It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare
reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse stirring
within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree. He remembered his
mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's
drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters
whom he had heard called "the Norwich men," and he wished to be an
artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting
verse-melodies, moved him most of all.
"I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me:
... verse alone, one life allows me."
He now gave way to the compulsive Byronic vogue, with an occasional
relapse to the polished artificialism of his father's idol among British
poets. There were several ballads written at this time: if I remember
aright, the poet specified the "Death of Harold" as the theme of one.
Long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of "Over the sea our
galleys went," and "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,"
and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies. Mrs. Browning
was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her
twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from
the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out
and carefully stitched MSS., she lost no opportunity--when Mr. Browning
was absent--to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she
showed them was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them,
discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read
them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams),
copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev.
William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts. Mr. Fox agreed with Miss
Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual
accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. The
originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the
eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new
thing for him: from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning,
transformed to a dominating reality. Passing a bookstall one day, he
saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as "Mr.
Shelley's Atheistical Poem: very scarce." He had never heard of Shelley,
nor did he learn for a long time that the "Dæmon of the World," and the
miscellaneous poems appended thereto, constituted a literary piracy.
Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched
him to a new emotion. Pope became further removed than ever: Byron,
even, lost his magnetic supremacy. From vague remarks in reply to his
inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there
really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes;
that he was dead.
Strange as it may seem, Browning declared once that the news of this
unknown singer's death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or
less earlier, the tidings of Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi. He
begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, a request not easily
complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local
booksellers had even heard of the poet's name. Ultimately, however, Mrs.
Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers' in
Vere Street, London.
She was very pleased with the result of her visit. The books, it is
true, seemed unattractive: but they would please Robert, no doubt. If
that packet had been lost we should not have had "Pauline": we might
have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley's writings,
all in their first edition, with the exception of "The Cenci": in
addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John
Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her
purchase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of
Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac
poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the
imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais." What
an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it
was a May night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of
gold," and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden,
two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment it is a
pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley
uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can
realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden
electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned
over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor" or
"Endymion," or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a Grecian
Urn.
More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first
pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life
he was fain, like his "wise thrush," to "recapture that first fine
careless rapture." It was an eventful eve.
"And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke
As from a dream."
Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous. Shelley
enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet's verse, wild
and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed
to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion
of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm
of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the Ode to a
Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in
"Epipsychidion," haunted him above all others: and again and again in
his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those "remote isles" and
"perilous seas"--as, for example, in "the dim clustered isles of the
blue sea" of "Pauline," and the "some isle, with the sea's silence on
it--some unsuspected isle in the far seas!" of "Pippa Passes."
But of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry.
His education at Mr. Ready's private academy seems to have been
excellent so far as it went. He remained there till he was fourteen.
Perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from his own
reticence in self disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any
school-mate deeply. We hear of no one who "knew Browning at school." His
best education, after all, was at home. His father and mother
incidentally taught him as much as Mr. Ready: his love of painting and
music was fostered, indirectly: and in the 'dovecot' bookshelf above the
fireplace in his bedroom, were the precious volumes within whose sway
and magic was his truest life.
His father, for some reason which has not been made public, but was
doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it, a
matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a
large public school, nor, later, to Oxford or Cambridge. A more
stimulative and wider training was awaiting him elsewhere.
For a time Robert's education was superintended by a tutor, who came to
the house in Camberwell for several hours daily. The afternoons were
mainly devoted to music, to exercise, and occasionally to various
experimental studies in technical science. In the evenings, after his
preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company
of his father, he read and assiduously wrote. After poetry, he cared
most for history: but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his
eager intellectual appetite. It was a period of growth, with, it may
be, a vague consciousness that his mind was expanding towards compulsive
expression.
"So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life
To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath
Was a vague sense of powers folded up--
A sense that though those shadowy times were past,
Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule."
When Mr. Browning was satisfied that the tutor had fulfilled his duty he
sent his son to attend a few lectures at University College, in Gower
Street, then just founded. Robert Browning's name is on the registrar's
books for the opening session, 1829-30. "I attended with him the Greek
class of Professor Long" (wrote a friend, in the _Times_, Dec. 14:'89),
"and I well recollect the esteem and regard in which he was held by his
fellow-students. He was then a bright, handsome youth, with long black
hair falling over his shoulders." So short was his period of attendance,
however, and so unimportant the instruction he there derived, that to
all intents it may be said Browning had no University training.
Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Browning but slightly appreciated his
son's poetic idols and already found himself in an opposite literary
camp, he had a profound sympathy with the boy's ideals and no little
confidence in his powers. When the test came he acted wisely as well as
with affectionate complaisance. In a word, he practically left the
decision as to his course of life to Robert himself. The latter was
helped thereto by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for,
and that, if need be, there was sufficient for himself also. There was
of course but one way open to him. He would not have been a true poet,
an artist, if he had hesitated. With a strange misconception of the
artistic spirit, some one has awarded the poet great credit for his
choice, because he had "the singular courage to decline to be rich."
Browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit: he was the last
man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as "singular courage."
There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so
his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having
published "Orion" at a farthing: "Perhaps he is going to shoot the
Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania."
With Browning there never could have been two sides to the question: it
were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered. The
outcome of their deliberations was that Robert's further education
should be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign
literatures.
By this time the poet was twenty. His youth had been uneventful; in a
sense, more so than his boyhood. His mind, however, was rapidly
unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming
days. It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority,
that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or
two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover
for this wooer. Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was
rudely interrupted, is not known. What is certain is that it made a deep
impression on the poet's mind. It may be that it, of itself, or wrought
to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of
"Pauline," that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning's
genius.
It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all
freely of his youthful life. Perhaps the earliest record of these
utterances is that which appeared in the _Century Magazine_ in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after
years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic
range of the _Comédie Humaine_, Browning planned "a series of
monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls--a gigantic
scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega would start back
aghast."
Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul in its
manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least there
was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion. In a sense he has
fulfilled this early dream: at any rate we have a unique series of
monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls. In another sense, the
major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic
"epic." He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching
modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. Through a
multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of
a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the
utterance of a single individual. He is a true dramatic poet, though not
in the sense in which Shakspere is. Shakspere and his kindred project
themselves into the lives of their imaginary personages: Browning pays
little heed to external life, or to the exigencies of action, and
projects himself into the minds of his characters.
In a word, Shakspere's method is to depict a human soul in action, with
all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray
the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said in his
dedicatory preface to "Sordello," "little else is worth study." The one
electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other
flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping
potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically, the other with life
as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art. Browning, who is above
all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many
of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence. His finest work is
in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas. He realised intensely
the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in "The Return
of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first
time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, "no draught coming as
from a sepulchre" saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the
assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when Anael,
coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her
tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her
emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single
worshipping cry, _Hakeem!_--or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book,"
where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature,
the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last
extremity not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and
murdered wife--"Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ... Pompilia,
will you let them murder me?" Thus we can imagine Browning, with his
characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance
or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in
"Macbeth," or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect,
the word 'wrought' towards the close of "Othello," when the Moor cries
in his bitterness of soul, "But being wrought, perplext in the extreme":
we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even
the author of "The Ring and the Book" could by any possibility have
composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue.
In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular promise and
beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.[6]
Thirty-four years later he included "Pauline" in his "Poetical Works"
with reluctance, and in a note explained the reason of his
decision--namely, to forestall piratical reprints abroad. "The thing was
my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which I have since
written according to a scheme less extravagant, and scale less
impracticable, than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary
sketch--a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some
hint of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis
persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however,
and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time." These be
hard words. No critic will ever adventure upon so severe a censure of
"Pauline": most capable judges agree that, with all its shortcomings, it
is a work of genius, and therefore ever to be held treasurable for its
own sake as well as for its significance.
[Footnote 6: Probably from the fact of "Richmond" having been added to
the date at the end of the preface to "Pauline," have arisen the
frequent misstatements as to the Browning family having moved west from
Camberwell in or shortly before 1832. Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me
that his father "never lived at Richmond, and that that place was
connected with 'Pauline,' when first printed, as a mystification."]
On the fly-leaf of a copy of this initial work, the poet, six years
after its publication, wrote: "Written in pursuance of a foolish plan I
forget, or have no wish to remember; the world was never to guess that
such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same
notable person.... Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in
my fool's Paradise." It was in conformity with this plan that he not
only issued "Pauline" anonymously, but enjoined secrecy upon those to
whom he communicated the fact of his authorship.
When he read the poem to his parents, upon its conclusion, both were
much impressed by it, though his father made severe strictures upon its
lack of polish, its terminal inconcision, and its vagueness of thought.
That he was not more severe was accepted by his son as high praise. The
author had, however, little hope of seeing it in print. Mr. Browning was
not anxious to provide a publisher with a present. So one day the poet
was gratified when his aunt, handing him the requisite sum, remarked
that she had heard he had written a fine poem, and that she wished to
have the pleasure of seeing it in print.
To this kindly act much was due. Browning, of course, could not now have
been dissuaded from the career he had forecast for himself, but his
progress might have been retarded or thwarted to less fortunate grooves,
had it not been for the circumstances resultant from his aunt's timely
gift.
The MS. was forthwith taken to Saunders & Otley, of Conduit Street, and
the little volume of seventy pages of blank verse, comprising only a
thousand and thirty lines, was issued by them in January 1833. It seems
to us, who read it now, so manifestly a work of exceptional promise,
and, to a certain extent, of high accomplishment, that were it not for
the fact that the public auditory for a new poet is ever extraordinarily
limited, it would be difficult to understand how it could have been
overlooked.
"Pauline" has a unique significance because of its autopsychical hints.
The Browning whom we all know, as well as the youthful dreamer, is here
revealed; here too, as well as the disciple of Shelley, we have the
author of "The Ring and the Book." In it the long series culminating in
"Asolando" is foreshadowed, as the oak is observable in the sapling. The
poem is prefaced by a Latin motto from the _Occult Philosophy_ of
Cornelius Agrippa, and has also a note in French, set forth as being by
Pauline, and appended to her lover's manuscript after his death.
Probably Browning placed it in the mouth of Pauline from his rooted
determination to speak dramatically and impersonally: and in French, so
as to heighten the effect of verisimilitude.[7]
[Footnote 7: "I much fear that my poor friend will not be always
perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange
fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what
of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. I do not
know, moreover, whether in striving at a better connection of certain
parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to
which so singular a production can pretend--that of giving a tolerably
precise idea of the manner (_genre_) which it can merely indicate. This
unpretending opening, this stir of passion, which first increases, and
then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden
return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of
mind, have made alterations almost impossible. The reasons which he
elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent, have secured my
indulgence for this paper, which otherwise I should have advised him to
throw into the fire. I believe none the less in the great principle of
all composition--in that principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, and of
Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to
their conception than to their execution; I have every reason to fear
that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and I
much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the
second. It would be best to burn this, but what can I do?"--(_Mrs.
Orr_.)]
"Pauline" is a confession, fragmentary in detail but synthetic in range,
of a young man of high impulses but weak determination. In its
over-emphasis upon errors of judgment, as well as upon real if
exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. An almost
fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a matter of
question if this be absolutely vicarious. To me it seems that the author
himself was at the time confused by the complicated flashing of the
lights of life.
The autobiographical and autopsychical lines and passages scattered
through the poem are of immediate interest. Generously the poet repays
his debt to Shelley, whom he apostrophises as "Sun-treader," and invokes
in strains of lofty emotion--"Sun-treader--life and light be thine for
ever." The music of "Alastor," indeed, is audible ever and again
throughout "Pauline." None the less is there a new music, a new poetic
voice, in
"Thou wilt remember one warm morn, when Winter
Crept aged from the earth, and Spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills--the black-thorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow--and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes."
If we have an imaginary Browning, a Shelleyan phantasm, in
"I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt
A strange delight in causing my decay;
I was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever
Within some ocean-wave:"
we have the real Browning in
"So I will sing on--fast as fancies come
Rudely--the verse being as the mood it paints.
* * * * *
I am made up of an intensest life,"
and all the succeeding lines down to "Their spirit dwelt in me, and I
should rule."
Even then the poet's inner life was animated by his love of the
beautiful Greek literature. Telling how in "the first dawn of life,"
"which passed alone with wisest ancient books," Pauline's lover
incorporated himself in whatsoever he read--was the god wandering after
beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the
high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos--his
second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the
place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had
there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of
the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric
awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor sweet
nature's face"--
"Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves--
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."
Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the
"old lore
Loved for itself, and all it shows--the King
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"
and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how
deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the
surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some
degree, cherish in various guises.
Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be
admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there
is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in "Pauline,"
written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the
inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages,
decasyllabically arranged. "Twas in my plan to look on real life, which
was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon
men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I
pondered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, an
end comprising every joy." Again: "Then came a pause, and long restraint
chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it
not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to
turn my mind against itself ... at length I was restored, yet long the
influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all,
which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me
thus far back to peace." No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting
music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not
be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as
expressionally poetical. It would seem as though, from the first,
Browning's ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained
evocation of the music of verse. Some flaw there was, somewhere. His
heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the
o'er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far
perspectives of the brain, "as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind."
I have dwelt at this length upon "Pauline" partly because of its
inherent beauty and autopsychical significance, and partly because it is
the least familiar of Browning's poems, long overshadowed as it has been
by his own too severe strictures: mainly, however, because of its
radical importance to the student who would arrive at a broad and true
estimate of the power and scope and shaping constituents of its author's
genius. Almost every quality of his after-verse may be found here, in
germ or outline. It is, in a word, more physiognomic than any other
single poem by Browning, and so must ever possess a peculiar interest
quite apart from its many passages of haunting beauty.
To these the lover of poetry will always turn with delight. Some will
even regard them retrospectively with alien emotion to that wherewith
they strive to possess their souls in patience over some one or other of
the barbarisms, the Titanic excesses, the poetic banalities recurrent in
the later volumes.
How many and how haunting these delicate oases are! Those who know and
love "Pauline" will remember the passage where the poet, with that
pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most
loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the
wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the
sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk
and through its rustling foliage "look for the dim stars;" or, again,
can live the life of the bird, "leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and
twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;" or be a fish, breathing the
morning air in the misty sun-warm water. Close following this is another
memorable passage, that beginning "Night, and one single ridge of narrow
path;" which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and
broader music to be evolved long afterwards. For, as it seems to me, in
"Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell
Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting
Of thy soft breasts -----"
(where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence between
the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint of that
superb scene in "Pippa Passes," where, on a sinister night of July, a
night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, Ottima and Sebald
lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with "the thunder like a whole
sea overhead." Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan
picture of morning, over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with
the high boughs swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists, and
the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks,
whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion,
an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the
poet's penultimate volume, beginning--
"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight
Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree
Stir themselves from the stupor of the night,
And every strangled branch resumes its right
To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free
In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge,
While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge,
Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see,
Each grass-blade's glory-glitter," etc.
Who that has ever read "Pauline" will forget the masterful poetry
descriptive of the lover's wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines
beginning "Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old
and green"? There is indeed a new, an unmistakable voice here.
"And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters,
Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head,
And old grey stones lie making eddies there;
The wild mice cross them dry-shod"....
What lovelier image in modern poetry than that depictive of the
forest-pool in depths of savage woodlands, unvisited but by the shadows
of passing clouds,--
"the trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl."
How the passionate sexual emotion, always deep and true in Browning,
finds lovely utterance in the lines where Pauline's lover speaks of the
blood in her lips pulsing like a living thing, while her neck is as
"marble misted o'er with love-breath," and
"... her delicious eyes as clear as heaven,
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist,
And clouds float white in the sun like broods of swans."
In the quotations I have made, and in others that might be selected
(_e.g._, "Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and _lips which bleed like a
mountain berry_"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature
the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art he
brings forward his new and striking imagery. Browning, indeed, is the
poet of new symbols.
"Pauline" concludes with lines which must have been in the minds of many
on that sad day when the tidings from Venice sent a thrill of startled,
half-incredulous, bewildered pain throughout the English nations--
"Sun-treader, I believe in God, and truth,
And love; ...
... but chiefly when I die ...
All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me,
Know my last state is happy--free from doubt,
Or touch of fear."
Never again was Browning to write a poem with such conceptive crudeness,
never again to tread the byways of thought so falteringly or so
negligently: but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much
over-rapturing joy in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to
the ideal beauty which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest
height and brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The
Browning who might have been is here: henceforth the Browning we know
and love stands unique among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we
not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, to the young Dionysos upon
whose forehead was the light of another destiny than that which
descended upon him? The Icelanders say there is a land where all the
rainbows that have ever been, or are yet to be, forever drift to and
fro, evanishing and reappearing, like immortal flowers of vapour. In
that far country, it may be, are also the unfulfilled dreams, the
visions too perfect to be fashioned into song, of the young poets who
have gained the laurel.
We close the little book lovingly:
"And I had dimly shaped my first attempt,
And many a thought did I build up on thought,
As the wild bee hangs cell to cell--in vain;
For I must still go on: my mind rests not."