Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Browning
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Poetry; Year 10

Selected Poems
of

Robert & Elizabeth Barrett

Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(1806-1861)

1
Sonnet II
from Sonnets from the Portuguese

But only three in all God’s universe

Have heard this word thou has said,—Himself, beside

Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied

One of us … that was God, …and laid the curse

So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce

My sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died,

The deathweights, placed there, would have signified

Less absolute exclusion. Nay is worse

From God than from all others, O my friend!

Men could not part us with their worldly jars,

Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;

Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:

And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,

We should but vow the faster for the stars.

2
Sonnet XLIII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

3
Sonnet XLIV
from Sonnets from the Portuguese

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers

Plucked in the garden, all the summer through

And winter, and it seemed as if they grew

In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.

So, in the like name of that love of ours,

Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,

And which on warm and cold days I withdrew

From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers

Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,

And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,

Here’s ivy!—take them, as I used to do

Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.

Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,

And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.

4
The Best Thing in the World

What’s the best thing in the world?

June-rose, by May-dew impearled;

Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;

Truth, not cruel to a friend;

Pleasure, not in haste to end;

Beauty, not self-decked and curled

Till its pride is over-plain;

Love, when, so, you’re loved again.

What’s the best thing in the world?

—Something out of it, I think.

5
Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access

Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,

In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express

Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death—

Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe

Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:

If it could weep, it could arise and go

6
The Sleep

Of all the thoughts of God that are

Borne inward into souls afar,

Along the Psalmist’s music deep,

Now tell me if that any is

For gift or grace surpassing this—

“He giveth His beloved, sleep”?

What would we give to our beloved?

The hero’s heart to be unmoved,

The poet’s star-tun’d harp to sweep,

The patriot’s voice to teach and rouse,

The monarch’s crown to light the brows?—

He giveth His beloved, sleep.

What do we give to our beloved?

A little faith all undisproved,

A little dust to overweep,

And bitter memories to make

The whole earth blasted for our sake:

He giveth His beloved, sleep.

“Sleep soft, beloved!” we sometimes say

Who have no tune to charm away

Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep:

But never doleful dream again

Shall break the happy slumber when

He giveth His beloved, sleep.

O earth, so full of dreary noises!

O men, with wailing in your voices!

O delved gold, the wailers heap!

O strife, O curse, that o’er it fall!

God strikes a silence through you all,

And giveth His beloved, sleep.

His dews drop mutely on the hill,

His cloud above it saileth still,

Though on its slope men sow and reap:

More softly than the dew is shed,

Or cloud is floated overhead,

He giveth His beloved, sleep.

Ay, men may wonder while they scan

A living, thinking, feeling man

Confirm’d in such a rest to keep;

But angels say, and through the word

I think their happy smile is heard—

“He giveth His beloved, sleep.”

For me, my heart that erst did go

Most like a tired child at a show,

That sees through tears the mummers leap,

Would now its wearied vision close,

Would childlike on His love repose

Who giveth His beloved, sleep.

And friends, dear friends, when it shall be

That this low breath is gone from me,

And round my bier ye come to weep,

Let One, most loving of you all,

Say, “Not a tear must o’er her fall!

He giveth His beloved, sleep.”

Robert Browning

(1812-1889)

Robert Browning’s first Love letter to Elizabeth:

January 10th, 1845
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me—for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration—perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter!—but nothing comes of it all—so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew … oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat and prized highly and put in a book with a proper account at bottom, and shut up and put away … and the book called a ‘Flora’, besides! After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought—but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too: do you know I was once seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning “would you like to see Miss Barrett?”—then he went to announce me,—then he returned … you were too unwell—and now it is years ago—and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel on crypt, … only a screen to push and I might have entered—but there was some slight … so it now seems … slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be!

Well, these Poems were to be—and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself.

Yours ever faithfully

Robert Browning

7
Among the Rocks

Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,

This autumn morning! How he sets his bones

To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet

For the ripple to run over in its mirth;

Listening the while, where on the heap of stones

The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;

Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows.

If you loved only what were worth your love,

Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:

Make the low nature better by your throes!

Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

8
My Star

All, that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue

Till my friends have said

They would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

9
The Statue and the Bust1

There’s a palace in Florence, the world knows well,

And a statue watches it from the square,

And this story of both do our townsmen tell.

Ages ago, a lady there,

At the farthest window facing the East,

Asked, “Who rides by with the royal air?”

The bridesmaids’ prattle around her ceased;

She leaned forth, one on either hand;

They saw how the blush of the bride increased—

They felt by its beats her heart expand—

As one at each ear and both in a breath

Whispered, “The Great-Duke Ferdinand.”

That self-same instant, underneath,

The Duke rode past in his idle way,

Empty and fine like a swordless sheath.

Gay he rode, with a friend as gay,

Till he threw his head back—“Who is she?”

—“A bride the Riccardi brings home today.”

Hair in heaps lay heavily

Over a pale brow spirit-pure—

Carved like the heart of the coal-black tree,

Crisped like a war-steed’s encolure—

And vainly sought to dissemble her eyes

Of the blackest black our eyes endure.

And lo, a blade for a knight’s emprise

Filled the fine empty sheath of a man,—

The Duke grew straightway brave and wise.

He looked at her, as a lover can;

She looked at him, as one who awakes:

The past was a sleep, and their life began.

Now, love so ordered for both their sakes,

A feast was held that selfsame night

In the pile which the mighty shadow makes.

(For Via Larga is three-parts light,

But the palace overshadows one,

Because of a crime which may God requite!

To Florence and God the wrong was done,

Through the first republic’s murder there

By Cosimo and his cursÃ¨d son.)

The Duke (with the statue’s face in the square)

Turned in the midst of his multitude

At the bright approach of the bridal pair.

Face to face the lovers stood

A single minute and no more,

While the bridegroom bent as a man subdued—

Bowed till his bonnet brushed the floor—

For the Duke on the lady a kiss conferred,

As the courtly custom was of yore.

In a minute can lovers exchange a word?

If a word did pass, which I do not think,

Only one out of the thousand heard.

That was the bridegroom. At day’s brink

He and his bride were alone at last

In a bedchamber by a taper’s blink.

Calmly he said that her lot was cast,

That the door she had passed was shut on her

Till the final catafalque repassed.

The world meanwhile, its noise and stir,

Through a certain window facing the East,

She could watch like a convent’s chronicler.

Since passing the door might lead to a feast,

And a feast might lead to so much beside,

He, of many evils, chose the least.

“Freely I choose too,” said the bride—

“Your window and its world suffice,”

Replied the tongue, while the heart replied—

“If I spend the night with that devil twice,

May his window serve as my loop of hell

Whence a damned soul looks on paradise!

“I fly to the Duke who loves me well,

Sit by his side and laugh at sorrow

Ere I count another ave-bell.

“’Tis only the coat of a page to borrow,

And tie my hair in a horse-boy’s trim,

And I save my soul—but not tomorrow”—

(She checked herself and her eye grew dim)

“My father tarries to bless my state:

I must keep it one day more for him.

“Is one day more so long to wait?

Moreover the Duke rides past, I know;

We shall see each other, sure as fate.”

She turned on her side and slept. Just so!

So we resolve on a thing and sleep:

So did the lady, ages ago.

That night the Duke said, “Dear or cheap

As the cost of this cup of bliss may prove

To body or soul, I will drain it deep.”

And on the morrow, bold with love,

He beckoned the bridegroom (close on call,

As his duty bade, by the Duke’s alcove)

And smiled “’Twas a very funeral,

Your lady will think, this feast of ours,—

A shame to efface, whate’er befall!

“What if we break from the Arno bowers,

And try if Petraja, cool and green,

Cure last night’s fault with this morning’s flowers?”

The bridegroom, not a thought to be seen

On his steady brow and quiet mouth,

Said, “Too much favour for me so mean!

“But, alas! my lady leaves the South;

Each wind that comes from the Apennine

Is a menace to her tender youth:

“Nor a way exists, the wise opine,

If she quits her palace twice this year,

To avert the flower of life’s decline.”

Quoth the Duke, “A sage and a kindly fear.

Moreover Petraja is cold this spring:

Be our feast tonight as usual here!”

And then to himself—“Which night shall bring

Thy bride to her lover’s embraces, fool—

Or I am the fool, and thou art the king!

“Yet my passion must wait a night, nor cool—

For tonight the Envoy arrives from France

Whose heart I unlock with thyself, my tool.

“I need thee still and might miss perchance.

Today is not wholly lost, beside,

With its hope of my lady’s countenance:

“For I ride—what should I do but ride?

And passing her palace, if I list,

May glance at its window—well betide!”

So said, so done: nor the lady missed

One ray that broke from the ardent brow,

Nor a curl of the lips where the spirit kissed.

Be sure that each renewed the vow,

No morrow’s sun should arise and set

And leave them then as it left them now.

But next day passed, and next day yet,

With still fresh cause to wait one day more

Ere each leaped over the parapet.

And still, as love’s brief morning wore,

With a gentle start, half smile, half sigh,

They found love not as it seemed before.

They thought it would work infallibly,

But not in despite of heaven and earth:

The rose would blow when the storm passed by.

Meantime they could profit in winter’s dearth

By store of fruits that supplant the rose:

The world and its ways have a certain worth:

And to press a point while these oppose

Were simple policy; better wait:

We lose no friends and we gain no foes.

Meantime, worse fates than a lover’s fate,

Who daily may ride and pass and look

Where his lady watches behind the grate!

And she—she watched the square like a book

Holding one picture and only one,

Which daily to find she undertook:

When the picture was reached the book was done,

And she turned from the picture at night to scheme

Of tearing it out for herself next sun.

So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam

The glory dropped from their youth and love,

And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;

Which hovered as dreams do, still above:

But who can take a dream for a truth?

Oh, hide our eyes from the next remove!

One day as the lady saw her youth

Depart, and the silver thread that streaked

Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth,

The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked,—

And wondered who the woman was,

Hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked,

Fronting her silent in the glass—

“Summon here,” she suddenly said,

“Before the rest of my old self pass,

“Him, the Carver, a hand to aid,

Who fashions the clay no love will change,

And fixes a beauty never to fade.

“Let Robbia’s craft so apt and strange

Arrest the remains of young and fair,

And rivet them while the seasons range.

“Make me a face on the window there,

Waiting as ever, mute the while,

My love to pass below in the square!

“And let me think that it may beguile

Dreary days which the dead must spend

Down in their darkness under the aisle,

“To say, ‘What matters it at the end?

I did no more while my heart was warm

Than does that image, my pale-faced friend.’

“Where is the use of the lip’s red charm,

The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,

And the blood that blues the inside arm—

“Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,

The earthly gift to an end divine?

A lady of clay is as good, I trow.”

But long ere Robbia’s cornice, fine,

With flowers and fruits which leaves enlace,

Was set where now is the empty shrine—

(And, leaning out of a bright blue space,

As a ghost might lean from a chink of sky,

The passionate pale lady’s face—

Eyeing ever, with earnest eye

And quick-turned neck at its breathless stretch,

Some one who ever is passing by—)

The Duke had sighed like the simplest wretch

In Florence, “Youth—my dream escapes!

Will its record stay?” And he bade them fetch

Some subtle moulder of brazen shapes—

“Can the soul, the will, die out of a man

Ere his body find the grave that gapes?

“John of Douay shall effect my plan,

Set me on horseback here aloft,

Alive, as the crafty sculptor can,

“In the very square I have crossed so oft:

That men may admire, when future suns

Shall touch the eyes to a purpose soft,

“While the mouth and the brow stay brave in bronze—

Admire and say, ‘When he was alive

How he would take his pleasure once!’

“And it shall go hard but I contrive

To listen the while, and laugh in my tomb

At idleness which aspires to strive.”

So! While these wait the trump of doom,

How do their spirits pass, I wonder,

Nights and days in the narrow room?

Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder

What a gift life was, ages ago,

Six steps out of the chapel yonder.

Only they see not God, I know,

Nor all that chivalry of his,

The soldier-saints who, row on row,

Burn upward each to his point of bliss—

Since, the end of life being manifest,

He had burned his way through the world to this.

I hear you reproach, “But delay was best,

For their end was a crime.”—Oh, a crime will do

As well, I reply, to serve for a test,

As a virtue golden through and through,

Sufficient to vindicate itself

And prove its worth at a moment’s view!

Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?

Where a button goes, ’twere an epigram

To offer the stamp of the very Guelph.

The true has no value beyond the sham:

As well the counter as coin, I submit,

When your table’s a hat, and your prize a dram.

Stake your counter as boldly every whit,

Venture as warily, use the same skill,

Do your best, whether winning or losing it,

If you choose to play!—is my principle.

Let a man contend to the uttermost

For his life’s set prize, be it what it will!

The counter our lovers staked was lost

As surely as if it were lawful coin:

And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,

Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.

You of the virtue (we issue join)

How strive you? De te, fabula.

10
An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician2

Karshish, the picker-up of learning’s crumbs,

The not-incurious in God’s handiwork

(This man’s-flesh he hath admirably made,

Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,

To coop up and keep down on earth a space

That puff of vapour from his mouth, man’s soul)

—To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,

Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,

Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks

Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain,

Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip

Back and rejoin its source before the term,—

And aptest in contrivance (under God)

To baffle it by deftly stopping such:—

The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home

Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)

Three samples of true snakestone—rarer still,

One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,

(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)

And writeth now the twenty-second time.

My journeyings were brought to Jericho;

Thus I resume. Who studious in our art

Shall count a little labour unrepaid?

I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone

On many a flinty furlong of this land.

Also, the country-side is all on fire

With rumours of a marching hitherward:

Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.

A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;

Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:

I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.

Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,

And once a town declared me for a spy;

But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,

Since this poor covert where I pass the night,

This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence

A man with plague-sores at the third degree

Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!

‘Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,

To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip

And share with thee whatever Jewry yields

A viscid choler is observable

In tertians, I was nearly bold to say;

And falling-sickness hath a happier cure

Than our school wots of: there’s a spider here

Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,

Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;

Take five and drop them … but who knows his mind,

The Syrian runagate I trust this to?

His service payeth me a sublimate

Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.

Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn,

There set in order my experiences,

Gather what most deserves, and give thee all—

Or I might add, Judea’s gum-tragacanth

Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,

Cracks ’twixt the pestle and the porphyry,

In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease

Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy—

Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar—

But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end.

Yet stay: my Syrian blinketh gratefully,

Protesteth his devotion is my price—

Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal?

I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,

What set me off a-writing first of all.

An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!

For, be it this town’s barrenness—or else

The Man had something in the look of him—

His case has struck me far more than ’tis worth.

So, pardon if—(lest presently I lose

In the great press of novelty at hand

The care and pains this somehow stole from me)

I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind,

Almost in sight—for, wilt thou have the truth?

The very man is gone from me but now,

Whose ailment is the subject of discourse.

Thus then, and let thy better wit help all!

’Tis but a case of mania—subinduced

By epilepsy, at the turning-point

Of trance prolonged unduly some three days:

When, by the exhibition of some drug

Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art

Unknown to me and which ’twere well to know,

The evil thing out-breaking all at once

Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,—

But, flinging (so to speak) life’s gates too wide,

Making a clear house of it too suddenly,

The first conceit that entered might inscribe

Whatever it was minded on the wall

So plainly at that vantage, as it were,

(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent

Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls

The just-returned and new-established soul

Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart

That henceforth she will read or these or none.

And first—the man’s own firm conviction rests

That he was dead (in fact they buried him)

—That he was dead and then restored to life

By a Nazarene physician of his tribe:

—‘Sayeth, the same bade “Rise,” and he did rise.

“Such cases are diurnal,” thou wilt cry.

Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume,

Instead of giving way to time and health,

Should eat itself into the life of life,

As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all!

For see, how he takes up the after-life.

The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew,

Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,

The body’s habit wholly laudable,

As much, indeed, beyond the common health

As he were made and put aside to show.

Think, could we penetrate by any drug

And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,

And bring it clear and fair, by three days’ sleep!

Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?

This grown man eyes the world now like a child.

Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,

Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep,

To bear my inquisition. While they spoke,

Now sharply, now with sorrow,—told the case,—

He listened not except I spoke to him,

But folded his two hands and let them talk,

Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool.

And that’s a sample how his years must go.

Look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life,

Should find a treasure,—can he use the same

With straitened habits and with tastes starved small,

And take at once to his impoverished brain

The sudden element that changes things,

That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand

And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust?

Is he not such an one as moves to mirth—

Warily parsimonious, when no need,

Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times?

All prudent counsel as to what befits

The golden mean, is lost on such an one

The man’s fantastic will is the man’s law.

So here—we call the treasure knowledge, say,

Increased beyond the fleshly faculty—

Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,

Earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven:

The man is witless of the size, the sum,

The value in proportion of all things,

Or whether it be little or be much.

Discourse to him of prodigious armaments

Assembled to besiege his city now,

And of the passing of a mule with gourds—

’Tis one! Then take it on the other side,

Speak of some trifling fact—he will gaze rapt

With stupor at its very littleness,

(Far as I see) as if in that indeed

He caught prodigious import, whole results;

And so will turn to us the bystanders

In ever the same stupor (note this point)

That we too see not with his opened eyes.

Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,

Preposterously, at cross purposes.

Should his child sicken unto death,—why, look

For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,

Or pretermission of the daily craft!

While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child

At play or in the school or laid asleep,

Will startle him to an agony of fear,

Exasperation, just as like. Demand

The reason why—” tis but a word,” object—

“A gesture”—he regards thee as our lord

Who lived there in the pyramid alone

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,

We both would unadvisedly recite

Some charm’s beginning, from that book of his,

Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.

Thou and the child have each a veil alike

Thrown o’er your heads, from under which ye both

Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match

Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!

He holds on firmly to some thread of life—

(It is the life to lead perforcedly)

Which runs across some vast distracting orb

Of glory on either side that meagre thread,

Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet—

The spiritual life around the earthly life:

The law of that is known to him as this,

His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.

So is the man perplext with impulses

Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,

Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,

And not along, this black thread through the blaze—

“It should be” baulked by “here it cannot be.”

And oft the man’s soul springs into his face

As if he saw again and heard again

His sage that bade him “Rise” and he did rise.

Something, a word, a tick of the blood within

Admonishes: then back he sinks at once

To ashes, who was very fire before,

In sedulous recurrence to his trade

Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;

And studiously the humbler for that pride,

Professedly the faultier that he knows

God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life.

Indeed the especial marking of the man

Is prone submission to the heavenly will—

Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.

‘Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last

For that same death which must restore his being

To equilibrium, body loosening soul

Divorced even now by premature full growth:

He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live

So long as God please, and just how God please.

He even seeketh not to please God more

(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.

Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach

The doctrine of his sect whate’er it be,

Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do:

How can he give his neighbour the real ground,

His own conviction? Ardent as he is—

Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old

“Be it as God please” reassureth him.

I probed the sore as thy disciple should:

“How, beast,” said I, “this stolid carelessness

Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march

To stamp out like a little spark thy town,

Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?”

He merely looked with his large eyes on me.

The man is apathetic, you deduce?

Contrariwise, he loves both old and young,

Able and weak, affects the very brutes

And birds—how say I? flowers of the field—

As a wise workman recognizes tools

In a master’s workshop, loving what they make.

Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:

Only impatient, let him do his best,

At ignorance and carelessness and sin—

An indignation which is promptly curbed:

As when in certain travels I have feigned

To be an ignoramus in our art

According to some preconceived design,

And happed to hear the land’s practitioners,

Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance,

Prattle fantastically on disease,

Its cause and cure—and I must hold my peace!

Thou wilt object—why have I not ere this

Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene

Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,

Conferring with the frankness that befits?

Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech

Perished in a tumult many years ago,

Accused,—our learning’s fate,—of wizardry,

Rebellion, to the setting up a rule

And creed prodigious as described to me.

His death, which happened when the earthquake fell

(Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss

To occult learning in our lord the sage

Who lived there in the pyramid alone)

Was wrought by the mad people—that’s their wont!

On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,

To his tried virtue, for miraculous help—

How could he stop the earthquake? That’s their way!

The other imputations must be lies:

But take one, though I loathe to give it thee,

In mere respect for any good man’s fame.

(And after all, our patient Lazarus

Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?

Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech

’Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)

This man so cured regards the curer, then

As—God forgive me! who but God himself,

Creator and sustainer of the world,

That came and dwelt in flesh on ’t awhile!

—‘Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,

Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,

Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,

And yet was … what I said nor choose repeat,

And must have so avouched himself, in fact,

In hearing of this very Lazarus

Who saith—but why all this of what he saith?

Why write of trivial matters, things of price

Calling at every moment for remark?

I noticed on the margin of a pool

Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,

Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!

Thy pardon for this long and tedious case,

Which, now that I review it, needs must seem

Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!

Nor I myself discern in what is writ

Good cause for the peculiar interest

And awe indeed this man has touched me with.

Perhaps the journey’s end, the weariness

Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus:

I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills

Like an old lion’s cheek teeth. Out there came

A moon made like a face with certain spots

Multiform, manifold, and menacing:

Then a wind rose behind me. So we met

In this old sleepy town at unaware,

The man and I. I send thee what is writ.

Regard it as a chance, a matter risked

To this ambiguous Syrian—he may lose,

Or steal, or give it thee with equal good.

Jerusalem’s repose shall make amends

For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine;

Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?

So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—

So, through the thunder comes a human voice

Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,

But love I gave thee, with myself to love,

And thou must love me who have died for thee!”

The madman saith He said so: it is strange.

11
Three Songs from Paracelsus3

I

I hear a voice, perchance I heard

Long ago, but all too low,

So that scarce a care it stirred

If the voice was real or no:

I heard it in my youth when first

The waters of my life outburst:

But now their stream ebbs faint, I hear

That voice, still low but fatal-clear—

As if all Poets, God ever meant

Should save the world, and therefore lent

Great gifts to, but who, proud, refused

To do His work, or lightly used

Those gifts, or failed through weak endeavour,

So, mourn cast off by Him for ever,—

As if these leaned in airy ring

To take me; this the song they sing.

‘Lost, lost! yet come,

With our wan troop make thy home.

Come, come! for we

Will not breathe, so much as breathe

Reproach to thee!

Knowing what thou sink’st beneath.

So sank we in those old years,

We who bid thee, come! thou last

Who, living yet, hast life o’erpast,

And altogether we, thy peers,

Will pardon ask for thee, the last

Whose trial is done, whose lot is cast

With those who watch but work no more,

Who gaze on life but live no more.

Yet we trusted thou shouldst speak

The message which our lips, too weak,

Refused to utter,—shouldst redeem

Our fault: such trust, and all a dream!

Yet we chose thee a birthplace

Where the richness ran to flowers;

Couldst not sing one song for grace?

Not make one blossom man’s and ours?

Must one more recreant to his race

Die with unexerted powers,

And join us, leaving as he found

The world, he was to loosen, bound?

Anguish! ever and for ever;

Still beginning, ending never!

Yet, lost and last one, come!

How couldst understand, alas,

What our pale ghosts strove to say,

As their shades did glance and pass

Before thee, night and day?

Thou wast blind as we were dumb:

Once more, therefore, come, O come!

How shall we clothe, how arm the spirit

Who next shall thy post of life inherit—

How guard him from thy speedy ruin?

Tell us of thy sad undoing

Here, where we sit, ever pursuing

Our weary task, ever renewing

Sharp sorrow, far from God who gave

Our powers, and man they could not save!’

II

Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes

Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,

Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes

From out her hair: such balsam falls

Down seaside mountain pedestals,

From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,

Spent with the vast and howling main,

To treasure half their island-gain.

And strew faint sweetness from some old

Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud

Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;

Or shredded perfume, like a cloud

From closet long to quiet vowed,

With mothed and dropping arras hung,

Mouldering her lute and books among,

As when a queen, long dead, was young.

III

Over the sea our galleys went,

With cleaving prows in order brave,

To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,

A gallant armament:

Each bark built out of a forest-tree,

Left leafy and rough as first it grew,

And nailed all over the gaping sides,

Within and without, with black bull-hides,

Seethed in fat and suppled in flame,

To bear the playful billows’ game:

So, each good ship was rude to see,

Rude and bare to the outward view,

But each upbore a stately tent

Where cedar-pales in scented row

Kept out the flakes of the dancing brine,

And an awning drooped the mast below,

In fold on fold of the purple fine,

That neither noontide nor star-shine

Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,

Might pierce the regal tenement.

When the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad

We set the sail and plied the oar;

But when the night-wind blew like breath,

For joy of one day’s voyage more,

We sang together on the wide sea,

Like men at peace on a peaceful shore;

Each sail was loosed to the wind so free,

Each helm made sure by the twilight star,

And in a sleep as calm as death,

We, the voyagers from afar,

Lay stretched along, each weary crew

In a circle round its wondrous tent

Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent,

And with light and perfume, music too:

So the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past,

And at morn we started beside the mast,

And still each ship was sailing fast!

Now, one morn, land appeared!—a speck

Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky:

‘Avoid it,’ cried our pilot, ‘check

The shout, restrain the eager eye!’

But the heaving sea was black behind

For many a night and many a day,

And land, though but a rock, drew nigh;

So, we broke the cedar pales away,

Let the purple awning flap in the wind,

And a statue bright was on every deck!

We shouted, every man of us,

And steered right into the harbour thus,

With pomp and paean glorious.

A hundred shapes of lucid stone!

All day we built its shrine for each,

A shrine of rock for every one,

Nor paused we till in the westering sun

We sat together on the beach

To sing because our task was done.

When lo! what shouts and merry songs!

What laughter all the distance stirs!

A loaded raft with happy throngs

Of gentle islanders!

‘Our isles are just at hand,’ they cried,

‘Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping;

Our temple-gates are opened wide,

Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping

For these majestic forms’—they cried.

Oh, then we awoke with sudden start

From our deep dream, and knew, too late,

How bare the rock, how desolate,

Which had received our precious freight:

Yet we called out—‘Depart!

Our gifts, once given, must here abide.

Our work is done; we have no heart

To mar our work,’—we cried.

12
By the Fire-Side4

I.

How well I know what I mean to do

When the long dark autumn-evenings come:

And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?

With the music of all thy voices, dumb

In life’s November too!

II.

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,

O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,

While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows

And I turn the page, and I turn the page,

Not verse now, only prose!

III.

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,

“There he is at it, deep in Greek:

“Now then, or never, out we slip

“To cut from the hazels by the creek

“A mainmast for our ship!”

IV.

I shall be at it indeed, my friends:

Greek puts already on either side

Such a branch-work forth as soon extends

To a vista opening far and wide,

And I pass out where it ends.

V.

The outside-frame, like your hazel-trees:

But the inside-archway widens fast,

And a rarer sort succeeds to these,

And we slope to Italy at last

And youth, by green degrees.

VI.

I follow wherever I am led,

Knowing so well the leader’s hand:

Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,

Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands,

Laid to their hearts instead!

VII.

Look at the ruined chapel again

Half-way up in the Alpine gorge!

Is that a tower, I point you plain,

Or is it a mill, or an iron-forge

Breaks solitude in vain?

VIII.

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things:

The woods are round us, heaped and dim;

From slab to slab how it slips and springs,

The thread of water single and slim,

Through the ravage some torrent brings!

IX.

Does it feed the little lake below?

That speck of white just on its marge

Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,

How sharp the silver spear-heads charge

When Alp meets heaven in snow!

X.

On our other side is the straight-up rock;

And a path is kept ’twixt the gorge and it

By boulder-stones where lichens mock

The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit

Their teeth to the polished block.

XI.

Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,

And thorny balls, each three in one,

The chestnuts throw on our path in showers!

For the drop of the woodland fruit’s begun,

These early November hours,

XII.

That crimson the creeper’s leaf across

Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,

O’er a shield else gold from rim to boss,

And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped

Elf-needled mat of moss,

XIII.

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged

Last evening–nay, in to-day’s first dew

Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,

Where a freaked fawn-coloured flaky crew

Of toadstools peep indulged.

XIV.

And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge

That takes the turn to a range beyond,

Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge

Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond

Danced over by the midge.

XV.

The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,

Blackish-grey and mostly wet;

Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.

See here again, how the lichens fret

And the roots of the ivy strike!

XVI.

Poor little place, where its one priest comes

On a festa-day, if he comes at all,

To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,

Gathered within that precinct small

By the dozen ways one roams–

XVII.

To drop from the charcoal-burners’ huts,

Or climb from the hemp-dressers’ low shed,

Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,

Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread

Their gear on the rock’s bare juts.

XVIII.

It has some pretension too, this front,

With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise

Set over the porch, Art’s early wont:

’Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,

But has borne the weather’s brunt–

XIX.

Not from the fault of the builder, though,

For a pent-house properly projects

Where three carved beams make a certain show,

Dating–good thought of our architect’s–

‘Five, six, nine, he lets you know.

XX.

And all day long a bird sings there,

And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;

The place is silent and aware;

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,

But that is its own affair.

XXI.

My perfect wife, my Leonor,

Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,

Whom else could I dare look backward for,

With whom beside should I dare pursue

The path grey heads abhor?

XXII.

For it leads to a crag’s sheer edge with them;

Youth, flowery all the way, there stops–

Not they; age threatens and they contemn,

Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,

One inch from life’s safe hem!

XXIII.

With me, youth led… I will speak now,

No longer watch you as you sit

Reading by fire-light, that great brow

And the spirit-small hand propping it,

Mutely, my heart knows how–

XXIV.

When, if I think but deep enough,

You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;

And you, too, find without rebuff

Response your soul seeks many a time

Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.

XXV.

My own, confirm me! If I tread

This path back, is it not in pride

To think how little I dreamed it led

To an age so blest that, by its side,

Youth seems the waste instead?

XXVI.

My own, see where the years conduct!

At first, ’twas something our two souls

Should mix as mists do; each is sucked

In each now: on, the new stream rolls,

Whatever rocks obstruct.

XXVII.

Think, when our one soul understands

The great Word which makes all things new,

When earth breaks up and heaven expands,

How will the change strike me and you
ln the house not made with hands?

XXVIII.

Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,

Your heart anticipate my heart,

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,

New depths of the divine!

XXIX.

But who could have expected this

When we two drew together first

Just for the obvious human bliss,

To satisfy life’s daily thirst

With a thing men seldom miss?

XXX.

Come back with me to the first of all,

Let us lean and love it over again,

Let us now forget and now recall,

Break the rosary in a pearly rain,

And gather what we let fall!

XXXI.

What did I say?–that a small bird sings

All day long, save when a brown pair

Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings

Strained to a bell: ’gainst noon-day glare

You count the streaks and rings.

XXXII.

But at afternoon or almost eve

’Tis better; then the silence grows

To that degree, you half believe

It must get rid of what it knows,

Its bosom does so heave.

XXXIII.

Hither we walked then, side by side,

Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,

And still I questioned or replied,

While my heart, convulsed to really speak,

Lay choking in its pride.

XXXIV.

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,

And pity and praise the chapel sweet,

And care about the fresco’s loss,

And wish for our souls a like retreat,

And wonder at the moss.

XXXV.

Stoop and kneel on the settle under,

Look through the window’s grated square:

Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,

The cross is down and the altar bare,

As if thieves don’t fear thunder.

XXXVI.

We stoop and look in through the grate,

See the little porch and rustic door,

Read duly the dead builder’s date;

Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,

Take the path again–but wait!

XXXVII.

Oh moment, one and infinite!

The water slips o’er stock and stone;

The West is tender, hardly bright:

How grey at once is the evening grown–

One star, its chrysolite!

XXXVIII.

We two stood there with never a third,

But each by each, as each knew well:

The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,

The lights and the shades made up a spell

Till the trouble grew and stirred.

XXXIX.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away!

How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,

Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,

And life be a proof of this!

XL.

Had she willed it, still had stood the screen

So slight, so sure, ’twixt my love and her:

I could fix her face with a guard between,

And find her soul as when friends confer,

Friends–lovers that might have been.

XLI.

For my heart had a touch of the woodland-time,

Wanting to sleep now over its best.

Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime,

But bring to the Iast leaf no such test!

“Hold the last fast!” runs the rhyme.

XLII.

For a chance to make your little much,

To gain a lover and lose a friend,

Venture the tree and a myriad such,

When nothing you mar but the year can mend:

But a last leaf–fear to touch!

XLIII.

Yet should it unfasten itself and fall

Eddying down till it find your face

At some slight wind–best chance of all!

Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place

You trembled to forestall!

XLIV.

Worth how well, those dark grey eyes,

That hair so dark and dear, how worth

That a man should strive and agonize,

And taste a veriest hell on earth

For the hope of such a prize!

XIIV.

You might have turned and tried a man,

Set him a space to weary and wear,

And prove which suited more your plan,

His best of hope or his worst despair,

Yet end as he began.

XLVI.

But you spared me this, like the heart you are,

And filled my empty heart at a word.

If two lives join, there is oft a scar,

They are one and one, with a shadowy third;

One near one is too far.

XLVII.

A moment after, and hands unseen

Were hanging the night around us fast

But we knew that a bar was broken between

Life and life: we were mixed at last

In spite of the mortal screen.

XLVIII.

The forests had done it; there they stood;

We caught for a moment the powers at play:

They had mingled us so, for once and good,

Their work was done–we might go or stay,

They relapsed to their ancient mood.

XLIX.

How the world is made for each of us!

How all we perceive and know in it

Tends to some moment’s product thus,

When a soul declares itself–to wit,

By its fruit, the thing it does

L.

Be hate that fruit or love that fruit,

It forwards the general deed of man,

And each of the Many helps to recruit

The life of the race by a general plan;

Each living his own, to boot.

LI.

I am named and known by that moment’s feat;

There took my station and degree;

So grew my own small life complete,

As nature obtained her best of me–

One born to love you, sweet!

LII.

And to watch you sink by the fire-side now

Back again, as you mutely sit

Musing by fire-light, that great brow

And the spirit-small hand propping it,

Yonder, my heart knows how!

LIII.

So, earth has gained by one man the more,

And the gain of earth must be heaven’s gain too;

And the whole is well worth thinking o’er

When autumn comes: which I mean to do

One day, as I said before.

13
Bishop Blougram’s Apology5

No more wine? then we’ll push back chairs and talk.

A final glass for me, though: cool, i’ faith!

We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.

It’s different, preaching in basilicas,

And doing duty in some masterpiece

Like this of brother Pugin’s, bless his heart!

I doubt if they’re half baked, those chalk rosettes,

Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere;

It’s just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?

These hot long ceremonies of our church

Cost us a little—oh, they pay the price,

You take me—amply pay it! Now, we’ll talk.

So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.

No deprecation,—nay, I beg you, sir!

Beside ’t is our engagement: don’t you know,

I promised, if you’d watch a dinner out,

We’d see truth dawn together?—truth that peeps

Over the glasses’ edge when dinner’s done,

And body gets its sop and holds its noise

And leaves soul free a little. Now’s the time:

’T is break of day! You do despise me then.

And if I say, “despise me,”—never fear!

I know you do not in a certain sense—

Not in my arm-chair, for example: here,

I well imagine you respect my place

( Status, entourage , worldly circumstance)

Quite to its value—very much indeed:

—Are up to the protesting eyes of you

In pride at being seated here for once—

You’ll turn it to such capital account!

When somebody, through years and years to come,

Hints of the bishop,—names me—that’s enough:

“Blougram? I knew him”—(into it you slide)

“Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,

“All alone, we two; he’s a clever man:

“And after dinner,—why, the wine you know,—

“Oh, there was wine, and good!—what with the wine . .

“’Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!

“He’s no bad fellow, Blougram; he had seen

“Something of mine he relished, some review:

“He’s quite above their humbug in his heart,

“Half-said as much, indeed—the thing’s his trade.

“I warrant, Blougram’s sceptical at times:

“How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!”

Che che , my dear sir, as we say at Rome,

Don’t you protest now! It’s fair give and take;

You have had your turn and spoken your home-truths:

The hand’s mine now, and here you follow suit.

Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays—

You do despise me; your ideal of life

Is not the bishop’s: you would not be I.

You would like better to be Goethe, now,

Or Buonaparte, or, bless me, lower still,

Count D’Orsay,—so you did what you preferred,

Spoke as you thought, and, as you cannot help,

Believed or disbelieved, no matter what,

So long as on that point, whate’er it was,

You loosed your mind, were whole and sole yourself.

—That, my ideal never can include,

Upon that element of truth and worth

Never be based! for say they make me Pope—

(They can’t—suppose it for our argument!)

Why, there I’m at my tether’s end, I’ve reached

My height, and not a height which pleases you:

An unbelieving Pope won’t do, you say.

It’s like those eerie stories nurses tell,

Of how some actor on a stage played Death,

With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,

And called himself the monarch of the world;

Then, going in the tire-room afterward,

Because the play was done, to shift himself,

Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,

The moment he had shut the closet door,

By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope

At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,

And whose part he presumed to play just now?

Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!

So, drawing comfortable breath again,

You weigh and find, whatever more or less

I boast of my ideal realized,

Is nothing in the balance when opposed

To your ideal, your grand simple life,

Of which you will not realize one jot.

I am much, you are nothing; you would be all,

I would be merely much: you beat me there.

No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!

The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,

Is—not to fancy what were fair in life

Provided it could be,—but, finding first

What may be, then find how to make it fair

Up to our means: a very different thing!

No abstract intellectual plan of life

Quite irrespective of life’s plainest laws,

But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,

May lead within a world which (by your leave)

Is Rome or London, not Fool’s-paradise.

Embellish Rome, idealize away,

Make paradise of London if you can,

You’re welcome, nay, you’re wise.

A simile!

We mortals cross the ocean of this world

Each in his average cabin of a life;

The best’s not big, the worst yields elbow-room.

Now for our six months’ voyage—how prepare?

You come on shipboard with a landsman’s list

Of things he calls convenient: so they are!

An India screen is pretty furniture,

A piano-forte is a fine resource,

All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf,

The new edition fifty volumes long;

And little Greek books, with the funny type

They get up well at Leipsic, fill the next:

Go on! slabbed marble, what a bath it makes!

And Parma’s pride, the Jerome, let us add!

’T were pleasant could Correggio’s fleeting glow

Hang full in face of one where’er one roams,

Since he more than the others brings with him

Italy’s self,—the marvellous Modenese!—

Yet was not on your list before, perhaps.

—Alas, friend, here’s the agent … is’t the name?

The captain, or whoever’s master here—

You see him screw his face up; what’s his cry

Ere you set foot on shipboard? “Six feet square!”

If you won’t understand what six feet mean,

Compute and purchase stores accordingly—

And if, in pique because he overhauls

Your Jerome, piano, bath, you come on board

Bare—why, you cut a figure at the first

While sympathetic landsmen see you off;

Not afterward, when long ere half seas over,

You peep up from your utterly naked boards

Into some snug and well-appointed berth,

Like mine for instance (try the cooler jug—

Put back the other, but don’t jog the ice!)

And mortified you mutter “Well and good;

“He sits enjoying his sea-furniture;

“’T is stout and proper, and there’s store of it:

“Though I’ve the better notion, all agree,

“Of fitting rooms up. Hang the carpenter,

“Neat ship-shape fixings and contrivances—

“I would have brought my Jerome, frame and all!”

And meantime you bring nothing: never mind—

You’ve proved your artist-nature: what you don’t

You might bring, so despise me, as I say.

Now come, let’s backward to the starting-place.

See my way: we’re two college friends, suppose.

Prepare together for our voyage, then;

Each note and check the other in his work,—

Here’s mine, a bishop’s outfit; criticize!

What’s wrong? why won’t you be a bishop too?

Why first, you don’t believe, you don’t and can’t,

(Not statedly, that is, and fixedly

And absolutely and exclusively)

In any revelation called divine.

No dogmas nail your faith; and what remains

But say so, like the honest man you are?

First, therefore, overhaul theology!

Nay, I too, not a fool, you please to think,

Must find believing every whit as hard:

And if I do not frankly say as much,

The ugly consequence is clear enough.

Now wait, my friend: well, I do not believe—

If you’ll accept no faith that is not fixed,

Absolute and exclusive, as you say.

You’re wrong—I mean to prove it in due time.

Meanwhile, I know where difficulties lie

I could not, cannot solve, nor ever shall,

So give up hope accordingly to solve—

(To you, and over the wine). Our dogmas then

With both of us, though in unlike degree,

Missing full credence—overboard with them!

I mean to meet you on your own premise:

Good, there go mine in company with yours!

And now what are we? unbelievers both,

Calm and complete, determinately fixed

To-day, to-morrow and for ever, pray?

You’ll guarantee me that? Not so, I think!

In no wise! all we’ve gained is, that belief,

As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,

Confounds us like its predecessor. Where’s

The gain? how can we guard our unbelief,

Make it bear fruit to us?—the problem here.

Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,

A chorus-ending from Euripides,—

And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears

As old and new at once as nature’s self,

To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,

Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—

The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.

There the old misgivings, crooked questions are—

This good God,—what he could do, if he would,

Would, if he could—then must have done long since:

If so, when, where and how? some way must be,—

Once feel about, and soon or late you hit

Some sense, in which it might be, after all.

Why not, “The Way, the Truth, the Life?”

—That way

Over the mountain, which who stands upon

Is apt to doubt if it be meant for a road;

While, if he views it from the waste itself,

Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,

Not vague, mistakeable! what’s a break or two

Seen from the unbroken desert either side?

And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)

What if the breaks themselves should prove at last

The most consummate of contrivances

To train a man’s eye, teach him what is faith?

And so we stumble at truth’s very test!

All we have gained then by our unbelief

Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,

For one of faith diversified by doubt:

We called the chess-board white,—we call it black.

“Well,” you rejoin, “the end’s no worse, at least;

“We’ve reason for both colours on the board:

“Why not confess then, where I drop the faith

“And you the doubt, that I’m as right as you?”

Because, friend, in the next place, this being so,

And both things even,—faith and unbelief

Left to a man’s choice,—we’ll proceed a step,

Returning to our image, which I like.

A man’s choice, yes—but a cabin-passenger’s—

The man made for the special life o’ the world—

Do you forget him? I remember though!

Consult our ship’s conditions and you find

One and but one choice suitable to all;

The choice, that you unluckily prefer,

Turning things topsy-turvy—they or it

Going to the ground. Belief or unbelief

Bears upon life, determines its whole course,

Begins at its beginning. See the world

Such as it is,—you made it not, nor I;

I mean to take it as it is,—and you,

Not so you’ll take it,—though you get nought else.

I know the special kind of life I like,

What suits the most my idiosyncrasy,

Brings out the best of me and bears me fruit

In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days.

I find that positive belief does this

For me, and unbelief, no whit of this.

—For you, it does, however?—that, we’ll try!

’T is clear, I cannot lead my life, at least,

Induce the world to let me peaceably,

Without declaring at the outset, “Friends,

“I absolutely and peremptorily

“Believe!”—I say, faith is my waking life:

One sleeps, indeed, and dreams at intervals,

We know, but waking’s the main point with us

And my provision’s for life’s waking part.

Accordingly, I use heart, head and hand

All day, I build, scheme, study, and make friends;

And when night overtakes me, down I lie,

Sleep, dream a little, and get done with it,

The sooner the better, to begin afresh.

What’s midnight doubt before the dayspring’s faith?

You, the philosopher, that disbelieve,

That recognize the night, give dreams their weight—

To be consistent you should keep your bed,

Abstain from healthy acts that prove you man,

For fear you drowse perhaps at unawares!

And certainly at night you’ll sleep and dream,

Live through the day and bustle as you please.

And so you live to sleep as I to wake,

To unbelieve as I to still believe?

Well, and the common sense o’ the world calls you

Bed-ridden,—and its good things come to me.

Its estimation, which is half the fight,

That’s the first-cabin comfort I secure:

The next … but you perceive with half an eye!

Come, come, it’s best believing, if we may;

You can’t but own that!

Next, concede again,

If once we choose belief, on all accounts

We can’t be too decisive in our faith,

Conclusive and exclusive in its terms,

To suit the world which gives us the good things.

In every man’s career are certain points

Whereon he dares not be indifferent;

The world detects him clearly, if he dare,

As baffled at the game, and losing life.

He may care little or he may care much

For riches, honour, pleasure, work, repose,

Since various theories of life and life’s

Success are extant which might easily

Comport with either estimate of these;

And whoso chooses wealth or poverty,

Labour or quiet, is not judged a fool

Because his fellow would choose otherwise:

We let him choose upon his own account

So long as he’s consistent with his choice.

But certain points, left wholly to himself,

When once a man has arbitrated on,

We say he must succeed there or go hang.

Thus, he should wed the woman he loves most

Or needs most, whatsoe’er the love or need—

For he can’t wed twice. Then, he must avouch,

Or follow, at the least, sufficiently,

The form of faith his conscience holds the best,

Whate’er the process of conviction was:

For nothing can compensate his mistake

On such a point, the man himself being judge:

He cannot wed twice, nor twice lose his soul.

Well now, there’s one great form of Christian faith

I happened to be born in—which to teach

Was given me as I grew up, on all hands,

As best and readiest means of living by;

The same on examination being proved

The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise

And absolute form of faith in the whole world—

Accordingly, most potent of all forms

For working on the world. Observe, my friend!

Such as you know me, I am free to say,

In these hard latter days which hamper one,

Myself—by no immoderate exercise

Of intellect and learning, but the tact

To let external forces work for me,

—Bid the street’s stones be bread and they are bread;

Bid Peter’s creed, or rather, Hildebrand’s,

Exalt me o’er my fellows in the world

And make my life an ease and joy and pride;

It does so,—which for me’s a great point gained,

Who have a soul and body that exact

A comfortable care in many ways.

There’s power in me and will to dominate

Which I must exercise, they hurt me else:

In many ways I need mankind’s respect,

Obedience, and the love that’s born of fear:

While at the same time, there’s a taste I have,

A toy of soul, a titillating thing,

Refuses to digest these dainties crude.

The naked life is gross till clothed upon:

I must take what men offer, with a grace

As though I would not, could I help it, take!

An uniform I wear though over-rich—

Something imposed on me, no choice of mine;

No fancy-dress worn for pure fancy’s sake

And despicable therefore! now folk kneel

And kiss my hand—of course the Church’s hand.

Thus I am made, thus life is best for me,

And thus that it should be I have procured;

And thus it could not be another way,

I venture to imagine.

You’ll reply,

So far my choice, no doubt, is a success;

But were I made of better elements,

With nobler instincts, purer tastes, like you,

I hardly would account the thing success

Though it did all for me I say.

But, friend,

We speak of what is; not of what might be,

And how’t were better if’t were otherwise.

I am the man you see here plain enough:

Grant I’m a beast, why, beasts must lead beasts’ lives!

Suppose I own at once to tail and claws;

The tailless man exceeds me: but being tailed

I’ll lash out lion fashion, and leave apes

To dock their stump and dress their haunches up.

My business is not to remake myself,

But make the absolute best of what God made.

Or—our first simile—though you prove me doomed

To a viler berth still, to the steerage-hole,

The sheep-pen or the pig-stye, I should strive

To make what use of each were possible;

And as this cabin gets upholstery,

That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw.

But, friend, I don’t acknowledge quite so fast

I fail of all your manhood’s lofty tastes

Enumerated so complacently,

On the mere ground that you forsooth can find

In this particular life I choose to lead

No fit provision for them. Can you not?

Say you, my fault is I address myself

To grosser estimators than should judge?

And that’s no way of holding up the soul,

Which, nobler, needs men’s praise perhaps, yet knows

One wise man’s verdict outweighs all the fools’—

Would like the two, but, forced to choose, takes that.

I pine among my million imbeciles

(You think) aware some dozen men of sense

Eye me and know me, whether I believe

In the last winking Virgin, as I vow,

And am a fool, or disbelieve in her

And am a knave,—approve in neither case,

Withhold their voices though I look their way:

Like Verdi when, at his worst opera’s end

(The thing they gave at Florence,—what’s its name?)

While the mad houseful’s plaudits near out-bang

His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones,

He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths

Where sits Rossini patient in his stall.

Nay, friend, I meet you with an answer here—

That even your prime men who appraise their kind

Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,

See more in a truth than the truth’s simple self,

Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street

Sixty the minute; what’s to note in that?

You see one lad o’erstride a chimney-stack;

Him you must watch—he’s sure to fall, yet stands!

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist, demirep

That loves and saves her soul in new French books—

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway: one step aside,

They’re classed and done with. I, then, keep the line

Before your sages,—just the men to shrink

From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad

You offer their refinement. Fool or knave?

Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave

When there’s a thousand diamond weights between?

So, I enlist them. Your picked twelve, you’ll find,

Profess themselves indignant, scandalized

At thus being held unable to explain

How a superior man who disbelieves

May not believe as well: that’s Schelling’s way!

It’s through my coming in the tail of time,

Nicking the minute with a happy tact.

Had I been born three hundred years ago

They’d say, “What’s strange? Blougram of course believes;”

And, seventy years since, “disbelieves of course.”

But now, “He may believe; and yet, and yet

“How can he?” All eyes turn with interest.

Whereas, step off the line on either side—

You, for example, clever to a fault,

The rough and ready man who write apace,

Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less—

You disbelieve! Who wonders and who cares?

Lord So-and-so—his coat bedropped with wax,

All Peter’s chains about his waist, his back

Brave with the needlework of Noodledom—

Believes! Again, who wonders and who cares?

But I, the man of sense and learning too,

The able to think yet act, the this, the that,

I, to believe at this late time of day!

Enough; you see, I need not fear contempt.

—Except it’s yours! Admire me as these may,

You don’t. But whom at least do you admire?

Present your own perfection, your ideal,

Your pattern man for a minute—oh, make haste

Is it Napoleon you would have us grow?

Concede the means; allow his head and hand,

(A large concession, clever as you are)

Good! In our common primal element

Of unbelief (we can’t believe, you know—

We’re still at that admission, recollect!)

Where do you find—apart from, towering o’er

The secondary temporary aims

Which satisfy the gross taste you despise—

Where do you find his star?—his crazy trust

God knows through what or in what? it’s alive

And shines and leads him, and that’s all we want.

Have we aught in our sober night shall point

Such ends as his were, and direct the means

Of working out our purpose straight as his,

Nor bring a moment’s trouble on success

With after-care to justify the same?

—Be a Napoleon, and yet disbelieve—

Why, the man’s mad, friend, take his light away!

What’s the vague good o’ the world, for which you dare

With comfort to yourself blow millions up?

We neither of us see it! we do see

The blown-up millions—spatter of their brains

And writhing of their bowels and so forth,

In that bewildering entanglement

Of horrible eventualities

Past calculation to the end of time!

Can I mistake for some clear word of God

(Which were my ample warrant for it all)

His puff of hazy instinct, idle talk,

“The State, that’s I,” quack-nonsense about crowns,

And (when one beats the man to his last hold)

A vague idea of setting things to rights,

Policing people efficaciously,

More to their profit, most of all to his own;

The whole to end that dismallest of ends

By an Austrian marriage, cant to us the Church,

And resurrection of the old regime ?

Would I, who hope to live a dozen years,

Fight Austerlitz for reasons such and such?

No: for, concede me but the merest chance

Doubt may be wrong—there’s judgment, life to come!

With just that chance, I dare not. Doubt proves right?

This present life is all?—you offer me

Its dozen noisy years, without a chance

That wedding an archduchess, wearing lace,

And getting called by divers new-coined names,

Will drive off ugly thoughts and let me dine,

Sleep, read and chat in quiet as I like!

Therefore I will not.

Take another case;

Fit up the cabin yet another way.

What say you to the poets? shall we write

Hamlet, Othello—make the world our own,

Without a risk to run of either sort?

I can’t—to put the strongest reason first.

“But try,” you urge, “the trying shall suffice;

“The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:

“Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!”

Spare my self-knowledge—there’s no fooling me!

If I prefer remaining my poor self,

I say so not in self-dispraise but praise.

If I’m a Shakespeare, let the well alone;

Why should I try to be what now I am?

If I’m no Shakespeare, as too probable,—

His power and consciousness and self-delight

And all we want in common, shall I find—

Trying for ever? while on points of taste

Wherewith, to speak it humbly, he and I

Are dowered alike—I’ll ask you, I or he,

Which in our two lives realizes most?

Much, he imagined—somewhat, I possess.

He had the imagination; stick to that!

Let him say, “In the face of my soul’s works

“Your world is worthless and I touch it not

“Lest I should wrong them”—I’ll withdraw my plea.

But does he say so? look upon his life!

Himself, who only can, gives judgment there.

He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces

To build the trimmest house in Stratford town;

Saves money, spends it, owns the worth of things,

Giulio Romano’s pictures, Dowland’s lute;

Enjoys a show, respects the puppets, too,

And none more, had he seen its entry once,

Than “Pandulph, of fair Milan cardinal.”

Why then should I who play that personage,

The very Pandulph Shakespeare’s fancy made,

Be told that had the poet chanced to start

From where I stand now (some degree like mine

Being just the goal he ran his race to reach)

He would have run the whole race back, forsooth,

And left being Pandulph, to begin write plays?

Ah, the earth’s best can be but the earth’s best!

Did Shakespeare live, he could but sit at home

And get himself in dreams the Vatican,

Greek busts, Venetian paintings, Roman walls,

And English books, none equal to his own,

Which I read, bound in gold (he never did).

—Terni’s fall, Naples’ bay and Gothard’s top—

Eh, friend? I could not fancy one of these;

But, as I pour this claret, there they are:

I’ve gained them—crossed St. Gothard last July

With ten mules to the carriage and a bed

Slung inside; is my hap the worse for that?

We want the same things, Shakespeare and myself,

And what I want, I have: he, gifted more,

Could fancy he too had them when he liked,

But not so thoroughly that, if fate allowed,

He would not have them also in my sense.

We play one game; I send the ball aloft

No less adroitly that of fifty strokes

Scarce five go o’er the wall so wide and high

Which sends them back to me: I wish and get

He struck balls higher and with better skill,

But at a poor fence level with his head,

And hit—his Stratford house, a coat of arms,

Successful dealings in his grain and wool,—

While I receive heaven’s incense in my nose

And style myself the cousin of Queen Bess.

Ask him, if this life’s all, who wins the game?

Believe—and our whole argument breaks up.

Enthusiasm’s the best thing, I repeat;

Only, we can’t command it; fire and life

Are all, dead matter’s nothing, we agree:

And be it a mad dream or God’s very breath,

The fact’s the same,—belief’s fire, once in us,

Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself:

We penetrate our life with such a glow

As fire lends wood and iron—this turns steel,

That burns to ash—all’s one, fire proves its power

For good or ill, since men call flare success.

But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn.

Light one in me, I’ll find it food enough!

Why, to be Luther—that’s a life to lead,

Incomparably better than my own.

He comes, reclaims God’s earth for God, he says,

Sets up God’s rule again by simple means,

Re-opens a shut book, and all is done.

He flared out in the flaring of mankind;

Such Luther’s luck was: how shall such be mine?

If he succeeded, nothing’s left to do:

And if he did not altogether—well,

Strauss is the next advance. All Strauss should be

I might be also. But to what result?

He looks upon no future: Luther did.

What can I gain on the denying side?

Ice makes no conflagration. State the facts,

Read the text right, emancipate the world—

The emancipated world enjoys itself

With scarce a thank-you: Blougram told it first

It could not owe a farthing,—not to him

More than Saint Paul! ’t would press its pay, you think?

Then add there’s still that plaguy hundredth chance

Strauss may be wrong. And so a risk is run—

For what gain? not for Luther’s, who secured

A real heaven in his heart throughout his life,

Supposing death a little altered things.

“Ay, but since really you lack faith,” you cry,

“You run the same risk really on all sides,

“In cool indifference as bold unbelief.

“As well be Strauss as swing ’twixt Paul and him.

“It’s not worth having, such imperfect faith,

“No more available to do faith’s work

“Than unbelief like mine. Whole faith, or none!”

Softly, my friend! I must dispute that point

Once own the use of faith, I’ll find you faith.

We’re back on Christian ground. You call for faith:

I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.

The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,

If faith o’ercomes doubt. How I know it does?

By life and man’s free will, God gave for that!

To mould life as we choose it, shows our choice:

That’s our one act, the previous work’s his own.

You criticize the soul? it reared this tree—

This broad life and whatever fruit it bears!

What matter though I doubt at every pore,

Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my fingers’ ends,

Doubts in the trivial work of every day,

Doubts at the very bases of my soul

In the grand moments when she probes herself—

If finally I have a life to show,

The thing I did, brought out in evidence

Against the thing done to me underground

By hell and all its brood, for aught I know?

I say, whence sprang this? shows it faith or doubt?

All’s doubt in me; where’s break of faith in this?

It is the idea, the feeling and the love,

God means mankind should strive for and show forth

Whatever be the process to that end,—

And not historic knowledge, logic sound,

And metaphysical acumen, sure!

“What think ye of Christ,” friend? when all’s done and said,

Like you this Christianity or not?

It may be false, but will you wish it true?

Has it your vote to be so if it can?

Trust you an instinct silenced long ago

That will break silence and enjoin you love

What mortified philosophy is hoarse,

And all in vain, with bidding you despise?

If you desire faith—then you’ve faith enough:

What else seeks God—nay, what else seek ourselves?

You form a notion of me, we’ll suppose,

On hearsay; it’s a favourable one:

“But still” (you add), “there was no such good man,

“Because of contradiction in the facts.

“One proves, for instance, he was born in Rome,

“This Blougram; yet throughout the tales of him

“I see he figures as an Englishman.”

Well, the two things are reconcileable.

But would I rather you discovered that,

Subjoining—“Still, what matter though they be?

“Blougram concerns me nought, born here or there.”

Pure faith indeed—you know not what you ask!

Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,

Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much

The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.

It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare

Some think, Creation’s meant to show him forth:

I say it’s meant to hide him all it can,

And that’s what all the blessed evil’s for.

Its use in Time is to environ us,

Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough

Against that sight till we can bear its stress.

Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain

And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart

Less certainly would wither up at once

Than mind, confronted with the truth of him.

But time and earth case-harden us to live;

The feeblest sense is trusted most; the child

Feels God a moment, ichors o’er the place,

Plays on and grows to be a man like us.

With me, faith means perpetual unbelief

Kept quiet like the snake ’neath Michael’s foot

Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

Or, if that’s too ambitious,—here’s my box—

I need the excitation of a pinch

Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose

Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes.

“Leave it in peace” advise the simple folk:

Make it aware of peace by itching-fits,

Say I—let doubt occasion still more faith!

You’ll say, once all believed, man, woman, child,

In that dear middle-age these noodles praise.

How you’d exult if I could put you back

Six hundred years, blot out cosmogony,

Geology, ethnology, what not

(Greek endings, each the little passing-bell

That signifies some faith’s about to die),

And set you square with Genesis again,—

When such a traveller told you his last news,

He saw the ark a-top of Ararat

But did not climb there since ’t was getting dusk

And robber-bands infest the mountain’s foot!

How should you feel, I ask, in such an age,

How act? As other people felt and did;

With soul more blank than this decanter’s knob,

Believe—and yet lie, kill, rob, fornicate

Full in belief’s face, like the beast you’d be!

No, when the fight begins within himself,

A man’s worth something. God stoops o’er his head,

Satan looks up between his feet—both tug—

He’s left, himself, i’ the middle: the soul wakes

And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!

Never leave growing till the life to come!

Here, we’ve got callous to the Virgin’s winks

That used to puzzle people wholesomely:

Men have outgrown the shame of being fools.

What are the laws of nature, not to bend

If the Church bid them?—brother Newman asks.

Up with the Immaculate Conception, then—

On to the rack with faith!—is my advice.

Will not that hurry us upon our knees,

Knocking our breasts, “It can’t be—yet it shall!

“Who am I, the worm, to argue with my Pope?

“Low things confound the high things!” and so forth.

That’s better than acquitting God with grace

As some folk do. He’s tried—no case is proved,

Philosophy is lenient—he may go!

You’ll say, the old system’s not so obsolete

But men believe still: ay, but who and where?

King Bomba’s lazzaroni foster yet

The sacred flame, so Antonelli writes;

But even of these, what ragamuffin-saint

Believes God watches him continually,

As he believes in fire that it will burn,

Or rain that it will drench him? Break fire’s law,

Sin against rain, although the penalty

Be just a singe or soaking? “No,” he smiles;

“Those laws are laws that can enforce themselves.”

The sum of all is—yes, my doubt is great,

My faith’s still greater, then my faith’s enough.

I have read much, thought much, experienced much,

Yet would die rather than avow my fear

The Naples’ liquefaction may be false,

When set to happen by the palace-clock

According to the clouds or dinner-time.

I hear you recommend, I might at least

Eliminate, decrassify my faith

Since I adopt it; keeping what I must

And leaving what I can—such points as this.

I won’t—that is, I can’t throw one away.

Supposing there’s no truth in what I hold

About the need of trial to man’s faith,

Still, when you bid me purify the same,

To such a process I discern no end.

Clearing off one excrescence to see two,

There’s ever a next in size, now grown as big,

That meets the knife: I cut and cut again!

First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last

But Fichte’s clever cut at God himself?

Experimentalize on sacred things!

I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain

To stop betimes: they all get drunk alike.

The first step, I am master not to take.

You’d find the cutting-process to your taste

As much as leaving growths of lies unpruned,

Nor see more danger in it,—you retort.

Your taste’s worth mine; but my taste proves more wise

When we consider that the steadfast hold

On the extreme end of the chain of faith

Gives all the advantage, makes the difference

With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule:

We are their lords, or they are free of us,

Just as we tighten or relax our hold.

So, others matters equal, we’ll revert

To the first problem—which, if solved my way

And thrown into the balance, turns the scale—

How we may lead a comfortable life,

How suit our luggage to the cabin’s size.

Of course you are remarking all this time

How narrowly and grossly I view life,

Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule

The masses, and regard complacently

“The cabin,” in our old phrase. Well, I do.

I act for, talk for, live for this world now,

As this world prizes action, life and talk:

No prejudice to what next world may prove,

Whose new laws and requirements, my best pledge

To observe then, is that I observe these now,

Shall do hereafter what I do meanwhile.

Let us concede (gratuitously though)

Next life relieves the soul of body, yields

Pure spiritual enjoyment: well, my friend,

Why lose this life i’ the meantime, since its use

May be to make the next life more intense?

Do you know, I have often had a dream

(Work it up in your next month’s article)

Of man’s poor spirit in its progress, still

Losing true life for ever and a day

Through ever trying to be and ever being—

In the evolution of successive spheres—

Before its actual sphere and place of life,

Halfway into the next, which having reached,

It shoots with corresponding foolery

Halfway into the next still, on and off!

As when a traveller, bound from North to South,

Scouts fur in Russia: what’s its use in France?

In France spurns flannel: where’s its need in Spain?

In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!

Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,

A superfluity at Timbuctoo.

When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?

I’m at ease now, friend; worldly in this world,

I take and like its way of life; I think

My brothers, who administer the means,

Live better for my comfort—that’s good too;

And God, if he pronounce upon such life,

Approves my service, which is better still.

If he keep silence,—why, for you or me

Or that brute beast pulled-up in to-day’s “Times,”

What odds is’t, save to ourselves, what life we lead?

You meet me at this issue: you declare,—

All special-pleading done with—truth is truth,

And justifies itself by undreamed ways.

You don’t fear but it’s better, if we doubt,

To say so, act up to our truth perceived

However feebly. Do then,—act away!

’T is there I’m on the watch for you. How one acts

Is, both of us agree, our chief concern:

And how you’ll act is what I fain would see

If, like the candid person you appear,

You dare to make the most of your life’s scheme

As I of mine, live up to its full law

Since there’s no higher law that counterchecks.

Put natural religion to the test

You’ve just demolished the revealed with—quick,

Down to the root of all that checks your will,

All prohibition to lie, kill and thieve,

Or even to be an atheistic priest!

Suppose a pricking to incontinence—

Philosophers deduce you chastity

Or shame, from just the fact that at the first

Whoso embraced a woman in the field,

Threw club down and forewent his brains beside,

So, stood a ready victim in the reach

Of any brother savage, club in hand;

Hence saw the use of going out of sight

In wood or cave to prosecute his loves:

I read this in a French book t’ other day.

Does law so analysed coerce you much?

Oh, men spin clouds of fuzz where matters end,

But you who reach where the first thread begins,

You’ll soon cut that!—which means you can, but won’t,

Through certain instincts, blind, unreasoned-out,

You dare not set aside, you can’t tell why,

But there they are, and so you let them rule.

Then, friend, you seem as much a slave as I,

A liar, conscious coward and hypocrite,

Without the good the slave expects to get,

In case he has a master after all!

You own your instincts? why, what else do I,

Who want, am made for, and must have a God

Ere I can be aught, do aught?—no mere name

Want, but the true thing with what proves its truth,

To wit, a relation from that thing to me,

Touching from head to foot—which touch I feel,

And with it take the rest, this life of ours!

I live my life here; yours you dare not live.

—Not as I state it, who (you please subjoin)

Disfigure such a life and call it names,

While, to your mind, remains another way

For simple men: knowledge and power have rights,

But ignorance and weakness have rights too.

There needs no crucial effort to find truth

If here or there or anywhere about:

We ought to turn each side, try hard and see,

And if we can’t, be glad we’ve earned at least

The right, by one laborious proof the more,

To graze in peace earth’s pleasant pasturage.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes:

Something we may see, all we cannot see.

What need of lying? I say, I see all,

And swear to each detail the most minute

In what I think a Pan’s face—you, mere cloud:

I swear I hear him speak and see him wink,

For fear, if once I drop the emphasis,

Mankind may doubt there’s any cloud at all.

You take the simple life—ready to see,

Willing to see (for no cloud’s worth a face)—

And leaving quiet what no strength can move,

And which, who bids you move? who has the right?

I bid you; but you are God’s sheep, not mine:

“Pastor est tui Dominus.” You find

In this the pleasant pasture of our life

Much you may eat without the least offence,

Much you don’t eat because your maw objects,

Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock

Open great eyes at you and even butt,

And thereupon you like your mates so well

You cannot please yourself, offending them;

Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep,

You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats

And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears

Restrain you, real checks since you find them so;

Sometimes you please yourself and nothing checks:

And thus you graze through life with not one lie,

And like it best.

But do you, in truth’s name?

If so, you beat—which means you are not I—

Who needs must make earth mine and feed my fill

Not simply unbutted at, unbickered with,

But motioned to the velvet of the sward

By those obsequious wethers’ very selves.

Look at me, sir; my age is double yours:

At yours, I knew beforehand, so enjoyed,

What now I should be—as, permit the word,

I pretty well imagine your whole range

And stretch of tether twenty years to come.

We both have minds and bodies much alike:

In truth’s name, don’t you want my bishopric,

My daily bread, my influence and my state?

You’re young. I’m old; you must be old one day;

Will you find then, as I do hour by hour,

Women their lovers kneel to, who cut curls

From your fat lap-dog’s ear to grace a brooch—

Dukes, who petition just to kiss your ring—

With much beside you know or may conceive?

Suppose we die to-night: well, here am I,

Such were my gains, life bore this fruit to me,

While writing all the same my articles

On music, poetry, the fictile vase

Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon’s Greek.

But you—the highest honour in your life,

The thing you’ll crown yourself with, all your days,

Is—dining here and drinking this last glass

I pour you out in sign of amity

Before we part for ever. Of your power

And social influence, worldly worth in short,

Judge what’s my estimation by the fact,

I do not condescend to enjoin, beseech,

Hint secrecy on one of all these words!

You’re shrewd and know that should you publish one

The world would brand the lie—my enemies first,

Who’d sneer—“the bishop’s an arch-hypocrite

“And knave perhaps, but not so frank a fool.”

Whereas I should not dare for both my ears

Breathe one such syllable, smile one such smile,

Before the chaplain who reflects myself—

My shade’s so much more potent than your flesh.

What’s your reward, self-abnegating friend?

Stood you confessed of those exceptional

And privileged great natures that dwarf mine—

A zealot with a mad ideal in reach,

A poet just about to print his ode,

A statesman with a scheme to stop this war,

An artist whose religion is his art—

I should have nothing to object: such men

Carry the fire, all things grow warm to them,

Their drugget’s worth my purple, they beat me.

But you,—you’re just as little those as I—

You, Gigadibs, who, thirty years of age,

Write statedly for Blackwood’s Magazine,

Believe you see two points in Hamlet’s soul

Unseized by the Germans yet—which view you’ll print—

Meantime the best you have to show being still

That lively lightsome article we took

Almost for the true Dickens,—what’s its name?

“The Slum and Cellar, or Whitechapel life

“Limned after dark!” it made me laugh, I know,

And pleased a month, and brought you in ten pounds.

—Success I recognize and compliment,

And therefore give you, if you choose, three words

(The card and pencil-scratch is quite enough)

Which whether here, in Dublin or New York,

Will get you, prompt as at my eyebrow’s wink,

Such terms as never you aspired to get

In all our own reviews and some not ours.

Go write your lively sketches! be the first

“Blougram, or The Eccentric Confidence”—

Or better simply say, “The Outward-bound.”

Why, men as soon would throw it in my teeth

As copy and quote the infamy chalked broad

About me on the church-door opposite.

You will not wait for that experience though,

I fancy, howsoever you decide,

To discontinue—not detesting, not

Defaming, but at least—despising me!

Over his wine so smiled and talked his hour

Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus

Episcopus, nec non—(the deuce knows what

It’s changed to by our novel hierarchy)

With Gigadibs the literary man,

Who played with spoons, explored his plate’s design,

And ranged the olive-stones about its edge,

While the great bishop rolled him out a mind

Long crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth.

For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.

The other portion, as he shaped it thus

For argumentatory purposes,

He felt his foe was foolish to dispute.

Some arbitrary accidental thoughts

That crossed his mind, amusing because new,

He chose to represent as fixtures there,

Invariable convictions (such they seemed

Beside his interlocutor’s loose cards

Flung daily down, and not the same way twice)

While certain hell deep instincts, man’s weak tongue

Is never bold to utter in their truth

Because styled hell-deep (’t is an old mistake

To place hell at the bottom of the earth)

He ignored these,—not having in readiness

Their nomenclature and philosophy:

He said true things, but called them by wrong names.

“On the whole,” he thought, “I justify myself

“On every point where cavillers like this

“Oppugn my life: he tries one kind of fence,

“I close, he’s worsted, that’s enough for him.

“He’s on the ground: if ground should break away

“I take my stand on, there’s a firmer yet

“Beneath it, both of us may sink and reach.

“His ground was over mine and broke the first:

“So, let him sit with me this many a year!”

He did not sit five minutes. Just a week

Sufficed his sudden healvehemence.

Something had struck him in the “Outward-bound”

Another way than Blougram’s purpose was:

And having bought, not cabin-furniture

But settler’s-implements (enough for three)

And started for Australia—there, I hope,

By this time he has tested his first plough,

And studied his last chapter of St. John.

14
Fra Lippo Lippi6

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!

You need not clap your torches to my face.

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

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

And here you catch me at an alley’s end

Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up,

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

Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,

And nip each softling of a wee white mouse,

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

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

Your hand away that’s fiddling on my throat,

And please to know me likewise. Who am I?

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

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

Master—a ... Cosimo of the Medici,

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

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

How you affected such a gullet’s-gripe!

But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves

Pick up a manner nor discredit you:

Zooks, are we pilchards, that they sweep the streets

And count fair prize what comes into their net?

He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!

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

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

Drink out this quarter-florin to the health

Of the munificent House that harbours me

(And many more beside, lads! more beside!)

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

His, elbowing on his comrade in the door

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

John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair

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

And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!

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

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

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

What, Brother Lippo’s doings, up and down,

You know them and they take you? like enough!

I saw the proper twinkle in your eye—

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

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

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

To roam the town and sing out carnival,

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

A-painting for the great man, saints and saints

And saints again. I could not paint all night —

Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.

There came a hurry of feet and little feet,

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

Flower o’ the broom,

Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!

Flower o’ the quince,

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

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

Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter

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

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

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

Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,

All the bed-furniture—a dozen knots,

There was a ladder! Down I let myself,

Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,

And after them. I came up with the fun

Hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met, —

Flower o’ the rose,

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

And so as I was stealing back again

To get to bed and have a bit of sleep

Ere I rise up tomorrow and go work

On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast

With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,

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

Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head—

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

If Master Cosimo announced himself,

Mum’s the word naturally; but a monk!

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

I was a baby when my mother died

And father died and left me in the street.

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

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

Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,

My stomach being empty as your hat,

The wind doubled me up and down I went.

Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,

(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)

And so along the wall, over the bridge,

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

While I stood munching my first bread that month:

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

Wiping his own mouth, ’twas refection-time,—

“To quit this very miserable world?

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

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

I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,

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

Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici

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

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

’Twas not for nothing—the good bellyful,

The warm serge and the rope that goes all round,

And day-long blessed idleness beside!

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

Not overmuch their way, I must confess.

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

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

Flower o’ the clove,

All the Latin I construe is, “amo” I love!

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

Eight years together, as my fortune was,

Watching folk’s faces to know who will fling

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

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

Which gentleman processional and fine,

Holding a candle to the Sacrament,

Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch

The droppings of the wax to sell again,

Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped,—

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

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

Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,

He learns the look of things, and none the less

For admonition from the hunger-pinch.

I had a store of such remarks, be sure,

Which, after I found leisure, turned to use.

I drew men’s faces on my copy-books,

Scrawled them within the antiphonary’s marge,

Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes,

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

And made a string of pictures of the world

Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,

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

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

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

What if at last we get our man of parts,

We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese

And Preaching Friars, to do our church up fine

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

And hereupon he bade me daub away.

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

Never was such prompt disemburdening.

First, every sort of monk, the black and white,

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

From good old gossips waiting to confess

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

To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,

Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there

With the little children round him in a row

Of admiration, half for his beard and half

For that white anger of his victim’s son

Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,

Signing himself with the other because of Christ

(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this

After the passion of a thousand years)

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

(Which the intense eyes looked through) came at eve

On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,

Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers

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

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

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

And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall.

The monks closed in a circle and praised loud

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

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

Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!

That woman’s like the Prior’s niece who comes

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

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

Their betters took their turn to see and say:

The Prior and the learned pulled a face

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

Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!

Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true

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

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

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

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

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

It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe—

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

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

Give us no more of body than shows soul!

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

That sets us praising,—why not stop with him?

Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head

With wonder at lines, colours, and what not?

Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!

Rub all out, try at it a second time.

Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,

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

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

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

A fine way to paint soul, by painting body

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

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

When what you put for yellow’s simply black,

And any sort of meaning looks intense

When all beside itself means and looks naught.

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

Left foot and right foot, go a double step,

Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,

Both in their order? Take the prettiest face,

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

You can’t discover if it means hope, fear,

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

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

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

And then add soul and heighten them threefold?

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

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

If you get simple beauty and naught else,

You get about the best thing God invents:

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

Within yourself, when you return him thanks.

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

And so the thing has gone on ever since.

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

You should not take a fellow eight years old

And make him swear to never kiss the girls.

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

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

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

Those great rings serve more purposes than just

To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse!

And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes

Are peeping o’er my shoulder as I work,

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

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

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

Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:

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

Flower o’ the pine,

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

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

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

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

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

To please them—sometimes do and sometimes don’t;

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

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

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

(Flower o’ the peach,

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

And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,

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

And I do these wild things in sheer despite,

And play the fooleries you catch me at,

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

After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,

Although the miller does not preach to him

The only good of grass is to make chaff.

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

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

Settled for ever one way. As it is,

You tell too many lies and hurt yourself:

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

You do like what, if given at your word,

You find abundantly detestable.

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

I always see the garden and God there

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

The value and significance of flesh,

I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
You understand me: I’m a beast, I know.

But see, now—why, I see as certainly

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

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

Come to our convent, studies what I do,

Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop:

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

They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk—

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

I hope so—though I never live so long,

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

You speak no Latin more than I, belike;

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

—The beauty and the wonder and the power,

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

Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!

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

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

The mountain round it and the sky above,

Much more the figures of man, woman, child,

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

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,

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

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

Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

God’s works—paint anyone, and count it crime

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

Are here already; nature is complete:

Suppose you reproduce her”—(which you can’t)

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

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

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

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

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

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,

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

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

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

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

Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh,

It makes me mad to see what men shall do

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

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

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

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

It does not say to folk—remember matins,

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

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

Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what’s best,

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

I painted a Saint Laurence six months since

At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style:

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

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

“Already not one phiz of your three slaves

Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,

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

The pious people have so eased their own

With coming to say prayers there in a rage:

We get on fast to see the bricks beneath.

Expect another job this time next year,

For pity and religion grow i’ the crowd—

Your painting serves its purpose!” Hang the fools!
—That is—you’ll not mistake an idle word

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

Tasting the air this spicy night which turns

The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine!

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

It’s natural a poor monk out of bounds

Should have his apt word to excuse himself:

And hearken how I plot to make amends.

I have bethought me: I shall paint a piece

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

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

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

God in their midst, Madonna and her babe,

Ringed by a bowery flowery angel-brood,

Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet

As puff on puff of grated orris-root

When ladies crowd to Church at midsummer.

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

Saint John, because he saves the Florentines,

Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white

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

And Job, I must have him there past mistake,

The man of Uz (and Us without the z,

Painters who need his patience). Well, all these

Secured at their devotion, up shall come

Out of a corner when you least expect,

As one by a dark stair into a great light,

Music and talking, who but Lippo! I!—

Mazed, motionless and moonstruck—I’m the man!

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

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

My old serge gown and rope that goes all round,

I, in this presence, this pure company!

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

Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing

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

—Addresses the celestial presence, “nay—

He made you and devised you, after all,

Though he’s none of you! Could Saint John there draw—

His camel-hair make up a painting-brush?

We come to brother Lippo for all that,

Iste perfecit opus!” So, all smile—

I shuffle sideways with my blushing face

Under the cover of a hundred wings

Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay

And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,

Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops

The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off

To some safe bench behind, not letting go

The palm of her, the little lily thing

That spoke the good word for me in the nick,

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

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

A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!

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

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

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

Notes

↑1 Charlotte Mason referred to this poem in Vol 4 Book II pg 139 and Vol. 6 pg. 133

The statue referred to has been identified by John Pettigrew (in his book Robert Browning: The Poems Vol I.) as the Equestrian Monument of Cosimo I sculpted by John of Douay, or Jean de Boulogne of Douai, better known as Giambologna in Florence, Italy. The bust is imaginary. In a letter dated April 22, 1888, to Edmund Yates, Browning wrote: “There are niches in the palace wall where such a bust might have been placed…” There are notes online in this pdf file. This poem has 82 little verses; you might read about 8 verses a day, taking two weeks to go through this poem.

↑2 Charlotte Mason quoted this poem in vol 4 Book II pg 186. You might read this poem over a week or two.

↑3 from CM’s Vol. 6, pg 331; the second stanza is most quoted. One stanza a day is a suggested way to divide this poem.

↑4 mentioned in CM’s vol. 3, pg. 124; with 53 verses, this poem could be spread over a week, reading about ten verses a day, or two weeks reading five verses a day.

↑5 Charlotte Mason quotes this poem in vol 3, pg 90

↑6 Charlotte Mason quoted from this poem in Vol 6, pg. 215

Table of Contents

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

- 1 Sonnet II
- 2 Sonnet XLIII
- 3 Sonnet XLIV
- 4 The Best Thing in the World
- 5 Grief
- 6 The Sleep

- Robert Browning

- Robert Browning’s first Love letter to Elizabeth

- 7 Among the Rocks
- 8 My Star
- 9 The Statue and the Bust

- 10 An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician

- 11 Three Songs from Paracelsus
- 12 By the Fire-Side
- 13 Bishop Blougram’s Apology
- 14 Fra Lippo Lippi

- Notes