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DEDICATED

(THO' WITHOUT HIS LEAVE ASKT)

ΤΟ

ROBERT BROWNING

"A MAN"

TRUE AS STEEL,

A POET

SEARCHER OF MEN'S MINDS AND SOULS.

F. J. F.

24

"IN A GONDOLA." THOUGHT AND FORM IN POETRY.

Note for no. 16, "In a Gondola," p. 45. The origin of this poem is shown by a note sent me by Mr. Shepherd :-DICKENS writes from Albaro (1844):-"In a certain picture called 'The Serenade,' for which Browning wrote that verse in Lincoln's-inn-fields, you, O Mac, painted a sky." To which his biographer subjoins the verse in a note

"I send my heart up to thee, all my heart,

In this my singing!

For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;
The very night is clinging

Closer to Venice' streets, to leave one space

Above me, whence thy face

May light my joyous heart to thee, its dwelling-place.”—

with the remark:- "Written to express Maclise's subject in the Academy Catalogue."-Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, Book Fourth, § iv. Edn. 1876, vol. ii. p. 365.

I have searched the Royal Academy Catalogues from 1835 to 1847 in vain, either for the title of the picture or the verses.'-R. H. S.

The picture of which Maclise painted the whole, not the sky only—is not mentiond in O'Driscoll's Memoir of Daniel Maclise, R.A., 1871, and cannot have been in the Academy. Browning wrote the stanza impromptu on Forster's report of Maclise's subject, and without seeing the picture. When he saw it, he thought it deservd fuller treatment, and accordingly added the rest of "In a Gondola" to his impromptu stanza.

The reader of Browning should always bear in mind these words of Ruskin, in his Elements of English Prosody, 1880, p. 30:

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"The strength of poetry is in its thought, not in its form; and with great lyrists, their music is always secondary, and their substance of saying, primary,much so, that they will even daringly and wilfully leave a syllable or two rough, or even mean, and avoid a perfect rhythm, or sweetness, rather than let the reader's mind be drawn away to lean too definitely on sound. p. 31: On the other hand, the lower order of singers cast themselves primarily into their song, and are swept away with it, (thinking themselves often finer folks for so losing their legs in the stream,) and are in the end little concerned though there be an extremely minute dash and infusion of meaning in the jingle, so only that the words come tuneably. p. 32: While, however, the entire family of poets may thus be divided into higher and lower orders, the higher always subordinating their song to their saying, and the lower their saying to their song,-it is throughout to be kept in mind that the primal essence of a poet is in his being a singer, and not merely a man of feeling, judgment, or imagination."

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Browning has stated in the Epilogue to Pacchiarotto, 1. 153-4, 1. 160, the subjects he has chosen: "Man's thoughts and loves and hates; "Earth is my vineyard;' "Mine be Man's thoughts, loves, hates." He has declared in his Forewords to the Sordello of 1863, that little else than the development of souls is worth study. He believs strongly in God and the Immortality of the Soul. He asks every one, in relation to every pursuit, "How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?" (Rabbi ben Ezra, st. viii, 1. 48). Let those whose ends are the same as his, however different their belief, give the earnest study it dezerves, to his "stark strength, Meat for a man" (Epil. to Pacch., st. ii.).

N.B. All Browning's books came out and are in post 8vo, except Pauline 1833, in demy 8vo, Bells and Pomegranates in royal 8vo, double-columns, and Dramatis Persona, 1864, and the Shelley Essay, in an 8vo between post and demy (?).

FOREWORDS.

No one can well set to work at a man's writings till a list of them is before him, and he knows the order of their publishing. I have therefore got together somewhat hastily the following list of Browning's Works for the use of my Fellow-Members of the Browning Society.

Had I been able to stay longer in Town, the lists would have containd more details, and would have been followd by a note of the chief criticisms on Browning, with short extracts from them. Some of these I had made, but our Committee thought they should be completed-so far as my time will allow-before any were issued. The Browningiana are therefore kept back for a while.1 For additions to the very imperfect list of them in the Appendix I shall be grateful.

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In the following pages An Alphabetical List of Browning's Works' comes first, because, till Mr. George Smith will advise a Collected Edition of Browning's Works, we sha'n't get one, but we shall want a handy reference to the volume in which any Poem we need to look-up appeard. The number before the name of each poem shows whereabouts in Browning's poetic life it was written. His first Poem, Pauline, was publisht in 1833 before he was 21. His First-Period work ended (I suppose) in 1845 with the last of the Bells and Pomegranates (Nos. 1 to 52). His Second Period may include the works of his married life, 1846-1861, that is, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, 1850; the Shelley Essay, 1851-2; Men and Women, 1855, &c. (Nos. 53 to 106). Looking at the depth and power of some of the Dramatis Personæ, 1864, I propoze to put that, with Hervé Riel,3 and his greatest work, The Ring and the Book, 1868-9 (Nos. 107—127), into his Third Period.

1 The 'while' may be a long one, as I see now (Aug. 27) that the money wanted for these old criticisms may perhaps be better spent in printing new ones from our Members' point of view.

2 In the Collections of the Poems and the Selections from them, the numbers call attention to the difference of date between poems put next to one another. Sce on p. 63 in Romances, (99), (4), (97)

(73), (3), (70).

3 Hervé Riel was written in 1867, tho not publisht till 1871. See p. 65, b.

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1. me to do the task He set to each

Woo shaped us to his ends and not our own:

The million rose to learn, and One to teach
What none yet ever knew or can be know.”

No more difference than this, from David's pregnant conclusion so long ago!

Meantime, as I call Shelley a moral man, because he was trie. simple-hearted, and brave, and because what he acted corresponded to what he knew, so I call him a man of religious mind, because every audacious negative cast up by him against the Divine, was interpenetrated with a mood of reverence and adoration,—and because I find him everywhere taking for granted some of the capital dogmas of Christianity, while most vehemently denying their historical basement. There is such a thing as an efficacious knowledge of and belief in the politics of Junius, or the poetry of Rowley, though a man should at the same time dispute the title of Chatterton to the one, and consider the author of the other, as Byron wittily did, "really, truly, nobody at all."1 There is even such a thing, we come to learn wonderingly in these very letters, as a profound sensibility and adaptitude for art, while the science of the percipient is so little advanced as to admit of his stronger admiration for Guido (and Carlo Dolce!) than for Michael Angelo. A Divine Being has Himself said, that "a word against the Son of man shall be forgiven

Or, to take our illustrations from the writings of Shelley himself, there is such a thing as admirably appreciating a work by Andrea Verocchio,― and fancifully characterising the Pisan Torre Guelfa by the Ponte a Mare, black against the sunsets,and consummately painting the islet of San Clemente with Its penitentiary for rebellious priests, to the west between Venice and the Lido— while you believe the first to be a fragment of an antique sarcophagus.-the Bond, Ugolino's Tower of Famine (the vestiges of which should be sought for in the Pinson do' Cavalieri) - and the third (as I convinced myself last summer at Venice), Nan Norvolo with its madhouse-which, far from being "windowless," is full of windows as a barrack.

HIS HALLUCINATIONS IN WALES, AT NAPLES, ETC.

to a man," while "a word against the Spirit of God" (implying a general deliberate preference of perceived evil to perceived good) "shall not be forgiven to a man." Also, in religion, one earnest and unextorted assertion of belief should outweigh, as a matter of testimony, many assertions of unbelief. The fact that there is a gold-region is established by the finding of one lump, though you miss the vein never so often.

Shelley died before his youth ended. In taking the measure of him as a man, he must be considered on the whole and at his ultimate spiritual stature, and not be judged of at the immaturity and by the mistakes of ten years before: that, indeed, would be to judge of the author of "Julian and Maddalo" by "Zastrozzi." Let the whole truth be told of his worst mistake. I believe, for my own part, that if anything could now shame or grieve Shelley, it would be an attempt to vindicate him at the expense of another.

In forming a judgment, I would, however, press on the reader the simple justice of considering tenderly his constitution of body as well as mind, and how unfavourable it was to the steady symmetries of conventional life; the body, in the torture of incurable disease, refusing to give repose to the bewildered soul, tos-ing in its hot fever of the fancy, and the laudanum-bottle making but a perilous and pitiful truce between these two. He was constantly subject to "that state of mind” (I quote his own note to "Hellas")" in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensation, through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and excess of passion animating the creations of the imagination :" in other words, he was liable to remarkable delusions and hallucinations. The nocturnal attack in Wales, for instance, was assuredly a delusion; and I venture to express my own conviction, derived from a little attention to the circumstances of either story, that the idea of the enamoured lady following him to Naples, and of the man in the cloak" who struck him at the Pisan post-office, were equally illusory, the mere projection, in fact, from himself, of the image of his own love and hate.

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"To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander

With short unsteady steps-to pause and ponder-
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
What busy thought and blind sensation mingle,—
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses

Till dim imagination just possesses

The half-created shadow ".

of unfelt caresses, and of unfelt blows as well: to such conditions was his genius subject. It was not at Rome only (where he heard a mystic. voice exclaiming, "Cenci, Cenci," in reference to the tragic theme. which occupied him at the time),-it was not at Rome only that be BROWNING, 1.

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