Shortly after the revival of learning in Europe. The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, "where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying." This poem is informed throughout with the poet's iterated doctrine in regard to earth life, to the relativity of that life. The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth, thought not of time. "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever." "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!" The poem "exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon's friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook" (Contemporary Rev.,' iv., 135). But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning's philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life, and became "soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst."2 The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable. There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side. AN EPISTLE CONTAINING THE STRANGE MEDICAL EXPERIENCE OF KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN. Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious 1 "Grammarian" mustn't be understood here in its restricted modern sense; it means rather one devoted to learning, or letters, in general. 2 "Every lust is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the more we drink the more we shall thirst."-TILLOTSON, quoted in 'Webster.' master, Abib, ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy." His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he passes the night. 66 The case of mania which so interests him, - far more than he is willing to admit, is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he'll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken unto death, why look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or suspension of his daily craft; while a word, gesture, or glance from that same child at play or laid asleep, will start him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like! The law of the life, it seems, to which he was temporarily admitted, has become to him the law of this earthly life; his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. He appears to be perfectly submissive to the heavenly will, and awaits patiently for death to restore his being to equilibrium. He is by no means apathetic, but loves both old and young, affects very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. This man, so restored to life, regards his restorer as, who but God himself, Creator and Sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died Here Karshish breaks off and asks pardon for writing of such trivial matters, when there are so important ones to treat of, and states that he noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage abounding, the Aleppo sort, very nitrous. the But he returns again to the subject, and tries to explain the pecu. liar interest, and awe, indeed, the man has inspired him with Perhaps the journey's end, and his weariness, he thinks, may have had something to do with it. He then relates the weird circumstances under which he met him, and concludes by saying that the repose he will have at Jerusalem shall make amends for the time his letter wastes, his master's and his own. Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell! But in spite of himself, his suppressed interest in the strange case must have full expression, and he gives way to all reserve and ejaculates in a postscript: “The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? And thou must love me who have died for thee!' See before, p. 41, some remarks on the psychological phase of the monologue. "The monologue is a signal example of 'emotional ratiocination.' There is a flash of ecstasy through the strangely cautious description of Karshish; every syllable is weighed and thoughtful, everywhere the lines swell into perfect feeling.". - ROBERT BUCHANAN. "As an example of our poet's dramatic power in getting right at the heart of a man, reading what is there written, and then looking through his eyes and revealing it all in the man's own speech, nothing can be more complete in its inner soundings and outer-keeping, than the epistle containing the 'Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,' who has been picking up the crumbs of learning on his travels in the Holy Land, and writes to Abib, the all-sagacious, at home. It is so solemnly real and so sagely fine."-- N. Brit. Rev., May, 1861. A MARTYR'S EPITAPH. A wonderfully effective expression, effective through its pathetic simplicity, of the peaceful spirit of a Christian, who has triumphed over persecution and death, and passed to his reward. SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER. The speaker in this monologue is a Spanish monk, whose jealousy toward a simple and unoffending brother has, in the seclusion of the cloister, developed into a festering malignity. If hate, he says, could kill a man, his hate would certainly kill Brother Laurence. He is watching this brother, from a window of the cloister, at work in the garden. He looks with contempt upon his honest toil; repeats mockingly to himself, his simple talk when at meals, about the weather and the crops; sneers at his neatness, and orderliness, and cleanliness; imputes to him his own libidinousness. He takes credit to himself in laying crosswise, in Jesu's praise, his knife and fork, after refection, and in illustrating the Trinity, and frustrating the Arian, by drinking his watered orange-pulp in three sips, while Laurence drains his at one gulp. Now he notices Laurence's tender care of the melons, of which it appears the good man has promised all the brethren a feast; 66 so nice!" He calls to him, from the window, “How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort can you spy?" Laurence, it must be understood, kindly answers him in the negative, and then he chuckles to himself, "Strange !- and I, too, at such trouble, keep 'em close-nipped on the sly!" He thinks of devising means of causing him to trip on a great text in Galatians, entailing "twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails"; or of slyly putting his "scrofulous French novel" in his way, which will make him "grovel hand and foot in Belial's gripe." In his malignity, he is ready to pledge his soul to Satan (leaving a flaw in the indenture), to see blasted that rose-acacia Laurence is so proud of. Here the vesper-bell interrupts his filthy and blasphemous eructations, and he turns up "Plena his eyes and folds his hands on his breast, mumbling gratiâ ave Virgo!" and right upon the prayer, his disgust breaks out, "Gr-r-r-you swine!" This monologue affords a signal illustration of the poet's skill in making a speaker, while directly revealing his own character, reflect very distinctly the character of another. This has been seen in My Last Duchess, given as an example of the constitution of this art-form, in the section of the Introduction on 'Browning's Obscurity.' "The 'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,' is a picture (ghastly in its evident truth) of superstition which has survived religion; of a heart which has abandoned the love of kindred and friends, only to lose itself in a wilderness of petty spite, terminating in an abyss of diabolical hatred. The ordinary providential helps to goodness have been rejected; the ill-provided adventurer has sought to scale the high snow-peaks of saintliness, — he has missed his footing, — and the black chasm which yawns beneath, has ingulfed him.”— E. J. H[ASELL], in St. Paul's Magazine, December, 1870. An able writer in the 'The Contemporary Review,' Vol. IV., p. 140, justly remarks: — "No living writer-and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him [Browning] · approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of man's religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation'; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in 'The Heretic's Tragedy.' More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative scepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dreaming mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to ... |