter is almost as purely as it can be the produce of

the mere understanding, it is still evident that the method of

the thought is poetic. The notions take the form of images.

For example, the poet means to say that Prose is a good

and mighty vehicle in its way, but that it is not Poetry;

and how does the conception shape itself in his mind? Why,

in an image. All at once it is not Prose that is thought about,

but a huge six-foot speaking-trumpet braced round with bark,

through which the Swiss hunters help their voices from Alp to Alp--

Poetry, on the other hand, being no such big and blaring instrument,

but a harp taken to the breast of youth and swept by ecstatic fingers.

And so with the images of Boehme and his book, and John of Halberstadt

with his magic rose--still a concrete body to enshrine

an abstract meaning.”

Apparent Failure.

“We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”--Paris Newspaper.

No, for I’ll save it! Seven years since,

I passed through Paris, stopped a day

To see the baptism of your Prince;

Saw, made my bow, and went my way:

Walking the heat and headache off,

I took the Seine-side, you surmise,

Thought of the Congress, Gortschakoff,

Cavour’s appeal and Buol’s replies,

So sauntered till--what met my eyes?

St. 1. To see the baptism of your Prince: the Prince Imperial,

son of Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie,

born March 16, 1856.

the Congress: the Congress of Paris.

Gortschakoff: Prince Alexander Michaelowitsch Gortschakoff;

while representing Russia at the Court of Vienna, he kept Austria

neutral during the Crimean War.

Cavour: Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italian statesman, b. 1810;

at the Congress of Paris, brought forward the question of

the political consolidation of Italy, which led to the invasion of Italy

by the Austrians, who were defeated; d. 6th June, 1861.

Buol: Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein, Austrian diplomatist,

and minister of foreign affairs from 1852 to 1859.

Only the Doric little Morgue!

The dead-house where you show your drowned:

Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue,

Your Morgue has made the Seine renowned.

One pays one’s debt in such a case;

I plucked up heart and entered,--stalked,

Keeping a tolerable face

Compared with some whose cheeks were chalked:

Let them! No Briton’s to be balked!

St. 2. Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue:

Fontaine de Vaucluse, a celebrated fountain, in the department

of Vaucluse, in Southern France, the source of the Sorgues.

The village named after it was for some time the residence of Petrarch.

First came the silent gazers; next,

A screen of glass, we’re thankful for;

Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text,

The three men who did most abhor

Their life in Paris yesterday,

So killed themselves: and now, enthroned

Each on his copper couch, they lay

Fronting me, waiting to be owned.

I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned.

Poor men, God made, and all for that!

The reverence struck me; o’er each head

Religiously was hung its hat,

Each coat dripped by the owner’s bed,

Sacred from touch: each had his berth,

His bounds, his proper place of rest,

Who last night tenanted on earth

Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast,--

Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.

How did it happen, my poor boy?

You wanted to be Buonaparte

And have the Tuileries for toy,

And could not, so it broke your heart?

You, old one by his side, I judge,

Were, red as blood, a socialist,

A leveller! Does the Empire grudge

You’ve gained what no Republic missed?

Be quiet, and unclinch your fist!

And this--why, he was red in vain,

Or black,--poor fellow that is blue!

What fancy was it, turned your brain?

Oh, women were the prize for you!

Money gets women, cards and dice

Get money, and ill-luck gets just

The copper couch and one clear nice

Cool squirt of water o’er your bust,

The right thing to extinguish lust!

It’s wiser being good than bad;

It’s safer being meek than fierce:

It’s fitter being sane than mad.

My own hope is, a sun will pierce

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

That, after Last, returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched;

That what began best, can’t end worst,

Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith, “A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

St. 1. Grow old along with me!: I understand that the aged Rabbi

is addressing some young friend.

The best is yet to be, the last of life:

“By the spirit, when age shall o’ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy

More indeed, than at first when, unconscious, the life of a boy.”

--‘Saul’, 162, 163.

Not that, amassing flowers,

Youth sighed, “Which rose make ours,

Which lily leave and then as best recall?”

Not that, admiring stars,

It yearned, “Nor Jove, nor Mars;

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!”

Not for such hopes and fears

Annulling youth’s brief years,

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!

Rather I prize the doubt

Low kinds exist without,

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.

St. 2, 3. The construction is, I do not remonstrate that youth,

amassing flowers, sighed, Which rose make ours, which lily leave, etc.,

nor that, admiring stars, it (youth) yearned, etc.

Poor vaunt of life indeed,

Were man but formed to feed

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast;

Such feasting ended, then

As sure an end to men;

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?

St. 4. Irks care: does care irk. . .does doubt fret. . .

Rejoice we are allied

To That which doth provide

And not partake, effect and not receive!

A spark disturbs our clod;

Nearer we hold of God

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.

St. 5. Nearer we hold of God: have title to a nearer relationship.

See Webster, s.v. Hold, v.i. def. 3. {No edition is given.}

Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

For thence,--a paradox

Which comforts while it mocks,--

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me:

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.

St. 7. What I aspired to be: “‘tis not what man Does which exalts him,

but what man Would do.”--‘Saul’, v. 296.

What is he but a brute

Whose flesh hath soul to suit,

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play?

To man, propose this test--

Thy body at its best,

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?

St. 8. Thy body at its best, How far, etc.: “In our flesh grows

the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit.”--‘Saul’, v. 151.

Yet gifts should prove their use:

I own the Past profuse

Of power each side, perfection every turn:

Eyes, ears took in their dole,

Brain treasured up the whole;

Should not the heart beat once “How good to live and learn”?

St. 9. the Past: he means the past of his own life.

10.

Not once beat “Praise be Thine!

I see the whole design,

I, who saw Power, see now Love perfect too:

Perfect I call Thy plan:

Thanks that I was a man!

Maker, remake, complete,--I trust what Thou shalt do!”

St. 10. The original reading of the 3d verse was, “I, who saw Power,

SHALL see Love perfect too.” The change has cleared up a difficulty.

The All-Great is now to me, in my age, the All-Loving too.

Maker, remake, complete: there seems to be an anticipation here

of the metaphor of the Potter’s wheel, in stanzas 25-32, and see Jer. 18:4.

11.

For pleasant is this flesh;

Our soul, in its rose-mesh

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest:

Would we some prize might hold

To match those manifold

Possessions of the brute,--gain most, as we did best!

12.

Let us not always say

“Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!”

As the bird wings and sings,

Let us cry “All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”

13.

Therefore I summon age

To grant youth’s heritage,

Life’s struggle having so far reached its term:

Thence shall I pass, approved

A man, for aye removed

From the developed brute; a God though in the germ.

St. 13. Thence shall I pass, etc.: It will be observed that

here and in some of the following stanzas, the Rabbi speaks

in the person of youth; so youth should say to itself.

14.

And I shall thereupon

Take rest, ere I be gone

Once more on my adventure brave and new:

Fearless and unperplexed,

When I wage battle next,

What weapons to select, what armor to indue.

15.

Youth ended, I shall try

My gain or loss thereby;

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:

And I shall weigh the same,

Give life its praise or blame:

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.

16.

For, note when evening shuts,

A certain moment cuts

The deed off, calls the glory from the gray:

A whisper from the west

Shoots--“Add this to the rest,

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day.”

17.

So, still within this life,

Though lifted o’er its strife,

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last,

“This rage was right i’ the main,

That acquiescence vain:

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.”

18.

For more is not reserved

To man, with soul just nerved

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day:

Here, work enough to watch

The Master work, and catch

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool’s true play.

19.

As it was better, youth

Should strive, through acts uncouth,

Toward making, than repose on aught found made:

So, better, age, exempt

From strife, should know, than tempt

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death, nor be afraid!

20.

Enough now, if the Right

And Good and Infinite

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own,

With knowledge absolute,

Subject to no dispute

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone.

St. 20. knowledge absolute: soul knowledge, which is reached through

direct assimilation by the soul of the hidden principles of things,

as distinguished from intellectual knowledge, which is based on

the phenominal, and must be more or less subject to dispute.

21.

Be there, for once and all,

Severed great minds from small,

Announced to each his station in the Past!

Was I, the world arraigned,

Were they, my soul disdained,

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!

St. 21, vv. 4, 5. The relatives are suppressed;--Was I whom

the world arraigned, or were they whom my soul disdained, right?

22.

Now, who shall arbitrate?

Ten men love what I hate,

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;

Ten, who in ears and eyes

Match me: we all surmise,

They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul believe?

23.

Not on the vulgar mass

Called “work”, must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the price;

O’er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

24.

But all, the world’s coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account:

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:

25.

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped:

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

26.

Ay, note that Potter’s wheel,

That metaphor! and feel

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,--

Thou, to whom fools propound,

When the wine makes its round,

“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!”

St. 26. Potter’s wheel: “But now, O Lord, thou art our Father:

we are the clay, and thou our Potter; and we are all the work

of thy hand.”--Is. 64:8; and see Jer. 18:2-6.

27.

Fool! All that is, at all,

Lasts ever, past recall;

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee,

THAT was, is, and shall be:

Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

28.

He fixed thee mid this dance

Of plastic circumstance,

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:

Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed.

29.

What though the earlier grooves

Which ran the laughing loves

Around thy base, no longer pause and press?

What though, about thy rim,

Skull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

30.

Look not thou down but up!

To uses of a cup,

The festal board, lamp’s flash, and trumpet’s peal,

The new wine’s foaming flow,

The Master’s lips aglow!

Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s wheel?

31.

But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who mouldest men!

And since, not even while the whirl was worst,

Did I,--to the wheel of life

With shapes and colors rife,

Bound dizzily,--mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:

32.

So, take and use Thy work,

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe.

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,

Singing together.

Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes,

Each in its tether

Sleeping safe in the bosom of the plain,

Cared-for till cock-crow:

Look out if yonder be not day again

Rimming the rock-row!

That’s the appropriate country; there, man’s thought,

Rarer, intenser, {10}

Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,

Chafes in the censer.

Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;

Seek we sepulture

On a tall mountain, citied to the top,

Crowded with culture!

All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;

Clouds overcome it;

No, yonder sparkle is the citadel’s

Circling its summit. {20}

Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights!

Wait ye the warning?

Our low life was the level’s and the night’s:

He’s for the morning.

Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,

‘Ware the beholders!

This is our master, famous, calm, and dead,

Borne on our shoulders.

Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft

Safe from the weather! {30}

He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft,

Singing together,

He was a man born with thy face and throat,

Lyric Apollo!

Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note

Winter would follow?

Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone!

Cramped and diminished,

Moaned he, “New measures, other feet anon!

“My dance is finished?” {40}

No, that’s the world’s way; (keep the mountain-side,

Make for the city!)

He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride

Over men’s pity;

Left play for work, and grappled with the world

Bent on escaping:

“What’s in the scroll,” quoth he, “thou keepest furled?

Show me their shaping,

Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,--

Give!”--So, he gowned him, {50}

Straight got by heart that book to its last page:

Learned, we found him.

Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,

Accents uncertain:

“Time to taste life,” another would have said,

“Up with the curtain!”

This man said rather, “Actual life comes next?

Patience a moment!

Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,

Still there’s the comment. {60}

Let me know all! Prate not of most or least,

Painful or easy!

Even to the crumbs I’d fain eat up the feast,

Ay, nor feel queasy.”

Oh, such a life as he resolved to live,

When he had learned it,

When he had gathered all books had to give!

Sooner, he spurned it.

Image the whole, then execute the parts--

Fancy the fabric {70}

Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,

Ere mortar dab brick!

(Here’s the town-gate reached; there’s the market-place

Gaping before us.)

Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace

(Hearten our chorus!)

That before living he’d learn how to live--

No end to learning:

Earn the means first--God surely will contrive

Use for our earning. {80}

Others mistrust and say, “But time escapes!

Live now or never!”

He said, “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever.”

Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head:

CALCULUS racked him:

Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead:

TUSSIS attacked him.

“Now, master, take a little rest!”--not he!

(Caution redoubled! {90}

Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!)

Not a whit troubled,

Back to his studies, fresher than at first,

Fierce as a dragon

He (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst)

Sucked at the flagon.

Oh, if we draw a circle premature,

Heedless of far gain,

Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure

Bad is our bargain! {100}

Was it not great? did not he throw on God

(He loves the burthen)--

God’s task to make the heavenly period

Perfect the earthen?

Did not he magnify the mind, show clear

Just what it all meant?

He would not discount life, as fools do here,

Paid by instalment.

He ventured neck or nothing--heaven’s success

Found, or earth’s failure: {110}

“Wilt thou trust death or not?” He answered, “Yes!

Hence with life’s pale lure!”

That low man seeks a little thing to do.

Sees it and does it:

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it.

That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred’s soon hit:

This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit. {120}

That, has the world here--should he need the next,

Let the world mind him!

This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed

Seeking shall find him.

So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,

Ground he at grammar;

Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:

While he could stammer

He settled HOTI’s business--let it be!--

Properly based OUN-- {130}

Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic ‘De’,

Dead from the waist down.

Well, here’s the platform, here’s the proper place:

Hail to your purlieus,

All ye highfliers of the feathered race,

Swallows and curlews!

Here’s the top-peak; the multitude below

Live, for they can, there:

This man decided not to Live but Know--

Bury this man there? {140}

Here--here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

Lightnings are loosened,

Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,

Peace let the dew send!

Lofty designs must close in like effects:

Loftily lying,

Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,

Living and dying.

18. overcome: pass over, overhang, overshadow; used as in Macbeth

III. IV. 3, “overcome us like a summer’s cloud”.

39, 40. New measures, . . .finished?: do you say? not at all.

42. All in parentheses, throughout the poem, is addressed

by the speaker directly to his companions.

57. Actual life comes next: do you say? No. I have more to do first.

86. Calculus: the stone.

88. Tussis: a cough.

95. hydroptic: hydropic, dropsical.

129. Hoti: the Greek particle ‘/Oti, conj. that, etc.

130. Oun: Greek particle Ou^’n, then, now then, etc.

131. the enclitic De: Greek De {Delta epsilon}; in regard to this,

the following letter by Browning appeared in the London ‘Daily News’

of Nov. 21, 1874: “To the Editor of ‘The Daily News’. Sir,--

In a clever article this morning you speak of ‘the doctrine of

the enclitic De’--‘which, with all deference to Mr. Browning,

in point of fact does not exist.’ No, not to Mr. Browning:

but pray defer to Herr Buttmann, whose fifth list of ‘enclitics’

ends ‘with the inseparable De’--or to Curtius,

whose fifth list ends also with ‘De (meaning ‘towards’

and as a demonstrative appendage)’. That this is not to be confounded

with the accentuated ‘De, meaning BUT’, was the ‘doctrine’

which the Grammarian bequeathed to those capable of receiving it.--

I am, sir, yours obediently, R. B.”--‘Browning Soc. Papers’,