THE QUARTERLY REVIEW
VOLUME 118.— No. 235
July 1865.

BROWNING'S POEMS
BY
GERALD MASSEY.
___________

ART. III.—l. Dramatis Personae. London, 1864.
                   2. Robert Browning's Poems. 3 Vols. London, 1863.

T a time like the present, when the tendency is for minds to grow more and more alike, all thinking the same thoughts with the regularity of Wordsworth's forty cattle feeding as one; when for a single original poet, like Mr. Tennyson, we have a hundred tuneful echoes, and one popular novelist has his scores of imitators, we think that a writer of Mr. Browning's powers ought to be better understood than he is, and the discrepancy lessened betwixt what is known of him by the few, and what is thought of him by the many.  He has qualities such as should be cherished by the age we live in, for it needs them.  His poetry ought to be taken as a tonic.  He grinds no mere hand-organ or music-box of pretty tunes; he does not try to attract the multitude with the scarlet dazzle of poppies in his corn; he is not a poet of similes, who continually makes comparisons which are the mere play of fancy; he has nothing of the ordinary technique of poetry; he has felt himself driven, somewhat consciously, to the opposite course of using, as much as possible, the commonest forms of speech.  The language of his verse is generally as sturdy as is the prose of Swift or De Foe.  Certainly these homely words are to be found in singular places, saying strange things now and again,—many things not easily understood, and many which good taste must condemn,—but the poetry is full, nevertheless, of hearty English character.  In his process of thinking, he is the exact reverse of those writers who are for making the most of their subject in expression.  Mr. Browning can never concentrate sufficiently.

    The current opinion of his poetry, outside the circle of the few who have thoroughly studied the subject, and met with their reward, would be somewhat nearer the mark, supposing the poet had only written his poem called 'Sordello.'  That work has all the poet's faults, and all the defects of his poetry.  It has only a few of the merits.  Flung down, as it was, to make readers stumble on the threshold of their acquaintanceship with a new poet, the obstacle has remained in memory, and in the minds of many has influenced, if not determined, their estimate of all that he has since written. 'Sordello' has to answer for much of its author's lengthened unpopularity.  It revels in a mental motion swift as that of the Irishman who said with him it was a word and a blow, and the blow came first.  So with 'Sordello' we get blow after blow, and shock after shock, without knowing what these are for.  There is flash after flash of a lightning energy, and all is dark again, before we have caught the object that should have been illuminated.

    The author certainly was not one of the 'serene creators of immortal things' when he wrote 'Sordello.'  It has not the look of a finished poem.  It rather represents the confusion of the mental workshop, with the poem in the making and the poet hard at it; the whole poetic process instead of the pure result.  Even then it sometimes looks as though the poet were tearing a poem to pieces, and flinging the reader jewels by the lapful, rather than creating a work of art, and giving his gems a worthy setting.  The author may know his own meaning, but it is not conveyed to us.  Mr. Browning tells us that there is little worth study in 'Sordello,' except the incidents in the development of a soul.  But for our part we cannot see how 'Sordello' the poet is evolved from the incidents of the story.  The inner life of the poet, and the outer movements of the history, remain apart by hundreds of years; are never combined.  The poetic experience has much more of modern meaning than of ancient application.  Whatever the 'Sordello' of Italian story may have been, the poet of this work has the mark of a nineteenth century creation.  We hold the poem to have been an imperfect conception, flawed from the first.  The author has, in the latest edition endeavoured to complete his work; tried, as it were, to drop a keystone between the two sides of an imperfect arch, by means of headlines to the pages, in spite of which few readers will ever be able to cross the arch.  Mr. Browning will, after all, have to give up 'Sordello' to the rage of the irritated reader, as Nelson gave up his Jacket when pursued by the bear, and rest content with the knowledge that he is now safely past it by some twenty-five years.  He can afford to offer as a sacrifice that serves a purpose a poem which was written by an immature dramatist, who had strayed into narrative poetry by mistake, and erred in trying to obtain certain modern reflections from an uncertain story of the past.

    Next to 'Sordello,' which is an obstacle of the poet's own making, the greatest hindrance to a proper appreciation of Mr. Browning appears to us to lie in the critical treatment his poetry has hitherto received.  It has been dealt with just as though the writer had been 'altogether such an one' as the rest of the poets of this century; and half the objections that have been urged, half the faults that have been discovered, really resolve themselves into a complaint that he is not a subjective poet, but something quite different.  Now the mass of our nineteenth century poetry has been mainly subjective.  Very few are the characters in its whole range to which we could point as uncoloured by the personality of the writer.  We seem to have lost the secret of the old dramatists, who could make plays that were peopled with real human beings, and pour forth such a prodigality of what we may call physical life.  The objective poetry of simple description, broad handling, and portraiture at first sight, seems to have passed away with Scott.   Indeed, it almost looks as though in our time the poetic mind was divided against itself.  Instead of great poets, we have poets and novelists, the latter employing themselves upon the rich range of human character, while the former shut themselves up more and more in the special domain of their own personal experience.  Mr. Browning came at a time when there was every likelihood that the excessive subjectiveness of our modern poetry would lead to decay.  He supplies a counter irritant.  He 'blows through bronze' oftener than through silver, a music calculated to awake God Mars rather than 'serenade a slumbering princess;' a 'medicated music,' as it was rightly called by Elizabeth Barrett.

    Mr. Browning is not one of those who can look upon men as trees walking, and see all things through a misty glamour or a 'kind of glory,' which is really a suffusion of self; not one of the cloud-worshippers who, as Aristaphanes says, 'speak ingeniously concerning smoke,' and who, in their inability to dramatise human nature, are for ever endeavouring to humanise external nature, and always paint it according to their special moods of mind.  He belongs to a robuster race of thinkers.  His genius being dramatic, he has to make his way to the heart of a character, conceal himself there, and then, looking abroad through the eyes of the man or woman, reveal their nature in their own speech.  He is dramatic down to his smallest lyrics.  He is not present in person to help us in making out his meaning.  He cannot show us all he has to reveal, from the describer's own personal point of view.  We must be able to reach many a point of view, according to the character of the speaker.  Let us quote an example of his way of working.  Here is a perfect little poem, entitled, 'My Last Duchess;' the scene is 'Ferrara,' and the Duke is the speaker.

    A slight examination will serve to show with what consummate art a world of character is portrayed in that small poem.  The person of the speaker stands firmly full-drawn, as one of the portraits by Titian, with their live eyes, and long beards, and black velvet dresses.  The proud bearing, together with the love of a proud bearing, the indifference to shedding blood which had not the true-blue drop in it, the gentlemanly way in which that 'matter of the murder' is delicately implied, and the subject dismissed, as with a graceful wave of the hand, for another passing glance at the bronze statue—the feeling for art which sets the portrait above the wife, the painter's name over both—the slight touch or two at which the dead face comes and smiles as in life—all is done with the easy stroke of a master, and the verse, too, is exquisitely modulated for its purpose, never pausing because it has to rhyme its lines.  From this quotation we may see how Mr. Browning's poems have to be judged.  They were not put together by parts.  Hence they are not to be enjoyed piecemeal.  We cannot point out that this is valuable for some deep thought or just reflection, and another for a magnificent image.  Each poetic characteristic is merged in the human character which we find so frequently unfolded with great fulness in a few lines.

    These poems of Mr. Browning, which are dramatic in principle and lyrical in expression, are not always easy to master.  The poem once presented, we get no help from the poet. He is only a dumb showman.   We have to work our way back from where the poet left off, and get to the centre of the web, whence strike out all the rays of detail.  The complaint often made is that readers do not at once catch the idea, which is the root of vitality to the poem.  Now the question is, not whether obscurity is a fault or not—we think it is a great fault, and we should have thought Mr. Browning a much greater poet if he had been free from it; but whether it is too much to ask one or two readings of a few stanzas in order that something worth getting at may be reached. Is it not well known that no true work of art with any depth in it can be fathomed at first sight? that, as Bacon says, there is an element of strangeness in all the highest beauty?  The question is, Is there something worth getting at in such poems?  And we have to answer emphatically in the affirmative.  There may be difficulties to unlock; but it is worth while to try to unlock them, for the sake of the hidden treasure which they keep concealed.  When we have conquered, we are wealthier by a substantial gain.  The result is not like a pleasant ripple of emotion that passes away, or a mere play of feeling, as with the subjective poem.  We are the richer by some new and original picture of life, of intricate character, of uncommon manners, which has been almost engraved upon the mind by the process of getting at it, and remains a possession for ever.

    Another complaint is that Mr. Browning is unmusical.  But in every case we must first grasp the character before we can judge of the fitness of the verse, or the quality of its music.  The music may not be our music, or Mr. Tennyson's music, or like anything we ever heard in verse: that is not the point.  The point is whether the music and movement of the verse receive their impetus and government in any sensible way from the character, so as to become its natural expression.  This we cannot determine until we know the character well enough to be able to read the poem off at an unchecked heat, such as may fuse all down into a music of a fit and efficient kind, that could not be excelled for its purpose; which can only be done upon acquaintance.  It is often a very grave and difficult character that has to be dealt with, and the smooth music and liquid lapse of vowelled sounds which serve to convey mellifluous emotion would be altogether inadequate to wrestle with the sterner strength.  The subjective lyric can wander at its own sweet will, and slip softly through sunshine and shadow with pleasant murmurs for the dreamer's ear; but the dramatic lyric has other work to do.

    We think it quite probable that Mr. Browning has a peculiar sense of music.  He is, we have heard, an educated musician, and a great lover of music. Indeed, we might learn this from his poems.  Now, it might be shown that some of the most melodious verse has been written by poets who could not read music, or rather who put all their feeling for music into their language, and the hidden quality has worked more sweetly, perhaps because it was more a music of the spirit than of the sense.  Whereas the poet who could read music has sometimes appeared harsh, crabbed, unequal, in the music of verse.  With Mr. Browning it would seem that his sense of music served to put into his verse a greater use of accent than flow of melody; conducing to a kind of staccato mental notation in words; and that much of the meaning in some poems was intended to be got at through this stress of the accent or dash of the notes.  The whole poem entitled the 'Laboratory' would illustrate our remark.  Here is one stanza:—

    The accent serves to italicise the meaning in these lines.  It helps to make the music bite into the subject—so to speak—in a most bitter way, corresponding to the feeling of the speaker.  Then the accent is often varied very suddenly, intricately, and is not followed easily by the lovers of jog-trot verse and common metre.  The first two lines of the galloping ballad, called 'How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,' will afford us a brief specimen—

with their sudden reversal of the accent in the second line.

    Following out this cue we think it will be found that the coarse, blunt, guttural sounds, and dogged stiffnecked movement of the 'Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister,' are characteristic; an essential and effective part of the character, they aid materially in embodying the imaginary speaker, as in the poem first quoted, the supple, fluent movement, the low-toned suavity and colloquial case give an insinuating grace of manner to the Italian Noble.  Still the question remains whether such harsh, abrupt sounds can be legitimately introduced into poetry.  We do not think them well suited to the English language.

    In his purely lyrical measures the poet appears at times to tread a rugged path with lame feet, and it is not easy for the mind of the reader to move to the measure.  The music does not meander.  It is much more like a cascade that comes hurrying from some far-off hill-top, leaping from crag to crag, and seems to split its force in twain because of the haste with which it dashes at all obstacles.  Of this, however, we cannot judge apart from the character of the speaker; we must distinguish before we are able to divide the merits from the defects.  Mr. Browning, in his dramatic poems with a lyrical utterance, undertakes to do more than any lyrical poet who ever lived.  He writes under conditions hardly ever attempted hitherto, and has given to the world many lyrics, dramatic in principle, and lyrical in expression, containing a great amount and variety of character.  So that whatever flashes of lyric energy his mind may be capable of kindling into, it is impossible for us to sum up his lyrical power as we might that of Moore and Burns, who are all the while singing their own sentiment or emotion, and have nothing else to do!  We cannot compare Mr. Browning's lyrics with those of any subjective poet; he has called them Dramatic Lyrics for the very purpose of distinguishing them from such.  Nor may we judge him as a lyrical poet by comparison with any subjective lyrist.  We must in both case appraise them on their own grounds; and if we applaud the subjective lyrist because the movement of his verse felicitously corresponds to the thought or emotion, then we must at least estimate the fitness or beauty of the movement in the Objective Lyric by its correspondence with the speaker's character, or the nature of the action.  If we were to judge the fine dramatic lyric entitled 'A Grammarian's Funeral,' as we should a lyric of emotion set to its own music, we should make little of it.  We might probably think the poet had gone to the extremest limit, out of the ordinary way, to discover the most uncommon and uninteresting measure.  But, let us read it with an understanding of what is meant.  It is the burial of a man of learning who had toiled up through the dark to meet the dawn; who was awake and working whilst the rest of the world were asleep, or in gross darkness.  He has done his work and shall have a symbolic burial!

So the bearers chant as they carry up the corpse of the master, 'famous, calm, and dead, borne on their shoulders;' and having reached the topmost height they sing—

    Now, to our feeling, the movement of this verse is most dramatic, and answers admirably to the character of the poem. It conveys a great sense of going up-hill, and the weight of the burden,—together with the exultation of the bearers, which gives them strength to mount; it toils upward step by step—long line and short—best-foot forward,—and altogether carries out the idea of a spirit that climbed in life, and a burial that shall afford the dead rest at the effort's end, with his resting-place in the pathway of the Morning.

    We must understand the principles of Mr. Browning's art, then, before we shall be on the way for interpreting his poems rightly.  A good deal of the difficulty in getting at them lies here in the beginning.  Next we must try to enter into the nature of his genius, and its peculiar predilections.  He has 'strange far-flights' of imagination.  He is fond of dwelling abroad, and of working widely apart from the life and circumstances of our time.  He loves a gnarly character, or a knotty problem; a conflict that is mental rather than emotional; and he has given full scope to his choice at times in the strangest rhymes on record.  He is not yet entirely free from the mannerisms of 'Sordello.'  Nor does he allow sufficiently for the difficulties of his own conditions, and for those of the reader in following him.  Here, we think, is a grave fault in art.  But, what strikes us as one of the greatest drawbacks of all, is this: that, whereas the subject selected, the character portrayed, is often of the remotest from the common apprehension, it is treated in a manner totally new to objective poetry.  The objective poets of the past dealt with their subjects in a simpler way, and more in the mass.  A few broad touches sufficed for their portraits; but Mr. Browning will carry out the utmost fidelity of detail—painting in all the minutiæ of a pre-Raphaelite foreground—whilst representing some unfamiliar character, unknown scene, or rare circumstance.  Thus the matter may be recondite, the manner novel, and all the conditions startling; the result is sure to be somewhat bewildering—especially at first sight.

    We shall meet with the same closeness of observation and directness of description in the pictures of external nature.  There is a lunar rainbow in the poem of 'Christmas Eve,' which any one who ever witnessed the phenomenon could swear to as drawn by a man who had seen what he painted, and who painted what he saw.  Suddenly

    Of course a subjective poet might not have painted in this piercing, keen-eyed way.  He might have given us effects that should have been produced according to our preconceived notions.  He might have brooded over the sight until it passed into memory with a sense of rest.  But Mr. Browning, in his imaginary person, saw a startling thing, and he has reproduced it so as to create the precise effects in the reader's mind that were felt by the startled seer, and not the conventional effects which some people look for.  He is describing of the instant—the object itself; and not a dream of it.  The truth is that many persons, when they meet with a novel picture—something fresh from nature, in poetry or painting—do not judge of its truthfulness by a knowledge of, or reference to nature itself.  They test it by what they know of previous pictures in poetry and painting.  If it be unlike these; they are in haste to condemn it. If like what they have been accustomed to, then it must be natural.  Now, Mr. Browning's work is the last to be judged in such a way as that.  He does not appeal to the second-hand knowledge of nature, but often to the very rarest intimacy and clearest vision.  Again, there is a great deal of haze in current criticism with regard to poetry, which was first breathed from the mind of Coleridge.  Much of his criticism was made to match the poetry of Wordsworth, in his exposition and defence of the same.  But the view which might be very just when applied to Wordsworth, would do great injustice if forced on Mr. Browning and his readers.  In the one case it might shed a clear light, and in the other only create a luminous mist.  Coleridge would seem to maintain that it is the true sign of greatness in poetry, indeed that it is a part of the poet's work, to paint creation with an atmosphere and tone out of his own mind; that in rendering objects he should seek for the 'sense of something interfused,' and add it to what we see.  Mr. Browning would say, 'Let us have things first, their associations afterwards. Let us reach the ideal through the real.'

    Mr. Browning is, as we have already said, essentially a dramatic poet.  So long as he speaks through some clearly conceived character we recognise the master's presence.  When he speaks in person, which he seldom does, he never quite reaches us or we him.  He has shown himself a skilful delineator of those conflicts in which good and evil strive and wrestle for the victory, and noble spirits are caught up in the tragic toils which death alone can loosen.  He has created characters intensely human, real enough to stir the profoundest feelings, and exhibited them to us bound by the nearest and dearest ties in that web of a bitter fate which is the dark delight of tragedy, which loves to show us how they might be saved, even with a word, and we cannot save them.  The theatre would probably have unfolded more of the theatrical part of his genius; he would have grown more in a direction, toward the people, and cultivated such qualities as stir the national feeling, instead of giving so great a range to those personal predilections of his which cling to what is peculiar and problematic.  We should have seen less of the philosophic thinker, and felt more of the emotional energy of the catholic poet.  Likewise he would have derived help from the actor, in giving a tangible embodiment to his creations, and conveying to thousands of minds some personification of those shapes of grandeur or of race which are now shut up in the pages of a book.  But we imagine that the theatre in our day is about the last place Mr. Browning would care to be found in; and ever since he wrote his plays the theatre and the poet have been pulling more widely apart.  The qualities that now-a-days win theatrical success are precisely those which Mr. Browning has endeavoured to strain his poetry quite clear of.

    Howsoever unfitted for our stage his dramas may be, many of the characters in his plays will take their place, and become abiding presences on the stage of the reader's mind. There is 'Pippa,' the Italian girl, a sunny little godsend, direct from heaven, unconsciously touching the edge of other lives with a beam that flashes through her own, and showing to the uplifted eye that 'God is in His Heaven:' 'Luria,' the Moor, who can so magnanimously forgive a great wrong: the 'Duchess Colombe,' who, like 'Pippa,' is one of everybody's favourites: Poor 'Mildred,' with that

superb, haughty 'Ottima,' 'magnificent in sin:' 'Jules and Phene,'—and a long line of characters that start into memory to show us how much we are indebted to the poet, how greatly his art has enriched us.

    If any one thinks Mr. Browning cannot enter into a woman's, heart or paint the feminine character, let him especially study the sayings and doings of the 'Duchess Colombe,' the latter part of the 'Plot on the Scutcheon,' and feel its ineffable pathos—the subtle force, as of sun and rain on plants, which 'Polyxena' brings to bear on King Charles, making the character grow visibly.  The two widely-different interpreters of the passion of love, who are at cross purposes in the 'Balcony Scene.'  There is not one of these plays but contains fine characters and a great wealth of dramatic qualities: whilst one alone, 'King Victor and King Charles,' would furnish proof that the author possesses the secret of unfolding the character whilst the action flows on continuously.  We hardly know pathos more piercing than that of the 'Blot on the Scutcheon,' pathos more grand than that of 'Luria,' or pathos more passionate than in the 'Return of the Druses.'  Although it is almost as vain as trying to take a dew-drop in hand, we extract a specimen of the latter.  In the closing scene 'Anael' has fallen dead, and her brother pleads with 'Djabal,' having a perfect belief in his supernatural powers to restore her life.

The conclusion of this tragedy is splendid as some fierce sunset after storm.  The mustering of the dramatic forces, and the mustering of the 'Druses,' who are 'bound for the land where their redemption dawns'—the words of the dying leader who, with his last breath of life, leads them on the first few steps of the way, and promises that he shall be with them, his spirit will await them 'above the cedars,' see them return 're-peopling the old solitudes;' the complexities of life made clear in death.  It is all exceedingly fine.

    Mr. Browning has none of the humours of farce which the Elizabethans supplied so plentifully, as sops to Cerberus, and which seem to have been looked for in dramas ever since. But if he causes no horse-laughter he has a contemplative humour of a rare kind. We should say that it is a strong sense of the grotesque which caused him to take in hand several of his singular subjects. See the curious poem entitled 'Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,' wherein the speaker describes the vengeance he wreaked on a dry pedantic book which he had carried into the garden to amuse himself with, and, seeing that Nature had nothing to do with the inside, he left it to see what she would do with the outside of the book.

    Also in 'A Soul's Tragedy,' there is a comic creation which is very droll.  There has been a local revolution at Faenza, as large as the little place could get up, and the Provost has been killed.  All is commotion when the Pontifical Legate comes trotting quietly into the town, a portly personage on muleback, humming a 'Cur fremuere gentes.'  'Ah,' he says to the populace, 'one Messer Chiappino is your leader.  I have known three-and-twenty leaders of revolt!' and he laughs gently to himself.  The way in which he helps demagogues to 'carry out their own principles,' judges 'people by what they might be, not are, nor will be,' shows the leader how not to change his principles but re-adapt them more adroitly, turning him inside out softly as he might a glove on his hand, is delightfully humorous. 'And naturally;' says the changing leader, 'time must wear off such asperities (betwixt the opposite parties), the bitterest adversaries get to discover certain points of similarity between each other, common sympathies, do they not?'  'Ay,' replies this humorist, full of smiling satire and wise insight, 'had the young David but sat first to dine on his cheeses with the Philistine, he had soon discovered an abundance of such common sympathies.  But, for the sake of one broad antipathy that had existed from the beginning, David slung the stone, cut off the giant's head, made a spoil of it, and after ate his cheeses alone.'  Having quietly upset the revolution, sent the leader to the right-about, put the keys of the Provost's palace in his own pocket, he dismisses the populace to profitable meditations at home with this finishing stroke to his homily:—

'You do right to believe you must get better as you get older.  All men do so, they are worst in childhood, improve in manhood, and get ready in old age for another world.  Youth, with its beauty and grace, would seem to be bestowed on us to make us partly endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves, without their aid, when they leave us.  The sweetest child we all smile on, for his pleasant want of the whole world to break up or such in his mouth,—seeing no other good in it,—would be rudely handled by that world's inhabitants, if he retained those angelic infantine desires when he has grown six feet high, black and boarded: but little by little he sees fit to forego claim after claim on the world, puts up with a less and less share of its good as his proper portion,—and when the octogenarian asks barely a sup of gruel and a fire of dry sticks and thanks you for his full allowance and right in the common good of life,—hoping nobody may murder him,—he who began by asking and expecting the whole of us to bow down in worship to him,—why, I say he is advanced far onward, very far, nearly out of sight, like our friend Chiappino yonder.  Good-by to you!  I have known four-and-twenty leaders of Revolt.'

    Turning from the plays to the poems we find that a large number of these are to be judged as the work of a dramatic poet who has no stage.  They are single-character pieces.  The poet has no aid from the actor, and we get no help in the making out from the usual stage directions to the lookers-on, and from the shows and circumstances of action.  The poet has to dispense with the old stage machinery.  Also he has to rely more on the quick apprehension of his readers.  He requires that all their mental powers be awake.  To follow him fully in all his ramifications of remote character the reader should be able to meet him halfway at the outset.  If it be a loss, however, for this writer to be limited to dramatic fragments which have to be presented under these more difficult conditions, he has his compensations.  He is able to make points in various directions where he could not have shaped out complete plays.  He can thus portray much that is of intense interest to us in our modern days.  There are dramas of mental conflict, such as could not be shown on the stage in action; tragedies and farces that occur in the intellectual sphere, as well as in the world of feeling, to be witnessed by God and his angels rather than by men.  Mr. Browning has taken advantage of this liberty.  He has thus given us such a daring delineation of the struggles of some solitary soul, as we find in Paracelsus; thrown off a most wonderful series of sketches and portraits of character in attitude; produced things sometimes totally unlike anything called 'poems' hitherto, but remarkable works of art nevertheless.  We allude now more particularly to 'Mr. Sludge, the Medium,' and 'Bishop Blougram's Apology.'  This dramatic latitude has permitted Mr. Browning to indulge his taste for the untrodden paths, his tendency to prefer such forms of character and such mental conflicts as afford the more startling contrast, the swifter movement of thought, the far-off foreign colour, showing everywhere the subtlest intuition in following nature through some of her most secret windings.  Also it has allowed him free scope amongst his favourite subjects—painting and music.  He has portrayed the inner man and outer relationships of characters, which in the hands of biography have so often lacked interest because the life was uneventful.  For example, if we turn to that reproduction of the painter 'Lippo Lippi,' we shall see how he has set before us, with his surroundings, the very man of a sensuous southern soul, compelled to wear a shaven crown and a monk's serge garb,—the merry eye twinkling from under the cowl,—the painter who so conscientiously felt the 'value and significance of flesh,' doomed by circumstances, and the monks, to be preached to in this style:—

    The humour of the contrast is capital, and the painter, his art, the art of his time, the local scenery, are all rendered with the most faithful exactness.  It has been pointed out with what truth Mr. Browning writes of the Middle Ages being, as he is, always 'vital, right and profound.'  Mr. Ruskin remarks that there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper that he has not struck upon.  He says, 'I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines (the Bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed's Church), of the Renaissance spirit, its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, luxury, and of good Latin.'  The Bishop is on his death-bed, and he has come to the conclusion that Solomon was right after all, and all is vanity.  So drawing his sons—if they be his sons, for he is not sure that their mother may not have played him false—round his bed; he gives directions for his sumptuous tomb which they are to erect in the church.  It must be rich and costly, and prominent enough for Gandolf, his old dead enemy, who probably had his wife's heart, to

'See and burst for envy;'

and of

    His epitaph must be 'choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word'—
 

    Then he will be able to rest in peace beneath his tabernacle amongst the tall pillars, just in sight of the 'very dome where the angels live and a sunbeam is sure to lurk;' there he can

    The chief cause of the complaint which we hear, that Mr, Browning's poetry is wanting in common human warmth and personal nearness, undoubtedly arises from his genius being more intellectual than emotional; and the intellect, unless drawn down, as it were, by the heart, and made to brood in a domestic way, is apt to dwell aloof, and remain remote.  The higher the intellectual range, the larger and more genial the humanity necessary to bring the poet home to the mass of men.  Impersonal as Shakspeare is, we do not feel that to be the result of his remoteness from us.  He is hidden by his nearness, rather than lost in the distance.  We lose him through interfusion, not in isolation.  He has passed into invisibility.  We feel his presence through his sympathy with his subject.  He floats the profoundest thoughts on a warm tide of human feeling.  He is able to waft us within reach of lofty things—of all that may be uncommon with us, in virtue of his wealth of those feelings which we share in common with him.  Lack of this human quality, which, like personal love, melts all barriers, fuses down all difficulties, will for long, if not for ever, keep the poetry of Mr. Browning an arm's-length farther from the popular heart.  In despite of this constitutional defect, however, he has shown a power quite capable of moving the common human heart in portraying various characters and conflicts of emotion.  In addition to such proofs as may be adduced from the dramas, there are certain little poems, special favourites of ours, in which the intellect is more than usually domesticated, and the poetry breathes the most fragrant warmth of affection in the shyest of ways.  One of these is a happy reverie by the fireside, in which the husband looks back with brimming heart and eyes to the hour—the very moment—when, 'at a touch of the woodland time,' two lives—subtly as two drops of dew—closed together in one.

    Another, entitled 'Any Wife to any Husband,' is a poem full of quiet beauty and a most searching pathos.  The subject is a dying woman, or, at least, one who is gradually fading away—a true wife, who offers up the last of her life in an incense of love for the husband.  He loves her, too; loves her with all manly fervour; would, if she lived, love her to the end.  This knowledge is sweet to her; but then, measuring his love by her own great feeling, dilated to its present height through nearness to death, 'this is the bitterness' to know that, with all his truth and love, he will marry again when she is gone.  He thinks such a thing impossible, but she knows it will be.  When they loose hands, and she arises to go, he will sink; he will grope; he will take another hand in his, and she must see from where she sits watching—

See him—

She thinks no blame. It must all come to the same thing in the end.  Back to her he must come:—

    How much the woman's wedded love transcends the man's, in ranges out of sight!  The poem contains a true statement of one of those facts of life that make so much of the tragedy of the human lot, the pathos of which is so intensely human.

    Here, again, is a touching little 'interior' from married life.  There has been a quarrel, and, in the tearful calm that follows, the wife steals closer into her husband's bosom with a 'woman's last word;' and, if women must have the proverbial last word, they will seldom find one more apposite or beautiful under the circumstances.  The poem should be read slowly, the music being helped out with thoughtful pauses, that are filled up with meaning:—

    At the risk of quoting lines amongst the best known of Mr. Browning's poetry, we make room for these affectionate 'Home-Thoughts; ' being, as we are, only too glad to catch the writer on English ground, where we should like to meet with him oftener:—

Again, a picture of life from the modern Italian point of view—

    Notwithstanding that spirit of impatience to be felt in many of Mr. Browning's pages, that tendency which we have admitted, to dart his thoughts at us after the manner of these lines:—

or, to spring a mine of thought in a moment, thus:—

yet he has given us poems in which the struggling forces have all blended in a brooding calm.  These are generally in blank verse, which does not impose the difficulties of a more lyrical movement.  One piece of this quiet kind is a surpassingly beautiful picture of 'Andrea del Sarto ' and his wife; a twilight scene, full of the sweetest silvery greys.  It is twilight, too, in more senses than one.  Twilight in the poor painter's soul, whose love-longings bring him no rest; light up no evening star large and luminous against the coming night.  The poem is sweet to sadness; the pathos of the painter's pleadings with the bold bad woman whom he loved, and who dragged down his lifted arm, broke his loving heart, is very touching.  The evening hush, the twilight tone, the slow musical speech, serve solemnly to lay bare the weary soul and wasted life, and make clear the wreck lying below the surface, that is trying so piteously to smile, with a cheery effort to love and labour on.

    There is a stately calm in the poem called the 'Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.' Karshish is on his travels, picking up the crumbs of learning, and he makes a report of his discoveries in a letter to his master, Abib, the 'all-sagacious' in medical art.  But the real object of emptying his wallet is not to show the curious spider that 'weaves no web,' the 'blue-flowering borage,' the Aleppo sort, more nitrous than theirs at home, the three 'samples of true snake-stone,' or any other little rarities he may have found.  The secret truth is, he has met with one 'Lazarus, a Jew,' and he wishes to report his case to the master; only, being ashamed and bewildered at the hold which the man's story has taken upon his mind, he approaches the subject in a stealthy way, and with windings truly oriental.  Of course the tale is despicable, still it were best to keep nothing back in writing to the learned leech.  He means only to allude to it in an offhand manner; just skirt the edge of the subject; but it fascinates him, and draws him into a whirling vortex of wild strange thoughts which he cannot resist.

    Such cases are diurnal, the master may reply.  Not so 'this figment.'  For here is a man of healthy habit, much beyond the ordinary; he is sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age.

    He points out the effect of this trance on the mind of Lazarus, and the way in which he takes up his after-life.  This grown man now looks on the world with the eyes of a child.  He is witless of the size, and sum, and value of things.  Wonder and doubt come into play at the wrong time, 'preposterously at cross-purposes.'

    He works hard at his daily trade, all the humbler for the exaltation that made him the proud possessor of such a secret.

    Some of his friends led Lazarus into the physician's presence obedient as a sheep.  He did not listen except when spoken to; he folded his hands and let them talk, watching the flies that buzzed.  And yet no fool, says Karshish, nor apathetic by nature.

    Of course, says Karshish, this is the raving of stark madness, and yet here is a case before which science is dumb and made ashamed.  What is the fact in the presence of which he stands, and is touched with awe?

    The spell which this new fact, in the physician's experience, exercises on his imagination, is most subtly and exquisitely portrayed.  And throughout, the character, so faithfully conceived, completely informs the movement of the verse with its own spirit.  We have no hurry, no gasps of utterance, but a work perfect in manner as in matter, grave and staid, the pauses answering to the pondering, and altogether fine in expression as it is weighty in thought.  This poem leads us up into the highest range of Mr. Browning's poetic powers.  He has the true reverence for the Creator of all that beauty on which poetry is fed—the clearest of all the seeing faculties—and recognises the Master of the feast.  His poetry, however, is not religious in a vague general way, nor dry through being doctrinal: it is, as in 'Christmas Eve' and ' Easter Day,' passionately alive with the most intense yearning for a personal relationship.  In many places we shall find the influence of the unseen treated as a solemn verity—the dark disc of this life's orb edged with a touch of light from the next. But in the last-mentioned poem the mystery of the Incarnation is pondered and proclaimed in the most powerful way.  In a 'Death in the Desert,' there is a close grapple of thought with the Subject of Subjects.  No one can understand Mr. Browning's poetry without having fully examined these two poems.  The casual reader may possibly set the 'Christmas Eve' down hastily as a strange mixture of grave matter and gay manner; a religious subject loosely treated with quips and cranks of irreverent rhyme.  But this would be a mistake.  The author has a sardonic way of conveying certain hints of the truth when no other way would be so effective.  In this poem we have a contrast such as furnished a hint of the true grotesque in art.  But it is the work of a man whose faith can afford the freaks of fancy.

    The 'Death in the Desert' is one of Mr. Browning's finest poems; a very lofty and solemn strain of religious thought.  It is evident that he takes great interest in the stir of our time, the obstinate questionings of doubt, which will yet make the flame of faith burn up toward heaven more direct and clear than ever. And he says his say emphatically on the side of belief.  It is a poem for the profoundest thinkers, and yet a dramatic creation of exceeding beauty.  It embodies the death of the beloved Apostle St. John in a cave of the desert, where he has been hidden from the persecution.  This chamber in the rock, a nestling-place of coolness and shadow, outside of which is the blinding white sand, the 'burning blue,' and the desert stillness, the waking up from his last trance to utter his last warning words of exhortation to the watchers listening round, are all rendered with impressive power.  The dying man rises and dilates, 'as on a wind of prophecy,' whilst in solemn vision his spirit ranges forward into the far-off time, when in many lands men will be saying, 'Did John live at all? and did he say he saw the veritable Christ?'  And, as he grows more and more inspired, and the energy of his spirit appears to rend itself almost free from the earthy conditions, the rigid strength of thought, the inexorable logic, the unerring force of will, have all the increased might that we sometimes see in the dying.  We have no space left to touch the argument, but we should greatly regret if the poem failed to be made known far and wide.  After M. Renan's 'Life of Jesus,' and the prelections of the Strasbourg school of theological thought, it should be welcome as it is worthy.

    In the course of our explorations and explanations we have shown something of the poet's range, which is the result of peculiarity as well as of power.  He carries along each line of the radius almost the same thoroughness of conception and surprising novelty of treatment.  We have also shown that the obscurity is not always poetic incompleteness.  It sometimes arises from the dramatic conditions.  In support of this statement we may remind readers how much greater was the demand on their patience when Mr. Tennyson cast his poem 'Maud' in a dramatic mould, than with his previous poems.  At other times it comes from the murky atmosphere in which the poet has had to take some of his portraits in mental photography; the mystery of the innermost life; the action of the invisible, which can only be apprehended dimly through the veil.  His genius is flexible as it has been fertile.  If he could have brought it to bear in a more ordinary way by illuminating the book of life with traits of our common human character, making the popular appeals to our home affections,—if he could have revealed to the many those rich colours in the common light of day, which have delighted the few in many a dark nook of nature and desert-place of the past, he would have been hailed long since as a true poet.  His poetry is not to be dipped into or skimmed lightly with swallow-flights of attention.  Its pearls must be dived for.  It must be read, studied, and dwelt with for a while.  The difficulties which arise from novelty must be encountered; the poetry must be thought over before its concentrated force is unfolded and its subtler qualities can be fully felt.  Coming fresh from a great deal of our nineteenth-century poetry to that of Mr. Browning, we are in a new world altogether, and one of the first things we are apt to do is to regret the charms of the old.  But the new land is well worth exploring; it possesses treasures that will repay us richly.  The strangeness and its startling effects will gradually wear away, and there will be a growth of permanent beauty.  With all its peculiarities, and all its faults, the poetry of Mr. Browning is thoroughly sanative, masculine, bracing in its, influence.  It breathes into modern verse a breath of new life and more vigorous health, with its aroma of a newly-turned and virgin soil.

    There are plenty of poems for beginners. Simple lyrics like the 'Cavalier Tunes,' brave ballads, and tender poems like 'Evelyn Hope,' lead up to such fine romances as 'Count Gismond' and the 'Pied Piper;' these again conduct the reader to a gallery of portraits in 'Men and Women,' painted with the strength of Velasquez, the glow of Giorgione, or the tenderness of Correggio.  No one is forced to plunge into the mysteries of 'Sordello' and get entangled there.  Curiously enough, the author in arranging his latest edition has printed this poem last; the reader, if so minded, can reject it altogether.  The mass of poems is crowned, as we have stated, with noble religious poetry, most suggestive and profound in thought, most Christian in feeling.

    We conclude with the latter part of the 'Pied Piper of Hamelin.'  The Piper had agreed with the mayor and magistrates, for a thousand guilders, to clear the town of rats, had accordingly by his music enticed all the rats into the Weser, where they were drowned, and had been contemptuously denied his stipulated reward; whereupon he proceeds to take revenge:

GERALD MASSEY.