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Cornell University Library 
 
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 Victorian poets. 
 
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Cornell University 
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UNIVERSITY EXTENSION -SERIES 
 
 Edited by J. E. Symes, M.A,, 
 Principal of University College, Nottingham 
 
 VICTORIAN POETS 
 
Under the above title Messrs. Methuen are publishing a series of books 
 on historical, literary, and economic subjects, suitable for extension students 
 and home-reading circles. The volumes are intended to assist the lecturer, 
 and not to usurp his place. Each volume will be complete in itself, and the 
 subjects will be treated by competent writers in a broad and philosophic 
 spirit. 
 
 Crown Svo, 2s. 6d. 
 THE INDtlSTEIAI. HISTOEY OP ENGLAND. By H. de B. Gibbins, 
 M.A. With Maps. 
 
 "A compact and clear story of our industrial development. A study of 
 his concise but luminous book cannot fail to give the reader a clear insight 
 into the principal phenomena of our industrial history. The editor and 
 publishers are to be congratulated on this first volume of their venture, and 
 we shall look with expectant interest for the succeeding volumes of the series, 
 if they maintain the same standard of excellence the series will make a per- 
 manent place for itself among the many series which appear from time to 
 time." — U7iiversity Exiension Journal. 
 
 A SHOET HISTORY OE POLITICAI ECONOMY IN ENGLAND, FEOM 
 ADAM SMITH TO AENOLD TOYNBEE. By L. L. Price, M.A. 
 
 PEOBLEMS OF POVERTY : An Inquiry into the Industrial Condition of 
 the Poor. By J. A. Hobson, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH SOCIAL EEFOEMEES. By H. de B. Gibbins, M.A. 
 
 TEADE AND FINANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH C£NTUEY. By W. 
 A. S. Hewiris, M.A. 
 
 VICTORIAN POETS. By A. Sharp, Newnham College, Cambridge. 
 
 SHAXESPEAEE. By F. H. Trench, M.A. 
 
 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By G. C. Moore-Smith, M.A. 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By J. E. Symes, M.A. \Sliortly. 
 
 NAPOLEON. By E. L. S. Horsburgh, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH POLITICAL HISTORY. By T. J. Lawrence, M.A. 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY. By F. S. Granger, M.A. [Shortly. 
 
 AN INTRODTTCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. By J. Solomon, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH PAINTEES, By D. S. Maccoll, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH AEOHITECTTJEE. Illustrated. By Ernest Radford, M.A. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF PLANT LIFE: Lower Forma. Illustrated. By 
 G. Massee. \_Shortly. 
 
 THE CHEMISTRY OF LIFE AND HEALTH. Illustrated. By C. W. 
 
 KiMMINS, M.A. 
 
 AIR AND WATER. By V. B. Lewes, M.A. 
 
VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 Bv AMY SHARP 
 
 Newnham College, Cambridge 
 University Extension Local Secretary, Rugby Ce?itre 
 
 ' I give you the end of a golden string, 
 
 Only wind it into a ball ; 
 It will lead you in at Heaven's gate. 
 Built in Jerusalem's wall.' 
 
 Blake. 
 
 Jletfjum k Co. 
 
 i8, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C. 
 1891 
 
 [All Tights reserved} 
 
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, ' 
 London & Bungay. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LIST OF BOOKS ... ... ... ... ... vH 
 
 RECORD OF DATES ... ... ... ... X 
 
 INTRODUCTION Xvii 
 
 I. ALFRED TENNYSON I 
 
 II. ROBERT BROWNING ... ... ... ... 40 
 
 III. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING IO3 
 
 IV. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 121 
 
 V. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MORRIS, 
 
 AND ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE ... 157 
 
 VI. MINOR POETS 186 
 
 INDEX ... ... 205 
 
BOOKS. 
 
 [The most valuable books are marked with two asterisks ; those 
 marked with one asterisk come next in importance. ] 
 
 I. Poets' Works. 
 
 Tennyson. ' Works,' 7 vols., Macmillan, Jx each. 
 
 **' Works,' I vol. (complete to year 1880), yj. 6d. 
 R. Browning. 'Works,' 16 vols., Smith & Elder, 5^. each. 
 (* Pippa Passes, vol. iii., * Colombe's Birthday, vol. iv., 
 * The Ring and the Book, vols. viii. — x.) 
 **' Selections,' 2 vols., 3^. dd. each. 
 ' Selections,' i vol., \s. 
 E. B. Browning. ' Works,' 6 vols., Smith & Elder, 51. each. 
 ** ' Selections,' 2 vols., y. 6d. each. 
 * ' Aurora Leigh,' Ts. 6d, 
 A. H. Clough. ** ' Poems,' Macmillan, 7s. 6d. 
 M. Arnold. 'Poems,' 3 vols., Macmillan, js. 6d. each. 
 ** ' Complete Poetical Works,' i vol., 7s. 6d. 
 *' Selections,' 4s. 6d. 
 D. G. Rossetti. **' Works,' 2 vols., Ellis & Elvey, i8.r. 
 W. Morris. * ' Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems,' 
 Reeves & Turner, Ss. 
 
 **'The Earthly Paradise,' 10 parts, y. 6d. each, or 
 I vol., 7s. 6d. 
 
 * ' Story of Sigurd the Volsung,' 6s. 
 A. C. Swinburne. **' Selections,' Chatto & Windus, 6s. 
 * ' Atalanta in Calydon,' 6s. 
 *' Songs before Sunrise,' 10s. 6d. 
 
viii BOOKS. 
 
 II. Books of Criticism and Reference. 
 
 ' The most valuable critic is the critic who communicates sympathy by 
 an e-xquisite record of his own delights.' — E. DowDEN. 
 
 (A) General. 
 
 Abbott and Seeley. * English Lessons for English People 
 
 (chapters on the Diction of Poetry and Metre), Seeley, 
 
 Jackson & Halliday, 4j. bd. 
 M. Arnold. * Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series (The Study of 
 
 Poetry), Macmillan, yj. dd. 
 E. C. Stedman. * Victorian Poets, Chatto & Windus, gj. 
 H. Buxton Forman. Our Living Poets. 
 R. H. Hutton. * Literary Essays (Tennyson, Browning, 
 
 Clough, Arnold), Macmillan, ^s. 
 E. Dowden. Transcripts and Studies (Victorian Literature) ; 
 
 Studies in Literaticre (Tennyson, Browning). 
 A. C. Swinburne. Essays and Studies (Rossetti, Morris, 
 
 Arnold), Chatto & Windus, \zs. 
 T. H. Ward. The English Poets, vol. iv., Macmillan, 7j. dd. 
 
 (B) Special. 
 
 For Tennyson. Lord Tennyson : A Biographical Sketch, by 
 H. J. Jennings. Chatto & Windus, 6s. 
 Tennysoniana, R. H. Shepherd. 
 The Poetry of Tennyson, H. Van Dyke. 
 
 * A Key to Tennyson's ' In Memoriaml A. Gatty, 3 j. 615?. ; 
 
 or, 
 
 * An Analysis of'In Memoriam^ F. W. Robertson. Kegan 
 
 Paul, 2j. (also reprinted in Robertson's ' Lectures, 
 
 Addresses, and Literary Remains,' 5j.) 
 Studies in Tennyson's Idylls, H. Elsdale. Kegan Paul, Ss. 
 Taine's History of English [Literature (English Trans.), 
 
 Book v., ch. iii. Chatto & Windus, ijj. 
 Notes to Selected Lyrics, by F. T. Palgrave. Macmillan, 
 
 45. 6d. 
 For R. Browning. Bibliography, F. J. Furnivall. Triibner 
 
 &Co. 
 
BOOKS. ix 
 
 *A Handbook to the Works of R. Browning, Mrs. Suther- 
 land Orr. George Bell, ts. 
 An Introduction to the Study of Browning, A. Symons, 
 
 2J-. dd. 
 Essays on R. Brownings Poetry, J. T. Nettleship, yj. 6(/. 
 Studies in the Poetry of R. Browning, J. Fotheringham, 6j. 
 Essay on Browning in Obita Dicta, ist Series, A. Birrell. 
 For E. B. Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, J. H. 
 
 Ingram (Eminent Women Series). 
 For A. H. Clough. Literary Studies, vol. ii., Bagehot. 
 For D. G. Rossetti. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, W. M. Rossetti, 
 •js. 6d. 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J. Knight (Great Writers Series), is. 
 Recollections of D. G. Rossetti, T. Hall Caine. 
 * Article in Encyl. Brit., by Theodore Watts. 
 For Sonnet Structure. Milton's Sonnets, edited with Intro- 
 duction and Notes by Mark Pattison. Kegan Paul, 6s. 
 
 III. Some Minor Poetry. 
 
 Emily Bronte. ' Poems by Ellis Bell,' appended to ' The 
 
 Professor,' Smith & Elder, 2s. dd. 
 Jean Ingelow. 'Poems,' 2 vols., Longmans, 12.?. 
 Christina Rossetti. ' Poems,' Macmillan, js. 6d. 
 Mrs. Hamilton King. ' The Disciples,' Kegan Paul, 6.r. 
 George Eliot. ' The Spanish Gypsy,' ' The Legend of Jubal, 
 
 and Other Poems,' Macmillan, each 5.f. 
 William Barnes. ' Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect,' 
 
 Kegan Paul, 8j. 
 ' Fo'c'sl' Yarns,' Macmillan, yj. 6d. 
 Austin Dobson. 'Old World Idylls,' 'At the Sign of the 
 
 Lyre,' Kegan Paul, each 6s. 
 C. S. Calverly. 'Fly Leaves,' Deighton, Bell & Co., zs. 6d. 
 W. G. Courthope. ' The Paradise of Birds,' Hatchards, -js. 6d. 
 Lewis Morris. ' Collected Poems,' i vol., 6s. 
 Sir Edwin Arnold. ' The Light of Asia ' (Lotus Series), 3^. 6d. 
 Charles Kingsley. ' Poems,' Macmillan, is. 6d. 
 James Thomson. ' The City of Dreadful Night,' Jj. 
 Cardinal Newman. ' Verses on Various Occasions,' 3^. 6d. 
 F. W. H. Myers. ' St. Paul,' Macmillan, is. 6d. 
 
RECORD OF DATES. 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 ' In poetry illustrious and consummate ; in friendship noble and sincere.' 
 
 R. Browning. 
 
 1809. Born Aug. 5 at Somersby in Lincolnshire. 
 
 1827. Publication of ' Poems by Two Brothers.' 
 
 1828. Matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 1829. Prize poem on ' Timbuctoo.' 
 
 1830. ' Poems, chiefly Lyrical.' 
 
 \Claribel, Lilian, The Owl, The Merman, Ode to 
 Meinory, Mariana, Recollections of the Arabian 
 Nights, etc.] 
 
 1832. 'Poems.' 
 
 {The Lady of Shalott, Elednore, Margaret, The 
 Miller's Daughter, The Palace of Art, The May 
 Quee7i, Fatima, The Lotos-Eaters, A Dream of 
 Fair Women, etc.] 
 
 1833. ' The Lover's Tale.' 
 
 „ Death of 'A. H. H.'— Arthur Henry Hallam, son of 
 the historian, bom Feb. i, 181 1, was educated at 
 Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated in 
 1832, died suddenly at Vienna on Sept. 15. His 
 body was brought back to England by sea and buried 
 in Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, Jan. 3, 1834. 
 1842. 'Poems,' 2 vols. 
 
 [Morte d' Arthur, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, 
 
 Godiva, Locksley Hall, The Day Dream, St. 
 
 Simeon Stylites, Ulysses, Tithonus, The Lord of 
 
 Burleigh, Sir Galahad, The Vision of Sin, and 
 
 others.] 
 
RECORD OF DATES. xi 
 
 1S47. ' The Princess.' 
 1850. 'In Memoriam.' 
 
 „ Appointed Poet-Laureate in succession to Wordsworth. 
 
 „ Marriage. 
 1852. Death of the Duke of Wellington. 
 
 1854. Battle of Balaclava : 'Charge of the Light Brigade.' 
 
 1855. 'Maud, and Other Poems.' 
 1859. ' Idylls of the King.' 
 
 [Enid, Elaine, Vivien, Guinevere^ 
 1 86 1. Death of the Prince Consort. 
 1S64. 'Enoch Arden, and Other Poems.' 
 1869. ' Idylls of the King.' 
 
 \The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, Coming of 
 Arthur, Passing of Arthur?[ 
 1872. 'Idylls of the King.' 
 
 [Gareih and Lynette, The Last Tournament.'] 
 1875. 'Queen Mary.' 
 1877. 'Harold.' 
 
 1880. 'Ballads and Other Poems.' 
 
 1884. Raised to the Peerage, as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, 
 Surrey, and Farringdon, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 
 Jan. 24. 
 „ ' The Cup.' 
 „ 'Becket' 
 
 „ ' Tiresias, and Other Poems.' 
 1886. Death of Lord Tennyson's younger son. 
 
 ,, ' Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and Other Poems.' 
 1889. ' Demeter, and Other Poems.' 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING, 1812— 1889. 
 
 1812. Born at Camberwell, near London. 
 1833. Publication of ' Pauline.' 
 1835. 'Paracelsus.' 
 1837. 'Strafford.' 
 1840. 'Sordello.' 
 
1 RECORD OF DATES. 
 
 1 84 1. ' Bells and Pomegranates.' i. ' Pippa Passes.' 
 
 1842. „ „ 2. ' King Victor and King 
 
 Charles.' 
 „ 3. ' Dramatic Lyrics.' 
 
 1843. ',' „ 4. 'The Return of the 
 
 Druses.' 
 „ 5. 'A Blot in the 'Scut- 
 
 cheon.' 
 
 1844. J, ,, 6. ' Colombe's Birthday.' 
 
 1845. ,, „ 7- 'Dramatic Romances 
 
 and Lyrics.' 
 1845. „ „ 8. 'Luria,' 'A Soul's 
 
 Tragedy.' 
 „ Marriage to Miss Elizabeth Barrett. 
 
 1849. ' Poems,' 2 vols. 
 
 1850. ' Christmas Eve and Easter Day.' 
 1855. ' Men and Women.' 
 
 [Fifty poems distributed in later editions under 
 various titles.] 
 1861. Death of Mrs. Browning at Florence, June 29. 
 1864. ' Dramatis Persona.' 
 
 1868. ' Collected Poetical Works.' 
 
 „ 'The Ring and the Book,' vols. i. ii. 
 
 1869. „ „ „ vols. iii. iv. 
 
 1 87 1. ' Balaustion's Adventure.' 
 
 ,, ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society.' 
 
 [The Emperor Napoleon IIL of France, 'in whom 
 the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist 
 were inextricably mixed.' — Obita Dicta?[ 
 
 1872. ' Fifine at the Fair.' 
 
 [' There is no harder reading.' — E. C. Stedman.] 
 
 1873. ' Red Cotton Nightcap Country ; or Turf and Towers.' 
 
 1875. ' Aristophanes' Apology ' ; ' The Inn Album.' 
 
 1 876. ' Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper.' 
 
 1877. ' The Agamemnon of yEschylus.' 
 
 1878. 'La Sairiaz' ; 'The Two Poets of Croisic' 
 
 1879. 'Dramatic Idylls,' ist Series. 
 
 1880. „ „ 2nd Series. 
 
RECORD OF DATES. xiii 
 
 1880. Honorary degree of LL.D. conferred at Cambridge. 
 
 1882. Honorary degree of D.C.L. conferred at Oxford. 
 
 1883. 'Jocoseria.' 
 
 1884. ' Ferishtah's Fancies.' 
 
 1887. 'Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their 
 Day.' 
 
 [Of many of these later poems it has been said they 
 must ' have been written solely for the behoof of 
 " The Browning Society," and not for mankind in 
 general.'— R. H. Hutton. The ' Dramatic Idylls ' 
 may be excepted.] 
 1889. 'Asolando.' 
 „ Died at Venice. 
 „ Buried in Westminster Abbey, Dec. 31. 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 1809— i86t. 
 
 1809. Probable date of birth. 
 
 1826. "An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems' (anonymous, 
 
 and not reprinted in collected works). 
 1832. 'Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems.' 
 
 1838. 'The Seraphim, and Other Poems.' 
 
 1839. ' The Romaunt of the Page.' 
 
 1844. 'Poems,' 2 vols, (including 'A Drama of Exile'). 
 1846. Marriage to Robert Browning. 
 
 1849. Birth of their son. 
 
 1850. ' Sonnets from the Portuguese.' 
 „ 'Poems,' 2nd edition. 
 
 1851. ' Casa Guidi Windows.' 
 1856. ' Aurora Leigh.' 
 
 i860. 'Poems before Congress.' 
 
 1861. Death at Florence, June 29. 
 
 1862. 'Last Poems.' 
 
RECORD OF DATES. 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1819— 1861. 
 
 'We have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in many 
 respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to 
 the sterner requirements of his art, will be thought a hundred years hence 
 to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual 
 tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period 
 in which he lived.' — J. R. Lowell, My Study Windows. 
 
 1819. Born at Liverpool, Jan. i. 
 
 1829. Entered at Rugby School. 
 
 1837. Entered at Balliol College, Oxford. 
 
 1842. Elected Fellow of Oriel College. 
 
 1848. Resignation of Fellowship from religious scruples. 
 „ ' Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.' 
 
 1849. 'Ambarvalia' (collection of poems). 
 
 ,, Appointed Principal of University Hall, London. 
 
 „ ' Amours de Voyage.' ) (Written, but not published till 
 
 1850. 'Dipsychus.' ) some years later.) 
 
 1852. Removal to America. 
 
 1853. Appointed Examiner in the Education Office, Whitehall. 
 
 1854. Marriage. 
 
 1 861. Death at Florence, Nov. 13. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 1822— 1888. 
 
 1822. Born at Laleham. 
 
 1845. Elected Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 
 
 1849. 'The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,' by 'A.' 
 
 1851. Marriage. 
 
 „ Appointed H.M. Inspector of Schools. 
 
 1852. 'Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems.' 
 
 1853. 'Poems.' 
 
 1857. Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 
 
 1858. 'Merope.' 
 
RECORD OF DATES. 
 
 1862. Re-elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 
 1876. Collected Poems, 2 vols. 
 1888. Death in April. 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 1828—1882. 
 
 1828. Bom in London, May 12. 
 
 1843. ' Sir Hugh the Heron' privately printed. 
 
 „ Student in Cary's Art Academy. 
 1846. Student at Royal Academy. 
 1848. Works in studio of Ford Madox Brown. 
 
 „ Establishment of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 1850. First number of ' The Germ,' Jan. i. 
 1853. 'Sister Helen' in Dusseldo>f Annual. 
 i860. ]\Iarriage at Hastings to Miss Eleanor Siddall, May 23. 
 
 1861. 'The Early Itahan Poets.' 
 
 1862. Death of Mrs. D. G. Rossetti. 
 
 1870. 'Poems.' 
 
 1 87 1. Controversy with Robert Buchanan. 
 
 1881. 'Ballads and Sonnets.' 
 
 1882. Death at Birchington-on-Sea, Easter Day (April 9). 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 1834. Bom. 
 
 1858. 'The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems' (dedi- 
 cated to Rossetti). 
 
 1865. 'The Life and Death of Jason.' 
 
 1868-70. ' The Earthly Paradise.' 
 
 1869. 'The Story of Grettir the Strong' (translated from the 
 Icelandic by E. Magniisson and W. Morris). 
 
 1872. ' Love is Enough.' 
 
 1875. 'The vEneids of Virgil done into English Verse.' 
 
 1876. 'The Story of Sigurd the Volsung.' 
 
vl RECORD OF DATES. 
 
 1887. 'The Odyssey of Homer done into English Verse.' 
 1889. 'A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the 
 Kindreds of the Mark ' (written partly in prose). 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 1837. Born. 
 
 1861. 'The Queen Mother and Rosamond' (dedicated to 
 Rossetti). 
 
 1864. ' Atalanta in Calydon.' 
 
 1865. 'Chastelard' (ist drama of Mary Stuart Trilogy). 
 
 1866. 'Poems and Ballads,' ist Series. 
 „ 'Notes on Poems and Reviews.' 
 
 1867. 'A Song of Italy.' 
 
 1870. ' Ode on the French Republic' 
 
 1871. ' Songs before Sunrise.' 
 
 1872. 'Under the Microscope.' 
 
 1874. 'Both weir (2nd drama in Mary Stuart Trilogy). 
 1876. 'Erechtheus' (2nd drama after Greek model). 
 1878. 'Poems and Ballads,' 2nd Series. 
 
 1880. ' Studies in Song' ; ' Songs of the Springtides.' 
 
 1 88 1. 'Mary Stuart' (3rd and concluding drama of the 
 
 Trilogy). 
 
 1882. 'Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems.' 
 
 1883. 'A Century of Roundels.' 
 
 1884. 'A Midsummer Holiday.' 
 
 1885. 'Marino Faliero' (drama). 
 1887. ' Locrine ' (drama). 
 
 1889, 'Poems and Ballads,' 3rd Series. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Charles Lamb's delicate humour finds, as usual, an 
 exquisitely quaint and graceful expression for a feeling that 
 many of us must have shared with him, when he says that 
 he wants a form of grace before Poetry, — 'a grace before 
 Milton — a grace before Shakespeare — a devotional exercise 
 proper to be said before reading the Faerie Queene.' With- 
 out the formalism of a form, he distils the very essence of 
 its spirit ; evoking the mood of reverent yet discriminating 
 enthusiasm in which all great poetry is best approached. 
 
 The study of poetry of our own time has one special 
 advantage and more than one difficulty of its own. We are 
 spared the labour of making ourselves acquainted with the 
 language, history, and ideas of another age, which in the 
 case of older poets is a necessary preparation if we wish to 
 gain true insight into the poet's mind. The language of 
 present-day poets is our language ; the ideas which surround 
 them surround us also ; many words and allusions that later 
 on will call for the note of explanation, are a plain tale to 
 us ; we are free to go straight to the heart of the matter, 
 and find out the interpretation offered to us by the seers of 
 our common life. 
 
 One great difficulty in the way of the contemporaries of a 
 great poet lies in the fact that the more original he is, the 
 less possible it can be for him to be immediately under- 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 stood. We are accustomed to gird at the obtuseness of an 
 age that paid twelve pounds for Paradise Lost, or turned a 
 deaf ear and stolid back upon Wordsworth ; but after all, if 
 ordinary minds lived in a state of such ready apprehension 
 as to find nothing strange in the utterances of genius, there 
 would be little need for the revealing power of the great 
 poets at all, and less for the aureole of mingled wonder and 
 admiration that rests upon one whose place among the 
 sacred bards has won its recognition. 
 
 In this respect students of Victorian poetry at the present 
 moment are again fortunate. It is now more than sixty 
 years since Lord Tennyson's first poems were published, 
 and nearly sixty years since Mr. Browning's Pauline ap- 
 peared. The time of indifference or sarcasm that greeted 
 both poets is already safely gone by; no denser medium 
 than our own mental equipment stands between us and 
 what they have to teach. 
 
 An opposite danger is that of making too much of our 
 own age and all that pertains to it. So far as regards the 
 future it would be waste time to speculate upon this possi- 
 bility; but we do need to be on our guard lest an over 
 estimate of our modern poetry should steal away any of our 
 will or ability to burn candles at the older shrines. Not 
 that our individual estimate signifies to the poets, whose 
 ' life and use and name and fame ' are in safe keeping ; but 
 it signifies intensely to ourselves ; and those among us who 
 have a sincere desire not only to know what we like, but to 
 ' approve things that are excellent,' know how difficult it is 
 to attain to a sure and clear judgment concerning them. 
 Here indeed we are brought face to face with a crucial 
 difficulty in the study of all poetry and all art. In the 
 study of recent poetry we are not helped over it so well as 
 
INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 might be expected from the fact that the genius of our 
 century has been so earnestly directed to criticism, because 
 on examination it turns out that divergences of judgment 
 among the leading critics are many, and not unfrequently 
 very serious. There is indeed no royal road to a just judg- 
 ment; we must be content to move along quietly, laying 
 aside here a prejudice, and there, it may be, an early 
 favourite ; gaining now a new perception of beauty, now a 
 glimpse along vistas of meaning hitherto concealed ; the 
 object of our care not being to improve our taste and end 
 as the fastidious connoisseur, but to enter into poetry as 
 an end in itself; or, it may be, to become more capable 
 of sharing in a higher and fuller life than our own, through 
 looking at life as with the eyes of those who have seen it 
 most truly, and have most wisely measured the relative 
 values of its elements. 
 
 Constant companionship with the poets themselves is the 
 best school. The great poet, it has been said, ' is his own 
 best critic ; his noblest conception and mightiest line are 
 the strictest censors of his faulty phrase or unworthy 
 thought' 1 And again, just as we can detect shortcomings 
 in the appointments of a room by imagining some noble 
 work of art — picture or statue — set in the midst of it, 
 so we may, as Matthew Arnold has shown, try poetry as we 
 read it by test lines of unquestioned perfection. Only here 
 too, judgment is needed in the apphcation of our tests, or 
 we may find ourselves breaking butterflies upon the wheel. 
 
 But it would be a great pity to neglect the minor poetry 
 altogether. It is almost certain that many readers miss the 
 enjoyment and enlightenment that might be theirs in the 
 
 ^ Poetry and Life : Inaugural Address by A. C. Bradley, M.A., 
 Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 realms of poetry, because they feel bound to begin at once 
 upon the great works whose names are in all mouths, and 
 finding themselves unable to cope with these, give up poetry 
 altogether, perhaps with an unacknowledged sense of relief, 
 perhaps with a slight feeling of self-contempt. Easier poems 
 and easier writers to begin with, might have led them on to 
 a very different conclusion. The Victorian era is rich in 
 lesser poets, of whom each adds something that we would 
 not as yet willingly lose. 
 
 A word or two about the use of such books as Mr. 
 Robertson's Analysis of In Memoriafn ' and Mrs. Sutherland 
 Orr's Handbook to the Poetry of Robert Browning may not 
 be out of place. Students who intend to take their poetry 
 seriously, will find it a good plan to read their poem first 
 very carefully, going over it again and again if necessary, 
 till the leading idea seems quite plain ; then, and not before, 
 to look at the book's summary and compare their own 
 result with it, returning to the poem itself for confirmation, 
 or for decision if the results differ. Used in this way, not 
 to save thinking but to test it, such aids may be of great 
 service in the mastery of difficult poems. 
 
 The chapters in this little book are of course merely 
 preparatory to the much fuller and more detailed study 
 encouraged by attendance on a course of Lectures. But 
 it is only the poet himself who ' doth not only show the way, 
 but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice 
 any man to enter into it.' 
 
VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 I. ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 ' The peereless Poet . . . commeth to you with words sent in delightfull 
 proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well in- 
 chaunting slcill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth 
 unto you : with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old 
 men from the chimney corner.' — Sir Philip Sidney, Apologie for 
 Poetrie, 
 
 The very early poems of a great poet are commonly 
 more interesting because they are his than because they are 
 poems ; and perhaps Mariana is the only one of Lord 
 Tennyson's earliest publications to be counted amongst the 
 exceptions to this rule. Most readers would have found 
 it hard to forecast from Oriana, The Merman, The Owl, 
 Circumstance, that a consummate artist in verse, a profound 
 interpreter of life, a great lyric poet, had arisen. But look- 
 ing back now with this knowledge safely in our possession it 
 is a pleasant task to trace in a line here and a stanza 
 there, in the turn of a thought or the choice of a subject, 
 the first signs of characteristics marked and perfected in the 
 later work. 
 
 One of the most remarkable of these is to be found in a 
 poem called by the curious name, Confessions of a Second-rate 
 
2 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Mind not at Unity with Itself, for this is the very first of that 
 fine group of modern poems which Tennyson and others 
 after him have devoted to the inner strivings and questionings 
 of the mind that has lost faith in received creeds and 
 doctrines yet clings to the spiritual essence of religion. The 
 longing for a conviction apparently unattainable ; the pain- 
 stricken regret for lost simplicity of faith ; the brave recog- 
 nition that faith cannot be forced in a nature driven by 
 the spirit to toss amongst doubts and fears as irresistibly as 
 the tempest-driven sea must rage and moan ; all these, the 
 thoughts afterwards so much more fully and richly worked 
 out, are there in embryo, and so, too, is the faint promise 
 of a final note of triumph. 
 
 ' It is man's privilege to doubt, 
 If so be that from doubt at length, 
 Truth may stand forth unmoved of change.' 
 
 In another of these ' Early Poems ' there is a suggestion 
 of the coming Palace of Art in the Chai-acter who 
 
 ' stood aloof from other minds 
 In impotence of fancied power.' 
 
 There is a further foretaste of subtlety and strength in the 
 Poet's inheritance — • 
 
 ' Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. 
 The love of love ; ' 
 
 and more than a foretaste in the Ode to Memory of the vivid 
 pictures of landscape that Lord Tennyson's words excel in 
 calling up — 
 
 ' Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side. 
 The seven elms, the poplars four 
 That stand beside my father's door. 
 And chiefly from the brook that loves 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 3 
 
 To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 
 Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 
 Drawing into his narrow earthen urn. 
 
 In every elbow and turn. 
 The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland.' 
 
 Mariana's dreary solitude in her decaying grange shows not 
 only this picturing skill, but also the use which Tennyson often 
 makes of it to heighten, by the setting of natural description, 
 the sense of the human moodVo which he is giving expression. 
 Mariana herself might have felt quite as forlorn and deserted 
 in a trim house and sunny, well-kept garden ; but how much 
 less vividly we should have realised it ! 
 
 ' About a stone-cast from the wall 
 
 A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
 And o'er it many, round and small. 
 The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 
 Hard by a poplar shook alway, 
 
 All silver green, with gnarled bark : 
 For leagues no other tree did mark 
 The level waste, the rounding gray. 
 She only said, " My life is dreary. 
 
 He Cometh not," she said ; 
 She said, " I am aweary, aweary, 
 I would that I were dead." 
 
 ' And ever when the moon was low. 
 
 And the shrill winds were up and away. 
 In the white curtain, to and fro. 
 
 She saw the gusty shadow sway. 
 But when the moon was very low. 
 
 And wild winds bound within their cell, 
 The shadow of the poplar fell 
 Upon her bed, across her brow. 
 
 She only said, " The night is dreary. 
 
 He Cometh not," she said ; 
 She said, " I am aweary, aweary, 
 I would that I were dead. " ' 
 
4 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 The beautiful and finished poems of the next two 
 divisions of Lord Tennyson's works fall naturally into 
 several different groups, each of them marking a distinct 
 line in the wide and varied range of his poetry. But 
 before dwelling in turn upon the most important of these 
 groups, with the later developments that spring out of 
 them, it may be well to notice two leading characteristics 
 which from this time onwards pervade the whole of 
 Tennyson's work, whether slight or important. 
 
 The first is the style, the language, and versification. No 
 one is more keenly alive to the difficulty of expression in 
 ' matter-moulded forms of speech ' ; but few have so 
 effectually subdued this stubborn medium of language to 
 their will. Lord Tennyson has set a new standard of 
 perfection in technical excellence ; his own art is so perfect 
 that we, simply as readers, rarely notice or think about it at 
 all, — when every word seems just what it should be, we are 
 led along in happy unconsciousness of effort, and are even 
 apt to be a little blinded to the power of his work by its 
 faultless execution. Yet Tennyson never for a moment 
 sacrifices meaning to sensuous effect ; indeed, his assured 
 hand is shown quite as much in reticence as in his employ- 
 ment of the words and images that go to produce the 
 felicitous result. But his instinct for words of which not 
 only the sound, but the associations help the thought, 
 though quite unobtrusively, enable him to communicate 
 subtleties of meaning, moods of impalpable delicacy, such 
 as in the hands of a smaller genius must have remained 
 amongst the ' fancies that broke through language, and 
 escaped' ; and to clothe in noble and appealing forms ideas 
 or feelings widely shared with him by others. As Lowell 
 has justly observed — 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. S 
 
 ' Though old the thought and oft exprest, 
 'Tis his at last who says it best ; ' 
 
 and for us Lord Tennyson has said many things best. 
 Many a writer, from Dante and Chaucer onwards, has 
 touched upon the sting of bitterness added to a present 
 grief by the memory of bygone joy ; but for English iiearts 
 that pain seems now uttered once for all in the grave beauty 
 of Tennyson's line — ■ 
 
 ' A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.' 
 
 Sometimes the whole essence of a poem is compressed 
 into a single musical line ; 
 
 ' Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.' 
 
 His choice or invention of metres is equally happy. 
 Observe, for example, how the changing metres of Maud 
 suit the ever-varying moods of the singer; or again how 
 perfectly the peculiar quatrain stanza of In Memoriam 
 harmonises with the sustained tone of grave sorrow, yet 
 never becomes monotonous. In this last case there is an 
 easy means at hand of proving to ourselves how the mind of 
 a great poet stamps the form adopted with its own unique 
 character; the same metre as used by Rossetti in My 
 SisUr's Sleep produces such an entirely different effect. 
 Read three stanzas from each — 
 
 ' The time draws near the birth of Christ ; 
 The moon is hid, the night is still ; 
 A single chui'ch below the hill 
 Is pealing, folded in the mist. 
 
 ' A single peal of bells below, 
 
 That wakens at this hour of rest 
 A single murmur in the breast, 
 That these are not the bells I know. 
 
6 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Like strangers' voices here they sound, 
 In lands where not a memory strays, 
 Nor landmark breathes of other days, 
 But all is new unhallow'd ground.' 
 
 In Meinoriam. 
 
 ' She fell asleep on Christmas Eve, 
 
 At length the long ungranted shade 
 Of weary eyelids overweigh'd 
 The pain nought else might yet relieve. 
 
 * * * 
 
 ' Without, there was a cold'moon up. 
 Of winter radiance sheer and thin ; 
 The hollow halo it was in 
 Was like an icy crystal cup. 
 
 * * * 
 
 ' Twelve struck. That sound by'dwindling years 
 Heard in each hour, crept off; and then 
 The ruffled silence spread again, 
 Like water that a pebble stirs. ' 
 
 My Sister's Sleep. 
 
 Close examination of the distribution of pauses, accents, 
 alliteration, exhibit the poet's technical skill, but through 
 and beyond all this there remains the indefinable something, 
 not to be analysed nor described, but only felt, which 
 distinguishes the style of one original poet from another. 
 Even the old-established English metre, the ten-syllabled 
 blank verse, takes a new character as Lord Tennyson shapes 
 it to his purpose. 
 
 ' So all day long the noise of battle roU'd 
 Among the mountains, by the winter sea. ' 
 
 ' " I heard the water lapping on the crag, 
 And the long ripple washing in the reeds." ' 
 
 It would be impossible to mistake that for the blank verse 
 of Milton or Cowper or Wordsworth or Shelley. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 7 
 
 Lord Tennyson has another inexhaustible resource in 
 his knowledge of nature and the varied uses he can make 
 of it. It is simple truth that no other poet has brought to 
 his work such a naturalist's powers of minute observation, 
 an endowment of knowledge so wide and so lovingly 
 accurate in detail. Many of his innumerable nature-touches 
 may easily escape the hasty reader, or even a careful reader, 
 who knows little of nature at first hand, so delicate are 
 they ; but they provide a rich mine for the lover of nature. 
 Tennyson's attitude towards these things is quite different 
 from Wordsworth's ; to him the meanest flowers that blow 
 do not give ' thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears ' ; 
 but he takes such pure joy in the things themselves for their 
 own sakes that the reader must be very dull indeed of soul 
 who is not led to enjoy them also. And not a few of us 
 will furthermore be led to wonder at our own contrasting 
 blindness. How many will undertake to say for certain, 
 without purposely looking to see, the number of divisions 
 into which the green case of a horse-chestnut splits when 
 the nut is ripe? — a sight we must all have had before our 
 eyes scores of times. Tennyson makes no parade whatever 
 of telling us such things; he always seems to take it for 
 granted that his own store of knowledge is common pro- 
 perty, and constantly uses such details in illustration as 
 being the most familiar matters of every-day experience by 
 which to explain the less known. In this case he incident- 
 ally describes the colour of auburn hair — 
 
 ' In gloss and hue the chestnut when the shell 
 Divides three-fold to show the fruit within.' 
 
 Readers of Mrs. Gaskell's delightful story, Cranford, will 
 thank me for reminding them of the remarkable passage 
 
8 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 where Miss Matty's whilom lover, the rough-spoken, true- 
 hearted farmer, Mr. Holbrook, dwells with such self-shamed 
 delight on the famous ' black as ash-buds in March,' or the 
 cedar's ' layers of shade.' Is there any other poet who has 
 noticed, or at least recorded, the change in the lark's song 
 as he nears ' his happy home, the ground ' ? 
 
 ' Realms of upland, prodigal in oil 
 
 And hoary to the wind.' — Palace of Art. 
 
 ' Hoary to the wind.' How the silver-backed, gray-green 
 olive leaves wave before us at the words ! Here is the 
 effect of an ill-natured woman — 
 
 ' All my heart turn'd from her as a thorn 
 Turns from the sea.' 
 
 The snowdrop has been utilised as an emblem of purity 
 perhaps more than enough ; but it is Tennyson who observes 
 that the comparison is truest of the green in the flower — 
 
 ' Pure as the lines of green that streak the white 
 Of the first snowdrop's inner leaves.' — TAe Princess. 
 
 And when the destruction of life amongst wild animals has 
 to be mentioned, the time-honoured tiger and spider give 
 way to strikingly fresh instances — 
 
 ' The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by 
 the shrike. ' — Maud. 
 
 That the shrike, or 'butcher-bird,' impales flies, bees, and 
 tiny birds on thorns near its nest for the gradual service 
 of its own young, is by no means a matter of general 
 knowledge even yet. 
 
 To Lord Tennyson the time of year — 
 
 ' When rosy plumelets tuft the larch ; ' 
 
or,- 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 ' To-night the winds begin to rise 
 
 And roar from yonder dropping day ; 
 The last red leaf is whirled away, 
 The rooks are blown about the skies ; ' 
 
 the hour of the day, — 
 
 ' Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again, 
 And howlest, issuing out of night, 
 With blasts that blow the poplar white, 
 
 And lash with storm the streaming pane.' 
 
 In Memoriam. 
 
 ' The hour 
 When the thick-moted sunbeam lay 
 Athwart the chambers, and the day 
 Was sloping toward his western bower ; ' — Mariana. 
 
 or of the night, — 
 
 ' Nigh upon that hour 
 When the lone hern forgets his melancholy, 
 Lets down his other leg, and stretching, dreams 
 Of goodly supper in the distant pool;' — Gareth and Lynette. 
 
 are all best registered in terms of nature. Sheer grief at 
 the notion of leaving her ever-fresh life is one of the 
 strongest deterrents that warn the tempted one in The Two 
 Voices from suicide, and this even when the tempter care- 
 fully points out the quiet indifference of Nature to the 
 presence of her admirer — 
 
 ' I wept, " Tho' I should die, I know 
 That all about the thorn will blow 
 In tufts of rosy-tinted snow." 
 
 ***** 
 ' " Not less the bee would range her cells. 
 The furzy prickle fire the dells. 
 The foxglove cluster dappled bells." ' 
 
lo VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 The same thought reappears in a softened form in the 
 May Queen — 
 
 'The building rook '11 caw from the windy tall elm-tree, 
 And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, 
 And the swallow 'ill come back again with summer o'er the wave, 
 But I shall lie alone, mother, within the mouldering grave. ' 
 
 A Still closer and more intimate affection breathes through 
 the delicately-rendered sense of forsakenness imputed to 
 trees and brook when he to whom they were dear is gone 
 away — 
 
 ' Unwatch'd the garden bough shall sway. 
 The tender blossom flutter down, 
 Unlov'd, that beech will gather brown. 
 This maple bum itself away ; 
 
 ' Unlov'd, the sun-flower, shining fair, 
 
 Ray round with flames her disk of seed, 
 And many a rose-carnation feed 
 With summer spice the humming air ; 
 
 ' Unlov'd, by many a sandy bar, 
 
 The brook shall babble down the plain. 
 At noon or when the lesser wain 
 Is twisting round the polar star ; 
 
 ' Uncar'd for, gird the windy grove, 
 
 And flood the haunts of hern and crake ; 
 Or into silver arrows break 
 The sailing moon in creek and cove. ' 
 
 To match the sentiment of those, one must go to the 
 pathetic last writing of poor Richard Jefferies : — ' I wonder 
 to myself how they can all get on without me ; how they 
 manage, bird and flower, without me, to keep the calendar 
 for them. For I noted it so carefully and lovingly day 
 by day. . . . They go on without me, orchis-flower and 
 cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. ii 
 
 patter of their feet — flower .and buds, and the beautiful 
 clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of 
 sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no 
 more than the least of the empty shells that strew the sward 
 of the hill.' 
 
 But with all his love, Tennyson is no stranger to the 
 terrible, inexorable side of Nature, and the deep misgivings 
 it can induce as to human destiny. He does not, like 
 Wordsworth, find Nature the very interpreter of God, find 
 immortality ' to one who lives among the mountains a 
 perfectly plain tale ' ; but he wins 'his way to that solemn 
 faith in love and the victory of love in spite of Nature 
 through a conflict in which Nature as an enemy 
 
 ' red in tooth and claw 
 With ravine, shrieked against his creed.' 
 
 Yet when the victory is won, this vanquished enemy is 
 folded safely within the embrace of an all-conquering faith 
 in 
 
 ' One far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves.' 
 
 Often some object of nature or landscape, ordinary enough 
 in itself, is wonderfully moulded into the vehicle of emotion ; 
 as in that most beautiful of lyrics — 
 
 ' Break, break, break, 
 
 On thy cold gray stones, O Sea ! 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 ' O well for the fisherman's boy. 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play ! 
 O well for the sailor lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 
 
12 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' And the stately ships go on, 
 To their haven under the hill ; 
 But for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! 
 
 ' Break, break, break, 
 
 At the foot of thy crags, O Sea ! 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me.' 
 
 There, in some mysterious way, the very sea and crags 
 breathe out the dumb grief, the ineffable sadness and longing 
 of the man's heart. This strangely expressive interweaving 
 of thought and scenery is particularly noticeable all through 
 In Memoriam. 
 
 Returning now to the two divisions of short poems, 
 perhaps the first to attract attention are the simple idylls, 
 such as The Miller's Daughter and The Gardener's Daughter. 
 In pure idyllic poetry — that is, as the word itself signifies, 
 picture-making poetry — Lord Tennyson surpasses all our 
 other poets ;fhis numbers of delicately wrought descriptions 
 of country scenes, rustic life, and natural effects stand by 
 themselves in their truth, their grace of subject and language, 
 and in the vividness with which the scene described is 
 placed, as it seems, before the reader's very eyes. J Take the 
 Lady of Shalotfs island — • 
 / 
 
 ' On either side the river lie 
 Long fields of barley and of rye. 
 That clothe the wold and meet the sky ;■>, 
 And thro' the field the road runs by 
 
 To many-tower'd Camelot ; 
 And up and down the people go, 
 Gazing where the lilies blow K 
 
 Round an island there below, 
 
 The island of Shalott. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 13 
 
 ' Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 
 Little breezes dusk and shiver 
 Thro' the wave that runs for ever 
 By the island in the river 
 
 Flowing down to Camelot. 
 Four gray walls, and four gray towers, 
 Overlook a space of flowers, 
 And the silent isle imbowers 
 
 The Lady of Shalott.' 
 
 Or take one of CEnone's song-plaints — 
 
 ' For now the noonday quiet holds the hill : 
 The grasshopper is silent in the grass : 
 The lizard, with his shadow on the stone. 
 Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.' 
 
 Or hear the mill-stream in that happy story of love both 
 sudden and lasting. The Miller's Daughter — 
 
 ' Or from the bridge I lean'd to hear 
 
 The mill-dam rushing down with noise. 
 And see the minnows everywhere 
 
 In crystal eddies glance and poise, 
 The tall flag-flowers when they sprung 
 
 Below the range of stepping-stones. 
 Or those three chestnuts near, that hung 
 
 In masses thick with milky cones. 
 
 * *. * * 
 
 ' I loved the brimming wave that swam 
 
 Thro' quiet meadows round the mill, 
 The sleepy pool above the dam. 
 
 The pool beneath it never still. 
 The meal-sacks on the whiten'd floor. 
 
 The dark round of the dripping wheel. 
 The very air about the door. 
 
 Made misty with the floating meal. ' 
 
 In the first edition of this poem it was the plunge of a 
 water-rat that was followed, by the vision of Alice's face 
 reflected in the water, and nothing could better mark the 
 
14 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 delicate sense of harmony to be learnt from Tennyson 
 than the change of even that sHght disturbance to the 
 absolutely peaceful — 
 
 ' Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood 
 I watch'd the little circles die ; 
 They past into the level flood, 
 And there a vision caught my eye. ' 
 
 Nor are his skill and fancy confined to English scenes : 
 the half mystic, dreamy land of the Lotos-eaters ; the 
 gorgeous, scorching tropics are just as tellingly delineated — 
 
 ' A land of streams ! some, like a downward smoke, 
 Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go ; 
 And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke. 
 Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. 
 They saw the gleaming river seaward flow 
 From the inner land : far off, three mountain-tops. 
 Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, 
 Stood sunset-flush'd ; and, dew'd with showery drops, 
 Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.' 
 
 The Lotos-Eaters. 
 
 ' No sail from day to day, but every day 
 The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
 Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 
 The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
 The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
 The blare upon the waters to the west ; 
 Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
 The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
 The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail.' — Enoch Arden. 
 
 The sea fragments, too, scattered up and down, would 
 make a delightful study in themselves — 
 
 ' One show'd an iron coast, ajid angry waves. 
 You seem'd to hear them climb and fall 
 And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves. 
 Beneath the windy wall.' — Palace of Art. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 15 
 
 ' The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-led waters white. ' — Palace of Art. 
 
 ' Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way, 
 Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand, 
 Torn from the fringe of spray.' — Dream of Fair Women, 
 
 ' Rounded by the stillness of the beach 
 To where the bay runs up its latest horn. 
 
 We left the dying ebb that faintly lipp'd 
 The flat red granite. ' — Atidley Court, 
 
 ' Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, 
 Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the waves. ' 
 
 Maud. 
 
 It will be noticed that Tennyson rarely pictures rugged, 
 barren wildness. That he can do it, one stanza in the 
 Palace of Art is sufficient witness — 
 
 ' And one a foreground black with stones and slags. 
 Beyond, a line of heights, and higher 
 AH barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags. 
 And highest, snow and fire ; ' 
 
 but clearly he prefers the rich lands of cultivation ; woods, 
 streams, many-flowered hedgerows, stretches of grassy 
 meadows ; and in their delineation he works in touch after 
 touch, yet all strictly subdued with sure eye to the whole, 
 till his own picture has the same unconfused richness of 
 effect. 
 
 That well-known favourite. The Brook, is perhaps in its 
 own way as perfect an instance as any. 
 
 ' I come from haunts of coot and hern, 
 
 I make a sudden sally. 
 And sparkle out among the fern, 
 To bicker down a valley. 
 
i6 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' By thirsty hills I hurry down, 
 Or slip between the ridges, 
 By twenty thorps, a little town. 
 And half a hundred bridges. 
 
 ' Till last by Philip's farm I flow 
 
 To join the brimming river. 
 For men may come and men may go. 
 But I go on for ever. 
 
 ' I chatter over stony ways. 
 
 In little sharps and trebles, 
 I bubble into eddying bays, 
 I babble on the pebbles. 
 
 ' With many a curve my banks I fret. 
 By many a field and fallow, 
 And many a fairy foreland set 
 With willow-weed and mallow. 
 
 ' I chatter, chatter, as I flow 
 
 To join the brimming river, 
 For men may come and men may go. 
 But I go on for ever. 
 
 ' I wind about, and in and out, 
 With here a blossom sailing, 
 And here and there a lusty trout, 
 And here and there a grayling. 
 
 ' And here and there a foamy flake 
 
 Upon me, as I travel 
 With many a silver waterbreak 
 
 Above the golden gravel, 
 
 ' And draw them all along, and flow 
 To join the brimming river. 
 For men may come and men may go, 
 But I go on for ever. 
 
 ' I steal by lawns and grassy plots, 
 
 I slide by hazel covers ; 
 I move the sweet forget-me-nots 
 That grow for happy lovers. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 17 
 
 ' I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, 
 
 Among my skimming swallows ; 
 I make the netted sunbeam dance 
 Against my sandy shallows. 
 
 ' I murmur under moon and stars 
 
 In brambly wildernesses ; 
 
 I linger by my shingly bars ; 
 
 I loiter round my cresses ; 
 
 ' And out again I curve and flow 
 
 To join the brimming river, 
 For men may come and men may go. 
 But I go on for ever.' 
 
 To let that have its will with one's mind is almost as 
 good and refreshing as actually to lie on the sun-warmed 
 banks by ' haunts of coot and hern,' listening to this tinkling 
 chatter in the original. It shows too the minute detail in 
 Tennyson's work. At every break in the song one would 
 suppose the brook's whole character had been given ; yet 
 another and another and another touch is added, each 
 perfectly fresh, and impossible to be spared when once it 
 has been heard. And finally the way in which sound fits 
 sense is in itself no small marvel. We have only to alter a 
 word here and there — to read, say, ' edges ' for ' pebbles ' 
 in the last line of stanza four, or 'flying' for 'skimming' 
 in the second line of stanza eleven- — to realise instantly the 
 subtle dependence of the brook-prattle on having every 
 syllable precisely right in sound as well as meaning. 
 
 Pure idylls shade off into narrative poems equally simple 
 and graceful in style, artistic in construction, and full of 
 human interest and feeling. Dora, Godiva, The Lord of 
 Burleigh, belong to this group, of which Enoch Arden is 
 the later and most important poem. So touching is this 
 last in its sweetness and its sorrow, in the tragic destiny 
 
 c 
 
i8 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 deepened by the very virtues of the three constant hearts 
 whom disaster overtakes, that, as another poet has said, 
 ' it appears to spring from the very fountain of tears.' 
 
 There are again two or three striking dramatic pieces, 
 giving voice to the strange half-crazed ecstasy of St. 
 Simeon StyHtes on his pillar of torture ; or to the shrinking 
 terror of Tithonus in the face of his self-invoked fate of 
 deathless, unceasing decay; or to the restless craving 
 of the aged Ulysses, wearied to death of his humdrum 
 home existence, to return to a life of heroic adventure — and 
 determined to do it. 
 
 ' How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use 1 
 As tho' to breathe were life. 
 
 * * * 
 
 ' Death closes all : but something ere the end. 
 Some work of noble note, may yet be done. 
 Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 ' Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho' 
 We are not now that strength which in old days 
 Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are ; 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' 
 
 In these dramatic lyrics we see the forerunners of Lord 
 Tennyson's dramas ; but when we turn to the dramas, the 
 first thing that strikes us is the predominance of thought 
 and feeling over action. Thrown on a time of changing 
 opinions, scientific discoveries, political and social advances, 
 he has shown himself a true son of his age. And as his 
 chief interest is in thoughts, opinions, feelings, so his 
 work is happiest when carried out in lyrical form rather 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 19 
 
 than when it requires the connected action and forward 
 movement of regular drama. His readers have to admit 
 that Harold, Beckef, and even Queen Mary, have far less fire 
 and inspiration than the lyrical poetry, and are much less 
 characteristic and successful than the dramatic rendering of 
 a single mood, or, as in the ' monodrama ' of Maud, of 
 successive and varying moods in a single mind. Dramatic 
 presentations of this kind occur from time to time all 
 through the Laureate's work, and are always striking. One 
 naturally thinks first of the two Northern Farmers, especially 
 him of the old style, with the clear glimpse given into the 
 mind of the man, narrow, prejudiced, clouded with ignorance, 
 yet faithful to such hghts as shone dimly upon him ; staunch 
 in discharge of duties to land, squire, parson, and child ; and 
 no less firmly determined not to be balked of his routine 
 glass of ale by any decrees, whether doctor's or coming 
 from the hazily-apprehended 'godamoighty.' 
 
 ' What atta stannin' theer fur, an' doesn bring ma the aale ? 
 Doctor's a 'toattler, lass, an a's hallus i' the owd taale ; 
 I weant break rules fur Doctor, a knaws naw moor nor a floy ; 
 Git ma my aale I tell tha', an' if I mun doy I mun doy. ' 
 
 Perhaps we shall find even more pathos in the Grand- 
 mother's lightly-strung reminiscences when the news comes 
 to her of her eldest son's death — 
 
 ' Why do you look at me, Annie ? you think I am hard and cold ; 
 But all my children have gone before me, I am so old : 
 1 cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the rest ; 
 Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best. 
 * * *t * * 
 
 ' Pattering over the boards, my Annie who left me at two. 
 Patter she goes, my own little Annie, an Annie like you : 
 Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will, 
 While Harry is in the five-acre and Charlie ploughing the hill. 
 
20 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' So Willy has gone, my beauty, my eldest-born, my flower ; 
 But how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour, — 
 Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next ; 
 I, too, shall go in a minute. What time have I to be vext ? ' 
 
 The finest of all, to my own mind, is Rizpah, with its passion 
 of enduring mother's love, stronger than death, stronger than 
 the mighty powers of superstitious dread, the love that goes 
 out by night through storm and darkness to gather the bones 
 of the gibbeted son as they fall one by one, hoarding them 
 for secret burial in holy ground. 
 
 ' Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot go? 
 For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at the 
 snow. 
 
 ' We should be seen, my dear ; they would spy us out of the town. 
 The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the down, 
 When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of the 
 
 chain. 
 And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched with the 
 
 rain. 
 
 ' Do you think I was scared by the bones ? I kiss'd 'em, I buried 'em 
 all— 
 I can't dig deep, I am old — in the night by the churchyard wall. 
 My Willy 'ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 'ill sound, 
 But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground. ' 
 
 When we compare such emotion as this, on the one hand 
 with the fierce passions of Queen Mary in the drama 
 (excepting the one lyrical outburst wrung from Mary in her 
 extremity of despair), and on the other hand with the 
 indescribable beauty of such songs as that in The Princess 
 about the sad, strange ' days that are no more,' with the 
 mixed feelings that remembrance of them brings — 
 
 ' Deep as first love, and wild with all regret,' 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 21 
 
 it becomes evident at once that the more closely Lord 
 Tennyson's forms of verse approach forms 'prepared for 
 the well-inchaunting skill of musicke,' the finer is their 
 effect. 
 
 It has already been remarked how deeply Tennyson 
 has shared in the many interests of his time, a fact which 
 more than anything else has helped to make him not only 
 " a great poet, but the great representative poet of his age, 
 our spokesman amongst the immortals. Lord Tennyson 
 began to write just at the time when the great democratic 
 movement which has taken place in England during this 
 century was beginning its struggle with the older system of 
 privilege, exclusion, and class-dominance. His early poems 
 were published a short time before the Reform Bill of 1832, 
 the first considerable success of the reforming party. He 
 has told us himself how eagerly he and the band of under- 
 graduate friends who were proud to count Arthur Hallam 
 their leader, threw themselves into the great questions of 
 which men's minds were full ; how in the stately old college 
 
 ' ... we held debate, a band 
 
 Of youthful friends, on mind and art, 
 And labour, and the changing mart, 
 And all the framework of the land.' 
 
 His sympathies lay with the liberalism of the type especially 
 identified with the 'Christian Socialists,' and we find the 
 glow of that enthusiasm faithfully reflected in his poetry. 
 More than once a disappointed lover, smarting under the 
 hard worldliness shown in unhesitating sacrifice of a girl's 
 happiness to the worship of position, or the coarser worship 
 of gold, is chosen to pour out vials of wrath upon the 
 corruptions of a social system just then grasping its power 
 
22 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 perhaps all the more fiercely as its dominance was felt to 
 be slipping away. We have in these cases to make due 
 allowance for the dramatic form, especially as regards the 
 actual expressions employed ; but a comparison of them 
 with other poems will show how far they do in substance 
 express the poet's own feelings. The rather self-complacent 
 suitor of Locksley Hall, not too much cast down to be able 
 to moralise on his cousin's inferior choice, is not to be 
 ranked with Maud's passionate lover, whose mind is shaken 
 to its very foundations by his ill fate ; yet they are charged 
 with kindred messages — 
 
 ' Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth ! 
 Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth ! ' 
 
 Maud, besides containing some of the most wonderful 
 love-songs that Tennyson ever wrote, is a passionate out- 
 break against the deadening materialism developed by a 
 long duration of peace and successful commercial enterprise, 
 which reached its climax just before the Crimean War. 
 It is the poet's contribution to an awakening of the 
 national conscience to evils fought by social reformers and 
 philanthropists in their own different ways. 
 
 ' Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace ? we have made them 
 
 a curse, 
 Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own ; 
 And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse 
 Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone ? 
 
 ' When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee. 
 And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones. 
 Is it peace or war ? better, war ! loud war by land and by sea, 
 War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.' 
 
 But Tennyson cannot endure lawless attempts to right 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 23 
 
 even the worst of social wrongs. He carries the love of 
 measure, balance, ' order serviceable,' which has governed 
 all his own work into his views of what social life should be. 
 He utters sincerest disapproval of French extravagances, 
 whether shown in dreams of ' glory ' won by warfare — 
 
 ' We love not this French God, the child of Hell, 
 Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise ; ' 
 
 or in internal disorganisation. 
 
 ' . . . social truth shall spread, 
 
 And justice, ev'n tho' thrice again 
 
 The red fool-fury of the Seine 
 Should pile her barricades with dead. ' 
 
 In Memoria7n. 
 
 ' But yonder, whiff ! there comes a sudden heat, 
 The gravest citizen seems to lose his head, 
 The king is scared, the soldier will not fight. 
 The little boys begin to shoot and stab, 
 A kingdom topples over with a shriek 
 Like an old woman, and down rolls the world 
 In mock heroics stranger than our own.' — The Princess, 
 
 In this last case the next speaker corrects the too sweeping 
 effect of the lines by the reflection — 
 
 ' Maybe wildest dreams 
 Are but the needful preludes of the truth ; ' 
 
 but elsewhere Tennyson has repeatedly condemned the 
 excesses of such preludes. Even out of evil good some- 
 times works itself, but none the less turbulence remains evil 
 and a thing to be hated. 
 
 ' O shall the braggart shout 
 For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself 
 Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law ' 
 System and empire ? ' — Love and Duty. 
 
24 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Not only patriotism, but genuine and sympathetic admira- 
 tion lead him to speak so lovingly of the land, with all her 
 faults — 
 
 ' Where Freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent .' 
 
 ' That sober freedom out of which there springs 
 Our loyal passion for our temperate kings.' 
 
 ' Our slowly-grown 
 And crown'd Republic's crowning common sense.' 
 
 His ideal has always been the time of which he questions — 
 
 ' Ah ! when shall all men's good 
 Be each man's rule, and universal Peace 
 Lie like a shaft of light across the land ? ' 
 
 But his burning hatred of tyranny and social injustice, his 
 patriotic conviction that our own country is the land where 
 they have been met and overcome by the inanliest and best 
 sort of opposition, never for a moment blind him to the 
 shortcomings of undisciplined, ignorant numbers. In his 
 fine Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington all sense 
 of the conservative opposition which the Duke as a 
 statesman had offered to democratic reform bills is com- 
 pletely sunk in the tribute to his magnificent services in the 
 cause of 'sober freedom,' and the cause of the discipline 
 and order imperatively needed to 
 
 ' . . . drill the raw world for the march of mind, 
 Till crowds at length be sane, and crowns be just.' 
 
 He feels keenly that ' knowledge comes but wisdom 
 lingers,' and fears the dangers to be expected when know- 
 ledge, unguided by wisdom, seizes upon power. 
 
 ' Let her know her place ; 
 She is the second, not the first. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 25 
 
 ' A higher hand must make her mild, 
 If all be not in vain, and guide 
 Her footsteps, moving side by side 
 With Wisdom, like the younger child.' 
 
 And he frequently urges that need for Reverence which it 
 is the undeniable tendency of modern democracies to lose 
 sight of. 
 
 ' Make Knowledge circle with the winds ; 
 But let her herald, Reverence, fly 
 Before her to whatever sky 
 Bear seed of men and growth of mind.' 
 
 ' Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell.' 
 
 ' Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovereign power.' 
 
 True freedom, he holds, lies in willing obedience to duty, 
 and to the dictates of just and enlightened laws, and he who 
 thus submits — 
 
 ' Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
 Are close upon the shining table-lands 
 To which our God Himself is moon and sun.' 
 
 It is not surprising that with the success of many aims of 
 the liberalism of sixty years ago, Lord Tennyson's con- 
 victions should have passed on into the conservatism 
 reflected in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. 
 
 The same love of law, but of progressive and ennobled 
 law, is apparent when Tennyson deals with the social posi- 
 tion of women in The Princess, that curious ' medley ' of 
 laughter and gravity, of mock-heroism and serious poetry. 
 The Lady Ida's revolt fails through its overstrained absolute- 
 ness ; but the poem anticipates many a modification actually 
 won since then, and concludes with an idealising of relations 
 noble enough to satisfy the high-spirited princess herself. 
 
26 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink 
 Together, dwarf d or godlike, bond or free : 
 ***** 
 For woman is not undevelopt man, 
 But diverse : could we make her as the man, 
 Sweet Love were slain ; his dearest bond is this, 
 Not like to like, but like in difference. 
 Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 
 The man be more of woman, she of man ; 
 He gain in sweetness and in moral height, 
 Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 
 She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, 
 Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind ; 
 Till at the last she set herself to man, 
 Like perfect music unto noble words ; 
 And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 
 Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers, 
 Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 
 Self-reverent each and reverencing each. 
 Distinct in individualities. 
 But like each other ev'n as those who love. ' 
 
 Still more deeply wrought into the very texture of 
 Tennyson's poetry is his treatment of moral and religious 
 problems in the light of that new appeal to the underlying 
 principles of spiritual faith best represented in theology by 
 Frederick Maurice, and in philosophy by the late Professor 
 T. H. Green. Not by the methods of the theologian or 
 philosopher, but in the way of the true poet, whose glory it 
 is to divine and exhibit the ' soul of good in things evil,' 
 Tennyson passes on from the first doubts and distractions 
 of the ' mind not at unity with itself to his final conviction 
 that 
 
 ' All is well, tho' faith and form 
 Be sunder'd in the night of fear ; ' 
 
 entering as he goes into the subtlest and most crucial 
 questions of morals and religion raised in a time of penetrat- 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 27 
 
 ing inquiry. It is impossible to do more here than indicate 
 in the shortest way where some of these deep thinkings are 
 best to be studied. 
 
 The Two Voices is a balanced contest between a sense of 
 the misery and bitterness in human life, so keen as to bring 
 with it the temptation to self-destruction, and a slowly 
 victorious sense not only of its brighter side, but of a 
 possible meaning in all, which makes endurance the gladder 
 as well as the wiser part. The tempter's scoff loses its sting 
 as the craving of the tempted for ' more life and fuller ' 
 gains its way. 
 
 ' Here sits he shaping wings to fly : 
 
 His heart forbodes a mystery : 
 
 He names the name Eternity.' 
 
 The Palace of Art exhibits at its strongest the besetting 
 danger to the highly cultivated of selfish exclusiveness, of 
 living in a lofty isolation which seems to grant release from 
 common behefs, common laws of conduct, and sanctions 
 contemptuous disdain for the multitude. The soul sitting 
 on Godlike heights, surrounded by every noble and beautiful 
 work that the world could produce, announces at last — 
 
 ' I take possession of man's mind and deed. 
 
 I care not what the sects may brawl. 
 I sit as God holding no form of creed, 
 But contemplating all.' 
 
 She is suddenly awakened. 
 
 ' Lest she should fail and perish utterly, 
 
 God, before whom ever lie bare 
 The abysmal deeps of Personality, 
 Plagued her with sore despair.' 
 
 She passes through a time of deep and wholesome distress, 
 and then the truth dawns that her way of salvation lies not 
 
28 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 in renunciation of enjoyment, but in shared enjoyment, 
 purified from selfishness. 
 
 ' " Make me a cottage in the vale,'' she said, 
 "Where I may mourn and pray. 
 
 ' ' ' Yet pull not down my palace towers that are 
 So lightly, beautifully built : 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 When I have purged my guilt." ' 
 
 In Love and Duty a more searching question is faced. 
 Two passionate lovers are compelled by duty to part without 
 earthly fulfilment of their love. One of them looks back on 
 the fierce struggle they have come through, and asks what 
 they have gained or lost by their passion and bitter farewell. 
 Is the end of it all only streaming eyes and breaking hearts, 
 solitary breedings over life in ruins ? Not so. In spite of 
 anguish and separation, the answer rings brave and clear — 
 
 'Am I not the nobler thro' thy love? 
 O three times less unworthy ! likewise thou 
 Art more thro' Love, and greater than thy years.' 
 
 Love has performed its work of enlightenment and dis- 
 cipline ; the lover has courage to do the right, and faces the 
 
 issue 
 
 ' Most Godlike,- being most a man.' 
 
 Duty is exalted, yet not after all at the expense of Love, — 
 at their highest they are not antagonistic, for it is the very 
 strength and purity of love that demands the sacrifice of 
 itself. 
 
 ' For Love himself took part against himself ' 
 
 to enforce the law of ' Duty loved of Love.' 
 
 The Vision of Sin shows the Nemesis of a life of sensu- 
 ality, and shadows out the far-reaching thought that the 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 29 
 
 sinfulness of sin lies in its being always a matter of choice. 
 The issue is left doubtful, as it must remain until the 
 possibility of choice is over. 
 
 ' At last I heard a voice upon the slope 
 Cry to the summit, " Is there any hope ? " 
 To which an answer peal'd from that high land, 
 But in a tongue no man could understand ; 
 And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
 God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. ' 
 
 The Higher Pantheism finely utters in poetry the idea 
 that philosophy expresses in saying that the whole is in 
 every part ; or religion in saying that the Divine presence 
 is everywhere. 
 
 ' Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.' 
 
 But all these shorter poems compared with In Memoriam 
 are as small porches or ante-chambers to a noble temple. 
 It appeared in 1850, seventeen years after the sudden death 
 at Vienna of Lord Tennyson's closest friend, Arthur H. 
 Hallam. ' Grief,' says Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in the closing 
 lines of a thoughtful sonnet — 
 
 ' Grief should be 
 Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate ; 
 Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; 
 Strong to consume small troubles, to commend 
 Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.' 
 
 Perhaps the ideal could hardly find a more perfect fulfil- 
 ment than in this wonderful series of poems, as they lead 
 on and up from the first desolating shock of bereavement, 
 through benumbing pains of loss, shadowy fears, doubts 
 raised by science and stern facts, moments of recovered 
 
30 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 serenity, musings on here and hereafter, to the final triumph 
 of love and peace and faith. 
 
 ' O living will that shall endure 
 
 When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
 Rise in the spiritual rock, 
 Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, 
 
 ' That we may lift from out of dust 
 
 A voice as unto him that hears, 
 
 A cry above the conquer'd years 
 
 To one that with us works, and trust, 
 
 ' With faith that comes of self-control. 
 
 The truths that never can be proved 
 Until we close with all we loved. 
 And all we flow from, soul in soul. ' 
 
 In Memoriam is not a sermon : it neither preaches nor 
 argues nor expounds. 
 
 ' If these brief lays, of Sorrow born, 
 Were taken to be such as closed, 
 Grave doubts and answers here proposed, 
 Then these were such as men might scorn : 
 * * * * 
 
 ' Nor dare she trust a larger lay, 
 
 But rather loosens from the lip 
 Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
 Their wings in tears, and skim away.' 
 
 But the poem searches deeply ; and so long as there are 
 human hearts pierced with grief, assailed by doubt, failing 
 for fear, they will find in it hid treasure, and the utterance 
 that gives relief. 
 
 As students of poetry it is needful to ask ourselves 
 whether the teachings of sorrow have gained reality at the 
 expense of the poetry, — whether the poet has injured his 
 art for the sake of his moral. But perhaps the more closely 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 31 
 
 In Memoriatn is studied, the more certainly that question 
 will seem to answer itself as soon as asked. Like all high 
 poetry, In Memoriatn needs close study; but whether we 
 test it by comparison with the best elegaic poetry we already 
 possessed — with Milton's Lycidas or Shelley's Adonais ; or 
 whether we examine the continuity and completeness of 
 the whole poem, or observe the perfect finish of each small 
 canto in itself; whether we dwell on the exquisite pictures 
 of nature, subdued in tone to fit harmony with the rest, or 
 on the 'music of perfect language,' in which all finds 
 utterance, our verdict can hardly be other than — benedicto 
 benedicatur. 
 
 Amongst other poems contained in the second and third 
 divisions, there are several — The lady of Shalott, Sir 
 Galahad, Sir launcelot and Queen Guinevere, and above 
 all, that beautiful fragment, the Morte d' Arthur, afterwards 
 incorporated in the last Idyll of the King — that show how 
 Tennyson's thoughts were already attracted by the Arthurian 
 legends which were later to give him the materials of his 
 greatest poem. Between the years 1859 and 1877, the 
 Idylls of the ^?Ǥ- appeared by instalments. But delightful 
 as it was felt to be to welcome each new set of Idylls as it 
 came out, the lasting advantage of being able to read the 
 poem for the first time as a whole, instead of in fragments, 
 is far greater. Its real character was for a while disguised 
 by publication in parts ; it seemed to be merely a series of 
 slightly-connected pictures of Arthur's court and the ad- 
 ventures of his knights ; and this misapprehension was 
 confirmed by the name Idylls, especially as the order of 
 publication was not that of their sequence as a whole, but 
 the middle parts — Vivien, Enid, Elaine, Guinevere — ap- 
 peared first. Beautiful as these were, taken as separate 
 
32 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 although mutually illustrative poems, they suffered by com- 
 parison with the perfect workmanship of In Memoriam ; it 
 was thought and said that Lord Tennyson's style was less 
 well adapted to narrative, that intellectual interest was to 
 some extent sacrificed to pictorial richness of effect. Now 
 that these, with the Idylls given later to the world, are seen 
 to fit each into its own definite place in a larger and 
 coherent whole, and can be studied as parts of what is 
 in fact a great epic poem, it is natural to regard them 
 differently. 
 
 In this great epic we have the story of the rise and fall 
 of a kingdom based on righteousness. In the temporary 
 subjugation of force and evil passion to a will strong and 
 holy; in the slipping away from a yoke too noble to be 
 long endured by natures of a baser mould ; in the overthrow 
 amidst gloom and confusion of the high rule ; in the seem- 
 ing utter failure, which is yet nowhere accepted as final 
 failure ; there is placed before us a spiritual problem of 
 profound interest both in itself and in the way it is handled. 
 We recognise, dimly shadowed in the contests of Arthur and 
 his knights with open foes and false friends, signs of the 
 battle as old as humanity itself, the truceless, never-ended 
 conflict of ' Sense at war with Soul.' 
 
 On grounds for which excellent reasons can be given, 
 Tennyson has chosen from the old and often conflicting 
 or even self-contradictory stories of the legendary Arthur, 
 elements capable of being welded into a harmonious 
 character of consistent nobility, purity, and dignity. Let 
 us trace very briefly the course of events recorded in the 
 Idylls. 
 
 The Coming of Arthur describes the mysterious uncer- 
 tainty in which his birth — if birth it were — is shrouded. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 33 
 
 ' From the great deep to the great deep he goes ' ; and one 
 thing only is certain — the inherent kinghness attested by 
 his deeds, and by his attendants, which wins from King 
 Leodogran consent to Arthur's marriage with Guinevere 
 his daughter and one deHght — a consent hastened by the 
 prophetic dream in which Leodogran saw a cloud of mist 
 descend and hide away the earth, but the phantom king 
 of his vision ' stood out in heaven, crown'd.' 
 
 Arthur's vow to his best-loved warrior — 
 
 ' " Man's word is God in man : 
 Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death ! " ' 
 
 his vow to the Queen of his choice and his worship — 
 
 ' " Behold, thy doom is mine. 
 Let chance what will, I love thee to the death ! " ' 
 
 are taken ; and his knighthood are bound to himself by 
 vows so stringent and sacred — 
 
 ' That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some 
 Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, 
 Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes 
 Half-blinded at the coming of a light. ' 
 
 The spell of the King's spiritual authority has already 
 asserted itself; in victory and hopefulness his reign begins. 
 
 ' And Arthur and his knighthood for a space 
 Were all one will, and thro' that strength the King 
 Drew in the petty princedoms imder him, 
 Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame 
 The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reign'd. ' 
 
 Gareth and Lynette belongs to the early days of happiness. 
 We hear how the mystic City of Camelot, built by the wizard 
 Merlin, rose ; though the fuller description of it is reserved 
 for Galahad's narration — 
 
34 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Like enow 
 They are building still, seeing the city is built 
 To music, therefore never built at all, 
 And therefore built for ever.' 
 
 We learn more, too, of the vows by which the Round 
 Table were bound — 
 
 ' Such vows, as is a shame 
 A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
 No man can keep. ' 
 
 ' My knights are sworn to vows 
 Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness. 
 And, loving, utter faithfulness in love. 
 And uttermost obedience to the King.' 
 
 In the quest won by Gareth against Castle Perilous there 
 can be traced a symbolic fore-shadowing of the story yet to 
 come. 
 
 Enid shows the first symptoms of doubt and disturbance 
 spreading from one to another, sprung from the rumour of 
 the Queen's fatal disloyalty. Trust is not yet destroyed 
 beyond remedy; the purity of Enid, the faith of Arthur, 
 restore faith to Geraint. 
 
 It is a little hard to understand why Vivien with her sin- 
 stamped wiles should come in at this stage ; she seems to 
 belong more truly to the later times of shameless outbreak. 
 Her undisguised wickedness seems to witness to more than 
 
 ' the little rift within the lute, 
 That by and by will make the music mute, 
 And ever widening slowly silence all.' 
 
 Elaine, in exquisitely beautiful fashion, draws the contrast 
 between her pure love for Lancelot, which he cannot return 
 because 
 
 ' His honour rooted in dishonour stood. 
 And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ; ' 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 35 
 
 and the unholy passion of Lancelot and Guinevere still 
 hidden from the knowledge of Arthur, and undreamt of by 
 his trusting heart. 
 
 Nothing in the whole poem, I think, is more striking than 
 the King's reception of the news concerning the vision of 
 the Holy Grail and the quest in search of it hastily em- 
 braced by his knights. To them it seemed a call from 
 highest heaven ; Arthur, clearer-sighted than they, sees in it 
 the neglect of a certain and immediate duty for one at best 
 doubtful, and discerns a presage of coming disaster to the 
 Round Table. The difference is due not to feebler imagin- 
 ation, but to saner judgment. To the great King whose 
 coming and passing are alike veiled in mystery, whose 
 blameless soul is ever in communion with things unseen, to 
 him more than any of them come ' visions of the night or 
 
 of the day '^ 
 
 ' Many a time they come, 
 Until this earth he walks on seems not earth. 
 This light that strilces his eyeball is not light, 
 This air that smites his forehead is not air 
 But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
 In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
 And knows himself no vision to himself. 
 Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
 Who rose again.' 
 
 But he will allow no vision to absorb his mind or turn 
 him aside from the humbler duties laid upon him. Had he 
 been present, his knights assert, he too would have sworn 
 the vow to seek the Holy Grail. ' Not easily,' the King 
 replies, 
 
 ' Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
 That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
 To whom a space of land is given to plow. 
 Who may not wander from the allotted field 
 Before his work be done. ' 
 
36 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Having sworn, the knights must go ; but it is with a heavy- 
 heart that Arthur sees the older vow — 
 
 ' To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 
 To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,' 
 
 suspended for the new quest. And when the ' year of 
 miracle' is over, and the fevered adventures past, when 
 the thinned ranks gather once more about the King to tell 
 of Sir Percivale's mirage-visions ' in a land of sand and 
 thorns,' of days when Sir Bors lay bound and dungeoned, 
 of Lancelot's maddened ride ; it is only to prove how true 
 were his forebodings. Most have failed ; many are lost — 
 ' scarce returned a tithe ' — and of the few to whom the 
 vision came, 
 
 ' My greatest hardly will believe he saw ; 
 Another hath beheld it afar ofif, 
 Andjeaving human wrongs to right themselves. 
 Cares but to pass into the silent life. 
 And one hath had the vision face to face, 
 And now his chair desires him here in vain, 
 However they may crown him otherwhere.' 
 
 The next two idylls, Pelleas and Ettarre and The Last 
 Tournament, axe painful reading. The new knights made 
 'to fill the gap left by the Holy Quest' are not like the 
 old ; the sin of Lancelot and Guinevere has done its fatal 
 work, and in gloom and treachery and disillusion Arthur's 
 realm 
 
 ' Reels back into the beast, and is no more.' 
 
 Pelleas and Ettarre is unrelieved by any light of Arthur's 
 presence, or of loyal act ; The Last Tournament, though 
 
 ' In the heart of Arthur pain was lord,' 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 37 
 
 has one touch of reh'ef in the faithfulness of Dagonet, the 
 fool, even to the bitter close. 
 
 ' That night came Arthur home, and while he ciimb'd, 
 All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom. 
 The stairway to the hall, and look'd and saw 
 The great Queen's bower was dark, — about his feet 
 A voice clung sobbing till he question'd it, 
 " What art thou?" and the voice about his feet 
 Sent up an answer, sobbing, "I am thy fool, 
 And I shall never make thee smile again. " ' 
 
 With Guinevere the poem again rises to its highest level. 
 The Queen's agonised self-abasement in 'the holy house 
 at Almesbury,' her too tardy repentance and bitterly 
 remorseful shame, the utter conquest of her love, which 
 Arthur at last achieves in the very crisis of his defeat, attest 
 the King's greatness, and the grandeur of his aims, no less 
 eloquently than his own patience and dignity and self- 
 mastery in the throes of love wounded to the quick, ideals 
 desecrated, purposes destroyed at the hands of his own 
 familiar friends. 
 
 ' We needs must love the highest when we see it. 
 Not Lancelot nor another.' 
 
 Guinevere's eyes had remained strangely, perversely blind ; 
 she sees now, and it is enough. 
 
 Once more in the Passing of Arthur Lord Tennyson's 
 power of surrounding persons and events with an atmosphere 
 of dim, unearthly mystery, in lines of haunting beauty, is 
 at its highest. There is a shiver of nameless apprehension 
 in the dream-visit to Arthur of Gawain's ghost, 'blown 
 along a wandering wind,' before 'that last weird battle in 
 the west,' and again in the sense of unreality that clings 
 about the King like the grey mist — 
 
38 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' This blind haze, which ever since I saw 
 One lying in the dust at Almesbury, 
 Hath folded in the passes of the world." 
 
 The battle itself looms phantom-like out of haze — 
 
 ' On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. 
 Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight 
 Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. 
 A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea : 
 Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew 
 Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold 
 With formless fear ; and ev'n on Arthur fell 
 Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.' 
 
 Before the battle Arthur's steadfast though bewildered trust 
 makes itself felt through all his grief — • 
 
 ' I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
 I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields. 
 But in His ways with men I find Him not. 
 
 ***** 
 
 ' Perchance, because ine see not to the close ; — 
 For I, being simple, thought to work His will. 
 And have but stricken with the sword in vain.' 
 
 And, again, when all is over, the day lost, the knighthood 
 scattered for ever, the King himself struck down, laid 'like 
 a shattered column,' he utters once more the same words 
 with which in joy and hopefulness he had entered into his 
 kingdom — 
 
 ' The old order changeth, yielding place to new.' 
 
 His trust is vindicated ; Leodogran's dream is fulfilled ; for 
 through the gates of earthly defeat lies the path to spiritual 
 victory. Though the realm has disappeared, the King 
 himself stands forth still crowned, his courage, his purity, 
 his truth and faith as much the worship of the new order 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 39 
 
 as of the old. Like the old Greek heroes taken up at last 
 to reign amongst the constellations, the ideal King passes 
 from the scene of his ruined purpose to shine with brighter 
 glory in the heaven of spiritual imagination as the stars for 
 ever and ever. 
 
II. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 ' This world's no blot for us 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely and means good ; 
 To find its meaning is my meat and drink.' 
 
 Fra Lippo Lippi. 
 
 ' A man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for ? ' — Andrea del Sarto. 
 
 There is still a curiously sharp line of cleavage between 
 people who read and treasure the poetry of Browning, 
 and people who are deterred from attempting it by a 
 fixed impression that he is unintelligible. At one extreme 
 he is treated with the deference paid to an oracle — though 
 never since Shakespeare, one would think, could there have 
 been poetry lending itself less naturally to the purposes of 
 an exclusive ' cult ' ; — while the other extreme wraps itself 
 in a mantle of comfortable contempt for an unread author, 
 partly perhaps in protest against over-adoration of him ; 
 for Browning, like Wordsworth, has suffered a little at the 
 hands of his friends. Between the two extremes are many 
 who read, and learn, and enjoy quietly and keenly ; 
 and many more who would share to the full in the 
 enjoyment and learning if they once began the reading. 
 
 The obscurity in Browning's style is the obstacle alleged. 
 But there has been much exaggeration on this score. Leaving 
 aside some of the early, and a considerable part of his 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 41 
 
 latest, work, there remains a great body of poetry which is 
 hardly ever obscure. This is not the same thing as saying 
 that it is not difficult ; most of it is difficult to some extent ; 
 some of it is very difficult ; that is, it needs close and un- 
 divided attention before it can be followed with clear under- 
 standing. Often the thought is intricate ; its turns sudden 
 and abrupt ; but while needless obscurity might lead us to 
 suspect that mental poverty was disguised in it, and excuse 
 us from the pains of unveiling it, difficulty surely offers no 
 reason why we should forego that which abundantly repays 
 the. exertion it costs. Nor need any one, through inability 
 or disinclination to grapple with the whole of works so 
 voluminous as to have been called ' not a book but a 
 literature,' be denied the delight of acquaintance with the 
 many poems that a very moderate effort cannot but render 
 intelligible to ordinary intelligence. 
 
 It seems very possible that Browning's rugged, abbre- 
 viated style is intentionally adopted in order to rouse the 
 attention (s3 easily lulled by well-accustomed forms) that his 
 meaning demands ; at any rate it is plain that he can 
 produce smooth verse and melody when he chooses. Take 
 The Lost Leader, for example — 
 
 ' We that had loved hira so, followed him, honoured him, 
 
 Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 
 Learned his great language, caught his clear accents. 
 
 Made him our pattern to live and to die ! ' 
 
 Or the Cavalier Tunes, or this quietly musical stanza from 
 Two in the Campagna — 
 
 ' The champaign with its endless fleece 
 
 Of feathery grasses everywhere : 
 Silence and passion, joy and peace, 
 
 An everlasting wash of air — 
 Rome's ghost since her decease.' 
 
42 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Or the whole of the lovely poem on Guercino's picture 
 of The Guardian Angel, especially, perhaps, these two 
 stanzas — 
 
 ' Dear and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave, 
 
 That child, when thou hast done with him, for me ! 
 Let me sit all the day here, that when eve 
 
 Shall find performed thy special ministry. 
 And time come for departure, thou, suspending 
 Thy flight, may'st see another child for tending. 
 
 Another still to quiet and retrieve. 
 * * * * 
 
 ' If this were ever granted, I would rest 
 
 My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands 
 Close covered both my eyes beside thy breast. 
 
 Pressing the brain which too much thought expands. 
 Back to its proper size again, and smoothing 
 Distortion down till every nerve had soothing, 
 
 And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed.' 
 
 Or once more this, of the bust of the infant emperor 
 Protus — 
 
 ' One loves a baby face, with violets there, 
 Violets instead of laurel in the hair, 
 As those were all the little locks could bear.' 
 
 Nor do these by any means stand alone. But neither do 
 they in the least represent the style Browning commonly 
 uses, a vigorous, terse, sometimes crabbed and eccentric 
 style, in which a word often stands for a sentence, paren- 
 theses are rife, and sound is not unfrequently sacrificed 
 to sense. Still, with a little time allowed for becoming 
 accustomed to the unique ways of this mode of expression, 
 the moderate effort aforesaid renders a large number of 
 these poems not only intelligible but intensely attractive. 
 Their great attractive power lies in the sense for the sake 
 of which beauty in form gives way ; for they are the out- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 43 
 
 come of a mind whose vivifying imagination combined with 
 a searching power of analysis, shows as only a great poet 
 can, the hidden significance he finds in our common human 
 life ; and both what he sees and the interpretation he puts 
 upon it are saturated with living interest. Some of us may 
 be fortunate enough to count among our friends one whose 
 way of viewing things makes commonplace events interest- 
 ing and rare ones positively thrilling, one to whom we 
 always care to tell even trivial experiences for the sake of 
 the illuminating word that is sure to come in reply. It is 
 said of the late Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh — ' " I'll tell 
 Dr. Brown," was the thought that came first to his friends 
 on hearing anything genuine, pathetic, or queer, and the 
 gleam as of sunlight that shone in his eyes, and played 
 round his sensitive mouth as he listened, acted as an 
 inspiration, so that friends and even strangers he saw at 
 their best, and their best was better than it would have been 
 without him.' So is Mr. Browning among the poets. Not 
 that we can take our experiences to him ; but that is 
 needless ; he is already amply provided, and, unasked, will 
 give us of his best. 
 
 He cares before all things for individual human life. 
 Not for the life of nations and races, or the movements of 
 political parties or social classes, but for the life-story of 
 Filippo or Jacynth, Smith and Kate ; and nothing about 
 them escapes or fails to interest him, from the inmost 
 recesses of Filippo's thoughts to the way Kate does her hair. 
 That is the first thing. Next, he brings these men and 
 women thronging before us ; they are there, living and real, 
 with faults, virtues, joys, griefs, in strength or in weakness, 
 like the men and women we know in our every-day lives, or 
 rather should know if we had heart and insight enough to 
 
44 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 read them as we are shown these. Sometimes indeed the 
 determination to ' make speak ' — 
 
 ' The very man as he was wont to do — ' 
 
 leads to total disregard of the canon that requires art to be 
 beautiful as well as true, as in the positive ugliness of the 
 first part of Holy Cross Day ; but this is an extreme case. 
 Lastly, through the treatment of these actual men and 
 women, most of them not in the least ideal people, some of 
 them as queerly grotesque as one can well imagine, we 
 arrive at the poet's own ideal of life, and find an ideal not 
 only interesting, but in the highest degree stimulating, 
 inspiring, bracing. For in a way, Browning is after all the 
 soul of all his creations. They speak, but we feel that he, 
 the observer, is there all the time, and somehow through 
 their own speech we discern his judgment of them ; out of 
 his own mouth is 
 
 ' Announced to each his station in the Past, — ' 
 
 not, of course, as the world judges, but according as they 
 stand in the poet's view of life. 
 
 It is therefore all-important to understand what this view 
 of life, broadly speaking, is. Browning clearly regards this 
 life as a preparation for ' more life and fuller ' beyond the 
 veil ; a time which, to be spent rightly, must be spent in 
 growth, progress, a constant rising from lower to higher 
 things through a never-ending series of experiences that 
 discipline, be they joys or pains. He delights in the joys 
 of life not as ends, but means ; he greets the pains of Mfe 
 not as evils, but as further means, the cause of struggle 
 indeed, but of health-giving struggle, without which we 
 should be the losers. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 45 
 
 ' Then, welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 Be our joys three-parts pain ! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe.' 
 
 Rabbi Ben E%ra. 
 
 He does not place his ideal in disciplined obedience to 
 law and duty, but in disciplined activity, continuous 
 aspiration from height to height. 
 
 ' I say that man was made to grow, not stop ; 
 That help, he needed once, and needs no more. 
 Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn : 
 For he hath new needs, and new helps to these. 
 This imports solely, man should mount on each 
 New height in view.' 
 
 ' Man knows partly but conceives beside. 
 Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact. 
 And in this striving, this converting air 
 Into a solid he may grasp and use. 
 Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone. 
 Not God's, and not the beasts' : God is, they are, 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. ' 
 
 A Death in the Desert, 
 
 Steady growth from less to more perfect knowledge ; to 
 stronger, because more reasonable, steadfastness of will ; to 
 finer spiritual insight — the eye ever quicker to perceive the 
 occasional ' God-gUmpse,' the ear to catch the ' first low 
 word ' of divine incitement ; this carried on from youth to 
 age he regards as the true hfe to be Hved here, the true 
 preparation for ' the last of life for which the first was 
 made.' 
 
46 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' And I shall thereupon 
 Take rest ere I be gone 
 Once more on my adventure brave and new : 
 Fearless and unperplexed, 
 When I wage battle next, 
 What weapons to select, what armour to indue.' 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
 It follows that progress of this kind must be accompanied 
 by a frequent consciousness of failure as the man's reach 
 still exceeds his grasp, and the goal of aspiration is attained 
 only to prove itself unsatisfying. Browning's doctrine of 
 defeat might be summed up in weighty words written by a 
 well-known teacher with a very different application. ' To 
 be defeated,' says the late Mr. Edward Thring, ' and go on 
 the better for being defeated, is the highest thing that can 
 happen to man. There is no blessing equal to defeat. . . . 
 Defeat is the hallowed means by which greatness is made 
 great.' 
 
 ' For thence,' says Rabbi Ben Ezra — 
 
 ' For thence, — a paradox 
 Which comforts while it mocks, — 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 
 What I aspired to be. 
 And was not, comforts me : 
 A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.' 
 
 And again in The Grammariati s Funeral Browning's view 
 is emphasised — 
 
 ' That low man seeks a little thing to do. 
 
 Sees it and does it : 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 
 Dies ere he knows it. 
 That low man goes on adding one to one, 
 
 His hundred's soon hit : 
 This high man, aiming at a million. 
 
 Misses an unit. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 47 
 
 That has the world here — should he need the next, 
 
 Let the world mind him ! 
 This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed, 
 
 Seeking shall find him.' 
 
 There are two opposite snares to be avoided by him who 
 would Hve truly. One is forgetfulness of the conditions of 
 this present life, the limitations which forbid a premature 
 attempt to force infinite achievement into the finite exist- 
 ence, to gain perfect knowledge, unbounded exercise of will, 
 undimmed perception, limitless emotion, to crowd the work 
 of eternity into the brief years of time. That way hes 
 destruction to the spirit. The other snare is acquiescence in 
 ordinary standards, contentment with easily-won things of 
 earthly life, of which the best is nothing — 
 
 ' Unless we turn, as the soul knows how, 
 The earthly gift to an end divine.' 
 
 Browning has absolutely no patience at all with apathy and 
 feebleness. 
 
 ' What had I on earth to do. 
 With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? 
 Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless did I drivel ? ' 
 
 Epilogue to Asolaniio. 
 
 He denounces the man or woman who stifles an arousing 
 impulse in obedience to prudential motives, — this seems 
 clearly to be the bearing of The Statue and the Bust, which 
 has strangely enough been construed into an approval of 
 license. 
 
 ' He looked at her, as a lover can ; 
 She looked at him as one who awakes : 
 .The past was a sleep, and her life began.' 
 
 Their love was unlawful, but not for this reason did they 
 refuse to indulge it. No sense of duty restrained them, 
 
48 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 nothing more exalted than -sloth and cowardice ; they clung 
 to the unfaithful love — the ' counter ' — yet hung back from 
 venturing aught for it, and therefore 
 
 ' 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, 
 Through the end in sight was a vice, I say.' 
 
 In Easter Day the soul which longed for nothing more 
 than earth can give receives in a dream-vision the award 
 of free possession of the world. 
 
 ' Thou art shut 
 Out of the heaven of spirit ; glut 
 Thy sense upon the world : ''tis thine 
 For ever — take it ! ' 
 
 But the transport of joy that the award at first occasions 
 is changed by degrees into dark despair as the soul realises 
 too late what it is to have accepted for eternity the limit- 
 ations of earth ; and the beseeching prayer breaks out — 
 
 ' Thou Love of God ! Or let me die. 
 Or grant what shall seem heaven almost ! 
 Let me not know that all is lost, 
 Though lost it be — leave me not tied 
 To this despair, this corpse -like bride ! 
 Let that old life seem mine — no more — 
 With limitation as before, 
 With darkness, hunger, toil, distress : 
 Be all the earth a wilderness ! 
 Only let me go on, go on, 
 Still hoping ever and anon 
 To reach one eve the Better Land ! ' 
 
 And when the dread vision is gone by, the lesson of 
 strenuous Uving has been effectually learnt. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 49 
 
 ' And so I live, you see, 
 Go through the world, try, prove, reject, 
 Prefer, still struggling to effect 
 My warfare ; happy that I can 
 Be crossed and thwarted as a man, 
 Not left in God's contempt apart, 
 With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart. 
 Tame in earth's paddock as her prize. ' 
 
 The connoisseur also, he whose attitude is merely that 
 of appraising, however accurately, the products of Art, 
 fares even worse at Mr. Browning's hands than at Lord 
 Tennyson's. The builder of the Palace of Art is saved 
 at last; but for the Bishop who orders his tomb at St. 
 Praxed's what prospect is there? His unexceptionable 
 taste in the matter of marble, lapis lazuli, bronze work, 
 inscriptions — 
 
 ' Carve my epitaph aright. 
 Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word, 
 No gaudy ware like Gandolf s second line — 
 TuUy my masters ? Ulpian serves his need ! ' 
 
 — ministers to nothing higher than vanity, spite, distrust, 
 cynical worldliness, curiously blended with a genuine regard 
 for customary ritual, a relish for 'good, strong, thick, 
 stupefying incense-smoke ' ; his whole conception of Art, 
 as a mere means of self-exaltation, seeming the more 
 degraded under the reverend episcopal cope and mitre. 
 
 Contrast with this, AM Vogler, the genuine artist, ' made 
 perfect ' for a moment with the wonderful palace of music 
 reared 
 
 ' All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, 
 All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, 
 All through music and me ! ' 
 
 As the beautiful sounds die away, and starting tears witness 
 
 E 
 
50 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 to their glory and their failure— for they are gone — he lifts 
 the more surely arms of aspiration to the God in whom all 
 fulness shall be found without change. 
 
 ' Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name ? 
 Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made witli hands ! 
 What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same ? 
 
 Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands ? 
 There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as before ; 
 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round. 
 ****** 
 
 And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fulness of the days ? ' 
 
 This is the apotheosis of noble failure ; but even for 
 ignoble and seemingly absolute failure Browning, always 
 an optimist through his own deeply-grounded confidence 
 in a governing Intelligence perfect in love as well as in 
 power, and through his acceptance of evil as a necessary 
 condition of good in this school of the soul, has something 
 hopeful to say. Musing in the Morgue over such an 
 unpromising text as the sight of 
 
 ' The three men who did most abhor 
 Their life in Paris yesterday, 
 So killed themselves : ' 
 he concludes — 
 
 ' My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
 
 That, after Last, returns the First, 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
 That what began best, can't end worst, 
 Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst. ' 
 
 Apparent Failure. 
 
 Browning is the sympathetic exponent of all sorts of 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 51 
 
 incident, of every kind of enthusiastic activity, in this life- 
 long growth of the single soul. Bodily development, music, 
 painting, poetry, love, hate, patriotism, hero-worship, the 
 life of cities and towns, country life, theology, philosophy — 
 hardly any imaginable human interest bearing on it lies 
 outside his range of interest. Only a few of the most 
 important can be touched upon here. 
 
 He sets high value on the body, and the happy, efficient 
 exercise of all its faculties — ■ 
 
 ' Oh, our manhood's prime vigour ! No spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
 Oh ! the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water. ' — Saul. 
 
 It is recognised, too, as a most precious instrument — 
 
 ' Eyes, ears took in their dole, 
 Brain treasured up the whole, 
 Should not the heart beat once " How good to live and learn ? " ' 
 
 And again — 
 
 ' Let us not always say 
 " Spite of this flesh to-day 
 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! " 
 As the bird wings and sings, 
 Let us cry " All good things 
 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul ! " ' 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
 Browning is so pre-occupied with man, or rather men, 
 that nature, except in its bearing on the mood or life of 
 some human being here and there, has a comparatively 
 small share in his poetry. But amongst his crowded gallery 
 of characters some are keenly susceptible to the influence of 
 skies, hills, and flowers ; and from them we get descriptive 
 
52 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 passages of great and original beauty. These touch oftenest 
 upon the larger aspects of nature, such as impress the 
 beholder with their revelation of power and majesty. Some- 
 times the picture is subdued in tone, as in the stanza quoted 
 before from Two in the Campagna; sometimes a lovely detail 
 is brought out, — ■ 
 
 ' That's the wise thrush : he sings each song twice over 
 Lest you should think he never could recapture 
 The first fine careless rapture ! ' 
 
 Home Thoughts from Abroad. 
 
 Sometimes details are richly multiplied, as in The English- 
 man in Italy, but oftener the tone of grandeur prevails, as 
 when the Grammarian's lofty burial-place is described — ■ 
 
 ' Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, 
 Lightnings are loosened. 
 Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm, 
 Peace let the dew send ! ' 
 
 The speaker in Christmas Eve bears emphatic testimony 
 to the constraining impulse of worship found by some so 
 much more powerful under the solemn, lonely sky than in 
 any narrower shrine. He has burst out of Zion Chapel, 
 oppressed by 
 
 ' the pig-of-lead-like pressure 
 Of the preaching man's immense stupidity,' 
 
 into the fresh, dark, storm-swept night. He describes a lull 
 in the rain and wind, the piled-up clouds, the flying moon, 
 the shifting tints of halo. With lightened brain he grows 
 calmer, and tolerance returns, but the ways of other men 
 will never be his, though his attitude towards them has yet 
 to be greatly modified. 
 
 ' Oh, let men keep their ways 
 Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine — 
 Be this my way ! And this is mine ! ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 53 
 
 Immediately afterwards, in the sudden light of ' the 
 moon's consummate apparition,' there springs up before him 
 a sight described in a passage palpitating with breathless 
 wonder and expectation — 
 
 ' North and South and East lay ready 
 For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless. 
 
 Sprang across them and stood steady. 
 'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, 
 From heaven to heaven extending, perfect 
 As the mother-moon's self, full in face. 
 It rose, distinctly at the base 
 
 With its seven proper colours chorded. 
 Which still, in the rising, were compressed. 
 Until at last they coalesced. 
 
 And supreme the spectral creature lorded 
 In a triumph of whitest white, 
 Above which intervened the night. 
 But above night too, like only the next. 
 
 The second of a wondrous sequence. 
 
 Reaching in rare and rarer fragrance, 
 Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed. 
 Another rainbow rose, a mightier. 
 Fainter, flushier and Ihghtier, 
 Rapture dying along its verge. 
 Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge. 
 Whose, from the straining topmost dark. 
 On to the keystone of that arc ? ' 
 
 In Pippa Passes another radiant passage tells how Luigi, 
 in prospect of death, will carry word to all in the other 
 world who care to hear of sunshine and storm, dying days 
 and moonlit nights. 
 
 ' God must be glad one loves his world so much. 
 I can give news of earth to all the dead 
 Who ask me : — last year's sunsets, and great stars 
 Which had a right to come first and see ebb. 
 The crimson wave that drifts the sun away — 
 
54 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims 
 That strengthened into sharp fire, and these stood, 
 Impatient of the azure — and that day 
 In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm — 
 May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights — 
 Gone are they, but I have them in my soul ! ' 
 
 To pass to another subject, no other poet has attempted, 
 as Browning does, to trace out in words the charm and 
 mystery of musical sounds. The grandest of these poems, 
 Abt Vogler, has already been mentioned ; it shows not only 
 delight in harmonised tones, but learned and minute know- 
 ledge of musical theory. Then there is the delightful 
 Toccata of Galuppi's, with its bright yet half ironical and half 
 melancholy picture of Venetian life ; and Master Hugues of 
 Saxe Gotha, in which the organist, left by himself in the 
 dim church, demands of the great dead composer whose 
 music has just taxed his fingers and filled his soul with 
 excitement, 
 
 ' What do you mean by your mountainous fugues ? ' 
 
 How vividly the somewhat eerie details of the time and 
 place are brought out, — the church left to its darkness and 
 silence, the glimmer of light from the burning scrap of candle 
 in the organ-loft, the deep shades among the forest of organ- 
 pipes, where, as the organist plays, the master's face seems to 
 lurk — 
 
 ' . . . with brow ruled like a score 
 Yes, and eyes buried in 'pits on each cheek, 
 
 Like two great breves as they wrote them of yore. 
 Each side that bar, your straight beak ! ' 
 
 Here again it takes some technical knowledge of music 
 to understand fully the masterly merits of the fugue-descrip- 
 tion that follows; and then what are we to make of the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 55 
 
 unfinished comparison at the end, the misgivings that will 
 force their way through the prevailing belief that the greater 
 mind knows best, lest all the labour is after all a mere 
 darkening of counsel as the spreading spider-webs overhead 
 blot out the golden roof? We are left to think it out for 
 ourselves; and meantime what dramatic force there is in 
 the abrupt end, — the player's irritable nerves suddenly and 
 badly upset, and his philosophising cut short by the sputter 
 of dying candle. 
 
 ' . . . Lo you the wick in tlie socket ! 
 Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there ! 
 
 Down it dips, gone like a rocket. 
 What, you want, do you, to come unawares, 
 Sweeping the church up for first morning prayers. 
 And find a poor devil has ended his cares 
 At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs ? 
 
 Do I carry the moon in my pocket ? ' 
 
 Independently of the poems actually devoted to music, 
 many a passing phrase or allusion shows Browning's quick 
 ear for it — 
 
 ' We shall have the word 
 In a minor third, 
 There is none but the cuckoo knows.' 
 
 No less characteristic are his poems on pictures and 
 painting. In the course of the thoughts they contain about 
 Art, its truth, its falsehood, its ideal of excellence, its office 
 in quickening men's perceptions, or lifting up their thoughts, 
 his own view of life and method of communicating it receive 
 vivid illustration. 
 
 ' For, don't you mark ? we're so made 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 ; 
 
56 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 God uses us to help each other so, 
 
 Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now 
 
 Your cuUion'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. ' 
 
 So Fra Lippo Lippi says, himself a marked example of 
 Browning's courage in acceptance of the amazing incongrui- 
 ties of human life. Here is Brother Lippo with the artist-soul 
 of a lover of the beautiful in the body of a rollicking monk, 
 caught in the very act of a disreputable escapade, and 
 lavishing excuses and clever blandishments upon his captors 
 along with his heavenly theories of Art. 
 
 Andrea del Sarto (called ' The faultless painter ') shows 
 that the absence of defects cannot compensate for the 
 absence of genius. With all his faultless technical skill, the 
 painter sees himself below the least of the inspired painters 
 whose reach exceeds their grasp — craftsman not artist, he 
 calls himself. All that his mind can conceive his hand can 
 execute — 
 
 ' Easily, too — when I say, perfectly, 
 I do not boast, perhaps.' 
 
 His drawing and colouring are flawless — but the meaning 1 
 
 ' All the play, the insight and the stretch — 
 Out of me, out of me ! ' 
 
 Rafael's drawing may be wrong, but the light of heaven 
 shines through the faulty Hnes, 'its soul is right.' Had but 
 Andrea's beautiful wife been able to supply the inspiration 
 he needed, he too might have risen at her word with Agnolo 
 and Rafael, ' up to God all three ' ; but the two objects of 
 his divided passion, his Art and his cold-hearted, shallow- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 57 
 
 brained wife, are alike, perfect in physical loveliness but 
 lacking soul. And so he acquiesces sadly in the small 
 return his devotion to either can secure. 
 
 Old Pictures in Florence draws the same contrast between 
 outward skill and the expression of inward meaning in 
 another way. Here the ancient art of Greece is compared 
 with the pictures of the early Christian painters ; the perfec- 
 tion of visible lineament and stature in the one is set against 
 the struggling spiritual significance of the other. 
 
 ' On which I conchide, that the early painters 
 
 To cries of " Greek Art and what more wish you ? " — 
 Replied, "To become now self-acquainters, 
 
 And paint man, man, whatever the issue ! 
 Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray. 
 
 New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters ; 
 To bring the invisible into full play, 
 
 Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters ?" ' 
 
 Passing on to the heaped-up riches of the love-poems 
 we again find that Browning's general view of life determines 
 and explains his attitude ; and looking at them as far as 
 possible from the same point of view, even more clearly 
 than before we 
 
 ' Discern 
 Infinite passion, and the pain 
 Of finite hearts that yearn.' 
 
 For he regards love as one of the best, or perhaps the best 
 and most powerful means of enlightenment among the 
 whole series of enlightening experiences in which the value 
 of life makes itself felt. Genuine love even more surely 
 than art or learning renovates the soul and widens its 
 horizon. Moreover, it is the commonest; anybody may 
 have it — it is 'a thing men seldom miss.' 
 
58 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her ! ' 
 
 To reject it through fear or prudence or inertness is to be 
 tried in the balances and found wanting, and to forego 
 life's best gift. And this is true for men and women 
 equally, for Browning is in direct opposition to the common 
 notion which thinks of love as the main part of a woman's 
 life, but only an episode in a man's. 
 
 His work here is quite new in the degree to which the 
 lovers are real, not idealised people ; just men and women, 
 passionate or cold, true or faithless, as in actual life. 
 Also he goes far beyond the early rapture to which most 
 other love-poetry is confined, and follows out the results 
 in after-days, when some barrier may have kept the lovers 
 asunder, or when, after marriage, love has declined through 
 miserable stages of decay, or union has grown ever closer 
 and dearer. No two situations are alike in these varied 
 poems, of pure love-rapture ; of love checked by timidity 
 or prudence, made tragic by caprice, frustrated by circum- 
 stances, cut short by death ; of love turned delirious ; of 
 love perfect on one side and faulty on the other ; above all, 
 of ideal love crowned in perfect union. 
 
 To come to individual poems. Simple passion animates 
 Meeting at Night — 
 
 ' A voice less loud, through joys and fears 
 Than the two hearts beating each to each ;' 
 
 and the daring Confessions — 
 
 ' We loved, sir— used to meet : 
 How sad and bad and mad it was — 
 But then, how it was sweet ! ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 59 
 
 In Dh Alitur Visum an old French savant has fallen in 
 love with a young beauty ' round and sound as a mountain 
 apple ' ; his love is returned, but his prudence forbids the 
 marriage — for them there was to be 
 
 ' No grasping at love, gaining a share 
 
 C the sole spark from God's life at strife 
 With death.' 
 
 Ten years later they meet again ; he has married a dancer, 
 she a man she does not care for, and so she tells her lover 
 his worldly-wise cowardice has lost ' two souls ; nay four.' 
 
 In Youth and Art the two have missed the mutual love 
 that might have been theirs, and so though one has married 
 a lord, and the other has gained his ambition and ranks 
 high as an artist — 
 
 ' Each life's unfulfilled, you see ; 
 
 It hangs still, patchy and scrappy ; 
 We have not sighed deep, laughed free. 
 Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy.' 
 
 The last two lines strike a vein in which Browning is 
 
 supremely successful, as he depicts the keen enjoyment that 
 
 two congenial souls get out of companionship in all and 
 
 any circumstances, no matter how trivial or disagreeable to 
 
 outside eyes. Glance at the snowed-up couple in A Lovers' 
 
 Quarrel— 
 
 ' Laughs with so little cause ! 
 We devised games out of straws. 
 
 We would try and trace 
 
 One another's face 
 In the ash, as an artist draws ; 
 
 Free on each other's flaws. 
 How we chattered like two church daws ! ' 
 
 And in Respectability, how happy they are to have escaped 
 
6o VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 comfortable, conventional, but separated, life for life together 
 in a back street of Paris. 
 
 In Cristina she has deliberately led him into love and 
 turned away from him. Which is the loser? and what has 
 the other gained ? 
 
 ' Such am I ; the secret's mine now ! She has lost me, I have gained 
 
 her ; 
 Her soul's mine : and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's 
 
 remainder. 
 Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and 
 
 blended : 
 And then, come next life quickly ! This world's use will have been 
 
 ended.' 
 
 He has ' caught God's secret,' separation cannot deprive 
 him of it ; it is her life that is left imperfect. ' She has lost 
 me, I have gained her.' 
 
 In Too Late she has married the wrong man, and after 
 six years is dead ; and his (the right man's) anguish breaks 
 out, and his contempt for ' that blank lay- figure your fancy 
 draped ' — 
 
 ' See, I bleed these tears in the dark 
 
 Till comfort come and the last be bled : 
 
 He ? He is tagging your epitaph.' 
 
 And the heart-break sobs through commonplace words of 
 almost playful remembrance. 
 
 The passionate lovers of In a Gondola are parted by the 
 hand of the assassin, whose stab is hardly suffered to inter- 
 rupt their speech before it is stilled in death. Porphyria's 
 lover himself calls death to his aid to free his beloved from 
 the ' vainer ties ' she could not escape in life. This poem 
 was originally among those purporting to have been written 
 from Madhouse Cells. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 6i 
 
 In The Worst of It the marriage has failed ; she has 
 proved faithless, and his loyal, unselfish heart grieves first 
 that she, his pride and joy, should be touched by the finger 
 of desecration ; next that his very devotion must some day 
 be the knife for her stabbing ; and worst of all, that even 
 should she now repent it would be for her own sake, not 
 for his or love's, and so for a heaven at best but a place 
 of cold glitter and shine. The deed is done, their fate 
 sealed ; and for all his unquenched love he ends with the 
 irrevocable sentence — 
 
 ' I knew you once : but in Paradise 
 
 If we meet, I will pass nor turn my head. ' 
 
 In Any Wife to Any Husband she, the deeper nature 
 of the two, is dying before he is perfected in love as he 
 might and would have been could she have remained at 
 his side. 
 
 ' And is it not the bitterer to think 
 That, disengage our hands and tliou wilt sink 
 Although thy love was love in very deed?' 
 
 In A Forgiveness, before the terrible interruption to love 
 occurs, there is a matchless ideal of the inspiring effect of 
 love on daily work — 
 
 ' Work freely done should balance happiness 
 Fully enjoyed ; and since beneath my roof 
 Housed she who made home heaven, in heaven's behoof 
 I went forth every day, and all day long 
 Worked for the world.' 
 
 Lastly, there are the poems of flawless love and life. 
 Their proportion — two only, out of a number of which 
 barely the fourth part has had even a word here — speaks its 
 own tale. 
 
62 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 By the Fireside brings us into the inner heaven of home 
 itself, where love and union reign secure. Years of love 
 ever ripening and deepening have made of them ' one soul,' 
 and now he watches her as she sits 
 
 ' Reading by fire-light, that great brow 
 
 And the spirit small hand propping it, 
 Mutely, my heart knows how — 
 
 ' 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.' 
 
 He goes back in thought to the moment among the wood- 
 land trees that took away the screen of division from 
 between them. 
 
 ' 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. 
 
 * * * # # 
 
 ' 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 ! 
 
 ***** 
 
 ' So, earth has gained by one man the more, 
 
 And the gain of earth must be heaven's gain too.' 
 
 In One Word More, the dedication of his Men and 
 Women, the poet speaks ' once, and only once, and for one 
 only ' in his own name to his own wife. 
 
 Another remarkable class of poems is concerned either 
 with subtle dissection of characters such as men endure 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 63 
 
 but do not praise, or with investigation of some belief or 
 philosophy. In Caliban, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Bishop 
 Blougram, Mr. Browning allows abject ignorance and super- 
 stition, prejudice, cunning, ecclesiastical sophistry and 
 worldly wisdom, to say their best for themselves, and in 
 the saying to display themselves unveiled. Whether the 
 result is regarded as merely a dramatic presentation marked 
 by extraordinary skill and insight, or as also a castigating 
 satire, will depend on the reader's point of view. 
 
 All these poems are difficult, and need most careful 
 reading and re-reading ; but it would be hard to say which 
 best repays the study it demands, so keen an interest can 
 each one of them arouse. In Cleon, the Greek poet, re- 
 plying to questions from Protus, the Emperor, passes from 
 stage to stage of a subtle argument involving some of the 
 most difficult problems of life, till he arrives at a point from 
 which it appears that the only possible solution for the crown- 
 ing perplexity lies in the promise of a future life. But at this 
 point the poet-philosopher is turned back upon himself, for 
 
 ' Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas, 
 He must have done so were it possible.' 
 
 By a most characteristic touch Cleon's letter is ended 
 with a contemptuous allusion to ' one called Paulus,' who 
 at that moment was delivering the message of revelation 
 that Cleon longs for with his whole soul. He reproaches 
 the Emperor for stopping to inquire of such an one — 
 
 ' He writeth, doth he? Well, and he may write.' 
 
 The Jew finds his proper scholars in ' certain slaves ' who 
 preach him and Christ — 
 
 ■ And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
 Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.' 
 
64 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 The cultivated Greek can by no means bring himself even 
 to hear the words of a barbarian Jew. 
 
 An Epistle works out a still more intricate problem. It 
 endeavours to realise in imagination the effect upon a man's 
 hfe here of having actually experienced the life of another 
 world, from which he has returned to earth ; and it conveys 
 this to the reader, not directly, but through the impression 
 which such a case may be supposed to have made upon 
 the mind of a beholder — in this case Karshish, the Arab 
 physician, a man trained by his occupation to observe and 
 reason, and familiar with the symptoms of mental aberration 
 or bodily disease. The double effort of imagination in- 
 volved complicates the problem, but adds greatly to its 
 dramatic force and interest. Karshish, travelling in India, 
 writes to the master-sage Abib, his instructor, and after 
 passing lightly in review certain ailments and remedies he 
 has found common in the land, he enters at length into 
 the ' case ' of Lazarus, met with at Bethany, whose epileptic 
 mania is distinguished from common hallucinations by the 
 fact that it remains fixed instead of giving way to time and 
 health. In a state of bodily health far beyond the average, 
 Lazarus is still firmly convinced that, so far from having 
 passed through an ordinary trance, he actually died, and 
 was restored to life ' by a Nazarene physician of his tribe ' ; 
 and Karshish then tells of the strange paradoxes observ- 
 able in his conduct. He has seemingly lost all sense of 
 proportion, 'eyes the world now like a child,' is often 
 totally indifferent in the face of great events, and at other 
 moments as unexpectedly indignant or alarmed over some 
 trifle. Yet he is no fool, and Karshish dimly discerns that 
 he has some standard by which to judge the importance of 
 earthly matters ; he half admits that Lazarus ' knows God's 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 65 
 
 secret,' and is inclined to admire his ' prone submission to 
 the heavenly will.' It is left for us to notice that to Lazarus 
 material concerns have one and all sunk into such utter 
 insignificance that the conquest of a province is of no more 
 account than 
 
 ' The passing of a mule with gourds,' 
 
 and his child's physical illness gives him scarcely a thought, 
 while on the other hand, everything touching the moral and 
 spiritual life has become so supremely important that an 
 unhallowed look or gesture can throw him into an agony. 
 But Karshish, while he tries to make light of Lazarus' 
 ' crazy tale,' is in spite of himself fascinated by it, and 
 cannot maintain an unshaken belief in his own theory of 
 ' mania.' He becomes at last impatient with himself and 
 apologetic to his master for the undue length of detail into 
 which he has strayed ; but then, after a final farewell, the 
 indifference in_ which he would fain take refuge suddenly 
 breaks down, and he adds after all a few lines of intensely 
 earnest questioning — 
 
 ' The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou thinli ? 
 So, the All-Great were the All- Loving too — 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, " heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself! 
 Thou hast no power nor may'st 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.' 
 
 The revelation of divine love that Karshish incredulously 
 yet longingly catches at, is again the climax, more clearly 
 discerned, more firmly held, in Saul ; but is there arrived 
 at by a very different process. David, in his efforts to 
 
66 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 arouse King Saul out of the trance of misery in which he 
 hung ' drear and stark, blind and dumb,' plays first the well- 
 known tunes associated with quiet every-day occupations 
 of life, and with its sorrows and gladness ; then he dwells 
 on the physical joys of living ; then on the delights of such 
 powers and gifts as Saul possesses, from which he passes 
 to the more intangible source of happiness to be found in 
 the thought of Saul's deathless fame. And then, through 
 the very strength of his own longing — ' had love but the 
 warrant love's heart to dispense ' — to restore Saul the 
 mistake, Saul the failure, the ruin, to new light and life, new 
 harmony of being, — the truth bursts upon him, and he mocks 
 at himself for having vainly imagined that he, the creature, 
 the receiver of gifts, could in the one way of love outdo 
 the Giver, the Creator. He reahses that, as his own perfect 
 love and service would lead him gladly to take suffering 
 or death if he could thereby help the king, so it must be 
 with Him who has the power as well as the will ; and there 
 breaks upon him with a dizzying shock the assurance that 
 restoration, completion in a new life will be given to Saul, 
 and this not by a mere fiat, costing nothing, but through 
 the voluntary suffering and endurance of the One mighty 
 to save — 
 
 ' So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown — 
 And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in ! ' 
 
 The Hebrew seer. Rabbi Ben Ezra, also, though his 
 theology is necessarily Theistic, not Christian, has received 
 in the purged vision of his old age the same essential truth — 
 
 ' I see the whole design, 
 I, who saw power, see now love perfect too ; ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 67 
 
 while in A Death in the Desert the aged and last-surviving 
 apostle St. John anticipates the doubts and questionings 
 with which generations to come will assail the gospel he 
 has taught, and answers them with applications of his 
 central doctrine — love and the divinity of love. 
 
 ' For life with all it yields of joy and woe, 
 And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend, — 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love.' 
 
 Indeed we seem here to have come to the very heart of 
 Mr. Browning's own theology. It would of course be both 
 unfair and unsafe to draw any such conclusion only from 
 words put dramatically into the mouth of other speakers ; 
 but comparing these with other passages at greater length 
 than is here possible, we may find that he looks upon 
 Christ in a mystical sense as the necessary revelation of 
 divine love, and love as the one indispensable channel of 
 communication between man and God. Through love 
 Omnipotence becomes veritable -Divinity ; through love 
 man, the creature, shares in the nature of his Creator, and 
 can draw ever closer to Him. It is natural that some 
 expression of belief so fundamental should recur again and 
 again; but one more example must here be enough. It 
 shall be taken from the speaker in Christmas Eve. 
 
 ' — Love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it, 
 Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it, 
 The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it, 
 
 Shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it, 
 And I shall behold thee, face to face, 
 O God, and in thy light retrace 
 How in all I loved here, still wast thou ! ' 
 
 Nearly all illustrations so far have been taken from poems 
 contained in the two volumes of Selections made by the poet 
 
68 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 himself. Almost every quality that is of most value in Mr. 
 Browning's poetry — the insight, the vigour, the exuberant 
 vitality, the keen intellectual interest — ^is to be found in 
 these dramatic monologues at its best and strongest, and 
 I can only hope that this bare outline, which is all that 
 could be attempted, may suggest enough idea of the wealth 
 of interest to be found in them to lead a few readers as yet 
 unfamihar with their richness and power and variety, to 
 search further and enjoy for themselves. 
 
 Of the dramas it is equally impossible to write with any 
 approach to fulness, but a little must be said, for we would 
 not willingly stop short of them. To some of us it is perhaps 
 in the nature of luxury to go further, but such an irresistible 
 luxury, and we may fairly add, so far from enervating, that 
 only the sternest demands upon time can make us forego it. 
 
 The dramas came before the shorter poems in point of 
 time, and they are for the most part less difficult. They are 
 really ^/ays, some of them having, as we know, successfully 
 stood the test of actual representation on the stage ; 
 yet they are, one would think, better to read than to 
 watch, because in them also the chief interest lies rather 
 in the springs of action than in action itself. The 
 action is commonly indeed quite unimportant, sometimes 
 trivial ; Pippa Passes, the most charming of all, has the 
 least exciting plot. Then, too, a resemblance in the 
 manner of speech between one and another of the persons 
 speaking — the well-known, abrupt, terse, piquant manner, 
 and the occasional word dropped by one and another of 
 comment that could never have come from the inside of the 
 situation, betray the fact that Mr. Browning himself is never 
 out of sight. But while this diminishes the genuinely 
 dramatic character of the plays it does not necessarily 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 69 
 
 dimmish their interest. For exciting plots and life-like 
 characters in whom their author's individuality is completely 
 lost sight of, we Victorian readers look indeed far more to 
 our prose novelists than to our verse playwrights ; and in 
 poetry, when it is Mr. Browning who muses or analyses or 
 indirectly holds up ideals or pronounces judgments — and at 
 his clearest — some of us are disposed to say that we cannot 
 easily have too much of him. 
 
 The idea of Pippa Passes is singularly fresh and simple. 
 The fascinating little maiden who springs out of her attic- 
 bed in the sunrise hour of New Year's Day, her one whole 
 holiday in the year, has a day of achievements before her 
 such as could rarely indeed fall to the lot of a little silk- 
 winder ; and yet there is nothing in the least overstrained 
 about it, and Pippa does not know a bit what she has done, 
 and most likely never will know to the end of her life that 
 she that day turned the course of four different sets of (to 
 her) important people's lives. 
 
 Not a single golden moment of the day must be lost, but 
 how spend it best ? thinks Pippa, dressing. She, ■ poor, 
 solitary, bright-hearted child, will for once fancy herself 
 possessed of the love that enfolds the ' happiest four ' in 
 Asolo. First there is Ottima, whose wealthy husband owns 
 the silk-mills, and whose lover, Sebald, is at her command. 
 But there is scandal in this love — 
 
 ' there's better love, I know ! 
 This foolish love was only day's first offer.' 
 
 The next she chooses shall be Phene's, the bride whose 
 young sculptor-husband weds her that day. Yet even a 
 husband's love may grow cold — only a parent's lasts on 
 without change. 
 
70 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Let me be cared about, kept out of harm, 
 And schemed for, safe in love as with a charm.' 
 
 She, fatherless and motherless from her infancy, will this 
 evening be Luigi, watched by his mother's tender love. 
 Best of all, and most lasting, is God's love, such as will bless 
 the holy Bishop who is to rest to-night in his dead brother's 
 palace. To-night Pippa will be Monsignor. 
 
 Yet no ! for does she not already possess God's love shed 
 on her own small self without need of fancy ? What says 
 the New Year's hymn ? 
 
 ■ All service ranks the same with God : 
 . . . God's puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we ; there is no last nor first.' 
 
 So she will only pass by each, and see their happiness 
 without envy — 
 
 ' Being just as great, no doubt ! 
 Useful to men and dear to God as they ! ' 
 
 Happy in her bright day, and mocking a little at herself, off 
 she sets. 
 
 Away in the villa on the hillside Ottima and Sebald have 
 this night murdered her aged husband, and now in the early 
 morning they speak together of their crime. Sebald is 
 shaken and half remorseful. Ottima, perfectly reckless, 
 labours with feverish passion to revive his love for her ; she 
 has all but hardened him, when above the sound of guilty 
 vows rings Pippa's voice carolling her cheery little song as 
 she loiters by and plucks a straggling heart's-ease from 
 Ottima's clump — 
 
 ' The year's at the spring, 
 
 And day's at the morn : 
 * * » 
 
 God's in His heaven — 
 
 All's right with the world ! ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 71 
 
 God's in his heaven 1 The simple words light up for Sebald 
 
 what he is and what he has done as with a flash of heaven's 
 
 own light. 
 
 ' I see what I have done, 
 Entirely now ! Oh, I am proud to feel 
 Such torments — let the world take credit thence — 
 I, having done my deed, pay too its price ! ' 
 
 Through his stinging conviction of sin, even Ottima's 
 conscience is aroused ; both are saved in spirit. 
 
 A little later, and Jules, the young sculptor, has led home 
 his beautiful bride only to find that he has been wickedly 
 duped by envious fellow-students and entrapped into marry- 
 ing an ignorant girl of the lowest class. But before her 
 own lips have betrayed the secret, his first words have 
 awakened her torpid soul to see the goodness of the man 
 to whom this thing has been done, and to long for his 
 regenerating influence. 
 
 ' What rises is myself, 
 Not me the shame and suffering ; but they sink, 
 Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so, 
 Above the world ! ' 
 
 None the less he is bidding her leave him, provided with 
 all the money he can raise to give her, when Pippa's voice 
 is heard, singing this time a little love-ballad. Somehow 
 the little song suggests to Jules a nobler part. "Why not 
 keep to this woman who has such need of him ? 
 
 ' Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff 
 Be art — and further, to evoke a soul 
 From form be nothing? This new soul is mine ! ' 
 
 The two depart to begin a new life and new pursuit of art 
 in ' some isle with the sea's silence on it.' 
 
 Later still, and Luigi, the ardent patriot, the inborn lover 
 
72 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 of nature who heeds the cuckoo's voice even while Hfe and 
 death depend upon his talk, debates with his mother the 
 mission that in the council of conspirators has fallen to his 
 lot. Shall he fulfil it and put the Austrian Emperor to 
 death ? Neither of them guess that Luigi will be arrested 
 unless, by leaving home that night, he proves that the pass- 
 port issued is really for his own use ; and his mother 
 anxiously, eagerly, dissuades him. She has almost prevailed 
 by the mention of his betrothed, but Pippa turns the 
 scale. She is singing again ; and now it is a song of wisdom 
 and justice in high places, of grace and peace reigning 
 where with ' old smiling eyes ' 
 
 ' The king judged, sitting in the sun.' 
 
 The thought of his own country, down-trodden and 
 oppressed under the foreign tyrant rushes back upon Luigi 
 and stirs the old aspirations to free his land. 
 
 ' 'Tis God's voice calls : how could I stay ? Farewell ! ' 
 
 And now, late at night, the Bishop, so hallowed in 
 Pippa's innocent imagination, sits in the palace of the 
 dead brother whose wealth he inherits, closeted with an 
 Intendant, the tool of that brother's crimes, Grasping for 
 himself after riches that have been the price of this man's 
 services, he threatens the Intendant with exposure and 
 destruction for the murder of the infant child and heiress 
 left by an elder brother years before. The Intendant turns 
 upon him with news that the child still lives — ' 'tis but a 
 little black-eyed pretty singing Felippa, gay silk-winding 
 girl ' — Pippa herself — and then in return for undisturbed 
 possession of his ill-gotten gains he offers to dispose of 
 her after a new and fiendish plan of his own devising. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 73 
 
 Her fate trembles in the balance, when once more the 
 clear young voice rises from the street below in sweet words 
 of simple love and knowledge of simple things — trees and 
 grass and changing white moon. The Bishop's better side 
 is touched ; at his hasty order the villain is instantly bound 
 and gagged, the very act commits the Bishop himself to a 
 course of justice and restitution. 
 
 Back in her attic, Pippa thinks over the day she has 
 spent, a httle drearily perhaps, for the holiday is over, and 
 naturally she is tired, and she has no suspicion of her real 
 share in the day's events, or of any prospect in store for 
 her other than twelve long months of monotonous silk- 
 winding. She wonders how near she might ever approach 
 these others — 
 
 ' Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so 
 As to ... in some way . . . move them — if you please, 
 Do good or evil to them in some slight way.' 
 
 Perhaps silk of her winding may hem Ottima's cloak ! 
 And how about the morning's dreams of importance ? But 
 no doubt the hymn is right in some sense or other ; and 
 she drops asleep with its words again upon her lips. 
 
 ' All service ranks the same with God — 
 With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we : there is no last nor first.' 
 
 It will be noticed how much the slightness in themselves 
 of Pippa's songs does to carry out the main idea of the 
 play — in Emerson's words. 
 
 ' There is no great and no small 
 To the soul that maketh all.' 
 
 Colombe's Birthday is again the story of a single day, 
 in which a sudden sharp crisis puts more than one soul to 
 
74 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 the proof. Colombe of Ravestein has been installed under 
 her father's will as Duchess of Juliers and Cleves, but as 
 the Duchy is held under Salic law, it is known — vaguely 
 by herself, clearly by her courtiers — that her title cannot 
 be maintained against the claim of her distant cousin, Prince 
 Berthold, should he choose to assert it. On the first 
 anniversary of her investment, also her birthday, the letter 
 containing his claim is received at the palace ; he himself 
 will be there an hour or two later. As the courtiers debate 
 who shall present this unwelcome letter to the Duchess, 
 a travel-stained advocate forces his way in, bearing a petition 
 concerning grievances from Cleves, and entreats permission 
 to lay it before the Duchess. Leave is given on condition 
 that he also presents the letter, which, in ignorance of 
 its contents, he easily consents to do. His outburst of 
 indignant loyalty on discovering the part he has been made 
 to play at once dismays the courtiers, wins the Lady 
 Colombe to declare she will hold by her Duchy for the 
 sake of remaining his sovereign, and constitutes him her 
 counsellor. Prince Berthold, greeted with this surprising 
 intelligence, yet secure in his own right, courteously with- 
 draws till Valence, the advocate, shall have had time to 
 master the claims put forward in papers now left with him. 
 Before their appointed meeting in the evening takes place, 
 three things have happened. Valence has discovered that 
 the Prince's claims are indefeasible; Prince Berthold has 
 discovered that it would be more politic as well as pleasanter 
 to win the Dukedom by marrying instead of dispossessing 
 his spirited young cousin ; the courtiers think they have 
 discovered that Colombe means to marry Valence, and 
 know that by marriage with a subject her right would, by 
 her father's will, pass to her kinsman. Instead of demanding 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 75 
 
 her Duchy, therefore, Berthold commissions Valence to 
 offer Colombe his hand, which Valence, stifling his own 
 feelings, does with conscientious eloquence. But on being 
 pressed to say that Berthold loves the Duchess, he has to 
 own that the offer is purely one of policy; and further 
 admits that he sees the absence of love in Berthold through 
 knowledge of his own love. For the moment Colombe 
 loses all her delight in his devotion. She had thought it 
 was disinterested loyalty, and behold, ' mere love ' ! She 
 ' did ill to mistrust the world so soon ' ; she will hear 
 Berthold speak for himself. The Prince, soon to be 
 Emperor, repeats his splendid offer, not disguising that 
 only splendour, not love, is his to give. At this point the 
 courtiers, anxious to win the new sovereign's favour, break 
 in with their fancied discovery of the state of feeling 
 between Colombe and Valence, asking how service such 
 as his could have been rendered except for love, or requited 
 except by love. The Prince, unmoved, pits his magnificent 
 rank and wealth against Valence's love, without a misgiving 
 about the result. Valence, warned that his suit can but 
 damage his lady's interests, is summoned to press or 
 renounce it. The Duchess has had time to think since 
 her first hasty vexation with his avowal of love ; she has 
 had the opportunity of comparing her two suitors ; she has 
 heard the courtiers' praise of Valence — true in fact, though 
 false in motive — and now the unselfish tenderness and 
 dignity with which he resigns her to Berthold lead to her 
 instant decision, and Colombe declares — 
 
 ' I take him — give up Juliers and [he world. 
 This is my Birthday. ' 
 
 Such is the skeleton of the play. Its charm lies chiefly 
 
76 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 in showing how at the touch of the mind of Valence, 
 Colombe's is awakened into sudden and beautiful develop- 
 ment. In the past year Colombe, in spite of a little regretful 
 longing for the river-side flowers and simple life of her old 
 home, has been innocently happy in her new state, enjoying 
 the deference of her Httle court, and entirely believing in 
 its sincerity." The wrongs and sufferings of Cleves, and the 
 burning pity with which Valence makes them known, are 
 alike a revelation to her; so, in another way, is the desertion 
 of her courtiers so soon as it appears that her rule will be 
 superseded. With Valence at her side, she learns from these 
 to distinguish between true and false grounds of rule — 
 
 ' There is a vision in tlie heart of each 
 Of justice, mercy, wisdom, tenderness 
 To wrong and pain, and knowledge of its cure : 
 And these embodied in a woman's form 
 That best transmits them, pure as first received. 
 From God above her, to mankind below. 
 Will you derive your rule from such a ground, 
 Or rather hold it by the suffrage, say. 
 Of this man — this — and this ? ' 
 
 Just when the hollowness of what she has hitherto supposed 
 to be real loyalty, in showing itself has prepared her to 
 yield up her Duchy wiUingly, a vision of what true dominion 
 might be and do, decides her (although she perceives that 
 outward government is not indispensable to its exercise) 
 not to resign Juliers without testing the strength of her 
 claim. Already she avows — 
 
 ' This is indeed my birthday— soul and body. 
 Its hours have done on me the work of years.' 
 
 But there is much more to come. Valence has aroused in 
 her a vivid perception of the blessings that a noble rule 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. T] 
 
 can confer ; a marriage willi Berthold might seem to offer 
 the largest possible scope for such a rule ; the question 
 now is, whether Colombe can rightly discriminate for herself 
 between the two lots open to her. And here we are 
 confronted with a new interest in the contrasting characters 
 of Berthold and Valence. Berthold is no ignoble man of 
 greed, no mere foil to Valence. On the contrary, the 
 description Valence gives of him is sometimes quoted as 
 being Browning's ideal of manhood. 
 
 ' He gathers earth's whole good into his arms ; 
 Standing as man now, stately, strong and wise, 
 Marching to fortune, not surprised by her. 
 One great aim, like a guiding-star, above— 
 Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift 
 His manhood to the height that takes the prize ; 
 A prize not near — lest overlooking earth 
 He rashly spring to seize it — nor remote, 
 So that he rest upon his path content ; 
 But day by day while shimmering grows shine, 
 And the faint circlet prophesies the orb, 
 He sees so much as, just evolving these. 
 The stateliness, the wisdom and the strength, 
 To due completion, will suffice this life, 
 And lead him at his grandest to the grave.' 
 
 This sounds truly magnificent ; but on looking more 
 closely into even this passage, I think we shall see that to 
 regard it as Browning's ideal is to be misled by sound. The 
 word ' completion ' is in itself enough to arouse suspicion. 
 We have seen that with Browning completion in this life 
 means stagnation.^ Again, 'he sees so much as will . . . 
 
 ■ Compare this effect of a. too-perfect career with the effect of 
 Greek Art in Old Pictures in Floi-mce. We have to remember that 
 the dramas are earlier work than the monologues, and that ideas in 
 them are often more fully worked out in the latter. 
 
78 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 lead him at his grandest to the grave' That is not usually 
 the goal of Browning's thoughts. Often enough he looks 
 forward to death, but it is as re-birth, another step onwards 
 and upwards, for which the mouldering, all-terminating 
 ' grave ' is no synonym. There is even a flavour of scorn 
 in the words. And this impression is fully confirmed as 
 we read further in the same passage — 
 
 ' So, mounting, feels each step he mounts, 
 Nor, as from each to each exultingly 
 He passes, overleaps one grade of joy. 
 
 This for his own good : — with the world each gift 
 
 Of God and man, — reality, tradition, 
 
 Fancy and fact — so well environ him, 
 
 That as a mystic panoply they serve — 
 
 Of force, untenanted, to awe mankind, 
 
 And work his purpose out with half the world. 
 
 While he, their master, dexterously slipt 
 
 From such encumbrance, is meantime employed 
 
 With his own prowess in the other half 
 
 ' This for his own good,' — a clear indication of what is 
 wrong. And finally — 
 
 ' Thus shall he go on, greatening, till he ends — 
 The man of men, the spirit of all flesh. 
 The fiery centre of an earthly world ! ' 
 
 No word of what is to come afterwards. ' He ends.' 
 Berthold is indeed a sublimated type of worldly success at 
 its loftiest ; and Valence — true advocate — exhibits the 
 loftiness in such a glamour of poetry that it is almost 
 irue to say he disguises the worldliness. Colombe is at 
 first to some extent misled ; but the weak point, the 
 something wanting, which nullifies all the grandeur and 
 glory of the rest, comes out later. He has no love, not 
 even for Colombe. Valence admits — 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 79 
 
 ' Had that been — love might so incline the Prince 
 To the world's good, the world that's at his foot — 
 I do not know, this moment, I should dare 
 Desire that you refused the world — and Cleves — 
 The sacrifice he asks.' 
 
 Through Melchior, Prince Berthold's book-loving, privileged 
 friend, we learn more of the good in him. Melchior 
 knows him thoroughly, counts him the ' one hero of the 
 world ' — 
 
 — ' one friend worth my books. 
 Sole man I think it pays the pains to watch,' 
 
 and knowing the fine qualities that are going to waste in 
 him, he leaves his books again and again to warn and 
 persuade. As the two ride together into Juliers, Melchior 
 laments Berthold's easy advance in worldly position by the 
 help of his powerful relatives, and covets difficulties for him, 
 and less material aims. Had he 
 
 ' Conquered a footing inch by painful inch, — 
 And, after long years' struggle, pounced at last 
 On her for prize, — the light life had been lived, 
 And justice done to divers faculties 
 Shut in that brow.' 
 
 Again when Berthold has sent the offer of his hand to 
 Colombe, Melchior tries to modify his cold-blooded desire 
 for the marriage only because his cousin will make a 
 suitable consort and be hindered by it from carrying claims 
 against him from court to court, which her beauty might 
 render dangerous to his future success. And once more 
 at the close Melchior seems to appeal to the Prince's 
 generosity to leave Colombe her Duchy when she weds her 
 love — 
 
 ' Speak, for I know you through your Popes and Kings ! ' 
 
8o VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 But he does not succeed with Berthold as Valence with 
 Colombe, partly perhaps because he was scarcely the same 
 living proof of his own words, partly because the conditions 
 were harder. For Berthold has, as he thinks, already had 
 his eyes opened when in the days of his obscurity the girl 
 he wooed ' under the grey convent-wall ' forsook him for a 
 Brabant lord. 
 
 ' I am past illusion on that score. ' 
 
 He now views other minds through the distorting medium 
 of this too hastily-accepted conviction, and utterly misreads 
 them. He mistakes Valence's consternation on hearing 
 his offer for amazement at the honour it confers upon 
 'Colombe ; in spite of Melchior he frankly rests his merits 
 with Colombe on the worldly advantages he can give 
 her — 
 
 ' You will be Empress, once for all : with me 
 The Pope disputes supremacy — you stand, 
 And none gainsays, the earth's first woman.' 
 
 He is secure that ' the Empire wins ' just before Colombe 
 announces her decision ; and when at last his error is laid 
 bare, it is too late to save him — he is too fully committed 
 to his worldly walks. 
 
 ' I could not imitate — I hardly envy — 
 I do admire you.' 
 
 He cannot even respond to Melchior's appeal ; he can 
 only remind Colombe with some humiliation that he needs 
 her Duchy more than she does, and then prepare to plod 
 on in the old way, though 
 
 ' A somewhat wearier life seems to remain 
 Than I thought possible.' 
 
 Valence on the other hand is destitute of everything that 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 8i 
 
 Berthold has to give. He is poor, unknown, ' a nameless 
 advocate,' unfriended except by unhappy, starving Cleves ; 
 and at first the discovery of his love for her has only 
 repelled Colombe. But his devotion to Cleves has given 
 her a new conception of possibilities in life, and has 
 suddenly quickened her power of judging between his 
 aspirations and the gilded but miserable aims that end in 
 self. The sincerity of his self-forgetting loyalty both to 
 Cleves and to Colombe is tried to the uttermost ; he is 
 spared no test, however severe. He despises toil and 
 contention for the sake of Cleves ; he stands fast by 
 Colombe when her false friends desert her ; he is assailed 
 by temptation to pronounce her no Duchess, that station 
 may not divide them — and flings it away ; next, knowing 
 beyond doubt that 
 
 ' She has no shade of right 
 To the distinction which divided us,' 
 
 he begins to hope that without treachery to Cleves she may 
 yet be his, and instantly his dawning hope is dashed by 
 Berthold's offer, which he himself must place in its most 
 attractive light before Colombe, — and he does it. A little 
 later, and ambiguous words persuade him that Colombe has 
 left him, him, flung his heart aside, 'the ermine o'er a 
 heartless breast embraced.' He is shaken with grief for 
 
 ' this farewell to Heaven, 
 Welcome to earth — this taking death for life — 
 This spurning love and kneeling to the world ' — 
 
 but even then not only refuses to press his own love against 
 her mistaken choice — ' for what am I but hers, to choose 
 as she ? ' — but is too absolutely loyal to allow her image to 
 be dimmed or dethroned in his mind. 
 
 G 
 
83 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Is the knowledge of her nought ? the memory, nought ? 
 — Lady, should such an one have looked on you, 
 Ne'er wrong yourself so much as quote the world 
 And say, love can go unrequited here ! 
 You will have blessed him to his whole life's end — 
 Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back. 
 All goodness cherished where you dwelt — and dwell. 
 
 ***** 
 He wishes you no need, thought, care of him — 
 Your good, by any means, himself unseen, 
 Away, forgotten ! ' 
 
 What depth of hidden anguish this last word covers ! Self- 
 effacement could go no farther in Colombe's cause ; but yet 
 one test remains for Cleves. Berthold, secure of victory, 
 promises Valence whatever he shall ask. He might possess 
 the flowers Colombe wears, or ask — 
 
 ' One last touch of her hand I never more 
 Shall see;' 
 
 but the momentary struggle ends in his request — 
 
 ' Cleves' Prince, redress the wrongs of Cleves ! ' 
 
 Valence himself has risen through his love ; he is as faithful 
 as before to Cleves, and at far heavier cost. 
 
 Such are the two men Colombe has to read, and we know 
 the end. Valence has awakened her perception, ' evolved ' 
 her love ; she sees now unerringly, decides on the instant. 
 
 The principal ordeal has its echo amongst the courtiers. 
 Guibert's wavering loyalty is first strengthened by the fine 
 conduct of Valence ; then base motives are suggested which 
 he believes too easily, and is disillusioned ; but the final 
 issue more than restores him, he springs forward to follow 
 Colombe into her self-chosen obscurity, levelling a parting 
 shaft at his rival. 
 
 ' God save you, Gaucelme ! 'Tis my Birthday, too ! ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 83 
 
 One is sinfully glad that the remaining courtiers are likely 
 to have no easy time under their new master, or rather his 
 deputy, ' the black Barnabite ! ' 
 
 The pathetic tragedy of The Blot in the 'Scutcheon is no 
 less direct and intelligible than these two beautiful little 
 plays ; and indeed none of the plays are really difficult. 
 But we must turn now to Mr. Browning's longest work, 
 The Ring and the Book. 
 
 The story of it can be told quite shortly. Crossing a 
 Square in Florence one day Mr. Browning singled out on 
 a stall of miscellaneous wares, a shabby little volume con- 
 taining, partly in print and partly in manuscript, the full 
 account of a murder case tried in Rome in February 1698. 
 The accused was a nobleman of Arezzo, Count Guido 
 Franceschini, who on the night of Christmas Eve, with four 
 cut-throats in his pay, entered a lonely villa on the outskirts 
 of Rome, stabbed his wife, a girl of seventeen, just a fort- 
 night after the birth of their son, left her for dead, and 
 murdered also the old couple who had brought her up, 
 calling themselves her parents. In justification of the crime 
 (the murderers having been taken red-handed before they 
 could cross the boundaries), outraged honour was pleaded, 
 it being alleged that the Count's wife, Pompilia, had left his 
 house eight months earlier in company with a handsome 
 young priest who had brought her to Rome. But Pompilia 
 survived her wounds for four days, and from her own 
 account and the evidence of others it appeared that the 
 Count had been guilty of diabolical cruelty towards her, 
 and had finally, by dint of forged letters, set a trap for her, 
 intending to drive her into a position that would enable him 
 to get rid of her by a divorce, still keeping her fortune, which 
 divorce he had tried and failed to obtain. It was urged 
 
84 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 further that PompiHa and the Canon had never spoken to 
 each other until the time when her appeal for help moved him 
 to aid her escape to her parents' house in Rome, and that 
 both were blameless. The Court decreed death to Count 
 Guido and his accomplices; but as he, though a layman, 
 had taken some steps towards priest's orders, an appeal in 
 his favour was carried to the Pope, Innocent XII. The 
 Pope having reviewed the whole case, with the evidence 
 and pleadings on both sides, gave orders that the Count 
 and his four hired assassins should at once be executed in 
 the most public spot in Rome. 
 
 This, in bare outline, is the tragic story which, as he read 
 on and on in the little old book, took living hold of 
 Browning's imagination — ' deep calling unto deep.' Every 
 scene acted itself over again in his mind that day ; and he 
 spent the next four years in so shaping the facts of the 
 ' old woe ' caught up and saved from rubbish-heaps of the 
 past, that it should live anew in men's minds, even penetrate 
 the minds of the ' British Public — ye who like me not.' At 
 the end of the four years he presented that public with his 
 poem of The Ring and the Book, the symbolic title signifying 
 that as the artificer in gold mixes alloy with the pure metal 
 too soft by itself to bear file and hammer, but when the 
 ring is fashioned drives off the alloy with acid, leaving pure 
 gold again ; so, conversely, the poet has tempered the hard 
 crude facts of the Florentine book with his own interpreting 
 imagination, and having thus welded, wrought, and stamped 
 them, fancy, which was needed only to help in workman- 
 ship, not to eke out substance, disappears, leaving a rounded 
 whole of unmixed truth. At this point Mr. Browning 
 exclaims — 
 
 ' A ring without a posy, and that ring mine?' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 85 
 
 and then breaks into an apostrophe to his dead wife in 
 which the sober blank verse metre becomes instinct with 
 lyrical passion. The first two lines especially are like 
 nothing else in all his poetry. 
 
 ' O lyric Love, half angel and half bird 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire, — 
 Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun. 
 Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 
 And sang a kindred soul out to his face, — 
 Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 
 When the first summons from the darkling earth 
 Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, 
 And bared them of the glory — to drop down. 
 To toil for man, to suffer or to die, — 
 This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 
 Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 
 Never may I commence my song, my due 
 To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 
 Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 
 That still, despite the distance and the dark, 
 What was, again may be ; some interchange 
 Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought. 
 Some benediction anciently thy smile : 
 ■ — Never conclude, but raising hand and head 
 Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 
 For all hope, all sustainment, all reward. 
 Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back 
 In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home. 
 Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud. 
 Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall ! ' 
 
 The Story of the trial and the events that led up to it, 
 with full accessories of episodes and details, is told from 
 ten different points of view. It is hard to imagine how the 
 strange medley of qualities, bad and good, the tangle of 
 base and noble motives in human affairs which it was 
 Browning's unfailing delight to study, could have been 
 
86 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 more effectually focussed. Greed, craft, hate, vacillation, 
 cynicism, ripe wisdom, indomitable purity, and a hundred 
 others play their part in a tragedy that appeals to the 
 deepest springs of human conduct and feeling. Incident- 
 ally too. Browning's intimate knowledge of Italian life and 
 history has free scope, and we get vivid glimpses into the 
 ways of Roman and provincial society in the seventeenth 
 century. There is the needy nobleman wasting years in 
 vain attendance upon the chances of a Church sinecure, 
 far enough advanced towards Orders to be eligible for a 
 profitable ofifice, yet not too deeply committed to be able to 
 resort to a marriage for wealth ; there are careless governors, 
 unfaithful priests; there is the worldly, frivolous Canon, 
 petted by fashion, yet noble at heart and capable of better 
 things; the conscientious Augustine friar; the nuns, not 
 beyond temptation to lose sight of truth and charity at a 
 prospect of gain to their convent ; there are the nimble- 
 witted lawyers, pleading their case with Latin and eloquence 
 and technical finesse ; the eminent personages to be met in 
 Roman drawing-rooms ; the paid assassins so easily found ; 
 the populace of Rome. 
 
 We have first the view of the pending trial taken by 
 'Half-Rome,' whose spokesman lounges away with his 
 fellows from the Corso where the murdered peasants' bodies 
 are laid, to gossip at ease over the event. They find much 
 excuse for Count Guido as a victim of imposture, for did not 
 the old woman Violante pass off upon Pietro her husband 
 as her own daughter a girl picked up from the streets ? and 
 did not the couple after marrying her to Guido as an 
 heiress, seek to defraud him by declaring Pompilia's true 
 origin ? and did not the girl herself confirm the character of 
 her real parentage and well-founded suspicions of her own 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 87 
 
 conduct when she quitted her ill-used husband in company 
 with the very Canon who had roused his jealousy ? and 
 had not the law itself failed him when in punishment it 
 merely secluded the wife in the care at first of a sisterhood 
 of nuns, and then of her nominal parents, and exiled the 
 Canon for a while to Civita ? And if further evidence were 
 needed, the Count had it on that Christmas night when at 
 the sound of Canon Caponsacchi's name the door flew 
 hospitably open to receive him. How is it possible to 
 blame the husband who, in such a case, takes the law into 
 his own hands ? He must be acquitted ; and one of 
 Browning's inimitable humorous touches, which explain so 
 much in a word, closes this discourse when the speaker 
 commends the vindicated revenge to the notice of a certain 
 neighbour over-attentive in serenading the house where ' I 
 keep a wife,' adding parenthetically to a bystander, 
 
 (' You, being his cousin, may go tell him so.') 
 
 ' The Other Half-Rome ' speaks next, and instinctively 
 takes Pompilia's side. No doubt Violante's deception was 
 wrong, yet her desire to secure Pompilia's prosperous future 
 was surely excusable ; and for Ponipilia herself, poor child, 
 married at thirteen (through the wily schemes of Guido 
 and his brothers practised on her guardians) to the grim 
 Count from whose violence she is driven to appeal for 
 protection to the governor of Arezzo, to the Archbishop, to 
 Guido's brother Abate Paolo, to a priest in confession — and 
 all in vain — what but pity can be felt for her ? The letters 
 alleged to have passed between her and Caponsacchi are 
 clearly forgeries, since Pompilia can neither read nor write, 
 and as clearly prove her husband's intrigues. Then observe 
 how his courage failed at the very moment when, if really 
 
88 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 wronged, it should have risen highest ; at the moment when 
 he overtook his wife and the Canon at the Castelnuovo 
 wayside inn on their flight to Rome, and instead of taking 
 instant vengeance, was cowed by them, and resorted to an 
 appeal to law where misleading evidence might weigh. 
 And then how craftily he delayed his final vengeance until 
 all rights in the disputed marriage-portion were his through 
 the infant son whose birth turned intervening lives into 
 mere obstructions to be disposed of with all possible speed ! 
 Guido is the common enemy ; if law be worth anything, he 
 must die. 
 
 So reason the common folk ; neither side having anything 
 sounder to go upon than prepossessions that bias their 
 judgment in one direction or the other. Next we have 
 the more critical, balanced judgment representing Roman 
 education and refinement. ' Tertium Quid ' speaks to an 
 Excellency and a Highness, and is guarded in his utterances. 
 On the whole 
 
 ' Quality took the decent side, of course ; ' 
 
 would, in the interests of domestic propriety and discipline, 
 defend the husband's rights and excuse his faults, partly 
 natural to a man of his rank. Still no doubt he had gone 
 to an extreme in his conduct, though not without serious 
 provocation. There have been faults on both sides ; and 
 Tertium Quid, dispassionate and neutral, declines to 
 pronounce decisively for either. 
 
 Then comes the trial itself. Count Guido, fresh from 
 torture under which he has admitted his crime, speaks first 
 in his own defence ; he is followed by Caponsacchi, 
 summoned from Civita to repeat the account he had given 
 of his relations with Pompilia at the early enquiry which 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 89 
 
 had taken place at Guide's instance immediately after their 
 flight from Arezzo. To this succeeds Pompilia's own story 
 of her life, whispered with painful breathings from the bed 
 where she lay dying. Next we have the written defence of 
 Guido put in by his counsel, Dominus Hyacinthus de 
 Archangelis, Procurator of the Poor, which, the murder being 
 admitted, is directed to win a reprieve by extenuating his 
 conduct in all particulars, from the legal point of view. 
 Except as a doubtful case in law this advocate has evidently 
 no interest in it whatever ; he is a good-natured, unimpres- 
 sionable man, much preoccupied with the thought of his 
 eight-year old boy, whose birthday they are just going 
 to celebrate at home with a supper of fried liver and 
 parsley. Pompilia's official defender. Doctor Johannes 
 Baptista Bottinius, the Fisc, or public prosecutor, is less 
 careful to establish her fair fame, than to put the best 
 colour on behaviour into which she might under the circum- 
 stances have been driven, and to prove Guide's guilt. He 
 too is almost ostentatiously indifferent to all but the legal 
 aspect of the case. The pleadings of the two lawyers, 
 interlarded as they are with Latin quotations, ill-timed jokes, 
 flippant personalities, are indeed the least interesting part of 
 the work ; but no doubt their display of keen though shallow 
 cleverness, and their indifference to the heights and depths 
 of the tragedy on whose fringes their wit is employed, do 
 heighten the eff'ect of the rest by force of contrast — though 
 the contrast sometimes jars more than the humour relieves 
 the strain of tragedy. 
 
 Judgment having gone against the Count, and an appeal 
 having been carried to the Pope, we have next his review of 
 the case, given after a minutely careful examination of all 
 the pleadings. And when this has ended in an order for 
 
90 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 immediate execution of the five criminals, Guido throws off 
 all disguise and pours out his cynical ' confession.' The 
 history ends with certain letters, describing the execution ; a 
 plea from the Fisc that as the Court, though condemning 
 Guido, had not pronounced Pompilia innocent, her in- 
 heritance passed by law to the Convent which had sheltered 
 her, and a further instrument, due to the Pope, by which 
 Pompilia's innocence was finally declared, and her inheritance 
 secured to her son. 
 
 Among the crowd of persons and masses of detail 
 collected in this great work, four characters stand con- 
 spicuously out, — Count Guido, Canon Caponsacchi, Pom- 
 pilia, and the Pope. 
 
 To most of his contemporaries the circumstances, but 
 imperfectly known, serve rather to disguise than demonstrate 
 Guido's character ; but we, admitted to fuller knowledge, 
 see that he is from first to last an appalling impersonation 
 of cold-blooded, calculating cruelty and greed. Whatever 
 small share of grace he might ever have possessed has all 
 disappeared in the course of his thirty years of idle and 
 envious waiting upon the chances of fortune ; he is soured 
 through and through by his fruitless efforts to appropriate 
 the Church's loaves and fishes; his marriage is a money- 
 hunting venture hit upon by his like-minded though feebler 
 brothers. Afterwards his inventive cruelty wreaked upon 
 his wife — • 
 
 ' putting, day by day, hour by hour, 
 The untried torture to the untouched place,' 
 
 his intrigues against her, planned with Satanic craft and 
 malice, are such as to call out the wise old Pope's exclama- 
 tion of marvel at their failure — 
 
 ' O God, 
 Who shall pluck sheep Thou holdest, from Thy hand ? ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 91 
 
 The wanton torture inflicted at last by his fiendish Genoese 
 dagger, triangular in the blade, 
 
 ' Armed with those little hook-teeth in the edge 
 To open in the flesh nor shut again, ' 
 
 is a true index to his conduct throughout — not only are his 
 ends bad, btit he takes the worst means to reach them. His 
 ingenuity equals his ferocity. His defence before the Court 
 is a masterpiece of special pleading and subtlety. He knows 
 and plays upon the worst side of his judges under cover of a 
 mock-humihty ; he skilfully confuses the issues ; draws off 
 attention from his own guilt to fix it upon any scrap' of 
 evidence that can be turned against his victims; simulates 
 an agony of wounded honour and baffled fatherhood com- 
 pared with which he declares the physical torture he has 
 undergone to have been a positive relief ; leads his hearer 
 through mazes of sophistry where truth and falsehood lose 
 all meaning, and right and wrong change places. But 
 after the Pope's decision the real Guido shows himself He 
 flings away the mask, and pours out a recital of naked 
 wickedness into the horror-stricken ears of Cardinal and 
 Abate, while one strives to check him with the crucifix, and the 
 other shudders over his beads to exorcise the powers of hell 
 let loose, as it seems, in that desperate prisoner's cell. Among 
 those who really know Guido, it takes Pompilia to find, I do 
 not say one redeeming trait — ^not even Pompilia could find 
 that — but one link with humanity, one point where human 
 feeling other than detestation could go out to him. Incapable 
 of malice herself, the worst she will say of the 'woeful man ' 
 who has dragged her young life through an Inferno upon 
 earth, and cut short the bright joy of her motherhood by a 
 cruel death, is simply 
 
 ' So he was made ; he nowise made himself : 
 I could not love him, but his mother did.' 
 
92 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 In forcible contrast to the Count's shifty defence comeS 
 Canon Caponsacchi's burst of hot indignation. Why did 
 the Judges, now so anxious for his witness, not believe the 
 story as he told it eight months before ? What had come of 
 their contempt for his warning of the danger that threatened 
 Pompilia ? — of their careless, vaunted guardianship ? 
 
 ' I left Pompilia to your watch and ward, 
 And now you point me — there and thus she hes ! ' 
 
 Wky had he ever allowed himself to leave her in their 
 hands? — or, most bitter of all, suffered Guido to escape 
 when within arm's-reach? And then he once more 
 describes the frivolous, dissipated life from which in one 
 supreme moment a single glance of Pompilia's had awakened 
 him to a shame-stricken sense of his desecrated priesthood, 
 and bowed him down in reverent worship of her saintliness. 
 He tells of the love-letters, forged, as he instantly detected ; 
 of the one genuine summons, when he found her standing 
 lamp in hand above him like Our Lady of all the Sorrows ; 
 of the appeal to his protection which had pierced him with 
 pity and roused every instinct of his manliness to rescue 
 her ; of their flight, and the words stamped into his soul 
 as they fell, which now and again had broken the silent 
 tension ; of the pause at Castelnuovo when Pompilia, 
 awakened out of the dead sleep of exhaustion to find her 
 defender in the threatening clutches of her husband, had 
 sprung to seize and wield Guido's sword herself, and when 
 overpowered and disarmed, had uttered a sublime defiance 
 before which the tyrant slunk away abashed. ^ The rest 
 
 ^ This scene irresistibly recalls the climax of Instans Tyrannus— 
 ' Do you see? Just my vengeance complete. 
 
 The man sprang to his feet, 
 Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed ! 
 — So, / was afraid ! ' 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 93 
 
 they know only too well. Again and again Caponsacchi's 
 anguish breaks out, and is repressed lest it should injure 
 Pompilia with the coarse-minded Judges — for himself he 
 cares nothing any more for their awards. 
 
 ' I have done with being judged. 
 I stand here guiltless in thought, word and deed, 
 To the point that I apprise you, — in contempt 
 For all misapprehending ignorance 
 O' the human heart, much more the mind of Christ, — 
 That I assuredly did bow, was blessed 
 By the revelation of Pompilia. There ! 
 Such is the final fact I fling you. Sirs.' 
 
 But when all is finished his imagination wanders off to a 
 dream of what life might have been to him unfettered by 
 the vow of his calling, companioned by her. 
 
 ' To have to do with nothing but the true. 
 The good, the eternal — and these, not alone 
 In the main current of the general life. 
 But small experiences of every day. 
 Concerns of the particular hearth and home ; 
 To learn not only by a comet's rush, 
 But a rose's birth, — not by the grandeur, God — 
 But the comfort, Christ.' 
 
 He would fain pass calmly from the happy dream to his 
 grey destiny of solitude, but suddenly all his strength breaks 
 down in one heart-broken cry — 
 
 ' O great, just, good God ! Miserable me ! ' 
 
 In the character of Pompilia, sqme hold that Mr. 
 Browning's creative genius touches flood-mark. He has 
 drawn many another as life-like and consistent, but none 
 quite so difficult, none so flawlessly beautiful, none that 
 would have been so marred by a single false phrase. For 
 her childlike simplicity is never lost in the depth of her 
 
94 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 power to endure, discern, and when need be, to dare. 
 The happy, innocent child of thirteen is passed through a 
 four years' ordeal of steadily intensifying misery, due to no 
 fault of her own, culminating in almost hourly peril to body 
 and soul, and the supreme test of sudden and painful death 
 at the very moment when life has at last become precious 
 to her, finds her stainless, unembittered, full of love and 
 holy trust. The pitiful side of Rome sees the pathetic 
 element as she lies with rent body in ' the good house that 
 helps the poor to die ' — 
 
 ' Little Pompilia with the patient brow 
 And lamentable smile on those poor lips' — 
 
 but there is much more to see. Her husband, loathing 
 the whiteness he cannot smirch, and the endurance he 
 cannot rufiSe, speaks of her as ' the pale poison my hasty 
 hunger took for food.' 
 
 ' What you call my wife 
 I call a nullity in female shape.' 
 
 He compares her to a picture by Fra Angelico, 
 
 ' Who traces you some timid chalky ghost 
 That turns the church into a charnel.' 
 
 But in spite of himself he is compelled to dread the meaning 
 of her patience — 
 
 ' I advise— no one think to bear that look 
 Of steady wrong endured as steadily 
 Through what sustainment of deluding hope? 
 Who is the friend i' the background that notes all ? 
 Who may come jDresently to close accounts ? 
 This self-possession to the uttermost, 
 How does it differ in aught, save degree, 
 From the terrible patience of God ? ' 
 
 And his secret recognition of her true nature, unacknow- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 95 
 
 ledged even to himself before, is forced out in his last wild 
 appeal when he is claimed by the stern Brotherhood of 
 Death— 
 
 ' Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, . . . 
 Pompilia, will you let them murder me ? ' 
 
 Pompilia, dead, stands highest in his thoughts of Godlike 
 power and divine compassion. 
 
 Of the passion of worship she inspires in Canon Capon- 
 sacchi we have already seen a little ; but even he cannot 
 estimate her so fully as the clear-sighted, sage old Pope, 
 who knows her whole story. And as he blames Guido the 
 more for having sinned against the light of his birth, 
 training, associations, so he finds Pompilia's purity and 
 patience and faith and forgiving temper the more remark- 
 able because of her unfavourable entrance into life. He 
 understands the rare virtue of one who, resisting nothing 
 for her own sake, could change submission for heroic 
 daring the moment another life than her own was im- 
 perilled ; and where all is praised, he praises most in her 
 that having been ' dutiful to the foolish parents first, sub- 
 missive next to the bad husband,' tolerant even of the 
 miserable tools who wreaked his will upon her, she could 
 yet rise from the old law to new service — 
 
 'Not 
 To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found 
 Sublime in new impatience with the foe ! 
 Endure man and obey God : plant firm foot 
 On neck of man, tread man into the hell 
 Meet for him, and obey God all the more ! ' 
 
 His wonder grows as he observes how this ' woman-child ' 
 has combined with her child's intellect the unerring spiritual 
 insight of a veteran saint. 
 
96 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Oh child that didst despise thy life so much 
 When it seemed only thine to keep or lose, 
 How the fine ear felt fall the first low word, 
 " Value life, and preserve life for My sake ! " 
 * # * * * 
 
 ' Didst hear, comprehend. 
 Accept the obligation laid on thee, 
 Mother elect, to save the unborn child. 
 )f * * * * 
 
 ' Didst resist — 
 Anticipate the office that is mine — 
 And with his own sword stay the upraised arm, 
 The endeavour of the wicked, and defend 
 Him who, — again in my default, — was there 
 For visible providence : one less true than thou 
 To touch, i' the past, less practised in the right, 
 Approved less far in all docihty 
 To all instruction, — how had such an one 
 Made scruple ' ' Is this motion a decree ? " 
 It was authentic to the experienced ear 
 O' the good and faithful servant.' 
 
 Pompilia's religious love for her child, told in her own 
 straightforward, simple way, breathes the holy warmth and 
 calm trustfulness of a Madonna. 
 
 ' I never realized God's birth before — 
 How He grew likest God in being born. 
 This time I felt like Mary, had my babe 
 Lying a little on my breast like hers. 
 ***** 
 
 ' We poor 
 Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong ! 
 I was already using up my life, — 
 This portion, now, should do him such a good, 
 This other go to keep off such an ill ! 
 The great life ; see, a breath and it is gone ! 
 So is detached, so left all by itself 
 The little life, the fact which means so much. 
 Shall not God stoop the kindlier to His work. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 97 
 
 His marvel of creation, foot would crush, 
 
 Now that the hand He trusted to receive 
 
 And hold it, lets the treasure fall perforce ? 
 
 The better ; He shall have in orphanage 
 
 His own way clearlier ; if my babe 
 
 Outlived the hour — and he has lived two weeks — 
 
 It is through God who knows I am not by. 
 
 Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black, 
 
 And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest. 
 
 Trying to talk ? Let us leave God alone ! 
 
 Why should I doubt He will explain in time 
 
 What I feel now, but fail to find the words ? 
 
 My babe nor was, nor is, nor yet shall be 
 
 Count Guide Franceschini's child at all — 
 
 Only his mother's, born of love not hate ! 
 
 So shall I have my rights in after-time. 
 
 It seems absurd, impossible to-day ; 
 
 So seems so much else not explained but known I ' 
 
 In the last few lines there is evidence of the assurance born 
 of insight too unclouded to be called faith, which has 
 governed her at all times ; it is still plainer in her farewell 
 thoughts of Guido. 
 
 * We shall not vieet in this world nor the next, 
 But where will God be absent ? In His face 
 Is light, but in His shadow healing too : 
 Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed ! ' 
 
 And lastly, Browning's doctrine of ideal love is made perfect 
 and revealed in Pompiha. As the shadow of death falls 
 upon her, she turns away from all else to spend her last 
 failing breath in ' being true ' to the man for whose truth 
 she has fought, whose rescuing hand saved her to save her 
 child, gave her months of healing peace, and her long, 
 whole fortnight of mother's bliss ; — ' my one friend, my 
 only, all my own.' For these two there could be no union 
 on earth, not a word of love even between them ; but no 
 
 H 
 
98 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 fault of theirs has either raised the separating barriers or 
 broken through them. Their great love, deep, passionate, 
 unearthly, pure, is its own safeguard on earth, its own 
 warrant of fulfilment in the heavens. And so without a sign 
 of struggle or of parting, Pompilia's word can teach him to 
 ' wait God's instant men call years ' in faithful tranquillity. 
 
 ' O lover of my life, O soldier-saint, 
 No work begun shall ever pause for death ! 
 Love will be helpful to me more and more 
 I' the coming course, the new path I must tread — 
 My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that ! 
 » * ^ * * * 
 
 Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit. 
 
 Mere imitation of the inimitable : 
 
 In heaven we have the real and true and sure.' 
 
 They will be as the angels, 'who, apart, know themselves 
 into one.' With this celestial love in her heart Pompilia's 
 closing words have the still rapture of one who at the 
 supreme moment beholds the unseen and is satisfied with it. 
 
 ' Through such souls alone 
 God stooping shows sufficient of His light 
 For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise. ' 
 
 Here at least in modern English poetry is one woman 
 worthy to enter the bright brave ranks of Cordelia and 
 Desdemona, Isabella and Hermione and Juliet and Imogen ; 
 worthy to clasp their outstretched hands of welcome to a 
 soul well-tempered like their own. 
 
 Hardly less impressive, in a very different way, is the 
 venerable Pope, as, sitting in his austerely plain private 
 room, he deliberates alone at the close of the dreary winter's 
 day whose leaden hours have been devoted to judicial sifting 
 of the documentary evidence. His mind is fully made up 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 99 
 
 now on the merits of the case ; but one by one he mentally 
 summons up every actor in it, passing his judgment on 
 each ; and then with searching care he tests the grounds of 
 his own confidence in the tremendously responsible decision 
 his office demands of him. His awards of blame and praise 
 are given with the mellowed wisdom of ripe experience ; 
 they are carefully weighed, yet unhesitatingly clear and 
 decided. Of Guido's infamy and Pompilia's virtue he has 
 no shadow of doubt; but he looks rather anxiously at 
 Caponsacchi, gladdened by his prompt and noble response 
 to Pompilia's appeal, yet not blinded to its over-impulsive 
 character, which through undue and needless disregard of 
 decorum has laid them both open to evil misconstruction. 
 Many a fresh light does the Pope throw on what has passed, 
 as when he speaks of the letters 
 
 ' false beyond all forgery — 
 Not just handwriting and mere authorship, 
 But false to body and soul they figure forth. ' 
 
 And again when he unsparingly lays bare the moral guilt of 
 Guido's paid accompKces in the murder. But we must pass 
 on to notice, though but meagrely, one or two of the reflec- 
 tions that arise in him when, courageous as he is, a moment- 
 ary hesitation to put_in force his own decision drives him 
 to reconsider the grounds of his authority. With fresh 
 vigour he expounds the doctrine of life we have already 
 traced ; his own misgiving puts him to the test — 
 
 ' I am near the end ; but still not at the end ; 
 All to the very end is trial in life : 
 At this stage is the ti-ial of my soul 
 Danger to face, or danger to refuse ? 
 Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare ? ' 
 
VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 And again — 
 
 ' Life is probation and the earth no goal 
 But starting-point of man : compel him strive, 
 Which means in man as good as reach the goal.' 
 
 Later on he connects the element of uncertainty (in Brown- 
 ing's view, as we have seen, a beneficent element) with the 
 hold that a divine creed takes of the hearts of men — 
 
 ' What but the weakness in a faith supplies 
 The incentive to humanity, no strength 
 Absolute, irresistible, comports? 
 How can man love but what he yearns to help ? ' 
 
 and thus gives a singular and unexpected application 
 to the apostolic saying, ' God hath chosen the weak things 
 of the world to confound the things which are mighty.' 
 With equal courage and originality, and very consistently, 
 after a sad review of the spiritual death around him which 
 the Church's outward success seems to have brought in its 
 wake, he goes on to forecast a possible renewal of life 
 through a new invasion of doubt. 
 
 ' What if it be the mission of that age 
 My death will usher into life, to shake 
 This torpor of assurance from our creed, 
 Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring 
 That formidable danger back, we drove 
 Long ago to the distance and the dark ? 
 No wild beast now prowls round the infant camp ; 
 We have built wall and sleep in city safe : 
 But if some earthquake try the towers that laugh 
 To think they once saw lions rule outside, 
 And man stand out again, pale, resolute, 
 Prepared to die, — which means alive at last ? ' 
 
 His own ordeal is past; his doubt has been honestly 
 faced and overcome ; his decision is surer than ever. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. loi 
 
 ' I smite 
 With my whole strengtli once more, ere end my part, 
 Ending, so far as man may, this offence.' 
 
 Then he gives a passing notice to the importunate and 
 plausible worldly reasons with which all fashionable Rome, 
 supported by the Emperor's Envoy, demand his pardon for 
 Guido. He does not stay or stoop to refute them ; their 
 sufficient answer is contained in his order, despatched now 
 without another moment's delay, for the execution of the 
 five criminals. 
 
 He reflects gravely that his decree of immediate death 
 grants the one chance of salvation left to Guido — may give 
 him in its suddenness an instant's shock of blinding light, 
 the sole alternative to relegation 
 
 ' Into that sad obscure sequestered state 
 Where God unmakes but to remalce the soul 
 He else made first in vain.' 
 
 For the rest, his own duty is plain — 
 
 ' Enough, for I may die this very night. 
 And how should I dare die, this man let live ? ' 
 
 The poem carries many a lesson with it ; and in a brief 
 epilogue Browning answers a question of high interest as 
 addressed to one who, among the poets, works so definitely 
 as a teacher. 
 
 ' Why take the artistic way to prove so much ? ' 
 
 ' Because,' he replies — 
 
 ' Because, it is the glory and good of Art 
 That Art remains the one way possible 
 Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.' 
 
I02 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Art may tell a truth 
 Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, 
 Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. 
 So you may paint your picture . . . 
 
 * X * * * 
 
 So write a book shall mean beyond the facts. 
 Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.' 
 
 So, with another word of dedication to his 'Lyric Love,' 
 ends this great work. 
 
 ' It lives. 
 If precious be the soul of man to man.' 
 
 Thorough-going students of Browning who have a fair 
 amount of spare time will not stop here. They will dig for 
 more treasure in his earlier poems, Sordello and Paracelsus, 
 and in his later work, especially, it may be, in Balaustion 
 and the Dramatic Idylls , but these are more difficult, 
 and it is perhaps better to assume that the busy people 
 for whom University Extension Lectures are in the main 
 intended, will spend what remains of their scanty leisure 
 more profitably on the master-works of other poets. So far 
 as their teaching is concerned, there is the less reason to de- 
 plore an incomplete acquaintance with Browning's volumin- 
 ous writings because his attitude as a thinker has remained 
 singularly unchanged. The central lesson he presents so 
 variously remains the same throughout, a lesson of hope, 
 courage, strenuous aspiration. Rightly he calls himself 
 in the final poem of his last volume of verse — 
 
 ' One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break. 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake.' 
 
III. 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 ' I was born to poet-uses, 
 To love all things set above me, all of good and all of fair. ' 
 
 Lady Geraldine's Courtship. 
 
 Mrs. Browning's poetry is so closely bound up with her 
 life that it is almost impossible to separate the two. She 
 was born in or about 1809 (there has been some controversy 
 about the exact year), a dehcate, inteUigent child, whose 
 chief delight as she grew into girlhood lay in eager study of 
 great books. Her own literary efforts began early, and were 
 helped by her father's encouragement ; but after the publica- 
 tion in 1826 of her first poems, of which the longest was an 
 Essay on Mind after the manner of Pope, there was a long 
 pause of seven years before the appearance of another 
 volume, this time a translation of Prometheus Bound, with 
 some miscellaneous original poems. In 1837 her health, 
 always feeble, was further weakened by the breakage of a 
 blood-vessel in the lungs ; and" two years later the shock of 
 her eldest brother's death by drowning at Torquay, turned 
 her for years into a complete invalid. Confined to a sofa in 
 a darkened room to which only her closest friends were 
 admitted, she spent nearly seven years of cloister-like 
 seclusion in the one pursuit from which nothing could deter 
 her — insatiable reading and the cultivation of her own 
 
104 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 poetical gifts. In 1842 came her marriage with Robert 
 Browning, to the consternation of her father, whd was 
 never reconciled to it, notwithstanding the amazing im- 
 provement in her health which immediately falsified all 
 alarmist predictions. Her own intense happiness, helped 
 no doubt by the change of climate, seems to have given her 
 the rallying power she needed. She was at once carried off 
 to Italy, and there, first at Pisa, then in the famous home of 
 Casa Guidi, in Florence, were spent the fifteen years of a 
 marriage for which the whole world has been richer, not 
 only by the priceless treasure of a realised ideal, but for 
 the actual work accompHshed in consequence of it. His 
 subsequent poems became, in his own words, a ' due ' 
 
 ' To God, who best taught song by gift of thee.' 
 
 To her it meant unlooked-for length of days, new develop- 
 ment of powers. All Mrs. Browning's best work was inspired 
 by her marriage and the new life that followed. 
 
 Both in the way of success and of limitation, the manner 
 of her previous life has impressed clear signs upon her work. 
 It is most natural that one who lived in almost unbroken 
 retirement should have known too little of men and women 
 in the world for the requirements of drama, and therefore 
 not wonderful that The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile 
 should, in spite of fine passages, be failures dramatically. 
 Nor is it surprising that out-of-door nature should enter 
 comparatively little into poems whose author was to begin 
 with a fragile girl, and later, the constant inhabitant of a 
 sick-room. Her own words To Flush best record what that 
 meant — 
 
 ' But of thee it shall be said, 
 This dog watched beside a bed 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 105 
 
 Day and night unweary, 
 Watched within a curtained room 
 Where no sunbeam brake the gloom 
 
 Round the sick and dreary. 
 * * « 
 
 ' Other dogs in thymy dew 
 Tracked the hares and followed through 
 
 Sunny moor or meadow ; 
 This dog only, crept and crept 
 Next a languid cheek that slept, 
 
 Sharing in the shadow.' 
 
 The description is all the more touching because it is only 
 as they affect her dog that it occurs to her to lament the 
 privations of her lot. 
 
 On the other hand she was rarely too ill to read, and 
 often well enough to write ; and having every possible 
 alleviation that love could devise and wealth provide, her 
 unquenchable craving for book-lore of every description had 
 such opportunities of gratification as but few women have 
 enjoyed. Even as a child, as she herself says, she ' ate and 
 drank Greek,' and her enthusiasm for learning, old and new, 
 grew with her growth, becoming only stronger as her bodily 
 strength declined. Perhaps the power of her own mind is 
 shown in nothing more plainly than in her mastery of such 
 masses of reading without detriment to her creative gift. 
 Her wide and sound learning told largely upon her work. 
 Although as a rule those of her poems which show it most 
 plainly in subject or allusions are not the most highly 
 prized, yet one or two of her very best could never have 
 been written without it ; and the immense indirect gain is 
 clearly seen in her grasp, firm handling, powers of expression. 
 
 Here, however, we have to notice the effect upon Mrs. 
 Browning's diction of knowledge drawn too exclusively from 
 books. Its richness and beauty are seriously spoilt by the 
 
io6 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 extraordinary words she frequently introduces. She hardly 
 appears to know obsolete from words of present day use, and 
 besides words such as ' unexpressive, - in the Miltonic sense, 
 ' geste,' where no archaic effect is required, she brings in 
 others far more questionable, such as 'reboant,' 'vatic,' 
 ' aspectable ' ; and many which, like 'oftly,' ' processive,' 
 ' conmoving,' ' inerned,' are of her own coinage. These 
 peculiarities of diction belong chiefly to her early work ; but 
 even in the beautiful Sonnets from the Portuguese the music 
 and the reader's attention are now and then disturbed by 
 such a word as 'exanimate.' Other faults of style have been 
 set down to over-hasty writing, or excused on the ground 
 that only since her day has the standard of finish in English 
 verse risen so high. But Mrs. Browning herself enters a 
 deliberate and vigorous protest against having it supposed 
 that she has written carelessly. ' If I fail,' she writes, ' it 
 will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of 
 labour — where labour could do anything. I have worked at 
 poetry — it has not been with me reverie, but art.' Again 
 she speaks of the revision her poems have undergone ; and 
 we have but to compare early and late editions to see how 
 true this is. When her use of such rhymes as ' inherit — 
 spirit,' 'month — loth,' 'tell us — Hellas,' 'islands — silence,' 
 'on — sun,' 'flowing — slow in,' was criticised, she answered 
 by producing more of them ; and defended them in a private 
 letter as ' chosen, selected, on principle, and with the deter- 
 minate purpose of doing my best. ... A great deal of 
 attention — far more than it would take to rhyme with con- 
 ventional accuracy — have I given to the subject of rhymes.' 
 After this, the rhymes may still be regarded as slipshod, but 
 they cannot be called the result of slipshod haste in work. 
 We are driven to feel that there must have been an in- 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 107 
 
 herently defective sense of style in a poet who, with the best 
 models of Greek and Latin literature before her, writing at 
 a time when her contemporary, Tennyson, was producing 
 work of the most perfect finish that English poetry has ever 
 reached, and possessing her own easy command of language, 
 could deliberately choose halting rhymes ' on principle,' 
 mar the music of ' the soul's expression,' by ill-fitting metres, 
 misplaced pauses and accents, or spoil the unity of a poem, 
 as the simplicity of Bertha in the Lane is spoilt, by two 
 bombastic stanzas at the end. 
 
 Another effect of Miss Barrett's suffering life is shown in 
 the sadness that pervades most of her poetry. Little 
 wonder indeed. 
 
 ' I have known how sickness bends, 
 I have known how sorrow breaks, — 
 
 How quick hopes have sudden ends, 
 How the heart thinks till it aches 
 
 Of the smile of buried friends.' 
 
 Every word of this kind is with her stamped with the truth 
 and gravity of experience, as far as possible removed from 
 any semi-morbid luxury of simulated grief. And in her case 
 grief has come upon one able not only to bear with courage 
 and sweetness, but to analyse and interpret, and so we get 
 from her utterances at once quick with feeling and weighty 
 with suggestive thought, as in that finest of her sonnets in 
 which she questions the new love whether it will fill to her 
 the place of all she leaves for it, even the place sacred to 
 memories of the dead. 
 
 ' That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried, 
 To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove ; 
 For grief indeed is love and grief beside.' 
 
 It is indeed through her acquaintance and sympathy with 
 
io8 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 grief that Mrs. Browning works most powerfully ; her strength 
 lies neither in narrative nor drama, nor even in her learning 
 itself, though the possession of it does her signal service, 
 but in fine expression of emotion, — pity, tenderness, indigna- 
 tion, and especially love, in every deepest and highest sense. 
 Mrs. Browning's originality begins to assert itself with her 
 ballads. In these the influence of other poets is still per- 
 ceptible, the setting of IsobeVs Child, for example, often 
 recalls Coleridge's Christabel, though the motive is entirely 
 different — but it is less so than in A Drama of Exile, which 
 is put at a disadvantage by the comparison it suggests with 
 Paradise Lost. They are simpler and more human in con- 
 ception than the somewhat cloudy Seraphim ; and the grace 
 and freedom of their execution, the generally skilful employ- 
 ment of enough and not too much archaism in language, 
 their freshness, and a certain weird effect due partly to the 
 situations imagined and partly to the glamour of language 
 thrown over them, speedily made them popular. The 
 Romaunt of Margret, Romaunt of the Page, Lay of the 
 Brown Rosary, have each their special merits ; but The 
 Rhyme of the Duchess May stands highest. The tale is 
 of a fair lady carried off by her lover from a marriage ap- 
 pointed and hateful to her, of furious kinsmen in pursuit, 
 of the castle's siege and capture, and of the desperate leap on 
 horseback, from the topmost battlements, of its lord and the 
 new-made wife who would not be parted from him. The 
 description of leading the splendid war-horse up to the 
 battlements, and his behaviour there, is especially fine. 
 
 ' And a look of human woe from his staring eyes did go, 
 
 Toll slowly. 
 And a sharp cry uttered he, in a foretold agony 
 Of the headlong death below, — 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 109 
 
 ' And " Ring, ring, thou passing-bell," still she cried, 
 " i' the old chapelle ! " 
 
 Toll slowly. 
 Then back-toppling, crashing back — a dead weight 
 
 flung out to wrack. 
 Horse and riders overfell.' 
 
 Tennyson had revived the refrain, and both in these 
 ballads and some of her later poems, Mrs. Browning makes 
 most effective use of it. ' The nightingales, the night- 
 ingales,' ' Pan, Pan is dead,' ' And now my spinning is all 
 done,' ' At last we're tired, my heart and I,' carry their own 
 wistful tale. 
 
 The little Romance of the Swan is a well-known favourite ; 
 and here too we may notice the poem which first made Miss 
 Barrett's fame, Lady Geraldine's Courtship. Her low-born, 
 poet-hero, Bertram, has been called, not without justice, a 
 dreadful prig, ' a libel upon the whole race of poets ; ' but 
 her heroine, her verse, and her remarkable and at that time 
 courageous avowal of democratic convictions, were enough 
 to win quick reputation for the poetess. 
 
 Then there are the many poems having classical subjects 
 for their motives, of which perhaps The Dead Fan is the 
 most striking, and A Musical Instrument the most perfect. 
 The former — founded on an old legend that in the hour of 
 Christ's agony a cry, ' Great Pan is dead,' was heard to 
 sweep over the waves, and the oracles ceased — shows at one 
 and the same time how great was the attraction that Greek 
 literature held for Mrs. Browning, and the absence in her- 
 self of the Hellenic spirit. To ' the old Hellenic tongue ' 
 belong the 
 
 ' Poets' songs the sweetest sung,' 
 
 and only a lover of their songs could have written — 
 
no VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Have ye left the mountain places, 
 Oreads wild, for other tryst ? 
 Shall we see no sudden faces 
 Strike a glory through the mist ? 
 Not a sound the silence thrills 
 Of the everlasting hills : 
 
 Pan, Pan is dead.' 
 
 Her intimate knowledge of Greek mythology is specially 
 evident here, and many an unobtrusive epithet betrays her 
 love for it ; and this in a poem where such praise is neces- 
 sarily at a minimum, for its whole object is a protest against 
 Schiller's lament for the lost 'gods of Hellas.' Mrs. Brown- 
 ing had no trace of the tendency to exalt pagan art and 
 philosophy at the expense of later developments of the 
 human spirit under the genius of Christianity; not only was 
 her living belief in the Christian faith too strong for that, 
 but her artistic instincts were also against it. Like her 
 husband she held the highest art to be that in which 
 
 ' More's felt than is perceived, 
 And more's perceived than can be interpreted,' 
 
 Aurora Leigh, 
 
 and therefore as the beautiful, insubstantial myths of fancy 
 are dispersed, she can acquiesce in gladness, and feels 
 Schiller's attitude of sorrow to be ' still more dishonouring 
 to poetry than to Christianity.' 
 
 ' Earth outgrows the mythic fancies 
 Sung beside her in her youth, 
 And those debonair romances 
 Sound but dull beside the truth. 
 Phoebus' chariot-course is run : 
 Look up, poets, to the sun ! 
 
 Pan, Pan is dead.' 
 
 She is even content to endanger her own work by enforcing 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. iii 
 
 her doctrine in lines less poetical and more didactic than 
 these. 
 
 Sustained freshness, clear intention, even workmanship, 
 lift A Musical Instrument to a unique place among the 
 shorter classical lyrics. Not a word could be spared as the 
 song changes from the havoc wrought by the god in his 
 rough seizure of the reed — 
 
 ' The limpid water turbidly ran, 
 And the broken lilies a-dying lay, 
 And the dragon-fly had fled away, 
 
 Ere he brought it out of the river ; ' 
 
 and from his subsequent mutilation of it, to the wonder 
 of his music, and its renovating magic — 
 
 ' The sun on the hill forgot to die, 
 And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly 
 Came back to dream on the river.' 
 
 And here, instead of the sometimes cumbersome moral, a 
 deeper meaning is lightly touched in with a single line — 
 ' Making a poet out of a man ' — with such felicity as to 
 heighten instead of weighting the poetry. 
 
 In poems about children, infancy, motherhood, Mrs. 
 Browning's tenderness and her sense of awe in the presence 
 of the mysteries of life have free scope. 
 
 ' A solemn thing it is to me 
 
 To look upon a babe that sleeps, 
 
 Wearing in its spirit-deeps 
 The undeveloped mystery 
 
 Of our Adam's taint and woe. 
 Which, when they developed be, 
 
 Will not let it slumber so ; 
 Lying new in life beneath 
 The shadow of the coming death. 
 With that soft, low, quiet breath.' 
 
 Isabel's Child. 
 
112 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Little Mattie, Void in Law, A Child's Grave at Florence, 
 Mother and Poet, overflow with the like feehng; but one's 
 thoughts turn still more naturally to the Song for Ragged 
 Schools — for the ' ragged children with bare feet,' whom the 
 angels know the names of. 
 
 ' Patient children — thinlc what pain 
 Makes a young child patient— ponder ! ' 
 
 And above all to the Cry of the Children oppressed in 
 factories. 'The passion,' says the heroine of a modern 
 novel in words the more emphatic from their contrast to her 
 consistently light handling of every other topic, ' The passion 
 one can feel through the wrongs of a child is something 
 awful. One can feel it for any child — for all children.' ^ 
 This is just Mrs. Browning's case ; and even the slowly- 
 worked machinery of legislation was hastened for relief of 
 the children by the moving verses in which her great pity 
 and indignation found vent. 
 
 ' For all day, the wheels are droning, turning ; 
 
 Their wind comes in our faces, 
 Till our hearts turn, our heads with pulses burning. 
 
 And the walls turn in their places : 
 Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling. 
 
 Turns the long light that drops adown the wall. 
 Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, 
 All are turning, all the day, and we with all. 
 And all day long the iron wheels are droning. 
 
 And sometimes we could pray, 
 " Oh, ye wheels " (breaking out in a mad moaning), 
 " Stop ! be silent for to-day ! " ' 
 
 Home affection invariably calls out warmth of utterance, 
 as in the concluding stanzas of The Pet Name ; and here 
 too we may notice, as allied in emotion though not in 
 
 ^ Through One Administration. 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 113 
 
 subject, the poem that has thrown yet another halo of 
 consecration over the name of Cowper. 
 
 ' O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing ! 
 O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging ! 
 O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling. 
 Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while you were 
 smiling ! 
 
 » * * * 
 
 He shall be strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation, 
 And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration ; 
 Nor ever shall he be in praise, by wise or good forsaken. 
 Named softly as the household name of one whom God hath taken.' 
 
 Cowper' s Grave. 
 
 Her Other special poem on death — The Sleep — has itself 
 received a new grace of association in having been sung as 
 the anthem at Robert Browning's funeral. 
 
 ' O earth, so full of dreai7 noises ! 
 O men, with wailing in your voices ! 
 O delved gold, the wallers' heap ! 
 O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall ! 
 God strikes a silence through you all. 
 And giveth His beloved, sleep.' 
 
 In the poems connected with her marriage we come to 
 the very ' sermon's text.' In A Wotnan's Shortcomings she 
 had already lifted up a standard of what true love should be 
 to her whom it possesses — 
 
 ' Unless you can think when the song is done. 
 
 No other is soft in the rhythm ; 
 Unless you can feel, when left by One 
 
 That all men else go with him ; 
 Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath, 
 
 That your beauty itself wants proving ; 
 Unless you can swear, " For life, for death ! " — 
 
 Oh, fear to call it loving ! ' 
 
 All this and far more it was to herself. She had looked for 
 
 I 
 
114 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Death, and Love found her ; and at first in her bewilderment 
 she could scarcely realise the joy, or consent that another 
 should take up the burden of her weary life. Two or three 
 short poems, Life and Love, A Denial, Inclusions, sound 
 like the uncertain preludings that in early days of spring 
 herald the thrush's full-throated song ; then in Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese comes the clear outpouring of a living heart 
 like Shirley Keeldar's, ' Like a shrine, — for it was holy ; like 
 snow, — for it was pure; like flame, ^for it was warm; like 
 death, — for it was strong.' 
 
 A Denial throbs with love too unselfish to own itself ; too 
 scrupulous to do other than bless — and rehnquish. In 
 Inclusions the scruples are giving way, overborne by a love 
 that .would take no denial. The Sonnets, behind the slight 
 disguise of their title, unveil the whole intensely personal 
 story, from the first revelation of the mystic Shape, ' Not 
 Death, but Love,' the first resolve 
 
 ' To live on still in love, and yet in vain, — 
 To bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face ' ; 
 
 to the last assured joy and avowal — 
 
 ' 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.' 
 
 English poetry has only two other sonnet-sequences to 
 count with this — Shakespeare's sonnets, and Dante Rossetti's 
 House of Life. That Mrs. Browning should, at the zenith 
 of her powers, and in the radiance of her love, have chosen 
 this particular vehicle of expression, is a matter for all lovers 
 of poetry to rejoice in. There could be no danger that the 
 sonnet in her hands should be merely artificial, while the 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 115 
 
 strict laws of its construction necessitated just the artistic 
 restraint and finish from the lack of which some of her 
 other work suffers much. The character of these sonnets 
 is all her own. Aglow with light and love, it is the bright- 
 ness that transfigures without hiding the deep-engraven 
 traces of former pain, ' the rainbow gleam of smiles through 
 tears,' to most of us so much more touching than even the 
 beautiful, shadowless joy of untried youth. They are full 
 of the truest pathos, the blending of joy with an undertone 
 of remembered sadness. 
 
 ' As brighter ladies do not count it strange, 
 For love, to give up acres and degree, 
 I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange 
 My near sweet view of Heaven for earth with thee. ' 
 
 ' Beloved, dost thou love ? or did I see all 
 The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when 
 Too vehement love dilated my ideal. 
 For my soul's eyes ? Will that light come again, 
 As now these tears come — falling hot and real ? ' 
 
 There is pathos in them such as we hear in the song of the 
 robin among birds ; in Mendelssohn's Wedding March ; in 
 the chiming of sweet-toned, consecrated bells ; in that most 
 pathetic psalm, ' Then were we like unto them that dream ; 
 then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue 
 with joy. . . . They that sow in tears shall reap in joy ' ; 
 in the meeting drawn by his hand who in modern literature 
 lays the surest finger on the deep springs of fejgling, when 
 Lady Castlewood receives back Esmond with the words of 
 this very psalm upon her lips. 
 
 Fresh developments of vitality and power followed Mrs. 
 Browning's marriage. In subsequent poems her subjects 
 become stronger, her diction purer, her verse more flexible. 
 
n6 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 She flung herself heart and soul into the great struggle for 
 the freedom and unity of Italy, and poured out poem after 
 poem in the cause of her adopted country. She was the 
 last to rejoice in her own home's happiness without thought 
 for what lay beyond its sheltering walls ; all that her words — 
 and in them lay her strength — could do, was done, and is 
 to this day gratefully commemorated in Florence. 
 
 Casa Guidi Windows, the longest of these poems, was 
 written in two parts with an interval of nearly three years 
 between them, during which interval the year 1849 had 
 brought its crushing disasters and disillusionment upon 
 Italian patriots ; naturally therefore her strain is saddened 
 in the second part. Ten years later Italian hopes rose high 
 again, and Mrs. Browning, with too ready confidence in the 
 French Emperor's magnanimity, wrote Napoleon IIJ. in 
 Italy, and the rest of her Poems before Congress, of which 
 A Court Lady has the palm. 
 
 ' Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. 
 But blessed are those among nations, who dare to be strong for the 
 rest ! ' 
 
 Indeed few except Mazzini foresaw how dearly the French 
 alliance would be purchased, and to Mrs. Browning the 
 Treaty of Villafranca came as a blow so heavy that it told 
 severely on her health, and evidently helped to shorten her 
 Hfe. She died at Florence, in June 1861. 
 
 Between the two dates of revolution in Italy, Mrs. 
 Browning *ad worked out and pubHshed her longest and 
 most ambitious poem, Aurora Leigh, Looked at in one 
 way, this is a novel in verse with an improbable plot, and 
 beset with the difficulties inherent in an autobiography 
 related by the heroine. Perhaps it is best to own the worst 
 at once, and admit that, taken as a whole, Aurora's own 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 117 
 
 criticism of her own poem would not be altogether misplaced 
 in application to it— 
 
 ' The range uneven, the points of sight obscure, 
 The music interrupted.' 
 
 In some parts the poetic inspiration does seem to halt a 
 good deal, and sometimes noisy words have escaped from 
 the control that calmer judgment would have placed upon 
 them. Then to make one who tells her own story produce 
 the attractive effect upon readers that she is bound somehow 
 to let them know she has produced upon the men and 
 women around her, is a difficulty of the first order, and it is 
 no great disparagement to say that Aurora scarcely over- 
 comes it. She does not make quite an ideal heroine. She 
 is either not weak enough, or not strong enough for her 
 part in the world ; too strong to become her cousin 
 Romney's wife at once on his own terms, yet not strong 
 enough, after her spirited refusal, either to face or silence 
 the love and longing which for ten years onward take the 
 zest out of her work, and the joy out of her life. And her 
 sadness is too much in view, too long drawn out. One can 
 imagine how Lucy Snowe, or still more certainly Jane Eyre, 
 would have taken her in hand and uttered about three 
 pungent sentences, which, if they had not made her any 
 happier, would all at once have taught her a great deal, 
 cut short many plainings, and assuredly have compelled her 
 to a demeanour of less helpless self-betrayal. For Aurora 
 is not in the least aware how clearly she exhibits her inmost 
 heart, not even when two or three different people have 
 spoken out her secret before her face. At the very last, 
 when all is set right between the two, she still says in 
 perfect good faith — 
 
ii8 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 'As I live 
 I should have died so, crushing in my hand 
 This rose of love, the wasp inside and all, 
 Ignoring ever to my soul and you 
 Both rose and pain.' 
 
 Her self-deception on this point is more complete than the 
 reader can quite accept as possible. No doubt the writer's 
 difficulty is that both Aurora's and Romney's extreme dis- 
 satisfaction with themselves, and with the partial failure of 
 their work, have to be exhibited in order to point the highly 
 characteristic moral that neither devotion to poetry, nor 
 devotion to philanthropy, is enough in itself; both are 
 inwardly unsatisfying and outwardly imperfect without 
 personal love. 
 
 ■ Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God 
 And makes heaven. ' 
 
 But when all this is allowed, there remains much more 
 
 to be said of the book's merits. Aurora is avowedly the 
 
 exponent of Mrs. Browning's creed in matters of Art, and 
 
 all the passages devoted to this are full of beauty and 
 
 interest. 
 
 ' Art's the witness of what Is 
 Behind this show.' 
 
 ' We stand here, we, 
 If genuine artists, witnessing for God's 
 Complete, consummate, undivided work. ' 
 
 ' O sorrowful great gift 
 Conferred on poets, of a twofold life. 
 When one life has been found enough for pain ! ' 
 
 A few beautiful descriptions of landscape, English and 
 Italian, find place here; and the poet is on almost her 
 strongest ground in her lovely drawing of Marian Erie's 
 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 119 
 
 motherhood and infant child. Much interest, again, lies in 
 her treatment of the place and work of women, and although 
 Aurora leaves the position she theoretically holds to 
 ' generalise ' recklessly on feminine characteristics — com- 
 pelling even Romney himself, after she has at last exploded 
 the not very exalted estimate he originally held of a woman's 
 powers, to tell her — ■ 
 
 ' You sweep your sex 
 
 With somewhat bitter gusts from where you live 
 
 Above them,' 
 
 — much can be forgiven in virtue of the admirable advice 
 she presses home. 
 
 ' A woman cannot do the thing she ought, 
 Which means whatever perfect thing she can, 
 In life, in art, in science, but she fears 
 To let the perfect action take her part. 
 And rest there : she must prove what she can do 
 Before she does it, prate of woman's rights, 
 Of woman's mission, woman's function, till 
 The men (who are prating too on their side) cry, 
 " A woman's function plainly is ... to talk." 
 Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed ; 
 They cannot hear each other talk. 
 
 # # » * 
 
 ' By speaking we prove only we can speak. 
 Which he, the man here, never doubted. What 
 He doubts is, whether \vs can do the thing 
 With decent grace we've not yet done at all. 
 Now, do it ; bring your statue, — you have room ! 
 
 # * * * 
 
 ' There's no need to speak ; 
 The universe shall henceforth speak for you, 
 And witness, " She who did this thing, was born 
 To do it, — claims her license in her work." ' 
 
 The satirical touches here are also very characteristic; such 
 light shafts fly about in all directions. 
 
I20 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts 
 Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, 
 Because we are of one flesh, after all, 
 And need one flannel (with a proper sense 
 Of difference in the quality).' — Bk. I. 
 
 ' She thanked God and sighed, 
 (Some people always sigh in thanking God).' — Bk. I. 
 
 ' Because a lord 
 Is still more potent than a poetess 
 With any extreme republican.' — Bk. v. 
 
 ' He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf, 
 To keep them at the grand millennial height. 
 He has to mount a stool to get at them ; 
 And, meantime, lives on quite the common way. 
 With everybody's morals.' — Bk. v. 
 
 But after all, we turn back to a few short lyrics, The Cry 
 of the Children, Cowpe/s Grave, A Musical Instrument, and 
 above all to the unmatched Sonnets from the Portuguese, for 
 our keenest enjoyment of Mrs. Browning's tenderness, 
 pathos, and the fine insight of a strong and guileless spirit. 
 
IV. 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 ' Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds. ' 
 In Memoridm. 
 
 ' Tlie one great tiling is to iiave a life of one's own.' 
 
 Laconiaire. 
 
 Of the two poets closely linked in friendship, associations, 
 and an intellectual tendency of thought which both have 
 represented in poetry, the work of the elder is still compara- 
 tively little known — far less than it deserves to be — in spite 
 of the high estimation of it repeatedly expressed by those 
 best able to judge of its merits. The few who do know and 
 care, are too much inclined to take it for granted that Clough 
 can only be valued, as they say, by ' highly educated and 
 meditative thinkers,' and to give up at the outset any 
 effort to make his poetry more widely known. It has 
 been said again and again that his poetry never will be 
 popular; and more, that it cannot be. It maybe so; yet 
 let us hope that the rapidly growing influence of the 
 Universities virill open up a knowledge of their traditions 
 and ways to ever-widening circles of students, and with it 
 the power to enter into certain enjoyments whose finest 
 flavour is reserved for the sons and friends of Oxford. 
 
122 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Meantime lovers of Clough's poetry are occasionally to be 
 met with in such unexpected places as to suggest that 
 imperfect opportunities have had as much or more than 
 indifference to do with the blank ignorance of him in 
 others. It is generally to be noticed, too, that the well- 
 worn condition of the volume of Clough's poems speaks 
 eloquently to the tenacious hold the contents have taken of 
 its happy owner. ' A poet does not deserve the name,' it 
 has been said, ' who would not rather be read a thousand 
 times by one man than a single time by a thousand ; ' and 
 tried by that test, Clough is a poet indeed. 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough was born in 1819 at Liverpool, but 
 most of his childhood was spent in America with the rest 
 of his family. At nine years old he was sent back to 
 England, to a school at Chester ; and a year later he was 
 entered at Rugby, then under the headmastership of Dr. 
 Arnold. His career at school was brilliant ; he was one of 
 Dr. Arnold's best and favourite pupils, and also one of those 
 most deeply impressed by the fervour of Arnold's religious 
 life and belief Leaving Rugby for Oxford, he came into 
 immediate contact with Newman, whose influence in Oxford 
 was then at its strongest, and Clough afterwards described 
 himself as having been for two years ' like a straw drawn up 
 the draught of a chimney.' The consequence of passing in 
 this way from the influence of one strong leader to that of 
 another, upon a mind like Clough's — thoughtful, impression- 
 able, and before all things absolutely sincere — was to force 
 him very early to face and examine the most difficult 
 questions of life that can be put before any thinker. The 
 keen logic of Newman destroyed in him the faith of Arnold, 
 yet he could not for long bring himself to accept the ground- 
 work of assumptions demanded by the faith of Newman. 
 
ARTHQR HUGH CLOUGH. 123 
 
 He was thrown into a state of uncertainty best described in 
 his own words, which show the courage of his character as 
 well as the trouble of his mind. 
 
 ' Here am I yet, another twelvemonth spent, 
 » * » » 
 
 ' Sails rent, 
 And rudder broken, reason impotent, 
 Affections all unfixed ; so forth I fare 
 On the mid seas unheedingly,' so dare 
 To do and to be done by, well content.' ' 
 
 The transition from the creed of Arnold through Tract- 
 arianism to inability to accept any dogmatic creed at all, 
 occupied several years. In the meantime, he had, after 
 taking his degree, been appointed a Fellow and Tutor of 
 Oriel College, a position which, besides being highly honour- 
 able, gave him congenial work as a lecturer. But it 
 assumed an adherence to religious beliefs which became by 
 degrees impossible to him, and nothing shows more plainly 
 his perfect unworldliness and sincerity than the fact that as 
 soon as he realised this, he resigned both tutorship and 
 fellowship, leaving himself for the time without any means 
 of livelihood, at a moment, too, when there were serious 
 calls upon him from family and friends for help, always given 
 to the utmost of his power. The reason of his resignation 
 
 ^ It is a curious and highly suggestive fact that two poets whose 
 mental attitude in religious matters was so widely different as that of 
 Cowper and Clough should have used the same image and nearly the 
 same words to describe it. Compare with the above lines these from 
 Cowper's poem On the Receipt of my Mother'' s Picture — 
 
 ' Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-toss'd, 
 Sails ripp'd, seams opening wide, and compass lost ; 
 And day by day some current's thwarting force 
 Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.' 
 
124 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 stood in the way of his obtaining other work suited to him ; 
 and when he did gain an appointment to the headship of an 
 unsectarian Hall in London, he passed through a dreary time 
 of isolation and cold treatment. He had, however, the great 
 satisfaction of friendships made with first Emerson, and then 
 Carlyle. In 1852 he went to America, intending to settle 
 there ; but in less than a year was brought back again by 
 the offer of an Examinership in the Education Office, which 
 post he held till his death. His marriage took place in 
 1854, and the next two years were filled for him with steady 
 official work, happy domestic life, and with many interests 
 of a social and public kind, especially that in the work of 
 his relative, Miss Florence Nightingale. Then, unhappily, 
 his health gave way ; travelling to restore it was unsuccess- 
 ful, and in November 1861 he died at Florence, at the early 
 age of forty-two, leaving England the poorer by a poet 
 whose vocation was only half fulfilled. 
 
 For during these years of varied work, and often trying 
 experiences, it was only now and then that he had at once 
 both the peaceful leisure and the stimulus that were neces- 
 sary for poetry-writing to his sensitive nature ; and though* 
 the vigorous poems he has left are themselves of great value, 
 they contain the promise of something greater, if he had 
 Hved to execute it. 
 
 The same characteristics mark Clough's poetry as may be 
 gathered from even so short a sketch as this of his life, — 
 fearlessness, honesty, a strong interest, almost preoccupa- 
 tion, with religious questions, and after them with social 
 problems ; determination not to take things for granted, but 
 to scrutinise them for himself; no hasty jumping at con- 
 clusions, bi.it much patient waiting and consideration of 
 conflicting views. They are stamped too with his high- 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 125 
 
 toned unselfishness, and bear the marks of his sensitiveness. 
 In addition there is to many readers a peculiar attractiveness 
 about his versification ; not always faultless, nor, except in 
 some of the lyrics, very musical, but with a unique vigour 
 and freshness of its own. It may sound like two-edged 
 praise to say that persons usually indifferent to poetry have 
 been known to find themselves unexpectedly enjoying his ; 
 but the wrong edge is turned by adding — which is also true 
 — that the attraction is by no means confined to readers 
 whose poetic sensibihties are not over-acute. 
 
 Clough's longest poem, the Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich, 
 was written soon after he quitted Oxford, and sets forth 
 with much breezy life and vigour, in a perfectly original 
 form, the views of life then fermenting in the minds ot 
 young men stirred by the thousand anomalies around them 
 — the contradictions between the real and ideal. A ' read- 
 ing party ' of Oxford men spend the long vacation in 
 Scotland under charge of a tutor — 
 
 ' the grave man, nicknamed Adam, 
 White-tied, clerical, silent, with antique square-cut waistcoat, 
 Formal, unchanged, of black cloth, but with sense and feeling 
 
 beneath it ; 
 Skilful in Ethics and Logic, in Pindar and Poets unrivalled ; 
 Shady in Latin, said Lindsay, but topping m Plays and Aldrich.' 
 
 Each of the party has his own clearly-marked character, but 
 the most conspicuous among them is — 
 
 ' Philip Hewson a poet, 
 Hewson a radical hot, hating lords and scorning ladies,' 
 
 and the interest of the poem turns on his discussions with 
 Adam of the problems of rank and station, love, marriage, 
 education, riches, poverty, and a hundred other matters ; 
 
126 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 and on his captivation successively, now in spite of and 
 now according to his theories, by the cottage-girl Katie, 
 the high-bred Lady Maria, and finally by sweet Elspie 
 Mackaye, the Highlander's daughter, as good and sensible 
 as she is pretty. With their marriage and emigration to 
 New Zealand the poem ends. 
 
 Philip's fervid eloquence, Adam's deliberate yet ready 
 replies, dictated by moderating wisdom, the shrewd and 
 lively comments thrown in by others of the party, especially 
 the 'cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay,' nicknamed the Piper, 
 keep the debates astir with unflagging animation and 
 humour. Here are a few lines from a burst of discussion 
 on the ideal relation between men and women. Philip, 
 with the bit in his teeth, has been declaiming at great 
 length (much to the Piper's wrath, who could scarcely get 
 in a word of dissent) on the superior charms of women 
 occupied in household or harder work, over those of fine 
 ladies with men 
 
 ' Dangling beside tliem, and turning the leaves on the dreary piano, 
 Offering unneeded arms, and performing dull farces of escort.' 
 
 Real goodness, answers Adam, is independent of either 
 position, and possible in both. 
 
 ' Ah, you have much to learn ; we can't know all things at twenty. 
 Partly you rest on truth, old truth, the duty of Duty ; 
 Partly on error, you long for equality. 
 
 Ay, cried the Piper. 
 That's what it is, that confounded egaliil, French manufacture ; 
 He is the same as the Chartist who spoke at a meeting in Ireland, 
 What, and is not one man, fellow-man, as good as another i 
 Faith, replied Pat, and a deal better too ! 
 
 So rattled the Piper,' 
 
 Later on a different element comes into the poem. Here 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 127 
 
 is Elspie's very original reception of Philip's agitated 
 question — ■ 
 
 ' Well, she answered, 
 And she was silent some time, and blushed all over, and answered 
 Quietly, after her fashion, still knitting. Maybe, I think of it. 
 Though I don't know that I did : and she paused again ; but it 
 
 may be. 
 Yes — I don't know, Mr. Philip — but only it feels to me strangely. 
 Like to the high new bridge, they used to build at, below there, 
 Over the burn and glen on the road. You don't understand me ; 
 But I keep saying in my mind — this long time slowly with trouble 
 I have been building myself up, up, and toilfully raising, 
 Just like as if the bridge were to do it itself without masons, 
 Painfully getting myself upraised, one stone on another, 
 All one side, I mean ; and now I see on the other 
 Just such anotlier fabric uprising, better and stronger. 
 Close to me, coming to join me ; and then I sometimes fancy — 
 Sometimes I find myself dreaming at nights about arches and bridges — 
 Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand coming down, and 
 Dropping the great key-stone in the middle : there in my dreaming, 
 There I felt the great key-stone coming in, and through it 
 Feel the other part, all the other stones of the archway, 
 Joined into mine with a strange, happy sense of completeness. But, 
 
 dear me, 
 This is confusion and nonsense. I mix all the things I can think of. 
 And you won't understand, Mr. Philip.' 
 
 Philip's last discussion with Adam (by letter, after months 
 of interval) is as characteristic as his first. He would have 
 each do only ' the thing we are meant for,' perfectly regard- 
 less of social station ; and Adam rephes — 
 
 ' When the armies are set in array and the battle beginning. 
 Is it well that the soldier whose post is far to the leftward 
 Say, I will go to the right, it is there I shall do best service ? 
 There is a great Field-Marshal, my friend, who arrays our battalions ; 
 Let us to Providence trust, and abide and work in our stations. 
 This was the final retort from the eager, impetuous Philip. 
 
128 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 I am sovry to say your Providence puzzles me sadly ; 
 Children of Circumstance are we to be? you answer, On no wise ! 
 Where does Circumstance end, and Providence, where begins it ? 
 What are we to resist, and what are we to be friends with ? ' 
 
 Nevertheless there is a ring of satisfaction in the close not 
 often to be met with in these poems. And the graver parts 
 of the Bothie are set in delightfully bright descriptions of 
 Scottish hills and glens, fresh with the very breezes of the 
 Highlands. 
 
 If Philip Hewson's intellectual conclusions were far from 
 settled, at least his practical course became clear ; but in 
 the next long poem, the Amours de Voyage, not so much 
 certainty as this is attained. Clough prefixed to this a 
 motto from a French novel, ' He doubted everything, even 
 love.' The hero, Mr. Claude, is overtaken in Rome by the 
 French siege of the city in 1849. He makes acquaintance 
 with a family of English visitors, and is, as any one but 
 himself would say, in love with one of the daughters. For 
 his own part he cannot make up his mind whether he is 
 in love or not, and is nervously afraid of giving himself 
 up to it — • 
 
 ' I do not like being moved ; for the will is excited ; and action 
 Is a most dangerous thing ; I tremble for something factitious, 
 Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process ; 
 We are so pi'one to these things with our terrible notions of duty.' 
 
 He is equally uncertain on most other points ; is not sure 
 whether he likes Rome or not, remains curiously neutral 
 in the midst of Italian enthusiasm under Mazzini, hesitates 
 whether to go or stay, speak or keep silence. He allows 
 the young lady to leave Rome, and then sets off on a very 
 unskilfully-managed pursttit, which is in the end a failure ; 
 whereupon he consoles himself by reflecting — 
 
ARTHUR, HUGH CLOUGH. 129 
 
 ' After all, do I know that I really cared so about her ? 
 * * * * 
 
 After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it ; 
 
 I have had pain, it is true ; I have wept, and so have the actors.' 
 
 The interest here lies in the highly skilful delineation of 
 this fastidious, doubtful, hesitating mind, obviously a most 
 difificult task. It contains also many clever character- 
 touches, such as those shown in the different effects produced 
 by the same sights on the sightseers. When the siege has 
 begun Mr. Claude admits that it is 'an experience, that, 
 among others ! ' to have a man killed before his eyes (by 
 the vsray, he is not sure that he saw it — could not declare 
 in court that he did; but he saw something in a place 
 where they said a man was killed) ; but to Georgina 
 Trevellyn and her friends, less startling experiences become 
 'the fearful scenes we have witnessed.' The quiet irony 
 of drawing such a figure as Mr. Claude, with all his dread of 
 action, against the background of Garibaldi's and Mazzini's 
 deeds in that year of heroic strain, enhances the effect, and 
 is emphasised-^still quietly — in the epilogue — 
 
 ' I was writ in a Roman chamber, 
 When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.' 
 
 These two poems are further remarkable as being among 
 the very few English poems successfully written in hexa- 
 meters. The fact that the measurement of feet in classical 
 poetry depends on the length, and not, as in English, on 
 the accent of syllables, makes it very hard to obtain the 
 peculiar and characteristic //// of hexameters in English ( 
 verse ; and though many attempts have been made — Long- 
 fellow's Evangeline being the best known — hardly any have 
 succeeded, and indeed some critics say that success is in 
 
130 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 the nature of things impossible. But others allow that 
 dough's Bothie and Kingsley's Andromeda are in the main 
 correct as well as spirited. 
 
 The taks of Mart Magno, related to each other on 
 shipboard by a little group of fellow-voyagers crossing the 
 Atlantic, are broader and simpler than the last subtle study; 
 but in them, too, Clough's sympathetic knowledge of the 
 self- questioning spirit shows itself — 
 
 ' A touch 
 Of something introspective overmuch. 
 With all his eager notions still there went 
 A self-correcting and ascetic bent, 
 That from the obvious good still led astray, 
 And set him travelling on the longest way.' 
 
 Dipsychus ('having two minds') is devoted to the 
 struggle undergone by a sensitive, thoughtful, conscientious 
 mind drawn in two opposite directions by the aspirations 
 of a noble nature on the one hand, and promptings to 
 acquiescence in common standards of morality and action 
 on the other. The almost morbidly sensitive organisation 
 of Dipsychus is brought out not only in the entanglement 
 of doubts and questionings to which it lays him open, but 
 in the effect upon him of callous worldliness, or of sights 
 common enough in Venice, and too commonly disregarded. 
 
 ' Lo, scarce come forth. 
 Some vagrant miscreant meets, and with a look 
 Transmutes me his, and for a whole sick day 
 Lepers me.' 
 
 Or again in cravings stifled back upon themselves in 
 pessimism too radically restless to find real calm in its 
 appeal to stoical resignation. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 131 
 
 ' Where are the great, whom thou would'st wish to praise thee ? 
 Where are the pure, whom thou would'st choose to love thee ? 
 Where are the brave to stand supreme above thee, 
 Whose high commands would cheer, whose chidings raise thee ? 
 Seek, seeker, in thyself ; submit to find 
 In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.' 
 
 The spirit who debates with Dipsychus, and answers 
 eagerly to his ejaculated ' Mephistopheles ! ' presents a 
 contrast to him at every point ; he is the shallow, calculat- 
 ing exponent of pure worldliness, as clever as he is unscru- 
 pulous. His mocking gibes often carry the sting of partial 
 truth under their flippancy — 
 
 ' Well now, it's anything but clear 
 What is the tone that's taken here : 
 What is your logic ? What's your theology ? 
 Is it, or is it not, neology ? 
 That's a great fault ; you're this and that. 
 And here and there, and nothing flat.' 
 
 His cynical worldliness is sometimes too frankly avowed 
 even for worldlings, sometimes such a precise rendering of 
 common notions as would entrap others besides the speaker 
 in the prose epilogue into the confession of admitting, ' Not 
 that he didn't say much which, if only it hadn't been for the 
 way he said it, and that it was he who said it, would have 
 been sensible enough.' 
 
 The dialogue between these two, as suggested by their 
 surroundings, proceeds through many turns and winds, 
 becoming rather too obscure in the latter part of the poem, 
 till its not very definite issue is reached, when the spirit 
 boasts, though with ill-disguised misgivings — 
 
 ' No matter, no matter, the bargain's made. 
 And I, for my part, will not be afraid ; ' 
 
132 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 and Dipsychus, calling him 
 
 ' The Power of this World ! hateful unto God, ' 
 
 repels him with the more assured rejoinder. 
 
 ' Yet in all these things we — 'tis Scripture too — 
 Are more than conquerors, even over you.' 
 
 One ' Gondola Song ' is noticeable as almost the smoothest 
 and most musical bit of writing in all Clough's verse. 
 
 ' How light we go, how softly ! Ah, 
 Were life but as the gondola ! ' 
 
 Clough is unsparingly severe upon hollow pretences, 
 compliance with form for form's sake, sordid self-interest 
 masked under the guise of respectability, and his impatience 
 with them sometimes finds expression in stinging satire, as 
 when he writes his poem, on Duty — 
 
 ' Duty — 'tis to take on trust 
 What things are good and right and just ; 
 And whether indeed they be or be not. 
 Try not, test not, feel not, see not ; ' 
 
 or when, as we have just seen, he puts the phrases of a 
 debased yet current morality into the mouth of the Spirit in i 
 Dipsychus, or again gives in The Latest Decalogue a transla- / 
 tion of the Ten Commandments as understood and practised [ 
 in certain walks of modern life. 
 
 ' Honour thy parents ; that is, all 
 From whom advancement may befall. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Thou shalt not steal ; an empty feat, 
 When it's so lucrative to cheat. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Thou shalt not covet, but tradition 
 Approves all forms of competition.' 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 133 
 
 For utterances such as these Clough has been called cynical, 
 just as Thackeray is called cynical by those who do not 
 discern between the pen that exposes to chastise and, if it 
 may be, cure, and the pen that exposes in bravado or out of 
 a kind of callous pleasure in exposure. 
 
 In his own person Clough treats the same topics as those 
 of the Bothie and Dipsychus in a number of short and often 
 very beautiful lyrics, which are perhaps the most permanently 
 valuable part of his work. One of the most striking is 
 Easter Day (Naples 1849), with its mournful burden — 
 
 ' Christ is not risen, no — 
 He lies and moulders low ; 
 Christ is not risen ! ' 
 
 to which an early reference in Dipsychus supplies a key in 
 the words — 
 
 ' Ah ! and I think at Venice 
 Christ is not risen either.' 
 
 This is one of several poems in which his interweaving of 
 well-known phrases sacred to religion has a singular fascina- 
 tion. Needless to say, nothing could be more dangerous to 
 imitate ; but somehow a deeper reverence seems to breathe 
 from Clough's denials than many people can manage to 
 express in their assertions of faith. 
 
 ' Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; 
 As of the unjust, also of the just — 
 
 Yea, of that just One too ! 
 This is the one sad Gospel that is true — 
 
 Christ is not risen ! 
 * * * 
 
 ' One look, and then depart, 
 Ye holy and ye humble men of heart ; 
 And ye ! ye ministers and stewards of a Word 
 Which ye would preach, because another heard — 
 
134 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Ye worshippers of that ye do not know, 
 Take these things hence and go : — 
 He is not risen ! 
 
 * * * 
 
 ' Let us go hence and think upon these things 
 In silence, whicli is best.' 
 
 Sometimes these lyrics ring with the key-note of high 
 courage — ' Hope evermore and believe, O man ! ' sometimes 
 the stress of life brings in a sadder tone, still brave, as in 
 the exquisite Qua cursum Venttis, that describes the unwilling 
 . estrangement of friends under the image of ships whose 
 courses have parted unknown to each other in the darkness — 
 
 ' To veer, how vain ! On, onward strain, 
 
 Brave barks ! In light, in darkness too. 
 Through winds and tides one compass guides — 
 To that and your own selves, be true. 
 
 # * * * 
 
 One port, methought, alike they sought. 
 One purpose hold where'er they fare — 
 
 O bounding breeze, O rushing seas ! 
 At last, at last, unite them there ! ' 
 
 Equal if not greater confidence breathes through the quiet 
 lines of Will meet again upon some future day — 
 
 ' When we have proved, each on his course alone, 
 The wider world, and learnt what's now unknown. 
 Have made life clear, and worked out each a way, 
 We'll meet again — we shall have much to say.' 
 
 Often, as in The Shadow, The Questioning Spirit, Bethesda, 
 there is a wistful sigh of regret for vanished certainties, 
 softening the steadfast — almost trustful — acceptance of 
 uncertainty. 
 
 ' And taking up the word around, above, below, 
 Some querulously high, some softly, sadly low, 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 135 
 
 We know not, sang they all, nor ever need we know ! 
 We know not, sang they, what avails to know ? 
 
 ****** 
 I also know not and I need not know, 
 Only with questionings pass I to and fro. 
 Perplexing these that sleep, and in their folly 
 Imbreeding doubt and sceptic melancholy ; 
 Till that, their dreams deserting, they with me 
 Come all to this true ignorance and thee.' 
 
 Tlu Questioning Spirit. 
 
 It has been said of Clough that he was one of those who 
 ' will not fall into place in the ordinary intellectual world 
 anyhow. If you offer them any known religion, they " won't 
 have that ; " if you offer them no religion, they will not have 
 that either; if you ask them to accept a new and as yet 
 unrecognised religion, they altogether refuse to do so.' ^ 
 And we have only to look in order to see that this does 
 truthfully describe the position of most of the ' Religious 
 Poems.' Clough distrusts the ' new lights ' even more than 
 the old, as The New Sinai bears witness. ' Ah, yet consider 
 it again,' he says elsewhere of the old faith scornfully 
 rejected — 
 
 ' " Old things need not be therefore true," 
 O brother men, nor yet the new ; 
 Ah ! still awhile the old thought retain, 
 And yet consider it again ! ' 
 
 The upshot of his own reflections is oftenest suspension of 
 judgment ; he tends on the whole — 
 
 ' To pace the sad confusion througli, 
 And say : — It doth not yet appear 
 What we shall be, what we are here.' 
 
 Through a Glass Darkly. 
 
 ^ Bagehot, Literary Studies, vol. ii. 
 
136 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 There are, however, two or three poems of deHcate power 
 and beauty, especially Qui laborat, orat, and one beginning — 
 
 ' O Thou whose image in the shrine 
 Of human spirits dwells divine,' 
 
 in which there is indicated a faith too shadowy to satisfy the 
 robust theologian, too assured to please the secularist, a 
 faith that makes Clough, like Emerson, 'the friend and 
 aider of those who would live in the spirit.' He represents 
 the men and women who have grown up in the teachings of 
 some strict, clearly-defined religious faith, and on leaving 
 its bounds, have carried with them all the earnestness it has 
 taught into inquiries searching indeed, but pure from the 
 least taint of flippancy or irreverence. Whether happy or 
 not, such an attitude held by one absolutely true to his 
 convictions or his doubts is noble, and may be helpful, as 
 Clough has made it. We find in his poems much un- 
 certainty, but no despair ; and gladly we recognise the 
 accents of victory, subdued though their tone may be, in the 
 last poem he ever wrote — 
 
 ' Say not, the struggle nought availeth, 
 
 The labour and the wounds are vain, 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 And as things have been they remain. 
 
 ' If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ; 
 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed. 
 
 Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers. 
 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 ' For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain. 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main ; 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 137 
 
 ' And not by eastern windows only, 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
 In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
 But westward, look, the land is bright.' 
 
 Like his friend Clougb, Matthew Arnold is essentially the 
 poet of his own time, of our time; and like him too, his 
 thoughts are much occupied with our contending intel- 
 lectual and religious ideas, the illogical confusions of men's 
 minds, and the harassing nature of their practice. 
 
 ' This tract which the river of Time 
 Now flows through with us, is the plain. 
 Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. 
 Border'd by cities and hoarse 
 With a thousand cries is its stream. 
 And we on its breast, our minds 
 Are confused as the cries which we hear. 
 Changing and shot as the sights which we see.' 
 
 The Future. 
 
 But the rare poems which, though only a part, are perhaps 
 the best part of his legacy to literature, are the outcome 
 of a very different poetic genius from Clough's ; less spon- 
 taneous and robust, they are more musical, and far more 
 finished in workmanship, as befits artistic work from the 
 hand of the apostle of Culture. Their range is not very 
 wide ; their whole number is not very large ; they are not 
 like the work of a man whose life is given up to poetry, 
 who looks at everything in the light of his poet's mind, 
 and brings every kind of experience into his images. But 
 within their own range poems so lucid, so finely thoughtful, 
 so choice in word and phrase, bear the hall-mark of fine 
 distinction. Matthew Arnold among poets stands like Sir 
 Philip Sidney among knights; less powerful -than some, his 
 
138 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 record of achievements shorter and less varied, but lifted by 
 their perfection of graceful and gracious performance into 
 the front rank of the finest spirits of his day. 
 
 Many and potent influences went to the fashioning of 
 this poet. Both by inheritance and cultivation, certain 
 didactic tendencies belong to him ; the son of Dr. Arnold, 
 the disciple of Goethe and Wordsworth, might have said 
 with as much truth as any of the three, 'I meant to teach 
 you something.' To his saturation in Greek culture may be 
 traced the form and style of his poems, their carefully 
 disciplined restraint, their chastened beauty of language. 
 With Goethe he discerns the purposeless fret and weariness 
 in latter-day stress of hurrying life ; after Wordsworth he 
 turns to Nature for anodyne. But all influences were fused 
 in him, and moulded into a new development of original 
 and high-wrought beauty — himself. 
 
 In early days Matthew Arnold originated a theory that 
 the function of poetry lies only in the field of action ; and 
 held to it so firmly that for a time he actually withdrew 
 Empedodes on Etna because, as he said, a situation in 
 which ' everything was to be endured, nothing to be done,' 
 ought not to be chosen as the subject of a poem. But his 
 own tendencies were too strong for his theories, and happily 
 too strong also to permit the barrier of a mistaken theory 
 to stand permanently in the way. Essentially reflective, 
 and somewhat didactic by nature, holding always a little 
 aloof from the world he watched with keen-sighted eyes, 
 more cultivated than spontaneous as a poet, it was im- 
 possible for his poetry of action to touch so high a level as 
 his meditative lyrics. Merope, his drama in the Greek style, 
 counts as his least successful effort, correct but tame, and 
 •wanting in fire. Empedodes on Etna, though cast in 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 139 
 
 dramatic form, is, as its author said, not a poem of action, 
 but owes its chief interest to the philosophic musings of 
 Empedocles, and its chief beauty to the lyrical songs of the 
 fiute-player Callicles. A poem in which nearly all the 
 speech is soliloquy, and the entire action consists in the 
 gradual ascent of a volcanic mountain, a long pause on its 
 summit occupied with painful meditation, and a final plunge 
 into its crater, has indeed but scant claim to the title of a 
 drama ; and it has been pointed out that even this climax 
 is at variance with what has gone before, but not led up to 
 it. For instead of rendering the thoughts likely to have 
 filled the mind of the real Empedocles, in despair at the 
 decay of true philosophy before his advancing antagonists 
 the Sophists, Arnold has in fact clothed in this classical 
 dress his own arraignment of human life ; and further, has 
 imbued his philosopher with his own steady determination 
 against yielding to despair, so that the closing suicide does 
 not come as the logical conclusion of the thinker's reason- 
 ing, but simply betrays a failure of courage, and leaves an 
 impression that, at any rate so far as he himself is concerned, 
 his discourse has proved itself 'a tale of little meaning, 
 though the words are strong.' 
 
 The longer narrative poems, again, though stronger than 
 Merope, are somehow wanting in force on the whole, in 
 spite of the many beautiful passages they contain. This is 
 especially the case with Baldur Dead, a treatment of the 
 Scandinavian myth involving, like the Odyssey, A Journey 
 to the Dead, and executed on Homeric lines, but not with 
 Homeric life. Even in Sohrab and Rustum the narrative 
 hardly seems swift enough, passionate enough, to make an 
 event so tragic as the death of the warrior-son by the hand 
 of his unwitting warrior-father quite so impressive as it 
 
140 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ought to be. But the beautiful similes and stately blank 
 verse are a joy in themselves ; and the poem closes with 
 one of Arnold's most characteristic bits of natural description, 
 at once soothing and suggestive. 
 
 ' But the majestic river floated on, 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land. 
 Into the frosty starlight, and there moved. 
 Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste. 
 Under the solitary moon ; — he flow'd 
 Right for the polar star, past Orgungi, 
 Brimming and bright and large ; then sands begin 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams. 
 And split his currents ; that for many a league 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral sea.' 
 
 Tristram and Iseuli tells freshly the rather complicated 
 story of one of the Arthurian legends ; here too the principal 
 charm is to be found in detached passages, such as the 
 description of the sleeping children, or that of the chamber 
 of death where Queen Iseult kneels by Sir Tristram's 
 bedside, the two — 
 
 ' Cold, cold as those who lived and loved 
 A thousand years ago. ' 
 
 Or again that of Iseult the wife, 'the young surviving Iseult,' 
 in after days — 
 
 'Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will — 
 Is it this thought which makes her mien so still. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 141 
 
 Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet, 
 So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet 
 t> Her children's ? She moves slovir ; her voice alone 
 Hath yet an infantine and silver tone. 
 But even that comes languidly ; in truth 
 She seems one dying in a mask of youth.' 
 
 But one of the shorter narrative poems, The Sick King 
 in Bokara, has, with extreme simplicity of action, all the 
 unity and quiet vigour that we miss in these. Calmly yet 
 graphically the whole case is related — the story of a re- 
 morseful Moolah, who in the fierce heat and drought, 
 having hidden away a little can of water for his own use 
 and found it empty, had, in his thirst and fever, cursed the 
 drinkers, among whom was his mother ; and who would 
 expiate his sin by invoking the vengeance of the broken law. 
 The young King's pitying reluctance to take the forfeited life ; 
 his futile attempts to evade giving sentence, or to nullify its 
 execution ; his wondering rebellion against bounds to his 
 own merciful will so unexpected and sternly impassable; 
 the aged Vizier's grave reproof of the King's hesitation and 
 weak tenderness towards one neither friend nor akin to him ; 
 his own fatalistic acquiescence in Hmitations imposed by 
 law and the conditions of social life, — follow each other 
 in bright, still beauty of verse; and the poem maintains 
 throughout a wonderful tone of Oriental dignity, the cere- 
 monious patience in speech and act, combined with un- 
 yielding enforcement of the demands of a long-established 
 order. In the end the young King's lesson is learnt once 
 
 for all. 
 
 ' But hear ye this, ye sons of men ! 
 They that bear rule and are obey'd. 
 Unto a rule more strong than theirs 
 Are in their turn obedient made. 
 
142 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Thou wast a sinner, thou poor man ! 
 Thou wast athirst ; and didst not see, 
 That, though we take what we desire. 
 We must not snatch it eagerly. 
 
 ' And I have meat and drink at will. 
 And rooms of treasures, not a few. 
 But I am sick, nor heed I these ; 
 And what I would, I cannot do. ' 
 
 The Forsaken Merman (more widely known than most 
 of Arnold's poems from having been included in volumes 
 of miscellaneous selections) is hardly a narrative poem at 
 all, but 'the clear cry of a creature astray in the world, 
 wild and gentle and mournful,' the pitiful, strange wonder 
 and yearning of unsatisfied love in the soulless one fronted 
 by mysterious claims of religion over the loved one's soul. 
 
 But the finest beauty and strength of Arnold's poetry 
 lies casketed in the lyrics ; it is in them that we have at its 
 clearest his own personal ' criticism of life,' which gives the 
 special tone and value to his work. He was, as we know, 
 profoundly influenced by Greek poets and thinkers ; among 
 them he speaks more particularly of Homer, Epictetus, and 
 above all Sophocles, he whom 
 
 ' Business could not make dull, nor passion wild ; 
 Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.' 
 
 A similar mighty power of ' wide and luminous view ' drew 
 him to the feet of Goethe among modern philosophers, 
 whose influence he repeatedly analyses and acknowledges. 
 
 ' Physician of the iron age, 
 Goethe has done his pilgrimage. 
 He took the suffering human race. 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
 And struck his finger on the place, 
 And said : Thou ailest here, and here ! ' 
 
 Memorial Verses. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 143 
 
 ' And Goethe's course few sons of men 
 May think to emulate. 
 
 ' For he pursued a lonely road, 
 His eyes on Nature's plan ; 
 Neither made man too much a God, 
 Nor God too much a man. 
 
 ' Strong was he with a spirit free 
 From mists, and sane, and clear ; 
 Clearer, how much ! than ours — yet we 
 Have a worse course to steer.' — Obermann. 
 
 And when Arnold turns to gaze for himself on the scene 
 around him, it is to see and pronounce upon the worst 
 flaws in modern life, its ceaseless bustle, noise, unrest, 
 its conflict of dim and undirected aims. 
 
 ' What is the course of the life 
 Of mortal men on the earth? — 
 Most men eddy about 
 Here and there — eat and drink. 
 Chatter and love and hate. 
 Gather and squander, are raised 
 Aloft, are hurled in the dust, 
 Striving blindly, achieving 
 Nothing ; and then they die — 
 Perish ; — and no one asks 
 Who or what they have been, 
 More than he asks what waves. 
 In the moonlit solitudes wild 
 Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, 
 Foam'd for a moment, and gone.' — Rugby Chapel. 
 
 And again, 
 
 — 'Most men in a brazen prison live, 
 Where, in the sun's hot eye, 
 With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly 
 Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, 
 Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall. 
 
144 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 And as, year after year, 
 
 Fresh products of their barren labour fall 
 
 From their tired hands, and rest 
 
 Never yet comes more near, 
 
 Gloom settles slowly down over their breast ; 
 
 And while they try to stem 
 
 The waves of mournful thought by which they are pressed. 
 
 Death in their prison reaches them, 
 
 Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.' 
 
 A Summer Night. 
 
 And again, 
 
 ' In cities should we English lie, 
 
 Where cries are rising ever new. 
 And men's incessant stream goes by — 
 We who pursue 
 
 ' Our business with unslackening stride. 
 
 Traverse in troops, with care-fiU'd breast, 
 The soft Mediterranean side. 
 The Nile, the East. 
 
 ' And see all sights from pole to pole. 
 
 And glance, and nod, and bustle by ; 
 And never once possess our soul 
 
 Before we die.' — A Southern Night. 
 
 But this is not all ; if it were we might be tempted to say 
 as he himself says of Heine's bitter satires — 
 
 ' We know all this, we know ! 
 Cam'st thou from heaven, O child 
 Of light 1 but this to declare ? 
 Alas, to help us forget 
 Such barren knowledge awhile, 
 God gave the poet his song ! ' 
 
 He sees, as he thinks, the old faiths disproved ; for him 
 they are irrecoverably passed away; death looms up for 
 him as the absolute end — 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 145 
 
 ' Stem law of every mortal lot ! 
 Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, 
 And builds himself I know not what 
 Of second life I know not where.' — Cast's Grave. 
 
 But the loss gives him neither scorn nor joy; it fills him 
 with almost unmixed pain, sadness, regret, and wrings out 
 the low ' Virgilian cry, the sense of tears in mortal things ' 
 that sobs in undertone through his tranquil verse. 
 
 ' Listen ! you hear the grating roar 
 Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling, 
 At their return, up the high strand. 
 Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 The eternal note of sadness in.' — Dover Beach. 
 
 Sophocles heard in it the turbid ebb and flow of human 
 misery, Arnold hears in it 'the melancholy, long, with- 
 drawing roar ' of the Sea of Faith once so full and bright. 
 He craves for light, peace, certitude, with an almost hope- 
 less longing; but yet never suffers despondency to sink 
 into despair. It is resisted, held at bay. He bids the 
 unspeakable yearning of man's heart for joy and assurance 
 and fuller scope 'not fly to dreams but moderate desire,' 
 bids it ' nurse no extravagant hope ' whose disappointment 
 leads to despair, but be temperate in all things. Perhaps 
 the influence of Epictetus has had to do with his attitude 
 of softened Stoicism ; possibly the many phrases he appro- 
 priates from the language of religion to the service of 
 culture carry their old associations with them ; certain it is 
 that his words often kindle the hope and brace the will, 
 just when what he has to say might be expected to ex- 
 tinguish the one and relax the other; and some who have 
 better hopes than his for the truth and vitality of their faith 
 
 L 
 
146 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 may gain from him a new sense of its beauty, its constrain- 
 ing power, its sacredness. We feel this — and cannot but 
 feel it — in Progress, in Morality, in the sonnet on Immor- 
 tality, and in many another poem less hopeful than these ; 
 we feel it as he speaks of the freedmen of the world — 
 
 ' The Children of the Second Birth, 
 Whom the world could not tame 
 
 * * * * 
 
 ' Christian and pagan, king and slave. 
 
 Soldier and anchorite. 
 Distinctions we esteem so grave, 
 Are nothing in their sight. 
 
 ' They do not ask, who pined unseen. 
 
 Who was on action hurl'd, 
 Whose one bond is, that all have been 
 Unspotted by the world.' — Oberviann. 
 
 But the refuge to which Arnold consciously turns, the 
 inspiration to patience and endurance that he consciously 
 seeks, are alike to be found in the sanctuary of Nature. 
 Weary of himself, wearier of life 'with its sick hurry, its 
 divided aims,' he appeals to sea and stars — 
 
 ' Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me. 
 Calm me, ah, compose me to the end ! ' — Self-Dependence. 
 
 He calls himself, and is called in this respect, the disciple 
 of Wordsworth, and so he is ; yet his way of resorting to 
 Nature is perfectly different from Wordsworth's. He has 
 neither the unbroken peace nor the high contemplative joy 
 that no man could take from Wordsworth. He reads his 
 own spirit of ' close-lipp'd patience' into the hills and 
 streams which for Wordsworth sang together in ' fulness of 
 bliss '— 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 147 
 
 ' The solemn hills around us spread, 
 This stream which falls incessantly, 
 The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky. 
 If I might lend their life a voice. 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
 And even could the intemperate prayer 
 Man iterates, while these forbear. 
 For movement, for an ampler sphere. 
 Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear ; 
 Not milder is the general lot 
 Because our spirits have forgot, 
 In action's dizzying eddy vifhirl'd. 
 The something that infects the world.' — Resignation. 
 
 He escapes from this ' something ' — which he elsewhere 
 calls ' the infection of our mental strife,' — and the magic of 
 nature gives him soothing but not rest ; we feel it is a calm 
 from which he may at any moment be plunged again in the 
 feverish turmoil of ' new beginnings, disappointments new.' 
 But while it lasts it is soothing of the purest and most 
 healing kind, and Arnold brings the very soul of its quieting 
 power into his verse. His debts to Wordsworth in poetic 
 description of nature have been freely acknowledged ; but 
 in spite of his own tribute few, if any, seem to have noticed 
 the influence upon this part of his work of De Senancour, 
 the author of Obermann. Yet the tone of his lovely 
 descriptive lines seems often more closely akin to De 
 Senancour than to Wordsworth. Take the opening of 
 
 Empedodes on Etna — 
 
 ' Pan, 
 How gracious is the mountain at this hour ! 
 A thousand times have I been here alone, 
 Or with the revellers from the mountain-towns. 
 But never on so fair a morn ; — the sun 
 Is shining on the brilliant mountain-crests, 
 And on the highest pines ; but farther down, 
 Here in the valley is the shade ; the sward 
 
148 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Is dark, and on the stream the mist still hangs ; 
 One sees one's footprints crush'd in the wet grass, 
 One's breath curls in the air ; and on these pines 
 That climb from the stream's edge, the long grey tufts, 
 Which the goats love, are jewell'd thick with dew. 
 
 ***** 
 What mortal could be sick or sorry here ? ' 
 
 That is very unlike the tone of Wordsworth on a mountain. 
 Take the sunrise in the first book of The Excursion— 
 
 ' When, from the naked top 
 Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
 Rise up and bathe the world in hght ! He looked — 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
 Beneath him ; — Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
 A.nd in their silent faces he could read 
 Unutterable love. 
 
 ' In such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise. 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 That made him ; it was blessedness and love 1 ' 
 
 Or take the lighter First Ascent of Helvellyn, — 
 
 ' For the power of hills is on thee, 
 As was witnessed through thine eye 
 Then, when old Helvellyn won thee 
 To confess their majesty ! ' 
 
 But, making due allowance for the difference between poetry 
 and prose, it is not at all unlike passages in the letters of 
 ' Obermann.' And the two poems on Obermann breathe 
 the spirit of De Senancour's feeling for nature at least as 
 faithfully as in the pages of Obermami, ' 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 149 
 
 ' the mountain-murmur swells 
 Of many a dark-bough'd pine, ' 
 
 But whatever affinities Arnold may have, his manner is 
 after all distinctly his own. Coleridge, speaking of nature 
 described by genius, says, ' Like a green field reflected in a 
 perfectly calm and transparent lake, the image is distin- 
 guished from the reality only by its greater softness and 
 lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius 
 neither distorts nor false-colours its objects ; but on the 
 contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which 
 escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the 
 rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the 
 hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of 
 custom.' 1 Both parts of the comparison are singularly 
 applicable to Arnold's pictures of Nature, which have just 
 the stillness and brightness needful to a perfect reflection, 
 and combine with that the lustrous polish due to his 
 deliberate, scholarlike workmanship. Here is a single 
 stanza from Thyrsis deUneating one of the much-loved 
 pathways near Oxford. 
 
 ' Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm, 
 Past the high wood, to where the elm tree crowns 
 The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames ? 
 The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, 
 
 The vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames ? — 
 This winter-eve is warm. 
 Humid the air ! leafless, yet soft as spring. 
 The tender purple spray on copse and briers ! 
 And that sweet city with her dreaming spires. 
 She needs not June for beauty's heightening. ' 
 
 How peaceful and clear and gentle it all is ! How delicately 
 the melancholy pleasure of revisiting a once familiar spot is 
 
 ' Literaria Biographia, vol. ii. 
 
ISO VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 implied in the questioning tone, the description as much 
 from memory as sight. And with what tender grace each 
 point is noted ; the ' signal elm,' ' lone weirs,' the ' youthful 
 Thames,' the rich winter colouring on copse and briers, so 
 often passed unseen even by dwellers in the country, who, if 
 they were asked, would call the leafless twigs and hedges 
 black. Especially are we carried out of the region of dull 
 prose and commonplace by the one exquisite line and 
 epithet — 
 
 ' That sweet city with her dreaming spires.' 
 
 Many another equally beautiful retreat from dust and din 
 is to be found in Arnold's poetry. Here is the dying away 
 of summer daylight among the high Alps. 
 
 ' How often where the slopes are green 
 
 On Jaman, hast thou sate 
 By some high chalet-door, and seen 
 The summer-day grow late ; 
 
 'And darkness steal o'er the wet grass 
 
 With the pale crocus starr'd, 
 And reach that glimmering sheet of glass 
 Beneath the piny sward, 
 
 ' Lake Leman's waters, far below ! 
 
 And watch'd the rosy light 
 Fade from the distant peaks of snow ; 
 And on the air of night 
 
 ' Heard accents of the eternal tongue 
 Through the pine branches play — 
 Listen'd, and felt thyself grow young ! 
 Listen'd and wept.' — Obermann. 
 
 How closely and lovingly he has observed, how happily the 
 spirit of what he sees has entered into him, is evidenced by 
 frequent passing phrases — the ' wet, bird-haunted English 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 151 
 
 lawn,' ' roses that down the alleys shine afar,' ' Sweet- 
 William with his homely cottage-smell.' 
 
 Through his fine sense for the expressiveness of words and 
 idioms, Arnold's verse lays his readers under a spell whose 
 secret is the power of strength in simplicity. One stanza 
 from Obermann is enough to illustrate — 
 
 ' A fever in these pages burns 
 
 Beneath the calm they feign ; 
 A wounded human spirit turns 
 Here, on its bed of pain. ' 
 
 Not a single vehement word ; but a whole paragraph of 
 vehemence would leave a weaker impression of spiritual 
 agony. There is nothing in the least childlike or homely in 
 simplicity of this kind ; nor is it like Wordsworth's simplicity, 
 even in his later, more artistic work. It is like Newman's 
 use of words in prose, the outcome of a finely disciplined 
 taste, able to use in a modern language the severely pure 
 style learnt in classical schools. 
 
 It will be noticed how few love-poems Arnold has written ; 
 on the other hand his work is peculiarly rich in the number 
 and beauty of his elegiac poems. Commemoration of fore- 
 runners and friends who for any reason have stood apart 
 from the 'world ' he so unsparingly condemns, gives the best 
 scope for his gravity and sweetness, for the contrast he draws 
 between the world's life and life which is not of it, for his 
 sense of the consoling power of Nature. Whether he com- 
 memorates men or creeds, or even his domestic pets, these 
 poems, never stormily nor bitterly sorrowful, are full of pure 
 deep feeling, gentle melancholy, yearning regret, often quite 
 as touching as more demonstrative grief. And he has the 
 gift of gifts for an elegiac poet of leaving both persons and 
 places the dearer to us for his words. Even spots sacred to 
 
152 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Wordsworth seem the more lovable for Arnold's reverie 
 over them. 
 
 ' The .spots which recall him survive, , 
 For he lent a new life to these hills. 
 The Pillar still broods o'er the fields 
 Which border Ennerdale Lake, 
 And Egremont sleeps by the sea. 
 The gleam of the evening star 
 Twinkles on Grasmere no more, 
 But ruined and solemn and grey 
 The sheepfold of Michael survives ; 
 And, far to the south, the heath 
 Still blows in the Quantock coombs 
 By the favourite waters of Ruth. ' 
 
 The Youth of Nature. 
 
 The twin poems The Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis are 
 among the most beautiful of these ; the latter, a memorial 
 to A. H. Clough, has borne comparison with Lycidas and 
 Adonais. Arnold rarely uses an elaborate metre, but he 
 does so both in these two and in Westminster Abbey, and 
 perhaps the one stanza already quoted from Thyrsis is 
 enough to show how admirably such a metre suits his 
 work. 
 
 Memorial Verses celebrate, with keen insight, Byron's 
 stormy passion and daring, Goethe's dissecting skill, 
 Wordsworth's 'healing power.' Heine's Grave, besides its 
 estimate of the dead poet, contains in a mournfully grand 
 image, Arnold's judgment of modern England, — 
 
 ' For her sons, 
 Long since, deep in our hearts, 
 Echo the blame of her foes. 
 We, too, sigh that she flags ; 
 We, too, say that she now — 
 Scarce comprehending the voice 
 Of her greatest, golden-mouth'd sons 
 Of a former age any more — 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 153 
 
 Stupidly travels her round 
 Of mechanic business, and lets 
 Slow die out of her life 
 Glory and genius and joy. 
 # * » 
 
 ' Yes, we arraign her ! but she, 
 The weary Titan, with deaf 
 Ears, and labour-dimm'd eyes. 
 Regarding neither to right 
 Nor left, goes passively by, 
 Staggering on to her goal ; 
 Bearing on shoulders immense, 
 Atlantean, the load, 
 Wellnigh not to be borne, 
 Of the too vast orb of her fate.' 
 
 Rugby Chapel, the tribute of a gifted son to a noble 
 father, honouring to both, is probably better known than 
 any other poem of Arnold's except The Forsaken Merman. 
 A Southern Night was written in memory of his brother ; 
 Haworth Churchyard in honour of the Bronte sisters, and 
 incidentally of Harriet Martineau. Many years later, when 
 Arnold was once more induced to break the silence which, 
 as a poet, he had kept so long, it was to take up the 
 elegiac strain again in three final poems — Westminster Abbey, 
 Geist's Grave, Poor Matthias — -whose chastened beauty 
 shows that his hand had lost none of its cunning. Of these, 
 one must give the name of the dachshound Geist, his 
 'little friend,' even tenderer associations in literature than 
 belong to Cowper's ' Beau,' or Mrs. Browning's ' Flush ' ; 
 and all birds should be dearer for the sake of this poet's 
 still tinier canary-friend Matthias. It would be hard to 
 find poems more genuinely and exquisitely pathetic than 
 these two. Arnold lays as sure a finger on the nature of 
 his favourites as on that of friends or brother poets. Who 
 
1S4 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 does not instantly endorse his reading of ' Atossa,' the mag- 
 nificent Persian ? 
 
 ' — Cruel, but composed and bland, 
 Dumb, inscrutable and grand, 
 So Tiberius might have sat. 
 Had Tiberius been a cat.' 
 
 And yet how touchingly he reahses the baffling impossibility 
 of real communion between natures so widely sundered as 
 those of men and birds — 
 
 ' What they want we cannot guess, 
 Fail to track their deep distress,' 
 
 — nay, even between separate human souls. 
 
 ' What you feel escapes our ken — 
 Know we more our fellow men ? 
 Human suffering at our side. 
 Ah, like yours is undescried ! 
 Human longings, human fears. 
 Miss our eyes and miss our ears. 
 Little helping, wounding much, 
 Dull of heart, and hard of touch. 
 Brother man's despairing sign 
 Who may trust us to divine ? 
 Who assure us, sundering powers 
 Stand not 'twixt his soul and ours? ' — Poor Matthias. 
 
 It is the same feeling that dictated the wonderful line 
 which, in an earlier poem, concludes his comparison of 
 human souls to islands having between their shores — 
 
 ' The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea. ' 
 
 Lastly there are the three finest of all these poems — 
 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and the two on 
 Obermann, of which the first has already been quoted more 
 than once. In these Arnold's intellectual position is made 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 155 
 
 especially clear ; and here too we have his lingering sym- 
 pathy with a faith he feels himself too clear-sighted to 
 accept. He describes the rugged approaches to the famous 
 Carthusian monastery, the rigid seclusion, the austere hfe, 
 the penitential observances of the brotherhood, and then 
 suddenly asks himself what right has he to be there ? 
 
 ' For rigorous teachers seized my youth, 
 
 And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, 
 
 Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, 
 There bade me gaze, and there aspire. 
 
 Even now their whispers pierce the gloom : 
 
 What dost thou in this living tomb ? 
 
 ' Forgive me, masters of the mind ! 
 
 At whose behest I long ago 
 So much unlearnt, so much resigii'd — 
 
 I come not here to be your foe ! 
 I seek these anchorites, not in ruth. 
 To curse and to deny your truth ; 
 
 ' Not as their friend, or child, I speak ! 
 
 But as, on some far northern strand, 
 Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek 
 
 In pity and mournful awe might stand 
 Before some fallen Runic stone — 
 For both were faiths, and both are gone. 
 
 ' Wandering between two worlds, one dead. 
 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to lay my head, 
 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride 
 I come to shed them at their side. ' 
 
 The second poem on Obermann — Obermann Once More 
 — has lost even the hopeless hope of the first. Its mag- 
 nificent pictures of Roman and Eastern civilization, the 
 decay of the one and stagnation of the other, lead up to a 
 requiem over the tomb of Christianity — 
 
156 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 
 In the lorn Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down.' 
 * * * » 
 
 ' Unduped of fancy, herueforth man 
 
 Must labour \ — must resign 
 His all too human creeds, and scan 
 Simply the zvay divine ! ' 
 
 From the sore pain and desolation that follow, the poem, 
 after vague hints at a new order as yet too imperfectly 
 beheld to give much consolation, subsides into the only 
 assuagement the poet has to command — a soothing con- 
 templation of Obermann's noble mountain haunts. 
 
 ' Soft darkness on the turf did lie. 
 
 Solemn, o'er hut and wood. 
 In the yet star-sown nightly sky, 
 
 The peak of Jaman stood. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 ' And glorious there, without a sound. 
 
 Across the glimmering lake, 
 High in the Valais-depth profound, 
 
 I saw the morning break.' 
 
 'No one,' says Mr. Hutton, summing up what Arnold's 
 poetry has done for this generation, ' no one has expressed 
 more powerfully and poetically its spiritual weaknesses, its 
 craving for a passion that it cannot feel, its admiration for 
 a self-mastery that it cannot achieve, its desire for a creed 
 that it fails to accept, its sympathy with a faith that it will 
 not share, its aspiration for a peace that it does not know.' 
 
V. 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 ' He holds that, paint a body well, 
 
 You paint a soul by implication, like 
 The grand first Master.' 
 
 Aurora Leigh. 
 
 ' I HATE long poems,' wrote Rossetti, and acted up to his 
 word. But the moderate-sized volume of his songs, ballads 
 and sonnets adds an entirely new and very remarkable 
 element to the already rich stores of Victorian poetry. 
 
 Born in London in 1828, the eldest son of an Italian 
 father and a mother whose parentage was half Italian and 
 half English, Rossetti's artistic character was naturally 
 moulded under very different influences from that of most 
 English poets. In early youth he showed signs of the 
 double genius for painting and literature which afterwards 
 distinguished him as one of the very few men who have 
 reached eminence in both. At nineteen or twenty he was 
 a leader in the little band of enthusiastic young artists who, 
 revolting from the then received and conventional methods 
 of picture-making, resolved to trust their own hearts and 
 eyes, and went back to early Italian masters for sincerity 
 and simplicity of style. In Mr. Ruskin's phrase, their aim 
 
iS8 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 was to ' paint nature as it is around them, with the help 
 of modern science.' Half jokingly they were dubbed the 
 ' Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,' — a name that is now perhaps 
 more familiar than well understood. 
 
 After a ten years' friendship, Rossetti married in i860 
 Miss Eleanor Siddons, the daughter of a Sheffield optician, 
 whose beauty and artistic susceptibilities were his joy and 
 pride. Within two years the sudden death of this idolised 
 wife from an overdose of laudanum drove Rossetti into a 
 life of seclusion. He buried himself in a sombrely pictur- 
 esque old house in Cheyne Walk, attracted chiefly by a 
 garden large enough to allow him to take exercise in private ; 
 and although his painting and literary work were pursued 
 as before, he never resumed his old habits of social inter- 
 course, keeping himself strictly to the society of a small 
 number of intimate friends. Twenty more years, chequered 
 with praise and blame, brightness and, deep gloom, work, 
 weariness, and the solace of friendship, were his ; and then, 
 his health of body and peace of mind alike shattered by the 
 use of narcotic drugs whose treacherous aid he had called 
 in to combat his misery of sleeplessness, he died in the 
 arms of his two devoted friends, Mr. Theodore Watts and 
 Mr. Hall Caine, on Easter Sunday, 1882. 
 
 Early as Rossetti's powers came to maturity, he was over 
 forty before he published a book of poems. Up to that 
 time only a few lyrics and sonnets had appeared now and 
 then in magazines, and some others were circulated to 
 some extent in manuscript ; but the greater number, Rossetti, 
 in the first paroxysm of grief at his wife's death, had declared 
 to be hers and hers alone, and he had the manuscript book 
 in which they were written buried with her. For seven 
 years they lay in her grave ; then the coffin was exhumed 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 159 
 
 and the poems recovered. When in 1870 his long-expected 
 volume of Poems at last came out, it was received with an 
 outburst of approving enthusiasm ; but presently it drew 
 down upon him, from the pen of a brother-poet, fierce 
 charges of sensuality and debased moral feeling. Mr. 
 Robert Buchanan, writing at first with an assumed signature, 
 published in the Contemporary Review an article which he 
 afterwards enlarged to a pamphlet, called The Fleshly School 
 of Poetry, and thus originated a heated and miserable con- 
 troversy which embittered Rossetti's already sorrowful life, 
 and for a while incapacitated him altogether. There was, 
 no doubt, real ground for Mr. Buchanan's protest against 
 certain tendencies towards sensualism in English society 
 and literature ; but his attack on Rossetti was levelled 
 against the wrong man, and executed in the wrong manner. 
 Two years afterwards he owned that his first fiercely un- 
 sparing judgment vijas a misconception arising from over- 
 hasty reading, and he dedicated his romance, God and the 
 Man, to Rossetti with the words — 
 
 ' Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song, 
 Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be ; 
 Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong, 
 And take tlie gift from me ! ' 
 
 After such a withdrawal, the whole unhappy episode might 
 well be passed over in silence were it not that Rossetti's 
 poetry has still to contend with a clinging reputation for 
 sensuality, and even of aggressive irreligion, strong enough 
 to deter some lovers of poetry from reading it. 
 
 Rossetti's real function as artist and poet is most clearly 
 and sympathetically set forth in the luminous article upon 
 him written by Mr. Watts in the British Encydopadia, 
 
l6o VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 which describes the part he took in what Mr. Watts, dis- 
 carding the hackneyed and never very lucid term, Romantic, 
 prefers to call the ' Renascence of the Spirit of Wonder in 
 Art and Poetry.' Just as the pre-Raphaelites, headed by 
 Rossetti, broke away from lifeless imitations of classical 
 models, and from eighteenth-century materialism, into new 
 regions of delight and imagination in painting, so Rossetti, 
 deeply imbued with Dante's idealism, and attracted by eerie 
 medieval legends and English ballad-lore, developed in 
 poetry the like sense of beauty, mystery, and awe. 
 
 The new order of poetry inaugurated by Cowper, not 
 so much consciously, perhaps, as through sheer force of 
 sincerity combined with the quick true insight of a nature 
 so loving that not even the dogmas of Calvinism could 
 harden, nor religious despair embitter it, culminated on the 
 side of nature-worship in Wordsworth. 
 
 ' He was a priest to us all 
 Of the wonder and bloom of the world, 
 Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad.' 
 
 Rossetti's worship of beauty takes up another line, and is 
 directed to beauty as manifested in human form, — in 
 woman hood. Of beauty in ' meadow,grove, and stream' 
 he took, for the most part, little heed ; but he is as one 
 haunted by a special type of womanly beauty, which he 
 dwells upon again and again with a warmth of description 
 foreign to English reserve, and apt to mislead hasty readers 
 as to his full purpose. But looking a little longer we see 
 that the object of his thoughts is no mere bodily beauty, 
 but bodily beauty ' ennobled by the concurrence of the soul 
 at all times,' — beauty 
 
 ' Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought 
 Nor Love her body from her soul. ' — Love-Lily. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. i6i 
 
 Love is for him a mystical passion ; beauty the symbolic 
 expression of hidden, perhaps incommunicable spiritual 
 meanings — 
 
 ' Shall birth and death and all dark names that be 
 As doors and windows bared to some loud sea. 
 
 Lash deaf mine ears and blind my eyes with spray ; 
 And shall my sense pierce love, — the last relay 
 And ultimate outpost of eternity ?' — House of Life, xxxiv. 
 
 And again, 
 
 ' Lady, I fain would tell how evermore 
 Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor, 
 Thee from myself, neither our love from God. ' 
 House of Life, v. 
 And again, 
 
 ' Tlie shadowed eyes remember and foresee. 
 Her face is made her shrine.'' — House of Life, x. 
 
 Rossetti does not reiterate sentiments of this kind so often 
 as he might if he regarded himself as in any way charged 
 with a message ; but his poetry is conceived in the spirit of 
 them. And further, he depicts the love generated by 
 beauty as touching, at its highest, an ideal in some degree 
 resembling Dante's, the love of one whose glance is 
 regeneration, whose worship lifts the heart to heaven, 
 where alone the Blessed Damozel can be approached. 
 There is a love also to destruction ; and although Rossetti 
 implicitly declares it to be no part of his object to 
 ' strengthen God among men ' — for ' when at any time 
 hath He cried unto thee, saying, "My son, lend me thy 
 shoulder, for I fall " ? ' ^ — yet it dawns upon us by degrees 
 that Mr. Hall Caine has shown the truest discernment of the 
 spirit of his poetry when he says, ' the topmost thing in him 
 
 ^ Rossetti's prose dream. Hand and Soul. 
 
i63 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 was indeed the love of beauty, but the deepest thing was 
 the love of uncomely right.' 
 
 Touching religion, Rossetti is neither prophet nor priest 
 nor saint nor assailant ; he is simply not in the least 
 concerned with religious struggles or searchings of heart. 
 Without being a Catholic, his attitude in such matters is not 
 unlike the unquestioning acquiescence of Catholicism. He 
 returns in spirit to the childhke devoutness of early Italian 
 painters, seeking for his artistic work an inspiration like 
 theirs, though unfettered by asceticism, and guided by 
 better scientific knowledge. 
 
 ' Give honour unto Luke Evangelist ; 
 
 For he it was (the aged legends say) 
 
 Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray. 
 Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist 
 Of devious symbols : but soon having wist 
 
 How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day 
 
 Are symbols also in some deeper way, 
 She looked through these to God and was God's priest. 
 
 ' And if past noon, her toil began to irk,' 
 
 And she sought talismans, and turned in vain 
 To soulless self-reflections of man's skill, — 
 Yet now, in this the twilight, she may still 
 Kneel in the latter grass to pray again. 
 Ere the night cometh and she may not work.' 
 
 House of Life, Ixxiv. 
 
 In many ways Rossetti seems rather a spirit who has strayed 
 among us out of medieval Italy than a latter-day English 
 poet. He is almost untouched by modern ideas ; the 
 number of poems in which he displays any care or know- 
 ledge of what nineteenth century Europe might be thinking 
 or doing, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. 
 He escapes from our moil and toil into a region where the 
 throbbing pant of the steam-engine is never heard, and 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 163 
 
 responsibility for the universe is never felt ; and be carries 
 no dust-mark with him. 
 
 It will be remembered how Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 as young men, settled to divide a large field of poetry 
 between them, in which division it was to be Wordsworth's 
 share to lift the commonplace into poetry, while Coleridge 
 would prove how strongly men's feelings might be stirred by 
 the supernatural treated with such simple conviction as to 
 produce a sense of reality. Hence the Ancient Mariner, 
 Christahel, Kubla Khan, casting their radiant spell. Keats, 
 too, just touched upon the secrets of 'faery-land forlorn' in 
 La Belle Dame Sans Merci and his lovely fragment. The 
 Eve of St. Mark. Where they visited, Rossetti seems to 
 draw native breath ; he lives in an atmosphere of dream 
 and portent, witcheries and visions of angels; and his richly 
 pictorial style harmonizes with his subjects like a gorgeous 
 stained glass window emblazoned with medieval legend or 
 device. 
 
 In The Blessed Damozel, written at nineteen for the short- 
 lived and afterwards famous pre-Raphaelite organ the Germ, 
 Rossetti's power of rendering strange, unearthly beauty is at 
 once evident. The clear, bold imagery, the curious blend- 
 ing of religion and glorified love, the pure still depth of the 
 beautiful girl's meditations in heaven, the accessories toned 
 in harmony with her thoughts, leave a wonderful impression 
 of something indescribably pure and lovely, ethereal, evan- 
 escent, and yet human. 
 
 ' Herseemed she scarce had been a day 
 
 One of God's choristers ; 
 The wonder was not yet quite gone 
 
 From that still look of hers ; 
 Albeit, to them she left, her day 
 
 Had counted as ten years. 
 
 ♦ ■+ » * 
 
l64 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Around her lovers newly met 
 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, 
 
 Spoke evermore among themselves 
 Their heart-remembered names ; 
 
 And the souls mounting up to God 
 Went by her like thin flames. 
 
 ' "When round his head the aureole clings, 
 
 And he is clothed in white, 
 I'll take his hand and go with him 
 
 To the deep wells of light ; 
 As unto a stream we will step down, 
 
 And bathe there in God's sight." ' 
 
 Like Coleridge's, such poetry as this tests the reader's 
 own powers of imagination and poetic feeHng; its charm 
 can no more be explained than the difference between red 
 and green can be made clear to a colour-blind man. But 
 happy are they who hold the passport of admission into 
 these bright realms. 
 
 The Last Confession, Rossetti's only poem in blank verse, 
 is a dramatic monologue in the manner of Browning, an 
 out-pouring of highly-wrought passion not without its 
 uncanny element in the ominous fate of the little glass- 
 ware image of Love given by the patriot-speaker to the 
 child he had kept in safety to his own constant peril. The 
 sudden dread hurrying the frenzied lover into murder, the 
 ever-withheld disclosure and the terror of it when made at 
 last, are full of gloomy power ; the earlier transition of 
 feeling in the speaker towards his charge is winningly 
 beautiful. 
 
 ' For now, being always with her, the first love 
 I had — the father's, brother's love — was changed, 
 I think, in somewise ; like a holy thought 
 Which is a prayer before one knows of it.' 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 165 
 
 Among shorter poems, two exquisite love-songs are The 
 Stream's Secret and Love's Nocturn — 
 
 ' O water wandering past, — 
 
 Albeit to thee I speak this thing, 
 O water, thou that wanderest, whispering. 
 
 Thou keep'st thy counsel to the last. 
 What spell upon thy bosom should Love cast, 
 
 His message thence to wring ? ' — The Stream's Secret. 
 
 In The Woodspurge, Sunset Wings, Cloud Confines, the 
 mysteries of grief, hope, strife, speak from heart to heart. 
 
 ' What of the heart of hate 
 
 That beats in thy breast, O Time ? — 
 Red strife from the furthest prime. 
 
 And anguish of fierce debate ; 
 War that shatters her slain. 
 And peace that grinds them as grain, 
 And eyes fixed ever in vain 
 
 On the pitiless eyes of Fate.' — Cloud Coitfines. 
 
 Most lovely of all, perhaps, is the musical, melancholy 
 Sea-Limits — ' Consider the sea's listless chime ' : — 
 
 ' Listen alone beside the sea, 
 
 Listen alone among the woods ; 
 
 Those voices of twin solitudes 
 Shall have one sound alike to thee : 
 
 Hark where the murmurs of thronged men 
 
 Surge and sink back and surge again, — 
 Still the one voice of wave and tree. 
 
 ' Gather a shell from the strown beach 
 And listen at its lips ; they sigh 
 The same desire and mystery, 
 The echo of the whole sea's speech. 
 And all mankind is thus at heart 
 Not anything but w'hat thou art : 
 And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.' 
 
 Rossetti was greatly attracted by ballad literature, and 
 
i66 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 a good deal of his most characteristic work is cast in the 
 form of literary ballads, differing from the old, spontaneous, 
 natural ballads in their complexity, condensed expression, 
 and sometimes dramatic power. The refrains in particular, 
 of which Rossetti makes large use, are often highly complex ; 
 occasionally the refrain is modified with every stanza, and 
 keeps up a running commentary on the action. Stratton 
 Water comes nearest to the old type without quite touching 
 it. Sister Helen wields the supernatural in its terrifying 
 aspects ; the much ill-used term ' weird ' is here exactly in 
 place. As the deserted lady hears through the unsuspecting 
 speech of her young brother, appeal after appeal to her 
 mercy from the friends of her false lover, married three 
 days since to another bride, and now dying in torment as 
 the waxen effigy she has made wastes slowly over the fire ; 
 and as she holds on her course, though her heart breaks and 
 her soul is lost by its success, we feel the grim force of 
 relentless, cruel destiny, controlled by unearthly and evil 
 powers. Hate fierce with the fierceness of transmuted love 
 works its dark will through the dread ban of demoniacal 
 witchcraft. 
 
 ' " Oh the wind is sad in the iron chill, 
 Sister Helen, 
 And weary sad they look by the hill." 
 "But he and I are sadder still, 
 
 Little brother ! " 
 {0 Mother, Mary Mother 
 Most sad of all, between Hell and Heaven I ) ' 
 
 Rose Mary is another story of love misplaced and be- 
 trayed, of supernatural aids invoked — but vainly ; of guilt, 
 expiation, death. We may contrast the moment of tragedy 
 in a veritable ballad with this mother's dramatic cry on 
 finding out the dead man's treachery to her daughter. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 167 
 
 ' " O what hills are yon, yon pleasant hills, 
 That the sun shines sweetly on ? " 
 " O yon are the hills of heaven," he said, 
 " Where you will never won.'' 
 
 ' " what a mountain is yon," she said, 
 "All so dreary with frost and snow ?" 
 "O yon is the mountain of hell," he cried, 
 
 ' Where you and I will go." ' — The Damon Lover. 
 
 ' She lifted the lock of gleaming hair 
 And smote the lips and left it there. 
 " Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll ! 
 Full well hath treason found its goal, 
 O thou dead body and damned soul ! " ' — J?ose Mary. 
 
 The White Ship and The King's Tragedy are more ballad- 
 like. The latter tells once again, with vivid freshness, 
 the story of the murder of the poet-King James I. of 
 Scotland, the narrator being Catherine Douglas, popularly 
 re-named Kate Barlass in memory of the part she took in 
 the King's defence. The diction is simpler than is usual 
 with Rossetti, being carefully adapted to the time and 
 speaker. The poem is steeped in supernaturalism, not 
 only as regards the imposing episodes of the phantom 
 woman's apparition, whose warnings against threatening 
 doom are powerless to turn the King aside, but also in 
 minor boding touches, as when, in the crisis of suspense 
 while the murderers search for the hidden King, the night 
 wind wails round the empty room, and the moonlit royal 
 shield in the window is suddenly left black. 
 
 Critics are divided between the respective merits of these 
 ballads, or ballad-romances, with their pictorial qualities, 
 their movement and weird imagination, and of the sonnets 
 with their splendid diction, elaborate workmanship, con- 
 densed, emphatic style, and mystic ideahsmj but on one 
 
i68 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 point they are not divided at all, — with one voice Ros- 
 setti is pronounced the greatest sonnet-writer of Victorian 
 times, not even excepting Mrs. Browning. Rossetti loved 
 sonnet-writing, practised it from boyhood, and attained a 
 mastery in it undisputed among his contemporaries. His 
 numerous isolated sonnets, especially those on pictures, well 
 deserve careful study; but the first place is of course claimed 
 by his magnificent sonnet-sequence. The House of Life, a 
 series of a hundred and one sonnets devoted to love, grief, 
 change, fate, and other life-influences through which men 
 move. No hasty reading is of the smallest use here ; even 
 with close attention it is often hard to follow the poet's 
 course of feeling from line to line or sonnet to sonnet, on 
 account of their 'arduous fulness' and highly condensed, 
 symbolic expression. The rules of sonnet structure must 
 also be understood if they are to be fully enjoyed, and 
 a short analysis of structure may be more useful here than 
 a futile attempt to examine The House of Life at once 
 briefly and with justice. 
 
 A typical sonnet ^ consists of fourteen lines of five 
 dissyllabic feet (iambics as a rule), divided into two ' sys- 
 tems ' composed of eight and six lines respectively. The 
 first division, or ' octave,' is subdivided into two ' quatrains,' 
 divisions containing four lines each ; the second, or ' sestet,' 
 is also subdivided into two sets of three lines each, called 
 ' tercets.' The lines throughout must rhyme in a certain 
 fixed order. The octave of a perfect sonnet has only two 
 rhymes, the first, fourth, fifth and eighth lines rhyming 
 together, and the second, third, sixth and seventh ; thus — 
 
 ' The best exposition of the structure and histoiy of sonnets is to be 
 found in Mr. Mark Pattison's introduction to his edition of Milton's 
 Sonnets. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 169 
 
 abba abba. 
 
 The sestet also has only two rhymes, following each other 
 thus — 
 
 c d c d c d. 
 
 There are, however, several recognized deviations from 
 this, the strictest form of the sonnet. In English — poorer 
 in rhyming words than Italian, in which sonnets were first 
 written, — a third rhyme is often admitted in the sestet, the 
 rhymes being thus arranged — 
 
 c d e c d e. 
 
 Sometimes, but less frequently, a third rhyme is introduced 
 in the octave, thus — • 
 
 abba ace a. 
 
 Lines i, 4, 5, 8 of the octave are regarded as its framework, 
 and in a true sonnet their rhyming is invariable. Two 
 other essential rules are that the rhymes of the tercets must 
 not repeat nor resemble those of the quatrains, and their 
 order must never be the same as that of the quatrain 
 rhymes. 
 
 Double rhymes are as a rule inadmissible in a sonnet ; 
 they overcharge it with sound in proportion to its'i length. 
 And the last two lines ought not to rhyme together, the 
 effect of this being to cause a break in the continuity of 
 sound, and to turn the two lines into a couplet separated 
 from the rest of the poem. But on these points, and in the 
 number and arrangement of rhymes in the tercets, English 
 writers have allowed themselves more latitude than is given 
 by the recognized variations just described. In doing so 
 their sonnets become more or less irregular ; but it does 
 not follow that all sonnets not formally correct are therefore 
 
170 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 failures. Their success can in each case be tried only on its 
 own merits, and judged by a trained ear. 
 
 So much for the form of a sonnet. As regards the matter, 
 the ideal sonnet is complete in itself; it is the expression 
 of oncj and only one, thought or feeling. Further, this 
 thought or feeling is expressed in a manner answering to 
 the formal divisions of the sonnet. It is opened in the 
 first quatrain, enlarged upon in the second; then after a 
 pause it is resumed in the first tercet, and is finally 
 summed up in the last tercet. There ought to be no 
 epigrammatic conclusion in the last two lines, for a corre- 
 sponding reason to that which forbids a rhyming couplet at 
 the close ; for no fragment should be made so telling as 
 to divide it from the rest, nor is any worked-up climax 
 required ; the flow of feeling in a sonnet, like the flow of 
 sound, should be continuous and almost even throughout. 
 
 It has sometimes been objected that a kind of poem so 
 artificial as this, bound by such stringent rules as to its 
 composition and contents, must be opposed to the very 
 nature of poetic inspiration, which demands absolute 
 freedom to choose its own form — make its own form if 
 needful. But poetry can give another pleasure besides that 
 of a sense of freedom and spontaneity in the poet's utter- 
 ance, the pleasure of fulfilled expectations when a known 
 and prescribed law is beautifully obeyed. Just as the 
 trained musician delights in the ordered ' movements ' of a 
 fine sonata, so in poetry the disciplined reader delights in 
 the happy fulfilment of rules whose fitness has been proved 
 and established by a long course of trials. There are many 
 forms in which the poet can have all the freedom he desires ; 
 there is no other important form so strictly ruled as this, — ■ 
 for the ballade is not at present important, whatever it may 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 171 
 
 become in the future. It is worth the reader's while to 
 train himself to the reception of the sort of enjoyment this 
 can give ; it is worth the poet's while to minister to it. 
 And indeed objections to the sonnet and its strictness do 
 not come from the poets themselves ; on the contrary, they 
 have, as Mr. Pattison remarks, 'caught at the opportunity 
 which the sonnet affords for distilling strong emotion into 
 drops.' 
 
 Sonnets were first grafted on English poetry about 1540, 
 and the first attempts show how difficult it was to naturahze 
 them in a language so different from their native, flexible 
 Italian. Then came Shakespeare's sonnets, varying widely 
 from the strict type, for they consist of three quatrains 
 closed with a rhyming couplet, and their rhymes are neither 
 limited nor placed according to canon. It has been con- 
 jectured that Shakespeare followed the rules he knew, but 
 did not know all. Milton, deeply versed in Italian poetry, 
 recalled the English sonnet to the more beautiful and 
 musical Italian form, and showed at the same time to what 
 fresh and various uses it might be put. Before him the 
 sonnet form had been employed only for love-poems, 
 especially love-poems in which ingenuity of language was 
 more certain than reality of feeling. In his hands the 
 fitness of the sonnet to be made the vehicle of strong 
 emotion, whatever its cause or subject, became no less 
 manifest than the grandeur and stateliness of which it was 
 capable. Only two of Milton's sonnets are on the same 
 subject ; no two in the same mood. 
 
 Once fairly established the sonnet has been stamped 
 anew with the personal impress of almost every great 
 English poet, receiving from one and another fresh asso- 
 ciations of pathos, vigour, depth, majesty, serenity. Inten- 
 
173 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 sity of feeling generally tinged, sometimes saturated, with 
 mystical imagination, extreme concentration, high-sounding 
 music, richly elaborated diction, distinguish Rossetti's 
 sonnets ; and he has also, as Mr. Hall Caine points out, 
 paid careful attention to the canon of comparatively recent 
 development, that the thought or feeling should be pre- 
 sented in a twofold aspect. Every line, every word, one 
 might almost say every syllable, is chosen with sedulous 
 care for its effect ; and the result is workmanship so equal 
 that it is hard to select one example rather than another. 
 Perhaps we cannot do better than end with the opening and 
 final sonnets of The House of Life — s 
 
 Love Enthroned. 
 ' I marked all kindred Powers the heart finds fair ; — 
 Truth, with awed lips ; and Hope, with eyes upcast ; 
 And Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past 
 To signal-fires. Oblivion's flight to scare ; 
 And Youth, with still some single golden hair 
 Unto his shoulder clinging, since the last 
 Embrace wherein two sweet arms held him fast ; 
 And Life, still wreathing flowers for Death to wear. 
 
 ' Love's throne was not with these ; but far above 
 All passionate wind of welcome and farewell 
 
 He sat in breathless bowers they dream not of ; 
 
 Though Truth foreknow Love's heart, and Hope foretell, 
 And Fame be for Love's sake desirable, 
 
 And Youth be dear, and Life be sweet to Love.' 
 
 The One Hope. 
 ' When vain desire at last and vain regret 
 Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 
 What shall assuage the unforgotten pain 
 And teach the unforgetful to forget ? 
 Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, — ■ 
 Or may the soul at once in a green plain 
 Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain 
 And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet ? 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS. 173 
 
 ' Ah ! when the wan soul in that golden air 
 Between the scriptured petals softly blown 
 
 Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, — 
 Ah ! let none other alien spell soe'er 
 But only the one Hope's one name be there, — • 
 
 Not less nor more, but even that word alone. ' 
 
 With Chaucer for his master, and the ' Renascence of 
 Wonder ' for his school, William Morris has made himself 
 the prince of modern story-tellers. He did not, however, 
 begin as a narrative poet, but published first, in 1858, a 
 volume of short romantic poems, The Defence of Guenevere, 
 and the dedication of this to Rossetti twelve years before 
 the latter's own poems appeared, was one of the first signs 
 to draw outside attention towards him. Rossetti's influence 
 is very plainly perceptible in these poems ; and there are 
 traces also of Browning's, chiefly in the monologue form in 
 which many of them are cast, — a form which in Morris's 
 hands produces a curious amount of obscurity, the very 
 last fault with which his later work could be charged. 
 Notwithstanding this the poems have a very attractive charm 
 of their own. The volume came out before Tennyson's 
 Idylls of the King, and several of the poems have Arthurian 
 subjects, though much more slightly treated than by 
 Tennyson. But the strongest and most characteristic poem 
 is the woeful Haystack in the Floods. This is not a mono- 
 logue, but tells in graphic narrative of the Lady Jehane's 
 comfortless flight with her lover from Paris, of their en- 
 counter with the foeman Godmar, whose company out- 
 numbers and overpowers Count Robert's, of the miserable 
 choice offered to the lady to live with the man she hates, 
 or be returned to Paris to undergo ordeal by fire or water, 
 
174 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 of her dreamless sleep on the wretched heap of soppedhay, 
 
 and pitiful awakening — ■ 
 
 'She 
 Being waked at last, sigh'd quietly 
 And strangely childlike came, and said : 
 "I will not."' 
 
 And then follows the straining, foiled attempt of the pair 
 to exchange a last kiss, the horror of his death before her 
 eyes, the oversetting of her reason. 
 
 ' She shook her head and gazed awhile 
 At her cold hands with rueful smile, 
 As though this thing had made her mad. 
 
 This was the parting that they had 
 Beside the haystack in the floods.' 
 
 Seven years later the long but fascinating story of The 
 Life and Death of Jason showed that Morris had found his 
 own special line, and already attained mastery in it ; and 
 this was quickly followed by the great work on which his 
 fame must chiefly rest — The Earthly Paradise. 
 
 The plan of The Earthly Paradise is taken from Chaucer, 
 but developed with more completeness and symmetry. 
 The three different metres in which it is written are all 
 Chaucerian ; but the modern poet differs from the elder in 
 having less dramatic power, and in carefully eschewing 
 contemporary affairs. He is, he tells us, ' the idle singer of 
 an empty day ' — ■ 
 
 ' Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, 
 Why should I try to set the crooked straight ? ' 
 
 And SO he carries himself and his readers far back into 
 the days of ancient song and fable, and the lands of myth 
 and miracle — 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS. 175 
 
 ' Telling a tale of times long passed away, 
 When men might cross a kingdom in a day, 
 And kings remembered they should one day die. 
 And all folk dwelt in great simplicity.' 
 
 The Prologue describes how ' certain gentlemen and 
 mariners of Norway, having considered all they had heard 
 of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it,' and the adven- 
 turers, having after many years reached a distant western 
 land, narrate the history of their travels to the strange people 
 among whom they thenceforth dwell and are held in high 
 honour. Twice a month, when solemn festival is held, a 
 tale is related ; and the poem contains the twenty-four tales 
 that occupy one year, beginning in the spring-time. In the 
 first half the subjects of the tales are alternately classical 
 and medieval ; before the work was finished Mr. Morris had 
 come under the attraction of Icelandic literature, and in the 
 later parts stories of Scandinavian origin are introduced, 
 one of which. The Lovers of Gudrun, is the most powerful 
 of any. 
 
 Morris does not invent either his forms or the ground- 
 work of his tales ; but taking the old verse or the old 
 legend, he re-animates it, refines away what was coarse 
 in its primitive structure, supplies deficiencies whether in 
 motive or symmetry, breathes new vigour and sweetness 
 into its life, and clothing all with delicate grace and beauty, 
 produces a whole as original in workmanship as it is 
 beautiful in effect. 
 
 Detailed analysis of these tales would be useless, even if 
 their length did not put it out of the question. No one 
 who has access to them can have the smallest difficulty in 
 following their clear, smooth, beguiling narrative ; as before 
 said, they consistently avoid all stress of heart- searching 
 
176 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 topics; and the charm of their execution is exactly what 
 analysis kills instead of demonstrating. It must be enough 
 to say a word or two about some general characteristics. 
 
 The extreme ease of narrative and rhythm is one of these, 
 producing a corresponding sense of restfulness in the 
 reader's mind. At the same time monotony is escaped by 
 variety of subject and changes in metre. Another lies in 
 the delightfully fresh descriptions of nature, not given in 
 great detail, but conspicuously faithful, and exhaling the 
 sweet wholesome breath of the open air. ' Mr. Morris,' it 
 has been said, ' is never so much at home as when he is out 
 of doors.' 1 The lovely preludes to the different months are 
 no unfair examples. 
 
 ' Here then, O June, thy kindness will we take ; 
 And if indeed but pensive men we seem, 
 What should we do ? thou wouldst not have us wake 
 From out the arms of this rare happy dream 
 And wish to leave the murmur of the stream, 
 The rustling boughs, the twitter of the birds, 
 And all thy thousand peaceful happy words. ' 
 
 The landscapes in The Man born to be a King are 
 especially noteworthy ; and here is another choice little 
 picture from the dreamland Story of Cupid and Psyche — 
 
 ' A lovely grassy valley could she see, 
 That steep grey cliffs upon three sides did bound, 
 And under these, a river sweeping round. 
 With gleaming curves the valley did embrace, 
 And seemed to make an island of that place ; 
 And all about were dotted leafy trees, 
 The elm for shade, the linden for the bees. 
 The noble oak, long ready for the steel 
 That in that place it had no fear to feel ; 
 
 1 Our Living Pods, H. Buxton Forman. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS. 177 
 
 The pomegranate, the apple, and the pear, 
 That fruit and flowers at once made shift to bear, 
 Nor yet decayed therefore, and in them hung 
 Bright birds that elsewhere sing not, but here sung 
 As sweetly as the small brown nightingales 
 Within the wooded, deep Laconian vales.' 
 
 Now and then a more imaginative touch occurs in the 
 treatment both of landscape and of persons — 
 
 ' And underneath his feet the moonlit sea 
 Went shepherding his waves disorderly.' 
 
 Cupid and Psyche. 
 
 ' The shadow of a long-forgotten smile 
 Her anxious face a moment did beguile.' — Hid. 
 
 But as a rule the verse keeps on an even way of placid 
 beauty, never sinking into prose nor rising to any great 
 height of passion. 
 
 Before the Earthly Paradise was finished, Morris had 
 begun the translations of Scandinavian sagas which, thanks 
 to his ease and simple directness in narrative, read like 
 original poems. They are, naturally, even less modern in 
 tone and style than the Paradise ; and indeed in securing 
 the proper efifect of remoteness, the use of archaic words 
 and expressions has threatened to become a mannerism ; 
 but that is a small blemish in a large field of beauty. But 
 since the saga-poems had their day, another change has 
 taken place ; Mr. Morris, as we know, has been unable to 
 refrain himself any longer from efforts to alleviate 
 
 ' The heavy trouble, the bewildering care 
 That weighs us down who live and earn our bread.' 
 
 Apology — Earthly Paradise. 
 
 His songs have become Socialistic Chants, and among its 
 other responsibilities, modern civilisation, with its imper- 
 fect control of the forces called by itself into play, has to 
 
 N 
 
178 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 answer for having drawn, or rather dragged, aside this poet 
 from his ministry of beauty and refreshment. 
 
 Me. Swinburne began his poetic career in high revolt 
 against reigning principles in morals, religion, and politics ; 
 endowed with a boundless gift of utterance, and entrenched 
 in a theory that poetry, being an art, was privileged to say 
 what it pleased so long as the verses were good. The 
 natural result was an immediate and sharp collision between 
 himself and the many to whose moral or religious sense he 
 gave grievous offence. The battle, bitter on both sides, 
 was fought out on the ground of Morals versus Art ; Swin- 
 burne's position might perhaps have been turned more 
 effectively and not less truly with the contention that as 
 the artistic ideal must include meaning as well as form, to 
 emphasise and cover with a glory of noble language ugly 
 facts or ideas essentially degraded, is to set up an ideal as 
 false artistically as it may be hurtful ethically. However, 
 without recanting anything, Mr. Swinburne's later works 
 have been cleared of the elements which made his earlier 
 poems offensive ; and there the controversy may well rest. 
 
 Like Matthew Arnold, Swinburne quickly tried his hand 
 at drama on the Greek model, and with much better success, 
 for his wonderful lyrical drama, Atalanta in Calydon, has 
 all the life and fire that Merope lacks. The rhymed 
 choruses, in particular, are a triumph of splendid eloquence. 
 The plot of Atalanta is simple; the principal incident 
 being the boar-hunt, in which the terrible beast sent by 
 Artemis upon Calydon (in anger at the king's neglect in 
 having offered sacrifice to all the gods save her alone) is 
 slain by Meleager, whose mother Althea, queen of Calydon, 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 179 
 
 had, soon after his birth, seen a vision of the three Fates 
 standing over him to prophesy of him, of whom the last 
 had declared that he should live only so long as the brand 
 then burning were unconsumed. Althea, therefore, had 
 caught away the brand from the fire and laid it up in 
 safety. But Meleager laid the spoils of the boar at the 
 feet of Atalanta, the huntress, highly favoured of Artemis, 
 and when his uncles disputed this disposal of the spoil, 
 he turned upon them and slew them also. And Althea, 
 hearing of the death of her brothers by the hand of her 
 son, cast the brand upon the fire, so that Meleager wasted 
 away and perished. 
 
 Every speech adds something to the movement or detail 
 of the drama ; the chorus keeps up its due commentary on 
 the action ; and Swinburne's own tendency to excess is 
 kept in check by the severely restrained form of Greek 
 tragedy. The animating motive of the whole play — the 
 futility of resistance to the high gods — is chiefly developed 
 by the chorus. After the exquisite introductory celebration 
 of spring, the first considerable chorus, ' Before the begin- 
 ning of years,' comes as a mournful piece of fatalism, 
 almost subdued in tone. It tells how with weeping and 
 laughter, loathing and love, the gods fashioned ' the holy 
 spirit of man ' — 
 
 ' In his heart is a blind desire, 
 
 In his eyes foreknowledge of death ; 
 He weaves, and is clothed with derision ; 
 
 Sows, and he shall not reap ; 
 His life is a watch or a vision 
 Between a sleep and a sleep.' 
 
 The next chorus, ' We have seen thee, O Love, thou art 
 
iSo VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 fair; thou art goodly, O Love/^ occurs immediately after 
 Althea's distressful warnings to her son against the attractions 
 of Atalanta, have been answered in the speech that shows 
 how, in spite of the exceeding tenderness and loyalty of his 
 attitude towards her — 
 
 ' For there is nothing terribler to men 
 Than the sweet face of mothers, and the might ', 
 
 — Meleager is nevertheless irresistibly impelled to thwart 
 her wishes in this matter. Celebrating the glorious goddess 
 of Love, it magnificently bewails the additional anguish 
 brought through her means upon unhappy man. 
 
 ' For bitter thou wast from thy birth, ,; 
 
 Aphrodite, a mother of strife ; 
 For before thee some rest was on earth, 
 
 A little respite from tears, 
 A little pleasure of life. ' 
 
 Was there not evil enough already on the sad earth for 
 
 man — 
 
 ' That thou must come after these, 
 That thou must lay on him love?' 
 
 In the great central chorus, 'Who hath given man speech?' 
 Swinburne includes a passionate arraignment of the ways 
 of the Most High among men such as could hardly have 
 come in reality from the lips of Greek polytheists. The 
 chorus begins in bitter complaints against 'the gods,' but 
 presently accusation narrows down its object to 
 
 ' The supreme evil, God ' ; 
 
 and the torrent of eloquent denunciation that follows seems 
 evidently directed against Jehovah rather than Zeus. 
 
 1 This chorus is contained in the volume of ' Selections ' under the 
 name oi Anadyomene, 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. i8i 
 
 In this we have an anticipation of the passionate anti- 
 theism to which in some of his later poems Swinburne gives 
 utterance in his own person, — with, however, one essential 
 difference in attitude. For the chorus in Atalanta denounces 
 God believed in as God; but in Songs before Sunrise the 
 poet speaks as one firmly convinced that the ideas of God- 
 head and Christianity are purely figments of human fancy, 
 and not only so, but that they are pernicious ideas, obstruc- 
 tive hindrances from the first to real progress. To most of 
 us it will appear that his historic sense has signally failed 
 him here ; and he stands in marked contrast to Matthew 
 Arnold, who, with an equal persuasion of the baseless origin 
 of these 'all too human creeds,' can still write of men's 
 religions — 
 
 ' Which has not taught weak wills how much they can, 
 Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain ? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : 
 Thou must he born again 1' — Progress. 
 
 But the fact is so, and in any fair judgment of Swinburne, 
 has to be taken into account. In virtue of it we cannot 
 fail to see that his attitude of scornful derision in Before a 
 Crucifix and the Hymn of Man, closely resembles that 
 which is commonly tolerated in Elijah when he mocked the 
 priests and worshippers of Baal. 
 
 ' Thy slave that slept is awake ; thy slave but slept for a span ; 
 Yea, man thy slave shall unmake thee, who made thee lord over man. 
 
 Cry aloud till his godhead awaken ; what doth he to sleep and to 
 dream ? 
 ******* 
 
 By the spirit he ruled as his slave is he slain who was mighty to slay. 
 And the stone that is sealed on his grave he shall raise not and not 
 roll away.' — Hymn of Man, 
 
i82 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 There is also, however, a positive element in the Songs. 
 Having repudiated theism altogether, Swinburne transfers 
 many attributes of godhead, and frequently the name too, 
 to 'the holy spirit of man.' 
 
 ' Glory to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master of things.' 
 
 On comparing passage with passage, this is the meaning 
 that unmistakably emerges from poems that would appear, 
 at first sight, to be pantheistic in bearing. For this ' God ' 
 a new day dawns — 
 
 ' The sun re-arisen is his priest, and the heat thereof hallows his head. 
 His eyes take part in the morning ; his spirit outsounding the sea 
 Asks no more witness or warning from temple or tripod or tree. 
 * * * * jt * * 
 
 His soul to his soul is a law, and his mind is a light to his mind. 
 The seal of his knowledge is sure, the truth and his spirit are wed.' 
 
 Hymn of Man. 
 
 For him Swinburne now demands absolute enfranchisement, 
 freedom like the freedom of Nature, liberty beside which 
 ordinary republicanism shows as bondage. Triumphing in 
 the political liberation of Italy and France, he sings as the 
 herald of a brighter, more burning sunrise. Now mourn- 
 ing, as in Mater Dolorosa, over the wrongs liberty has 
 suffered ; now invoking her like a lover his mistress, as in 
 The Oblation; now flinging himself in a passion of hero- 
 worship at the feet of Mazzini and others whose hands 
 have upborne her ; now, as in Mater Triumphalis, exulting 
 in her victory, the poet gives himself wholly to the 
 cause of this 'dreadful mother' with heroic grandeur of 
 self-abandonment. 
 
 ' I am no courtier of thee sober-suited, 
 
 Who loves a little for a little pay. 
 Me not thy winds and storms nor thrones disrooted 
 
 Nor molten crowns nor thine own sins dismay. 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 183 
 
 ' I shall bum up before thee, pass and perish, 
 
 As haze in sunrise on the red sea-line ; 
 But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish 
 The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine. 
 * * * * 
 
 ' I am thy storm-thrush of the days that darken. 
 
 Thy petrel in the foam that bears thy bark 
 To port through night and tempest ; if thou hearken. 
 My voice is in the heaven before the lark.' 
 
 Mater Triumphalis. 
 
 After all, it is for the magnificetit eloquence, the splendid 
 rush and rhythm of passages like this and countless others, 
 rather than for depth of thought or meaning, that we go to 
 the poetry of Swinburne. 
 
 A Song of Italy and Songs before Sunrise were followed 
 by new exercise of Swinburne's dramatic genius. Another 
 fine play on classical lines, Erechtheus, came first ; then the 
 second and third plays in Elizabethan style of the famous 
 ' Mary Stuart trilogy.' The first of the trilogy, Chastelard, 
 as a presentation of the delirious and too often ignoble 
 passion which with Swinburne does duty for love, shares 
 with the first series of Poems and Ballads the worst objec- 
 tions to be brought against his early poems. The second 
 stands out as the greatest of the three ; but neither Morris 
 nor Swinburne share Rossetti's objection to long poems, 
 and the physical proportions of Bothwill are, at first sight, 
 such as to strike alarm into the mind of even an intrepid 
 reader of dramas. Whoever overcomes it will find the reward 
 in the play, of unbounded life and vigour, much interest in 
 characterisation, and Swinburne's unfailing music of sound. 
 Mary Stuart closes the tragic series with the crowning 
 tragedy of the Queen's own death. All these plays give 
 evidence of the potent fascination that lay for Swinburne in 
 the riddle of her character and ill-starred career. 
 
i84 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' Surely you were something better 
 
 Than innocent ! 
 ' No maid that strays with steps unwary 
 Through snares unseen, 
 But one to live and die for ; Mary, 
 The Queen.' 
 
 Adimx cl Marie Stuart. 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse exemplifies — at great length — 
 Swinburne's views of the way in which Arthurian narratives 
 ought to be treated. Among his remaining poems, two or 
 three subjects frequently recur, and are dwelt upon with 
 ever-fresh delight. One of these is the poet's devotion to 
 Victor Hugo, who has exercised so powerful an influence 
 over his work ; another is his extreme love (Swinburne is 
 always in extremes) and admiration for little children. 
 
 ' Where children are not, heaven is not, and heaven if they come not 
 
 again shall be never ; 
 But the face and the voice of a child are assurance of heaven and its 
 promise for ever.' — A Song of Welcome. 
 
 Lastly there is the one object in Nature for which he really 
 cares, of which he never wearies — the sea ; and perhaps no 
 single topic better illustrates the qualities of his verse than 
 this. His amazing command of language ; his no less 
 wonderful mastery of metre, shown especially in his tro- 
 chaic and anapaestic measures ; his invention of new effects 
 in alliteration and other elements of sound ; his musical 
 cadences ; his unchecked ease, sustained eloquence in ex- 
 pression, are all exerted to bring his hearers under a spell as 
 of the very sea itself, with all the sound and the glory of it, 
 the foam and fret, the salt spray and freshening breath, 
 the gladness and mystery and majesty, the storm and the 
 eternal peace. Yet in these poems we perceive his weak- 
 ness as well as strength, — the slightness of actual meaning 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 185 
 
 that often underlies the splendour of sound, the curious 
 sense of monotony which so much unbroken harmony at 
 last produces. Both suggest that the repeated comparisons 
 of Swinburne as a lyrist to Shelley, have been made with 
 more boldness than success. To think of Shelley's lyrics 
 and monotony of any kind at the same moment requires 
 an effort which sufKciently marks out one difference between 
 the two poets ; and with all their beauty and impetuous 
 movement, Swinburne's measures have neither the ethereal 
 magic of Shelley's, nor his surpassing swiftness. But no 
 comparison could either help or hinder our enjoyment of 
 such lines as these — 
 
 ' The sea is awake, and the sound of the song of the joy of her waking 
 is rolled 
 From afar to the star that recedes, from anear to the wastes of the 
 wild wide shore. 
 ******* 
 
 Life holds not an hour that is better to live in ; the past is a tale that 
 
 is told, 
 The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep, with a blessing in 
 
 store. 
 As we give us again to the waters, the rapture of limbs that the 
 
 waters enfold 
 Is less than the rapture of spirit whereby, though the burden it quits 
 
 were sore, 
 Our souls and the bodies they wield at their will are absorbed in the 
 
 life they adore — 
 In the life that endures no burden, and bows not the forehead, and 
 
 bends not the knee — • 
 In the life everlasting of earth and of heaven, in the laws that atone 
 
 and agree. 
 In the measureless music of things, in the fervour of forces that rest 
 
 or that roam. 
 That cross and return and reissue, as I after you and as you after me 
 Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and beseeches, 
 
 athirst for the foam. ' — In the Water. 
 
VI. 
 MINOR POETS. 
 
 ' All round the room my silent servants wait, — 
 My friends in every season, bright and dim. 
 * * * * 
 
 From the old world's divine and distant date, 
 From the sublimer few, 
 Down to the poet who but yester-eve 
 Sang sweet and made us grieve ! ' 
 
 Barry Cornwall. 
 
 It would be a most pleasant task to single out various 
 groups and individuals from the great wealth of Victorian 
 minor poetry, and look carefully into works at which 
 present limits will allow nothing more than a glance. 
 
 No other poetess has reached Mrs. Browning's level of 
 achievement, or anything like it; but there have been 
 several whose poetry is nevertheless of no mean value. 
 First she who, throughout the years of her short life on the 
 wild Yorkshire moors, so dreary in winter, so divine in 
 summer, might have been taken for their very Genius, 
 incarnate for a while in human shape. Emily Bronte loved 
 the moors with a passionate, personal love. She dreamed 
 of them by night; she ranged over them by day; away 
 from them she pined ; in the bare, distant school-room her 
 heart turns from the ' alien firelight ' with sick longing for 
 her moorland parsonage home; the midnight gale on the 
 
MINOR POETS. 187 
 
 bleak hill-side has its answer from her as from a votary. 
 The moors kept back no secret from her ; their might and 
 gloom and glory and mystery breathe from every page of 
 hers, and above all their freedom, which to her dauntless, 
 untamable spirit was as the very breath of life. 
 
 ' I'll walk where my own nature would be leading : 
 
 It vexes me to choose another guide : 
 Where the gray flocks in ferny glades are feeding ; 
 Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.' 
 
 Stanzas. 
 ' Oh dreadful is the check — intense the agony — 
 When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see ; 
 When the pulse begins to throb, and the brain to think again, 
 The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.' 
 
 The Prisoner. 
 
 But as a poet Emily Bronte had hardly thrown off the 
 trammels of conventional forms whose poverty of rhythm 
 disguised rather than expressed her will, before that last 
 terrible conflict came upon her, in which she wrestled 
 with Death as with a tangible and conquerable foe, ' would 
 see, would hear, would breathe, would live up to, within, 
 well-nigh beyo7id the moment when death says to all 
 sense and all being — " Thus far, and no farther ! " ' Only 
 four or five poems are left worthy of her 
 
 ' Whose soul 
 Knew no fellow for might, 
 Passion, vehemence, grief, 
 Daring, since Byron died.' 
 
 There are the Statizas and The Prisoner just quoted ; there 
 is The Old Stoic, and the deathless passion of Remembrance ; 
 and there are the last lines her hand ever wrote, her ' too- 
 bold dying song,' as Matthew Arnold calls it, the poem 
 
i88 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 of which Mr. Swinburne says truly that it is 'as utterly 
 disdainful of doctrine as of doubt.' 
 
 ' No coward soul is mine, 
 No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere : 
 
 I see Heaven's glories shine, 
 And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. ' 
 
 Very different in tone and strength is the tranquil, 
 melodious verse which has won for Jean Ingelow a rather 
 unaccountable degree of popularity. Her skill lies chiefly 
 in songs and in small, gracefully idyllic poems, where her 
 love for wild birds and flowers, especially the humble 
 ones, is conspicuous : when she moulds a little episode in 
 dramatic form, as in Afternoon at a Parsonage, or Supper 
 at the Mill, the incidental songs are much the best part of 
 it. One of her most successful efforts is the ballad-like 
 Winstanley, commemorating the first hero of the Eddystone 
 Rock Lighthouse ; another favourite is the tenderly mourn- 
 ful Divided, in motive somewhat resembling Clough's Qua 
 ciirsum Ventus, only here love takes the place of friendship, 
 and the two who in sport step down on opposite sides of 
 the tiny rivulet, see every inch added to the distance 
 between them by the course they cannot retrace. Hand in 
 hand they walk at first, but at last each moving speck is 
 lost to the other's sight across the broad river rolling 
 between them. But to my mind no other poem of Jean 
 Ingelow's comes up to The High Tide on the Coast of 
 Lincolnshire, telling in the homely sixteenth-century dialect 
 first of the peaceful rich green level pastures lying in the 
 golden sunset, — 
 
 ' Where the reedy Lindis floweth ; 
 
 Floweth, floweth ; 
 From the meads where melick groweth ; ' 
 
MINOR POETS. 189 
 
 then of the alarm as the warning tune of Enderby came 
 floating over from the sweet-toned bells of Boston ; of the 
 sudden disaster— 
 
 ' So farre so fast the eygre drave, 
 The heart had hardly time to beat, 
 
 Before a shallow seething wave 
 Sobbed in the grasses at oure feet : 
 
 The feet had hardly time to flee 
 Before it brake against the knee, 
 
 And all the world was in the sea ; ' 
 
 — of the sorrowful bereavement so touchingly softened as it 
 falls from the aged lips of her who, without losing tender- 
 ness, is beyond the time for passionate grieving. 
 
 With less facility and melody, Christina Rossetti's poetry 
 has more thought, concentration, and imaginative genius. 
 Songs, sonnets, and short lyrics — many of them devotional 
 in tone — constitute its staple, with the exception of her best 
 known poem, Goblin Market. They are very miscellaneous 
 in subject, and cannot readily be grouped ; each dream or 
 diirge or reverie has its own clear thought or emotion, and 
 one chiefly resembles another in its true poetic ring, and in 
 a prevailing sadness of tone such as to place her in our 
 minds among those who ' learn in suffering what they teach 
 in song.' To-day for me, a lament for and with France in 
 1870, shares with The Convent Threshold and several 
 sonnets the distinction of having been singled out for 
 special approval by Dante Rossetti. Among those 
 definitely religious in subject, Despised and Rejected is 
 one of the finest. 
 
 ' "Friend, open to Me."— Who is this that calls? 
 Nay, I am deaf as are my walls : 
 Cease crying, for I will not hear 
 Thy cry of hope or fear. 
 
tgo VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Others were dear, 
 
 Others forsook me ; what art thou indeed 
 
 That I should heed 
 
 Thy lamentable need ? 
 
 Hungry should feed, 
 
 Or stranger lodge thee here ? ' 
 
 Goblin Market stands all by itself, — the happiest possible 
 combination of serious fancy and mirthful earnest ; light 
 and graceful on the surface with hidden depths below ; a 
 tale out of elf-land, strange and bewitching to mortal ears. 
 
 Mrs. Hamilton King's principal volume of poetry, The 
 Disciples, has perhaps come hardly, if at all, behind Mrs. 
 Browning's and Swinburne's poems in quickening the 
 sympathy of English hearts with the great mid-century 
 struggle for the unity and freedom of Italy ; and in its 
 consolations for the sick and weary touches chords which 
 are never silenced by time. So well has this been recog- 
 nised indeed, that one fragment, known as The Sermon in 
 the Hospital, has been separately printed as a tiny pamphlet ; 
 but it suffers by this treatment as the slow movement of a 
 sonata suffers by detachment from its setting, though here the 
 loss comes not through difference in style, but through the 
 reader's inadequate knowledge of the preacher's character 
 and the previous facts of his life. They are such as to give 
 peculiar force and meaning to his ministrations in the 
 Hospital. In the young priest of Bologna,. Fra Ugo Bassi, 
 who joined Garibaldi's army before the terrible disasters of 
 1849, and to whom the greater part of this volume is 
 devoted, Mrs. Hamilton King delineates a character of 
 singular beauty in its sweetness, elevation, and unchanged 
 serenity, from his noviciate to the hour when, through 
 protracted torture and in the face of certain death, he kept 
 
MINOR POETS. 
 
 191 
 
 the silence that screened Garibaldi's flight, so that it was 
 said of him at last — 
 
 ' He saved others from the perishing : 
 Himself he did not save ! ' 
 
 Few readers who remember the eager response of George 
 Eliot's sensitive soul to beauty in music, in pictured form, 
 in thought or word or deed, can wonder that she did not 
 rest without an endeavour to mould her own high thoughts 
 in the supreme form of poetry; and perhaps the more 
 deeply they have felt the wonderful music and rhythm of 
 her prose, the more certain are they to be disappointed with 
 the heavy movement of her verse. She has indeed infused 
 some of her most characteristic views into her poems. The 
 sacredness of natural human ties ; the supremacy of duty 
 apart from the sanctions of God and immortality ; the post- 
 ponement of personal desires to the claims of a larger life, 
 are all enforced and illustrated in The Spanish Gypsy and 
 The Legend of Jubal. Responsibility is again driven home 
 in novel fashion in the quaint bit of dialogue between 
 Stradivarius the aged maker of Cremona violins, and Naldo 
 the blase young painter — 
 
 ' 'Tis God gives slcill, 
 But not without men's hands : He could not make 
 Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 Without Antonio.' 
 
 But hardly more than once does George Eliot's poetry attain 
 real freedom and singing power, and this occurs in her final 
 poem — an outburst of longing to share in the agnostic ideal 
 of ' life to come,' here conceived at its loftiest — 
 
 ' O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those inmortal dead who live again 
 
192 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 In minds made better by their presence : live 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 For miserable aims that end with self. 
 * * * * 
 
 So shall I join the choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world. ' 
 
 A marked feature of Victorian poetry is to be found in the 
 number and beauty of its dialect poems, virhether produced 
 as occasional pieces, like the Laureate's Northern Farmers, 
 or in the form of expression most natural to the singer, like 
 many poems of the people, or written in dialect by deliberate 
 preference of the poet. Among these last by far the most 
 important place is held by William Barnes, ' the Dorsetshire 
 poet,' for whose sake the loved county of his ' memory and 
 mind-sight ' should become as dear as the Wiltshire Downs 
 for Jefiferies'. Sprung from an old Dorsetshire family of 
 yeoman rank, William Barnes worked himself up after his 
 school-days through a small clerkship to the mastership of 
 two successive schools. He further qualified himself for a 
 degree at Cambridge, and for Holy Orders, which he took 
 in 1847^ at the age of forty-six. From 1862 the last twenty- 
 four years of his quiet, fruitful life were spent as Rector of 
 Winterbourne Came, between a country parson's active 
 duties, and the pursuits of a scholar and poet. His mastery 
 of languages was extraordinary; and he himself regarded 
 his studies in philology as having at least as much value as 
 his performances in poetry. 
 
 This was the life that supplied Barnes with the outward 
 materials for the fusion his genius accomplished in poetry, 
 the fusion — so rare as to be almost unique — of spontaneous, 
 
MINOR POETS. 193 
 
 free, simple feelings proper to rustic folk with flawless poetic 
 form. Country born and country bred, he remained so 
 completely one in heart with the yeomen and peasants 
 among whom he dwelt, that the only difference one can trace 
 lies in the fact of utterance ; in him the peasants' dumbly- 
 experienced thoughts and feelings become articulate. And 
 then the other side of his twofold existence — his wide 
 scholarship — comes in to replace the many faults of style 
 which almost necessarily beset the spontaneous but uncul- 
 tivated singer, by technique so perfect that it has been said 
 of his eclogues and other pastorals, 'There has been no 
 such art since Horace.' That his learning did not weaken 
 the sympathetic bond between himself and his neighbours 
 is indeed a matter of no small wonder. A country clergy- 
 man of highly intellectual habits commonly considers him- 
 self and is considered one of the most isolated of beings. 
 A few years before William Barnes took Orders, a dis- 
 tinguished Cambridge graduate was presented to the 
 Rectory of an obscure Midland village, where he was soon 
 afterwards visited by a brother-clergyman, the hard-working 
 and successful Vicar of a town parish. The visitor was 
 shown both landscape and people ; looked, meditated, and 
 took his way back to the town with the single remark at 
 parting — ' And the Lord shut him in ! ' 
 
 However, Barnes did not feel himself imprisoned, and 
 his cultivation only gave him the means of putting an outer 
 form on his poems worthy of their humour and pathos, their 
 sweetness and simple dignity. The Dorsetshire dialect, 
 strange to other ears, though quite easy to master in print 
 so far as understanding goes, has no doubt delayed such a 
 wide recognition of their merits as may safely be looked for 
 in time. One or two have undergone the indignity of being 
 
194 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 printed by main force in common English — a kind of rough 
 treatment at least as fatal to these poems as it would be to, 
 say, The Land o' the Leal ; but literature takes care of her- 
 self in such a case, and rewards the aggressor by leaving 
 him with a lifeless body on his hands. Well for us that it is 
 so, for there would be something peculiarly ungrateful in 
 such a defeat of the poet's favourite wish to preserve the 
 loved dialect of his native county. 
 
 The subjects of these pastoral lyrics are as various as the 
 range of character, circumstances, and landscape in rural 
 Dorset permits to one on whom no detail in the changing 
 days and years is thrown away. Field and hedgerow and 
 stream, childhood and old age, are all dear to him, nor are 
 the stretches of middle life prosaic. It is difficult to choose 
 from the numberless bits of picturesque description. Here 
 is the breaking up of a summer storm — 
 
 ' The dreven scud that overcast 
 The zummer sky is all a-past, 
 An' softer air, a blowen drough 
 The quiv'ren boughs, do sheake the vew 
 Last rain drops off the leaves lik' dew ; 
 
 * * ' * 
 
 The sheades that were a-lost below 
 The stormy cloud agean do show 
 Their mocken sheapes below the light.' 
 
 The Sky A-Clearen. 
 
 That notice of the returning shadows is as characteristic as 
 it is delicate. Elsewhere he speaks of — 
 
 The sheadeless darkness o' the night, 
 
 and he knows well the cold blue of shadows over snow — the 
 ' vrosty sheades,' he calls them — compared with the dusky, 
 chequered, summer shade of trees in full leaf. In our days 
 
MINOR POETS. 19s 
 
 of grass-cutting machines, perhaps we care more than ever 
 for the poetry of the old-fashioned hay-field — 
 
 ' How soft do sheake the zummer hedge — 
 How soft do sway the zummer zedge — 
 How bright be zummer skies and zun — 
 How bright the zummer brook do run ; 
 An' feair the flow'rs do bloom, to feade 
 Behind the swayen mower's bleade.' 
 
 Another of these hay-field pictures, The Child aii the 
 Mowers, is touched with indescribable tenderness. A little 
 child has died from sunstroke in the heat, and the sad, 
 simple narration ends — 
 
 ' He died while the hay russled grey 
 On the staddle so leately begun : 
 Lik' the mown-grass a-dried by the day — 
 Aye ! the zwath-flow'r's a-klUed by the zun.' 
 
 It would be hard indeed to imagine a more touching image 
 for the little life so easily overpowered, than this of the 
 fragile meadow flowers laid dying in the swath of new-mown 
 grass. 
 
 Country manners and ways of thought are presented with 
 abounding humour and insight in A Bit 0' sly Coortlm 
 The 'Lotments, The Common a-fook in, Wayfearln, and 
 many another too long to quote in whole and spoilt by 
 mutilation. The blessed rest of Sunday to the labouring 
 man ' in the wold vo'k's time ' comes in for many a word, 
 and there must, one [.feels, have been a wonderfully good 
 understanding between these flocks of Arcady and the 
 shepherd who could write' of them as he does. It would 
 be delightful to trace his handling of the various relation- 
 ships of family life, from ' Gramfer ' and ' Grammer ' down- 
 
IgS VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 wards, to follow all through the ' Married Peair's ' story 
 whose Love Walk begins so enticingly — 
 
 ' Come, Esther, teake, vor wold time's seake, 
 Your hooded cloak that's on the pin, 
 An' wrap up warm, an' teake my earm. 
 You'll vind it better out than in. 
 Come, Etty dear ; come out o' door, 
 An' teake a sweetheart's walk woonce mwore. ' 
 
 In The Wife A-Lost we feel the depth of the one great 
 sorrow of his own life ; The Wold Wall consecrates the first 
 sorrowful days of befeavement — 
 
 ' The wall is wold, my grief is new.' 
 
 The Holloiv Woak breathes the softened regret of advanced 
 old age for things gone by now, but once familiar. 
 
 ' An' all do show the wold times' feace 
 Wi' new things in the wold things' pleace.' 
 
 Others, like The Love Child, touch more subtly-blended and 
 deeper feelings still. But I can only hope that these few 
 fragments may be enough to tempt new readers to test for 
 themselves what scant justice can be done here to their 
 claims upon genuine lovers of genuine poetry. 
 
 The nautical language of Fdc'sV Yarns is less of an 
 obstacle than provincial dialects to readers unfamiliar with 
 it, and these songs sung ' to unlock the treasures of the 
 Island heart ' have gone straight home to many who care to 
 
 listen for the 
 
 ' Romance 
 Of nature, traversing 
 On viewless wing 
 All parallels of sect, 
 And race and dialect.' 
 
 Prologue to Fo'c'sV Yarns. 
 
MINOR POETS. 197 
 
 Years ago, when Betsy Lee appeared alone in a modest 
 little volume, it came into the hands of a brilliant young 
 scholar, no poet himself but full of love for poetry, who, 
 after trying it on various friends, must needs risk his 
 reputation with the venerable Rector of his parish (not only 
 a poet but so beautiful a reader that to read aloud before 
 him was in itself an ordeal) by proposing to read it to him. 
 Half pityingly the Rector's family arranged the desired 
 interview, and the young man, feeling, as he afterwards 
 confessed, that it was the boldest thing he had ever done in 
 his life, and forewarned not to take it too much to heart if 
 the Rector fell asleep as he almost inevitably would, set off, 
 and was received with a courtesy likely enough to turn out 
 the precursor of a fit of abstraction if not of sleep. He 
 began ; and bit by bit the aged poet's attention instead of 
 wandering became fixed, nay, riveted. Which of the two 
 was most moved by the time the reading was over, it would 
 be hard to say ; but Betsy Lee proved then, as many a time 
 since, 'fit to make a body cry.' 
 
 Another dialect poet of no mean order is the well-known 
 Edwin Waugh, the Lancashire compositor of whom his 
 county has good reason to be proud. His poems fill several 
 volumes, and he, too, has treasures of humour and pathos, 
 the quick eye and guiding voice to the hidden soul of poetry 
 concealed in strange places. Come Whoam to thi Childer 
 an' Me is a good example, with the wife's appealing details 
 about the homely cheer ready and the loving hearts ' rayther 
 hurt ' with waiting so long for her man, and the unexpectedly 
 satisfactory end — 
 
 ' God bless thee, my lass ; aw'll go whoam. 
 An' aw'll kiss thee an' th' childer reawnd 
 Thae knows, 'at wheerever aw roam, 
 Aw'm fain to get back to th' owd greawnd . 
 
igS VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Aw can do wi' a crack o'er a glass ; 
 
 Aw can do wi' a bit ov a spree ; 
 But aw've no gradely comfort, my lass, 
 
 Except wi' yon childer an' thee.' 
 
 Here again is the cheery and humorous last stanza of the 
 love-story of a certain great strong athlete and his little 
 village-born ' missus,' — 
 
 ' Oh, th' kindest mates, this world within, 
 
 Mun sometimes meet wi' pain ; 
 But, if this pair could life begin, 
 
 They'd buckle to again ; 
 For, though he's hearty, blunt an' tough, 
 
 An' Matty sweet an' mild. 
 For threescore year, through smooth an' rough, 
 
 Hoo led him like a child.' 
 
 And The Dule's i' this Bonnet o' Mine is the prettiest 
 possible forecast of another love-story quite as promising. 
 'Jamie' has a happy prospect before him in his warm- 
 hearted bride, so sweet and modest and humble ; at once 
 so careful of her maidenly dignity and yet so full of fun ; 
 bent on acting up to her code of propriety, but dreadfully 
 afraid of not looking her best. 
 
 Writing both in dialect and ordinary English there have 
 been many other democratic poets since Ebenezer Elliott's 
 days, of whose poems some give real pleasure to the lover 
 of poetry, and some are perhaps of more permanent value 
 to the student of social history. From Thomas Cooper 
 (the Chartist author of The^ Purgatory of Suicides), Joseph 
 Skipsey, Samuel Bamford, Laycock, James Cooper, Aaron 
 Watson, and a small host of other north country poets, 
 many stirring verses might be quoted. 
 
 At the other end of the social scale we have in equal 
 
MINOR POETS. 199 
 
 wealth a sort of poetry for which we have admirable de- 
 scriptions, but no satisfactory name, — ' Occasional Verse,' 
 distinguished less by subject than style, by light touch, 
 refinement, sparkle, brevity ; very often marked by the 
 display of a certain fine irony, and invariably demanding 
 perfect technical finish. It is in this kind of verse that such 
 highly artificial forms as the ballade and rondeau have been 
 successfully adopted. Foremost among many, Edmund 
 Gosse, Andrew Lang, and especially Austin Dobson — and 
 Austin Dobson especially when he is reproducing the finest 
 flavour of eighteenth-century manners — come into one's 
 mind ; and no less delightful are C. S. Calverly's delicately 
 polished jestings in verse, or the choice Httle poems- of W. 
 Cory's lonica. But hardly one of these poems would not 
 be fatally spoilt by fragmentary quotation. 
 
 Closely allied to them in character, although too long to 
 be classed as ' Occasional Verse,' and claiming more serious 
 attention, is W. G. Courthope's Paradise of Birds, in form a 
 play, on the lines of Aristophanes, abounding in pointed 
 and piquant satire on current fashions in dress, cookery, 
 politics, literature, science. In Mr. Ruskin's Lectures on 
 Birds (' Love's Meinie ') there is to be found a line-to-line 
 commentary on one of the principal choruses, the book 
 being, as he says, ' too thoughtful to be understood without 
 such notes as a good author will not write on his own work ; 
 partly because he has not time, and partly because he 
 always feels that if people won't look for his meaning, they 
 should not be told it.' He also quotes the lamentable 
 bewailings of the souls of the French Cook and the Lady, 
 both in Purgatory, and each suffering appropriate penal 
 torments for their misdeeds worked in the flesh on their 
 furred and feathered fellow-creatures. There still is— gr 
 
200 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ought to be — too much of the sting of truth in these 
 expositions of what women's dress and men's ghittony can 
 exact, and perhaps I may add, too much pain in the 
 thought of the senseless, destructive cruelty they involve, 
 for these parts of the poem to be approached in an 
 altogether light-hearted mood ; but probably the account 
 given by Maresnest, ' a philosopher of the " Development " 
 persuasion,' of the Origin of Species from the ' philoprogeni- 
 tive Sponge ' would delight Professor Huxley himself as 
 much as anybody. Even with our present high standard, 
 we do not often get poetry so packed with allusive signifi- 
 cance as Mr. Courthope's. 
 
 Various other poets refuse to be grouped ; among them 
 may be mentioned Charles Kingsley, whose beautiful and 
 moving lyrics lift him to a higher place than The Sainfs 
 Tragedy or even Andromeda; Sir Edwin Arnold, with his 
 intimate knowledge and sympathetically faithful rendering 
 of Asiatic ideals; Lewis Morris, whose least ambitious 
 poems are perhaps the most successful — Songs of Two 
 Worlds rather than the Ode of Life or Epic of Hades, and 
 among the Songs, Street Children, The Organ Boy, Love in 
 Death, rather than Evensong or The Wanderer ; and — 
 more remarkable than any of the three, though as yet far 
 less known — James Thomson, author of our one poem of 
 unrelieved despair. The City of Dreadful Night. In him 
 power and gloom and beauty meet to portray anguish 
 and desolation so profound that only a fellow-sufferer 
 can fully comprehend it. Here and there he says, ' some 
 weary wanderer ' 
 
 ' Will understand the speech, and feel a stir 
 Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight ; 
 
MINOR POETS. 20I 
 
 " I suffer mute and lonely, yet another 
 Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother 
 
 Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."' 
 
 To the dwellers in this dark City, the Inferno itself is a 
 refuge — forbidden ; for none can muster the needful entrance- 
 fee of some hope however small. The poem concludes 
 with an enthronement of Diirer's ' Melencolia ' ; rightful 
 Queen of the sombre, terrible City is she, in whose 
 expression dawns 
 
 ' The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
 
 Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; 
 That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 
 
 Because they have no secret to express ; 
 That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
 Because there is no light beyond the curtain ; 
 That all is vanity and nothingness.' 
 
 Canto xxi. 
 
 It is difficult to leave aside Scottish and Irish poetry, but 
 some mention, however inadequate, must be made of one 
 other class of poems which has received interesting additions 
 since the pre- Victorian work of Keble,i — sacred song, and 
 other poems of religious life. Christina Rossetti's devo- 
 tional pieces have been already alluded to ; Bishop Heber, 
 Archbishop Trench, Dean Milman, C. C. Fraser-Tytler 
 (Mrs. Edward Liddell), Faber, Bonar, have in their 
 different ways contributed much that is of value j and 
 Cardinal Newman's Verses on Various Occasions, touching 
 the hidden life with true poetic feeling, would throw fresh 
 light, if any were needed, on the devotion and humility of 
 his pure and lofty spirit. 
 
 ■■ The Christian Year was published in 1827. 
 
202 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 ' But Thou, dear Lord ! 
 Whilst I traced out bright scenes which were to come, 
 Isaac's pure blessings, and a verdant home, 
 
 Didst spare me and withhold Thy fearful word ; 
 Wiling me year by year, till I am found 
 A pilgrim pale with Paul's sad girdle bound.' 
 
 Our Future. 
 
 Who is not reminded of George Herbert ? — 
 
 ' Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 
 The way that takes the town ; 
 Thou didst betray me to a lingring book, 
 And wrap me in a gown.' 
 
 Perhaps one of the most poetically beautiful passages in 
 Newman's poetry is the angel's closing song in his longest 
 poem, the mystical Dream of Gerontius — 
 
 ' Softly and gently, dearly ransom'd soul, 
 
 In my most loving arms I now enfold thee, 
 And o'er the penal waters, as they roll, 
 I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee. 
 
 And carefully I dip thee in the lake. 
 
 And thou, without a sob or a resistance. 
 Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take, 
 
 Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance. 
 
 » * * * 
 
 Farewell, but not for ever ! brother dear. 
 
 Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow ; 
 Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here. 
 
 And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.' 
 
 One would not call F. W. H. Myers a ' sacred poet,' but 
 in Saint Paul he has accomplished a noticeably fine religious 
 poem, in which boldness and fervour are fitly enshrined 
 in gravely musical language and a metre of singular dignity. 
 Some idea of the general style of the poem can be gained 
 from even one or two stanzas. He compares the spread 
 
MINOR POETS. 203 
 
 of the new divine knowledge to the steady, gentle overflow 
 of Euphrates — 
 
 ' Even with so soft a surge and an increasing, 
 Drunk of the sand and thwarted of the clod, 
 Stilled and astir and checked and never-ceasing 
 Spreadeth the great wave of the grace of God ; 
 
 Bears to the marishes and bitter places 
 
 Healing for hurt and for their poisons balm, 
 
 Isle after isle in infinite embraces 
 
 Floods and enfolds and fringes with the palm.' 
 
 No complete exposition of doctrine is so much as at- 
 tempted, and in some respects St. Paul's views are obviously 
 modified— conspicuously so as regards his attitude towards 
 women — but the poem as a whole absolutely thrills with his 
 passionate faith and love and loyalty to the death. 
 
 ' Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest 
 
 Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny : 
 
 Yea, with one voice, o world, tho' thou deniest, 
 
 Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.' 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A Death in the Desert, 67 
 
 A Forgiveness, 61 
 
 A Lover's Quarrel, 59 
 
 A Musical Instrument, 109, in, 
 120 
 
 A Song for Ragged Schools, 112 
 
 Al>t Vogler, 49, 54 
 
 Amours de Voyage, 128 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, 56 
 
 An Epistle, 64 
 
 Any Wife to any Husband, 6 1 
 
 Apparent Failure, 50 
 
 Arnold, Dr., 122, 138 
 
 Arnold, E., 200 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, xiv, xix, 137 — ■ 
 156 ; his training, 138 ; dramatic 
 and narrative poetry, 138 — 142 ; 
 lyrics, 142 — 151 ; agnosticism, 
 144 ; stoicism, 145 ; refuge in 
 nature, 146; style, 147 — 151; 
 elegiac poems, 151 — 156, 178, 
 181, 187 
 
 Art, 27, 55—57, no, n8 
 
 Atalanta in Calydon, 178 
 
 Aurora Leigh, 1 16 — 1 20 
 
 Bagehot, W., 135 
 Ballades, 170, 199 
 Ballads, Mrs. Browning's, 108 ; 
 
 Rossetti's, 1 66 
 Bamford, Samuel, 198 
 Barnes, William, 192 — 196 
 Betsy Lee, 197 
 Blessed Damozel, The, 161, 163 
 
 Books, vii, viii, xx. 
 
 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 125 — 
 128, 130 
 
 Bronte, Emily, 186—188 
 
 Brown, Dr. John, 43 
 
 Browning, E. B., xiii, 103 — 120 ; 
 life, 103 ; effect on work, 104 — 
 108 ; classical poems, 109 — in ; 
 poems on childhood etc., in, 
 118 ; on death, 113 ; love-poems, 
 113 — 115; on Italy, 116; Au- 
 rora Leigh, n6 — 120 
 
 Browning, Robert, xi — xiii, xviii, 
 40 — 102 ; alleged obscurity, 40 ; 
 style, 42, 68 ; human interest, 
 43 ; ideal of life, 44 ; doctrine of 
 failure, 46 — 50; nature, 51 — 54; 
 music and art, 54 — 57 ! love- 
 poems, 57 — 62; philosophical 
 and religious poems, 63 — -68 ; 
 dramas, 68 — 83 ; The Ring and 
 the Book, 83 — 102 
 
 Buchanan, R., 159 
 
 By the Fireside, 62 
 
 Calverly, C. S., 199 
 
 Carlyle, T,, 124 
 
 Casa Guidi Windows, 1 16 
 
 Chaucer, 5, 173 
 
 Christabel, 108, 163 
 
 Christian Socialists, 21 
 
 Christinas Eve, 52, 67 
 
 City of Dreadful Night, The, 200 
 
 Cleon, 63 
 
2o6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Clough, A. H., xiv, 121 — 137; 
 life, 122 — 124 ; character of 
 work, 124 ; poems on social and 
 religious topics, 125 — 128, 130 — 
 137 ; Arnold's Memorial poem, 
 152, 188 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 108, 149, 163, 
 164 
 
 Colombe's Birthday, 73 — 83 
 
 Cooper, Thomas, 198 
 
 Cory, W., 199 
 
 Courthope, W. G., 199 
 
 Cowper, 6, 113, I20, 123, 160 
 
 Cranford, 7 
 
 CristUia, 60 
 
 Cry of the Children, The, 112, 1 20. 
 
 Dante, S, 160, 161 
 De Senancour, 147, 148 
 De Vere, Aubrey, 29 
 Dialect Poems, 19, 192 — 198 
 Dipsychus, 130 — 132 
 Dts AliiiLr Visum, 59 
 Disciples, The, 190 
 Dobson, Austin, 199 
 Dream of Gerontius, 202 
 Diirer, A., 201 
 
 Earthly Paradise, The, 1 74 
 Easter Day, 48 
 
 Easier Day {Naples, 1849), 133 
 Eliot, George, 191 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 198 
 Emerson, R. W., 73, 124, 136 
 Empedocles on Etna, 138 
 Epictelus, 142, 145 
 Esmond, 115 
 
 EoVsl' Yarns, 196 
 Era Lippo Lippi, 56 
 Eraser- Tytler, C. C, 201 
 
 Garibaldi, 129, 190 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 7 
 Germ, The, 163 
 Goblin Market, 189 
 Goethe, 138, 142 
 Gosse, E., 199 
 
 Green, Professor T. H. , 26 
 
 Hallam, A. H., x, 29 
 
 Heine, 144 
 
 Herbert, George, 202 
 
 Hexameters, 129 
 
 Higher Pantheism, The, 29 
 
 Homer, 142 
 
 House of Life, The, 168 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 184 
 
 Hutton, R. H., 156 
 
 Idylls of the King, 31 — 39, 173 
 In Menioriam, 5, 12, 29 — 31 
 Ingelow, J., 188 
 Italy, 104, 116, 128, 182, 190 
 
 Jane Eyre, 117 
 
 Jefferies, Richard, 10, 192 
 
 Karshish, 64 
 
 Keats, 163 
 
 Keble, 201 
 
 King, Mrs. Hamilton, 190 
 
 Kingsley, C, 130, 200 
 
 Lady Geralditie's Courtship, 109 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 199 
 
 Laycock, ig8 
 
 Longfellow, 129 
 
 Love and Duty, 28 
 
 Lowell, J. R., 4 
 
 Lucy Snowe ( Villette), 117 
 
 Mariana, I, 3 
 
 Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 54 
 
 Maud, 5, 22 
 
 Maurice, F. D. , 26 
 
 Mazzini, 116, 128, 129, 182 
 
 ' Melencolia,' DUrer's, 201 
 
 Metre, S, 6 
 
 Milman, 201 
 
 Milton, xvii, 6, 31, 171 
 
 Minor Poets, xx, 186 — 203 
 
 Morris, Lewis, 200 
 
 Morris, William, xv, 173 — 178 ; 
 romantic poems, 173 ; narratives, 
 174—176 ; ease of style, 176 ; 
 
INDEX. 
 
 207 
 
 descriptions of nature, 176 ; sagas, 
 177 ; socialism, 177 
 Myers, F. W. H., 202 
 
 Newman, J. H., 122, 151, 201 
 Nightingale, Florence, 124 
 
 Ohermann, 148, 150, 151, 154 — 156 
 Occasional Verse, 199 
 Old Pictures in Floretice, 57, 77 
 Oxford, 122, 125, 149 
 
 Palace of Art, The, 27, 49 
 Paradise of Birds, The, 199 
 Pattison, Mark, 168, 171 
 Pippa Passes, 53, 68—73 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 158, 
 160, 163 
 
 Rabbi Ben E^ra, 45, 46, 5', 66 
 
 Respectability, 59 
 
 Ring and the Book, The, 83 — 102 
 
 Rizpah, 20 
 
 Rossetti, Christina, 189, 201 
 
 Rossetti, D. G., xv, 157 — 172; 
 birth and parentage, 157 ; mar- 
 riage, 158 ; first poems, 158 ; 
 controversy with Buchanan, 159 ; 
 poetic character, 159 — 163 ; bal- 
 lads, i66; sonnets, 168 — 172 
 
 Ruskin, J., 157, 199 
 
 St. Paul, 202 
 Saul, 65 
 Schiller, no 
 Shakespeare, 40 
 Shelley, 6, 31, 185 
 Skipsey, Joseph, 198 
 Songs before Sunrise, 1 83 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, 106, 
 114, 115, 120 
 
 Sonnets, structure of, 168 — 172 
 Sophocles, 142, 145 
 Statue and the Bust, The, 47 
 Swinburne, A. C, xvi, 178 — 185 ; 
 expression, 178, 184; dramas, 
 178, 183 ; antitheism, 181 ; 
 poems on liberty, 181 — 183 ; sea- 
 poems, 184 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, x, xviii, i — 39 ; 
 style, 4 ; knowledge of nature, 7 
 — 12; idylls, 12 — 17; dramatic 
 work, 18 — 21 ; social ideals, 21 — 
 25; moral and religious problems, 
 26 — 31 ; Arthurian poems, 31 — 
 
 39 
 Thackeray, 115, 133 
 The Worst of It, 61 
 Thomson, James, 200 
 Thring, E., 46 
 To Flush, 104 
 Too Late, 60 
 Trench, 201 
 T%iio Voices, The, 9, 27 
 
 Ulysses, 18 
 
 Victorian Drama, 69 
 Vision of Sin, The, 28 
 
 Watson, Aaron, 198 
 
 Watts, Theodore, article on Ros- 
 setti, 159 
 
 Waugh, Edwin, 197 
 
 Women's work, 119 
 
 Wordsworth, xviii, 6, 7, li, 40, 
 138, 146, 148, 151, 152, 160, 
 163 
 
 Yotith and Art, 59 
 
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12 
 
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38 
 
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 OasfcelKMrs.). CRANFORD. 
 
 MARY BARTON. 
 
 NORTH AND SOUTH. 
 
 Gerard (Dorothea). HOLY MATRI- 
 MONY. 
 
 THE CONQUEST OF LONDON. 
 
 MADE OF MONEY. 
 
 Qissing (George). THE TOWN TRAVEL- 
 
 THE CROWN OF LIFE. 
 
 GlanvlUe (Ernest). THE INCA'S 
 
 TREASURE. 
 THE KLOOF BRIDE. 
 Olelg (Charles). BUNTER'S CRUISE. 
 Qrimm (The Brothers). GRIMM'S 
 
 FAIRY TALES. Illustrated. 
 Hope (Anthony). A MAN OF MARK. 
 A CHANGE OF AIR. 
 THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT 
 
 ANTONIO. 
 PHROSO. 
 
 THE DOLLY DIALOGUES. 
 Hornung (E. W.). DEAD MEN TELL 
 
 NO TALES. 
 Ingraham (J. H.). THE THRONE OF 
 
 DAVID. 
 LeQuenx(W.). THE HUNCHBACK OF 
 
 WESTMINSTER. 
 Levett- Yeats (S. K.). THE TRAITOR'S 
 
 WAY. 
 Unton (E. Lynn). THE TRUE HIS- 
 TORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. 
 Lyall (Edna). DERRICK VAUGHAN. 
 Malet (Lucas). THE CARISSIMA. 
 A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. 
 Mann (Mrs. M. E.). MRS. PETER 
 
 HOWARD. 
 A LOST ESTATE. 
 THE CEDAR STAR. 
 ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 
 Marchmont (A. W.). MISER HOAD- 
 
 LEY'S SECRET. 
 A MOMENT'S ERROR. 
 Marryat (Captain). PETER SIMPLE. 
 JACOB FAITHFUL. 
 Marsh (Richard). THE TWICKENHAM 
 
 PEERAGE. 
 THE GODDESS. 
 
 THE JOSS. 
 
 A METAMORPHOSIS. „^„, , 
 
 Mason (A. E. W.). CLEMENTINA. 
 
 Mathers (Helen). HONEY. 
 
 GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT. 
 
 SAM'S SWEETHEART. - 
 
 Meade (Mrs. L. T.). DRIFT. 
 
 Mitford (Bertram). THE SIGN OF THE 
 SPIDER. 
 
 Montresor (P. P.). THE ALIEN. 
 
 Morrison (Arthur). THE HOLE IN 
 THE WALL. 
 
 Nesbit(E.). THE RED HOUSE. 
 
 Norris (W. E.). HIS GRACE. 
 
 GILES INGILBY. 
 
 THE CREDIT OF THE COUNTY. 
 
 LORD LEONARD. 
 
 MATTHEW AUSTIN. 
 
 CLARISSA FURICSA. 
 
 Oliphant (Mrs.). THE LADY'S WALK. 
 
 SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. 
 
 THE PRODIGALS. 
 
 Oppenheim (E. Phillips). MASTER OF 
 MEN. 
 
 Parker (Gilbert). THE POMP OF THE 
 LAVILETTES. 
 
 WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC. 
 
 THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. 
 
 Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEPS 
 OF A THRONE. 
 
 I CROWN THEE KING. 
 
 Phillpotts (Eden). THE HUMAN BOY. 
 
 CHILDREN OF THE MIST. 
 
 'Q.' THE WHITE WOLF. 
 
 Ridge (W.Pett). A SON OF THE STATE. 
 
 LOST PROPERTY. 
 
 GEORGE AND THE GENERAL. 
 
 Russell (W. Clark). A MARRIAGE AT 
 
 SEA. 
 ABANDONED. 
 
 MY DANISH SWEETHEART. 
 
 HIS ISLAND PRINCESS. 
 
 Sergeant (Adeline) THE MASTER OF 
 
 BEECHWOOD. 
 BARBARA'S MONEY. 
 THE YELLOW DIAMOND. 
 THE LOVE THAT OVERCAME. 
 Surtees (R. S.). HANDLEY CROSS. 
 
 Illustrated. 
 MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR. 
 
 Illustrated. 
 ASK MAMMA. Illustrated. 
 Walford(Mrs. L. B.). MR. SMITH. 
 COUSINS. 
 
 THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER. 
 Wallace (General Lew). BEN-HUR. 
 THE FAIR GOD. 
 
 Watson (H. B. Marriot). THE ADVEN- 
 TURERS. 
 Weekes (A. B.). PRISONERS OF WAR. 
 White (Percy). A PASSIONATE 
 PILGRIM. 
 
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