The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning (part 3 of 6)

The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning (part 3 of 6)

=Jochanan Hakkadosh.= (Jocoseria: 1883.) The Hebrew which Mr. Browning quotes in the tale as the title of the work from which his incidents are derived, may be translated as "Collection of many Fables"; and the second Hebrew phrase means "from Moses to Moses [Moses Maimonides] there was never one like Moses." Although the story of this poem is not historical, it is founded on characters and events which are familiar to students of Jewish literature and history. Hakkadosh means "The Holy." Rabbi Yehudah Hannasi (the Prince) was the reputed author of the Mishnah, and was born before the year 140 of the Christian era. On account of his holy living he was surnamed Rabbenu Haḳkadosh. Jochanan means John. In the Jewish Messenger for March 4th, 1887, the poem is reviewed from a Jewish point of view by "Mary M. Cohen," from which interesting study we extract the following particulars:--The scene of the poem is laid at Schiphaz, which is probably intended for Sheeraz, in Persia. "I think," says the authoress, "that, with artistic licence, Mr. Browning does not here portray any individual man, but takes the names and characteristics of several rabbis, fusing all into a whole. Jochanan finds old age a continued disappointment. He is represented as almost overtaken by death; his loving scholars, as was usual in the days of rabbinism, cluster about him for some worthy word of parting advice. One of the pupils asks: 'Say, does age acquiesce in vanished youth?' The rabbi, groaning, answers grimly:

"Last as first The truth speak I--in boyhood who began Striving to live an angel, and, amerced For such presumption, die now hardly, man. What have I proved of life? To live, indeed, That much I learned."

It was suggested to the dying rabbi that if compassionating folk would render him up a portion of their lives, Hakkadosh might attain his fourscore years. Tsaddik, the scholar, well versed in the Targums, was foremost in urging the adoption of this expedient. By yielding up part of their lives, the pupils of Jochanan hope to combine the lessons of perfect wisdom and varied experience of life. But experience proves fatal to all the hopes, the aspirations, the high ideals of youth. Experience paralyses action. Experience chills the aspirations which animate the generous mind of the lover, the soldier, the poet, the statesman. When the men of experience contributed their quota, 'certain gamesome boys' must needs throw some of theirs also. This accounts for the rabbi being found alive unexpectedly after a long interval:

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."

The rabbi utters heaven-sent intuitions, the gift of these lads. Under the influence of the Ruach, or spirit, Jochanan declares that happiness, here and hereafter, is found in acting on the generous impulses, the noble ideals which are sent into the mind, in spite of the testimony of experience that we shall fail to realise our aspirations. 'There is no sin,' says the rabbi, 'except in doubting that the light which lured the unwary into darkness did no wrong, had I but marched on boldly.' What we see here as antitheses, or as complementary truths, are reconciled hereafter. This reconciliation cannot be grasped by our present faculties. The rabbi seems to 'babble' when he tries to express in words the truth he sees. The pure white light of truth, seen through the medium of the flesh, is composed of many coloured rays. Evil is like the dark lines in the spectrum. The whole duty of man is to learn to love. If he fails, it matters not; he has learned the art: 'so much for the attempt--anon performance.' Love is the sum of our spiritual intuitions, the law of our practical conduct.'

NOTES.--Mishna, the second or oral Jewish law; the great collection of legal decisions by the ancient rabbis; and so the fundamental document of Jewish oral law. Schiphaz, an imaginary place; or perhaps Sheeraz, on the Bundemeer, referred to at end of poem. Jochanan Ben Sabbathai, not historical. Khubbezleh, a fanciful name of the poet's invention. Targum, a Chaldee version or paraphrase of the Old Testament. Nine Points of Perfection: Nine is a trinity of trinities, and is a mystical number of perfection; the slang expression "dressed to the nines" means dressed to perfection. Tsaddik == just, not historical. Dob == Bear (the constellation). The Bear, the constellation. Aish, the Great Bear. The Bier: the Jews called the constellation of the Great Bear "The Bier." Three Daughters, the tail stars of the Bear. Banoth == daughters. The Ten: Jewish martyrs under the Roman empire. Akiba, Rabbi, lived A.C. 117, and laid the groundwork of the Mishna. He was one of the greatest Jewish teachers, and was at the height of his popularity when the revolt of the Jews under Barcochab took place. (See for a history of the revolt, and of Akiba's influence, Milman's History of the Jews, Book xviii.) He was scraped to death with an iron comb. Perida: a Jewish teacher of such infinite patience that the Talmud records that he repeated his lesson to a dull pupil four hundred times, and as even then he could not understand, four hundred times more, on which the spirit declared that four hundred years should be added to his life. Uzzean: Job, the most patient man, was of the land of Uz. Djinn, a supernatural being. Edom: Rome and Christianity went by this name in the Talmud. "Sic Jesus vult," so Jesus wills. The Statist == the statesman. Mizraim == Egypt. Shushan == lily. Tohu-bohu, void and waste. Halaphta, Talmudic teachers. Ruach, spirit. Bendimir: no doubt the Bundemeer, one of the chief rivers of Farzistan, a province in Persia. Og's thigh bone: "Og was king of Bashan. The rabbis say that the height of his stature was 23,033 cubits (nearly six miles). He used to drink water from the clouds, and toast fish by holding them before the orb of the sun. He asked Noah to take him into the ark, but Noah would not. When the flood was at its deepest, it did not reach to the knees of this giant. Og lived 3000 years, and then he was slain by the hand of Moses. Moses was himself ten cubits in stature (15 feet), and he took a spear ten cubits long, and threw it ten cubits high, and yet it only reached the heel of Og.... When dead, his body reached as far as the river Nile. Og's mother was Enach, a daughter of Adam. Her fingers were two cubits long (one yard), and on each finger she had two sharp nails. She was devoured by wild beasts.--Maracci."

=Jocoseria.= The volume of poems under this title was published in 1883. It contains the following works: "Wanting is--What?" "Donald," "Solomon and Balkis," "Cristina and Monaldeschi," "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli," "Adam, Lilith and Eve," "Ixion," "Jochanan Hakkadosh," "Never the Time and the Place," "Pambo." In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this work, the poet stated that "the title is taken from the work of Melander (Schwartzmann)--reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the Blackwood of this month. I referred to it in a note to 'Paracelsus.' The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention), being translated, amount to: (1) "A Collection of Many Lies"; and (2) an old saying, 'From Moses to Moses arose none like to Moses' (i.e. Moses Maimonides)...." One of the notes to Paracelsus refers to Melander's "Jocoseria" as "rubbish." Melander, whose proper name was Otho Schwartzmann, was born in 1571. He published a work called "Joco-Seria," because it was a collection of stories both grave and gay.

=Johannes Agricola in Meditation.= (First published in The Monthly Repository, and signed "Z.," in 1836. Reprinted in Dramatic Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.) Johannes Agricola meditates on the thought of his election or choice by the Supreme Being, who in His eternal counsels has before all worlds predestined him as an object of mercy and salvation. God thought of him before He thought of suns or moons, ordained every incident of his life for him, and mapped out its every circumstance. Totally irrespective of his conduct, God having chosen of His own sovereign grace, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by anything which Johannes has done or left undone, to consider him as a guiltless being, is pledged to save him of free mercy. It would make no difference to his ultimate salvation were he to mix all hideous sins in one draught, and drink it to the dregs. Predestined to be saved, nothing that he can do can unsave him; foreordained to heaven, nothing he could do could lead him hell-wards. As a corollary, those souls who are not so predestined in the counsels of God to eternal salvation may be as holy, as perfect, in the sight of men as he (Agricola) might be vile in their sight; yet they shall be tormented for ever in hell, simply because God has mysteriously left them out of His choice. They are reprobate, non-elect, and nothing that they could possibly do could avail to save them. When Adam sinned, he sinned not only for himself, but for the whole human race, and the whole species was forthwith condemned in him, excepting only those whom God in His Sovereign mercy had from all eternity elected to save, and that without regard to their merit or demerit. These reprobate persons might try to win God's favour, might labour with all their might to please Him, and would only thereby add to their sin. Priest, doctor, hermit, monk, martyr, nun, or chorister,--all these, leading holy and before men beautiful lives, were eternally foreordained to be lost before God fashioned star or sun. For all this Johannes Agricola praises God, praises Him all the more that he cannot understand Him or His ways, praises Him especially that he has not to bargain for His love or pay a price for his salvation. Such is the terrible portrait which Mr. Browning has drawn of the teaching of a man who, as one of the Reformers, and as a friend of Luther, was the founder of what is known in religious history as Antinomianism. Hideous as is the perversion of gospel teaching which Agricola set forth, the doctrines of Antinomianism still linger on amongst certain sects of Calvinists in England and Scotland. The doctrine of reprobation is thus stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, iii. 7: "The rest of mankind (i.e. all but the elect), God was pleased ... to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath, etc." Mosheim, in his Ecclesiastical History (century xvii., Sect. II., Part II., chap, ii., 23), thus describes the Presbyterian Antinomians: "The Antinomians are over-rigid Calvinists, who are thought by the other Presbyterians to abuse Calvin's doctrine of the absolute decrees of God, to the injury of the cause of piety. Some of them ... deny that it is necessary for ministers to exhort Christians to holiness and obedience of the law, because those whom God from all eternity elected to salvation will themselves, and without being admonished and exhorted by any one, by a Divine influence, or the impulse of Almighty grace, perform holy and good deeds; while those who are destined by the Divine decrees to eternal punishment, though admonished and entreated ever so much, will not obey the Divine law, since Divine grace is denied them; and it is therefore sufficient, in preaching to the people, to hold up only the gospel and faith in Jesus Christ. But others merely hold that the elect, because they cannot lose the Divine favour, do not truly commit sin and break the Divine law, although they should go contrary to its precepts and do wicked actions, and therefore it is not necessary that they should confess their sins or grieve for them: that adultery for instance, in one of the elect appears to us indeed to be a sin or a violation of the law, yet it is no sin in the sight of God, because one who is elected to salvation can do nothing displeasing to God and forbidden by the law." Very similar teaching may be discovered at the present day in the body of religionists known as Hyper-Calvinists or Strict Baptists. The professors are for the most part much better than their creed, and they are exceedingly reticent concerning their doctrines so far as they are represented by the term Antinomian; but the organs of their phase of religious belief, The Gospel Standard and The Earthen Vessel, frequently contain proofs of the vitality of Agricola's doctrines in their pages. For example, in the Gospel Standard for July 1891, p. 288, we find the following: "No hope, nor salvation, can possibly arise out of the law or covenant of works. Every man's works are sin,--his best works are polluted. Every page of the law unfolds his defects and shortcomings, nor will allow of a few shillings to the pound,--Pay the whole or die the death." The tendency of Antinomianism is to become an esoteric doctrine, and it is seldom preached in any grosser form than this, however sweet it may be to the hearts of the initiated.

=John of Halberstadt.= The ecclesiastic in Transcendentalism who was also a magician and performed the "prestigious feat" of conjuring roses up in winter.

=Joris.= One of the riders in the poem "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix."

=Jules.= (Pippa Passes). The young French artist who married Phene under a misunderstanding, the result of a practical joke played upon him by his companions.

=Karshish.= (An Epistle.) The Arab physician who wrote of the interesting cases which he had seen in his travels to his brother leech, and who described Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, as having been in a trance.

=King, A.= The song in Pippa Passes, beginning "A king lived long ago," was originally published in The Monthly Repository (edited by W. J. Fox) in 1835.

=King Charles I.= of England. See STRAFFORD.

=King Charles Emanuel=, of Savoy (King Victor and King Charles), was the son of Victor Amadeus II., Duke of Savoy. He became king when his father suddenly abdicated, in 1730.

=King Victor and King Charles: A Tragedy.= (Bells and Pomegranates, II., 1842.) Victor Amadeus II., born in 1666, was Duke of Savoy. He obtained the kingdom of Sicily by treaty from Spain, which he afterwards exchanged with the Emperor for the island of Sardinia, with the title of King (1720). He was fierce, audacious, unscrupulous, and selfish, profound in dissimulation, prolific in resources, and a "breaker of vows both to God and man." He was, however, an able and warlike monarch, and had the interests of his kingdom at heart. He was, moreover, beloved by the people over whom he ruled, and under his reign the country made great progress in finances, education, and the development of its natural resources. His whole reign was one of unexampled prosperity, and his life was a continued career of happiness until, in 1715, his beloved son Victor died. His daughter, the Queen of Spain, died shortly after. Charles Emanuel, his second son, had never been a favourite with the King. He was ill-favoured in appearance, and weak and vacillating in his conduct. When the Queen died, in 1728, Victor married Anna Teresa Canali, a widowed countess, whom he created Marchioness of Spigno. For some reasons or other which have never been satisfactorily explained, the King now decided to abdicate in favour of his son Charles Emanuel. He gave out that he was weary of the world and disgusted with affairs of State, and desired to live in retirement for the remainder of his days. It is more probable that his fiery and audacious temper, and his deceitfulness, dissimulation, and persistent endeavours to overreach the other powers with which he had intercourse, had involved him in difficulties of State policy from which he could only extricate himself by this grave step. Mr. Browning implies, in the preface to his tragedy, that his investigations of the memoirs and correspondence of the period had enabled him to offer a more reasonable solution of the difficulties connected with this strange episode in Italian history than any previous account has offered. When the King announced his intention to resign his crown, he was entreated by his people, his ministers and his son, to forego a project which every one thought would be prejudicial to the interests of the kingdom; but nothing would induce him to reconsider his decision, which he carried out with the completest ceremonial. After taking this step he retired with his wife to his castle at Chambéry; and, as might have been expected, he speedily grew weary of his seclusion. He had an attack of apoplexy, and when he recovered it was with faculties impaired and a temper readily irritated to outbursts of violent behaviour. The marchioness now began to suggest to him that he had done unwisely by resigning his crown; and, day by day, urged him to recover it. This was probably due to the desire she felt of being queen. He still remained on good terms with his son, who visited him at Chambéry; but he gave him to understand that he was not satisfied with his management of affairs, and constantly intervened in their direction. In the summer of 1731 Charles, accompanied by his queen (Polyxena) visited his father at the baths of Eviano, and before his return home he received private intimation that his father was about to proceed to Turin to resume the crown he had resigned. He lost no time in returning home, which he reached just before his father and the marchioness. He visited the ex-king on the following day, when he was informed that his reason for returning to Turin was the necessity for seeking a climate more suitable to his present state of health. Charles was satisfied with the explanation, and placed the castle of Moncalieri at his father's service: here the ex-king received his son's ministers, and hints were dropped and threatening expressions used by Victor, which left little doubt as to his intentions on the minds of his audience. It now became necessary for King Charles to seriously consider the best means to secure himself and his queen from the effects of his father's change of mind. Victor lost little time in declaring himself: on September 25th, 1731, he sent for the Marquis del Borgo, and ordered him to deliver up the deed by which he had resigned his crown. The minister evaded in his reply, and of course informed the King of the demand. Now it was that Charles was inclined to waver between his duty to his realm and his duty to his father. He was a good, obedient son, and of upright and generous disposition, and was inclined to yield to his father's wishes. He called the chief officers of state around him, and laid the matter before them. They were not forgetful of the threats which the old king had recently used towards them, and the Archbishop of Turin had little difficulty in convincing them and the king that it was impossible to comply with his father's demands. If anything were wanting to confirm them in their decision, it was forthcoming in the shape of news that the old king had demanded at midnight admittance into the fortress of Turin, but had been refused by the commander. The council of Charles Emanuel readily concurred in the opinion that Victor should be arrested. The Marquis d'Ormea, who had been the old king's prime minister, was charged with the execution of the warrant of arrest. He proceeded, with assistance and appropriate military precautions, to carry out the order, entering the king's apartments at Moncalieri. They captured the marchioness, who was hurried away screaming to a state prison at Ceva, with many of her relatives and supporters; and then secured the person of the old king. He was asleep, and when aroused and made acquainted with the mission of the intruders, he became violently excited, and had to be wrapped in the bedclothes and forced into one of the court carriages, which conveyed him to the castle of Rivoli, situated in a small town of five thousand inhabitants, near Turin. His attendants and guards were strictly ordered to say nothing to him: if he addressed them, they maintained an inflexible silence, merely by way of reply making a very low and submissive bow. He was afterwards permitted to have the company of his wife and to remove to another prison, but on October 31st, 1732, he died.

=Laboratory, The=: ANCIEN REGIME. First appeared in Hood's Magazine, June 1844, to which it was contributed to help Hood in his illness; afterwards published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Bells and Pomegranates, VII.) This poem and The Confessional were printed together, and entitled France and Spain. Mr. Arthur Symons reminds us that Rossetti's first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line "Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?" The keynote of the poem is jealousy, a distorted love-frenzy that impels to the rival's extinction. The story is told in the most powerful and concentrated manner. The jealous woman's whole soul is compressed into her words and actions; her emotion is visible; her voice, subdued yet full of energy, is audible in every line. The woman is a Brinvilliers, who has secured an interview with an alchemist in his laboratory, that she may purchase a deadly poison for her rival. We gather from the first verse that the poison consisted principally of arsenic. The "faint smokes curling whitely," to protect the chemist from which it was necessary to wear a glass mask, sufficiently supplement our knowledge of the old poisoner's art to enable us to indicate its nature. The patience of the woman, who in her eagerness for her rival's death has no desire to hurry the manufacture of the means of it, is powerfully described. She is content to watch the chemist at his deadly work, asking questions in a dainty manner about the secrets of his art. She has all the ideas of "a big dose" which the uninitiated think requisite for big patients. "She's not little--no minion like me!" "What, only a drop?" she asks. She is anxious to know if it hurts the victim. Is it likely to injure herself too? Reassured on that point, the glass mask is removed, and for reward the old man has all her jewels and gold to his fill. He may kiss her besides, and on the mouth if he will. There is a very remarkable instance in the second verse of the use made of antithesis by the poet. The proper emphasis can only be given when we rightly apprehend the ideas which oppose each other in the lines--

"He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the _drear Empty church_, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."

The antithesis of the several sets of ideas is the only safe guide to the emphasis--he as opposed to her, tears to laughter, me to them, the church to the laboratory.[1] Although the effects of some of the deadliest poisons were well known to the ancients, their detection and recovery from the body by chemical means is a branch of science of only modern discovery. The Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with mercury, arsenic, henbane, aconite and hemlock. The art of poisoning was brought to great perfection in India; but, though dissection of the living and the dead was practised by the Alexandrian School in the third century B.C., the Greek and Roman physicians were quite incapable of such a knowledge of pathology as would enable them to detect any but the coarsest signs of poisoning in a dead body. Much less were they able to detect or recover by analysis the particular poison used by the criminal. It is not surprising that, under such circumstances, professional poisoners usually escaped punishment. In the fourteenth century arsenic was generally employed. Of the great schools of poisoners which flourished in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice was the earliest. Troublesome people were removed by the Council of Ten by means of convenient poisons. Toffana and others combined poisoning with the art of cookery; and T. Baptist Porta, in his book on "Natural Magic," under the section of cooking, shows that the trades of poisoner and cook were often combined. Toffana was the greatest of all the seventeenth-century poisoners. She made solutions of arsenic of various strengths, and sold them in phials under the name of "Naples Water" or "Acquetta di Napol." It is said that she poisoned six hundred persons, including Popes Pius III. and Clement XIV. There was practically no fear of detection, and the liquid was sold openly to any one willing to pay the price for a deadly compound; the purpose for which it could alone be employed being perfectly well understood. Mr. Browning's poem introduces us to a laboratory, where an arsenical preparation is being prepared. The glass mask refered to in the first line was used to protect the purchaser from the white, deadly smoke which the mineral gave off. The poison for which the lady paid so lavishly could be prepared nowadays by any chemist's apprentice for a few pence; but, plentiful as it is, it is comparatively rarely used by criminals, as the same apprentice could infallibly detect it in the body after death, and reproduce in a test tube the very same poison used by the criminal.

=Lady and the Painter, The.= (Asolando: 1889.) A lady visiting an artist who has a picture on his easel of a nude female figure, protests against the irreverence to womanhood involved in his inducing a young woman to strip and stand stark-naked as his model. Before replying, he asks the lady what it is that clings half-savage-like around her hat. She, thinking he is admiring her headgear, tells him they are "wild-bird wings, and that the Paris fashion-books say that next year the skirts of women's dresses are to be feathered too. Owls, hawks, jays and swallows are most in vogue." Asking if he may speak plainly, and having been answered that he may, he tells Lady Blanche that it would be more to her credit to strip off all her bird-spoils and stand naked to help art, like his poor model, as a type of purest womanhood. "You, clothed with murder of His best of harmless beings, what have you to teach?" The poem is directed against the savage and wicked custom of wearing the plumage of birds, by which millions of God's beautiful creatures are doomed annually to slaughter; by wearing gloves made of skins stripped from the living bodies of animals (if report be true); and by the use of sealskin and other animal coverings, which necessitates the wholesale slaughter of countless thousands of happy creatures in Arctic seas. I recently asked Miss Frances Power Cobbe--the noble lady who was a friend of Mr. Browning, and who has devoted her life and splendid literary talents to befriending dumb animals and protesting against cruelty in high places--to furnish me with some account of the agitation against the foolish habit of wearing bird-plumage in women's bonnets. I have received from Miss Cobbe the following particulars: "The Plumage League began December 1885. It started with a letter in the Times, December 18th, 1885 (quoted in extenso in the Zoophilist, January 1886, p. 164), by the Rev. F. O. Morris, embodying one from Lady Mount Temple. Before May 1886 a long list of names (given in the Zoophilist) were given as patrons of the League, including Lady Mount Temple, Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough, Lady Sudeley, Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle, Louisa Marchioness of Waterford, Princess Christian, Lady Burdett Coutts, Lady Eastlake, Lady John Manners, Lady Tennyson, Lady Herbert of Lea, and about forty other ladies of rank. I should say that the League was originated by Lady Mount Temple and the Rev. F. O. Morris. There is another society in existence for the same purpose, working in London--the Birds' Protection Society--one of whose local secretaries lately applied to me for a subscription."

=Lady Carlisle, Lucy Percy.= (Strafford.) She was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, and did her utmost to save Strafford's life.

=Lapaccia.= Mona Lapaccia was Fra Lippo Lippi's aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up till he was eight years old, when, being no longer able to maintain him, she took him to the Carmelite Convent.

=La Saisiaz= (A. E. S., Sept. 14th, 1877).--Mr. Browning was staying during the autumn of 1877, with his sister, amongst the mountains near Geneva, at a villa called "La Saisiaz," which in the Savoyard dialect means "The Sun." They were accompanied on this occasion by Miss Ann Egerton Smith. The happiness of the visit to this beautiful spot was marred by the sudden death of Miss Smith, from heart disease, on the night of September 14th. The poem is the result of the poet's musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. It is one of Mr. Browning's noblest and most beautiful utterances on the great questions of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. It is Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which it is based are as philosophical as they are poetically expressed. The work has often been compared with the In Memoriam of Tennyson. The powerful optimism, the robust confidence and devout faith in the infinite love and wisdom of the Supreme Being, are in each poem emphasized again and again. After several pages of description of the scenery of the locality, Mr. Browning imagines that a spirit of the place bade him question, and promised answer, of the problems of existence--

"Does the soul survive the body? Is there God's self--no or yes?"

He is weak, but "weakness never needs be falseness." He will go to the foundations of his faith; he will take stock--see how he stands in the matter of belief and doubt; will fight the question out without fence or self-deception. It shall not satisfy him to say that a second life is necessary to give value to the present, or that pleasure, if not permanent, turns to pain; in the presence of that recent death there must be rigid honesty, and it does not satisfy him to know there's ever some one lives though we be dead. Such a thought is repugnant to him,--not that repugnance matters if it be all the truth. He must, however, ask if there be any prospect of supplemental happiness? In the face of the strong bodies yoked to stunted souls, and the spirits that would soar were they not tethered by a fleshly chain; of the hindering helps, and the hindrances which are really helps in disguise,--the fact remains that hindered we are. However the fact be explained, life is a burthen; at best, more or less, in its whole amount is it curse or blessing? He thinks he has courage enough to fairly ask this question, and accept the answer of reason. He has questioned, and has been answered. Now, a question presupposes two things: that which questions and answers must exist. "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito, ergo sum), said Descartes. (And this is about the only thing in life of which we can be certain. Matter may be all illusion; as Bishop Berkeley said, we may be living in one long dream. But at least it takes a mind to do that. We therefore are; soul is, whatever else is not.) The second thing presupposed is, that the fact of being answered is proof that there must be a force outside itself:

"Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, Unaffected by its end,--that this thing likewise needs must be."

Here, then, are two facts: the last we may call God; the first, Soul. If an objector demands that he shall prove these facts his answer is that, recognising they surpass his power of proving these facts, proves them such to him:

"Ask the rush if it suspects Whence and how the stream which floats it had a rise, and where and how Falls or flows on still!"

If the rush could think and speak, it would say it only knows that it floats and is, and that an external stream bears it onward. What may happen to it the rush knows not: it may be wrecked, or it may land on shore and take root again; but this is mere surmise, not knowledge. Can we have better foundation for believing that, because we doubtless are, we shall as doubtless be? Men say we have, "because God seems good and wise." But there reigns wrong in life. "God seems powerful," they say; "why, then, are right and wrong at strife?" "Anyhow, we want a future life," say men; "without it life would be brutish." But wanting a thing, and hoping for it, are not proofs that our aspirations will be gratified; out of all our hopes, how many have had complete fulfilment? None. But "we believe," men sigh. So far as others are concerned the poet will not speak--he knows not. But he knows not what he is himself, which nevertheless is an ignorance which is no barrier to his knowing that he exists and can recognise what gives him pain or pleasure. What others are or are not is surmise; his own experience is knowledge. To his own experience, then, he appeals. He has lived, done, suffered, loved, hated, learned and taught this: there is no reconciling wisdom with a distracted world, no reconciling goodness with evil if it is to finally triumph, no reconciling power if the aim is to fail; if--and he only speaks for himself, his own convictions, and not for any other man's--if you hinder him from assuming that earth is a school-time and life a place of probation, all is chaos to him; he cannot say how these arguments and reasons may affect other men; he reiterates that he speaks for himself alone, because to colour-blind men the grass which is green to him may be red,--who is to decide which uses the proper term, supposing only two men existed, and one called grass green, the other red? So God must be the referee in His own case. The earth, as a school, is perhaps different for each individual; our pains and pleasures no more tally than our colour-sense. The poet, therefore, recognises that for him the world is his world, and no other man's; he is to judge what it means for himself. He will therefore proceed to estimate the world as it seems to him, exactly as he would judge of an artisan's work,--is it a success or a failure? Was God's will or His power in fault when the vapours shrouded the blue heaven, and the flowers fell at the breath of the dragon? Death waits on every rose-bloom, pain upon every pleasure, shadow on every brightness. We cannot love, but death lurks hard by; cannot learn sympathy unless men suffer pain. If he is told that all this is necessity, he will bear it as best he can; if, on the other hand, you say it has been ordained by a Cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent, he protests as a man he will not acquiesce if, at the same time, you tell him that this life is all:

"No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute: Goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!"

Speaking for himself he counts this show of things a failure if after this life there be no other; if the school is not to educate for another sphere, all its lessons are fruitless pain and toil. But, grant a second life, he heartily acquiesces; he sees triumph in misfortune's worst assaults, and gain in all the loss. When was he so near to knowledge as when hampered by his recognised ignorance? Was not beauty made more precious by the deformities surrounding him? Did he not learn to love truth better when he contemplated the reign of falsehood? And for love, who knows what its value is till he has suffered by the death-pang? The poet here breaks off the argument to address the spirit of the lost friend, and express his hope that one day they may meet again:--

"Can it be, and must, and will it?"

Then he recalls his thoughts from the region of surmise, to which they have wandered, home to stern and sober fact. He needs not the old plausibilities of the "misery done to man" and the "injustice of God," if another life compensate not for the ills of the present; he is prepared to take his stand as umpire to the champions Fancy and Reason, as they dispute the case between them. FANCY begins the amicable war by conceding that the surmise of life after death is as plain as a certainty, and acknowledges that there are now three facts--God, the soul, and the future life. REASON assents, sees there is definite advantage in the acknowledgment, admits the good of evil in the present life, detects the progress of everything towards good, and, as the next life must be an advance upon this one, suggests that, at the first cloud athwart man's sky, he should not hesitate, but die. FANCY then increases its concession, and sees the necessity of a hell for the punishment of those who would act the butterfly before they have played out the worm. Thus we have five facts now--God, soul, earth, heaven and hell. REASON declares that more is required: are we to shut our eyes, stop our ears, and live here in a state of nescience, simply waiting for the life to come, which is to do everything for the soul? FANCY protests that this present stage of our existence has worth incalculable--that every moment spent here means so much loss or gain for that next life which on this life depends. We have now six plain facts established. REASON points out that FANCY has proved too much by appending a definite reward to every good action and a fixed punishment to every bad one. We lay down laws as stringent in the moral as the material world. If we say, "Would you live again, be just," it is to put a necessity upon man as determined as the law of respiration--"Would you live now, regularly draw your breath." If immortality were anything more than surmise, if heaven and hell were as plainly the consequences of our course of life here as a fall of a breach of the laws of gravity, then men would be compelled to do right and avoid evil. Probation would be gone, our freedom would be destroyed, neither merit nor discipline would remain--

"Thus have we come back full circle."

The poet says he hopes,--he has no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope. Standing on the mountain, looking down upon the Lake of Geneva, his eye falls on the places where dwelt four great men: Rousseau, who lived at Geneva; Byron, lived at the villa called "Diodati," at Geneva; and wrote the Prisoner of Chillon at Ouchy, on the Lake; Voltaire, who built himself a château at Fernex; Gibbon, who wrote the concluding portion of his great work at Lausanne. The somewhat obscure reference to the "pine tree of Makistos," near the close of the poem, has caused considerable puzzling of brains amongst Browning students, none of whom have been able to assist me in solving the problem. So far as I am able to understand it, the solution seems to be this: The reference to Makistos is from the Agamemnon of Æschylus. The town of Makistos had a watch-tower on a neighbouring eminence, from which the beacon lights flashed the news of the fall of Troy to Greece. Clytemnestra says:

"sending a bright blaze from Ide, Beacon did beacon send, Pass on--the pine-tree--to Makistos' watch-place."

So the famous writers named as connected with that part of the Lake of Geneva contemplated by Mr. Browning, who were all Theists, passed on the pine-tree torch of Theism from age to age--Diodati, Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, Voltaire, who--

"at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God."

(Voltaire built a church at Ferney, over the portal of which he affixed the ostentatious inscription, "Deo erexit Voltaire.") Many writers (Canon Cheyne for one, in the Origin of the Psalter, p. 410) have thought that by the lines beginning, "He there with the brand flamboyant," etc., the poet referred to himself. Of course, any such idea is preposterous; the reference was to Voltaire. Mr. Browning, apart from the question of the egotism involved, could not say of himself, "he at least believed in soul." There was no minimising of religious faith in the poet Still less could he speak of himself as "crowned by prose and verse."

NOTES.--Python, the Rock-snake, the typical genus of Pythonidæ; "Athanasius contra mundum" == Athanasius against the world. St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and one of the most illustrious defenders of the Christian faith, was born about the year 297. In defending the Nicene Creed he had so much opposition to contend with from the Arian heretics that, in the words of Hooker, it was "the whole world against Athanasius, and Athanasius against it."

=Last Ride Together, The.= (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) This poem is considered by many critics to be the noblest of all Browning's love poems; for dramatic intensity, for power, for its exhibition of what Mr. Raleigh has aptly termed Browning's "tremendous concentration of his power in excluding the object world and its relations," the poem is certainly unequalled. It is a poem of unrequited love, in which there is nothing but the noblest resignation; a compliance with the decrees of fate, but with neither a shadow of disloyalty to the ideal, nor despair of the result of the dismissal to the lover's own soul development. The woman may reject him,--there is no wounded pride; she does not love him,--he is not angry with her, nor annoyed that she fails to estimate him as highly as he estimates himself. He has the ideal in his heart; it shall be cherished as the occupant of his heart's throne for ever--of the ideal he, at least, can never be deprived. This ideal shall be used to elevate and sublimate his desires, to expand his soul to the fruition of his boundless aspiration for human love, used till it transfigures the human in the man till it almost becomes Divine. And so--as he knows his fate--since all his life seemed meant for, fails--his whole heart rises up to bless the woman, to whom he gives back the hope she gave; he asks only its memory and her leave for one more last ride with him. It is granted:

"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"

(a line which no poet but Browning ever could have written. The force of the hour, the value of the quintessential moment as factors in the development of the soul, have never been set forth, even by Browning, with such startling power.) She lay for a moment on his breast, and then the ride began. He will not question how he might have succeeded better had he said this or that, done this or the other. She might not only not have loved him, she might have hated. He reflects that all men strive, but few succeed. He contrasts the petty done with the vast undone,

"What hand and brain went ever paired? What heart alike conceived and dared? What act proved all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen?"

And the meaning of it all, the reason of the struggle, the outcome of the effort? The poet alone can tell: he says what we feel. "But, poet," he asks, "are you nearer your own sublime than we rhymeless ones? You sculptor, you man of music, have you attained your aims?" Then he consoles himself that if here we had perfect bliss, still there is the life beyond, and it is better to have a bliss to die with dim-descried--

"Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?"

What if for ever he rode on with her as now, "The instant made eternity"?

=Lazarus=, who was raised from the dead, is the real hero of the poem An Epistle.

=Léonce Miranda.= (Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.) The principal actor in the drama was the son and heir of a wealthy Paris jeweller. He formed an illicit connection with Clara de Millefleurs, and lived with her at St. Rambert, finally committing suicide from the tower on his estate. It is said that the real name of the firm of jewellers was "Meller Brothers," and that Clara de Millefleurs was Anna de Beaupré.

=Levi Lincoln Thaxter.= Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 598 (1889), states that Mr. Browning wrote an inscription for the grave of Levi Lincoln Thaxter, a well known American Browning reader, on the Maine sea-coast. The inscription runs thus:--"Levi Lincoln Thaxter. Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Feb. 1st, 1824. Died May 31st, 1884.

"Thou, whom these eyes saw never! Say friends true Who say my soul, helped onward by my song, Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too? I gave of but the little that I knew; How were the gift requited, while along Life's path I pace, couldst thou make weakness strong! Help me with knowledge--for Life's Old----Death's New!" R. B. to L. L. T., April 1885.

=Life in a Love.= (Men and Women, 1855, Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man is content to spend his whole life on the chance that the woman whose heart he pursues will one day cease to elude him. When the old hope is dashed to the ground, a new one springs up and flies straight to the same mark. And what if he fail of his purpose here? How can life be better expended than in devotion to one worthy ideal?

=Light Woman, A.= (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A wanton-eyed woman ensnares a man in her toils just to add him to the hundred others she has captured. The victim has a friend who feels equal to conquering the victor. It is a question which is the stronger soul; the woman of a hundred conquests lies in the strong man's hand as tame as a pear from the wall. But the game turns out to be a serious one: the light woman recognises her conqueror as the higher soul, and loves him accordingly. What is he to do? He does not wish to eat the pear; is he to cast it away? It is an awkward thing to play with souls. Light as she was, she had a heart, though the hundred others could not discover a way to it; this man did, and broke it. The question for the breaker is What does he seem to himself? The last lines of the poem are interesting. The author says of himself:--

"And Robert Browning, you writer of plays, Here's a subject made to your hand."

=Likeness, A.= (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) As no two faces are exactly alike in every particular, so no two souls are ever cast in one mould. The very markings of our finger tips differ in every hand, and so each soul has its own language, which must be learned by whomsoever would discover its secret. And here science avails not; soul grammars and lexicons are not written for its tongue. A face, a glance, a word will do; but it must be the right glance, and the true open-sesame. The face which has spoken to us, the soul visitant who has penetrated to our solitude, the book, the deed which has formed the bond between us, speaks not to others as it spoke to us; and the face which is enshrined in our heart of hearts, to them is "the daub John bought at a sale." "Is not she Jane? Then who is she?" asks the stranger who intermeddleth not with our joys. But when that face is confessed to be one to lose youth for, to occupy age with the dream of, to meet death with; then, half in rapture, half in rage, we say, "Take it, I pray; it is only a duplicate!"

=Lilith.= (Adam, Lilith, and Eve.) "According to the Gnostic and Rosicrucian mediæval doctrine, the creation of woman was not originally intended. She is the offspring of man's own impure fancy, and, as the Hermetists say, 'an obtrusion.'... First 'Virgo,' the celestial virgin of the Zodiac, she became 'Virgo-Scorpio.' But in evolving his second companion, man had unwittingly endowed her with his own share of spirituality; and the new being whom his 'imagination' had called into life became his 'saviour' from the snares of Eve-Lilith, the first Eve, who had a greater share of matter in her composition than the primitive 'spiritual man.'"--Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, vol. ii., p. 445.

=Lost Leader, The.= (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, No. VII., 1845; Poems, 1849; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A great leader of a party has deserted the cause, fallen away from his early ideals and forsaken the teaching which has inspired disciples who loved and honoured him. They are sorrowful not so much for their own loss as for the moral deterioration he has himself suffered. The poem is a very popular one, and is generally considered to refer to Wordsworth, who in his youth had strong Liberal sympathies, but lost them, as Mr. John Morley says in his introduction to Wordsworth's poems:--"As years began to dull the old penetration of a mind which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human nature from the golden side, and had been eager to 'clear a passage for just government,' Wordsworth lost his interest in progress. Waterloo may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to fail, and with it his poetic glow. He opposed Catholic emancipation as stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker. For the practical reform of his day, even in education, for which he had always spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force." Browning used to see a good deal of Wordsworth when he was a young man, but there was no friendship between them. Wordsworth treated with contempt Browning's republican sympathies--a contempt heightened, as is usually the case with those who have lapsed from their former ideals, by the remembrance that he had once professed to follow them. But, though the poem has undoubted reference to Wordsworth, it has a certain application also to Southey, Charles Kingsley, and others, who in youth were Radicals and in old age became rigidly Conservative. Browning told Walter Thornbury that Wordsworth was "the lost leader," though he said "the portrait was purposely disguised a little; used, in short, as an artist uses a model, retaining certain characteristic traits and discarding the rest" (Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. i., p. 213.) There is a letter published in Mr. Grosart's edition of Wordsworth's Prose Works, which is conclusive on this point:--

"19, WARWICK CRESCENT, W., February 24th, 1875.

"DEAR MR. GROSART,--I have been asked the question you now address me with, and as duly answered, I can't remember how many times. There is no sort of objection to one more assurance, or rather confession, on my part, that I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter's model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account. Had I intended more--above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man--I should not have talked about 'handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon,' These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet--whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face-about of his special party, was, to my private apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But, just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognise figures which have struck out a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy; so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the 'very effigies' of such a moral and intellectual superiority.

"Faithfully yours, "ROBERT BROWNING."

="Lost, lost! yet come."= The first line of the "Song of April" in Paracelsus, Part II.

=Lost Mistress, The.= (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A calm suppression of intensest feeling, the quiet resignation of a great love in a spirit of humility and sacrifice, by a man who has complete control over himself. The pretence of not feeling the blow is exquisitely represented, and the spirit which underlies it is that of the strong-souled contender with the trials of life who wrote the poem. The life's current frozen, the sun sunk in the heart to rise no more, the joy gone out of life, are summed up in "All's over, then!" He remarks the sparrow's twitter and the leaf buds on the vine; the snowdrops appear, but there is no spring in his heart; her voice will stay in his soul for ever, yet he may hold her hand "so very little longer" than may a mere friend.

=Love among the Ruins.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) While Mrs. Browning was staying with Mr. Browning in Rome, in the winter of 1853-54, she was writing Aurora Leigh, and he was busy with Men and Women, including this exquisite poem. It is a landscape by Poussin in words, and is melodious and soothing, as befits the subject. It is evening in the Roman Campagna, amid the ruins of cities once great and famous. The landscape cannot fail to touch the soul with deepest melancholy, as we reflect on the evanescence of all human things. A vast city, whose memorials have dwindled to a "so they say"; "the domed and daring palaces "represented by a few blocks of half-buried marble and the shaft of a column, overrun by a vegetation which is the symbol of eternal beauty, lovingly covering the decaying handiwork of a long vanished people. And amid the colonnades and temples, the turrets and the bridges, the spirit of the observer dwells with the mournful reflection that the hand of death and the devouring tooth of time reduce all earthly things to ruin, and the shadows of oblivion fall on the world of spirit and cover the deeds alike of glory and of shame. But from the wreck of the ages, and the scattered memorials of a forgotten metropolis, there came a golden-haired girl with eager eyes of love, and the sad-reflecting contemplator of the past learns, by the glance of her eye and the embrace which extinguishes sight and speech, that whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin, are not to be weighed against that moment when we recognise that Love is best.

=Love in a Life.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A lover inhabiting the same house as his love, is constantly eluded by the charmed object of his pursuit. The perfume of her presence is in every room, and he is always promising his heart that she shall soon be found, yet the day wanes with the fruitless quest, for as he enters she goes out, and twilight comes with--

"Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"

Thus do our ideals ever evade us.

=Love Poems.=--"One Word More," "Evelyn Hope," "A Serenade at the Villa," "In Three Days," "The Last Ride Together," "Numpholeptos," "Cristina," "Love among the Ruins," "By the Fire Side," "Any Wife to any Husband," "A Lovers' Quarrel," "Two in the Campagna," "Love in a Life," "Life in a Love," "The Lost Mistress," "A Woman's Last Word," "In a Gondola," "James Lee's Wife," "Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli," "O Lyric Love!" (in the first volume of the Ring and the Book), "Count Gismond," "Confessions," "The Flower's Name," "Women and Roses," "My Star," "Mesmerism." (These are by no means all, but are, perhaps, some of the best.)

=Lover's Quarrel, A.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) "A shaft from the devil's bow," in the shape of a bitter word, has divided two lovers who before were all the world to each other. It seems to him so amazing that the tongue can have power to sever such fond hearts as theirs. He comforts himself with the assurance that though in summertide's warmth heart can dispense with heart, the first chills of winter and the first approach of the storms of life will drive the loved one to his arms.

=Lucrezia.= (Andrea del Sarto.) She was the wife of the artist--cold, unsympathetic, but beautiful--and was the model for much of his work. In the poem Andrea is conversing with her, and indicating the causes which have arrested his power as an artist.

=Luigi.= (Pippa Passes.) The conspiring young patriot who meets his mother at evening in the turret on the hillside near Asolo. He believes he has a mission to kill the Emperor of Austria. His mother is trying to dissuade him, and he is about to yield, when Pippa's song as she passes re-inspires him, and he leaves the tower, and so escapes from the police who are on his track.

=Luitolfo.= (A Soul's Tragedy.) Chiappino's false friend, and Eulalia's lover.

=Luria, A Tragedy.= (Bells and Pomegranates, VIII., 1846.) Time 14--. The historical incidents which are to some extent the basis of this play had their rise in the constant struggles between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions in Italy, which involved the various republics which arose in consequence of those wars in the most bitter internecine struggles for supremacy. One of the most important of these was the war between the Florentine and the Pisan republics. Wars between different Italian cities were frequent in the middle ages; according to Muratori, the first conflict was waged in 1003, when Pisa and Lucca contended for the mastery. In the eleventh century the military and real importance of Pisa was greatly developed, and was doubtless due to the necessity of constantly contending against Saracenic invasions. The chroniclers assert that the first war with Florence, which broke out in 1222, arose from a quarrel between the ambassadors of the rival states at Rome over a lapdog. When so trifling an occasion led to such a result, it is evident there were deeper grounds for hatred and mistrust at work. It is not within the scope of this work to trace the causes which led to the war between the two great Italian republics in the beginning of the fifteenth century. In the early part of the fourteenth century Castruccio became lord of Lucca and Pisa, and was victorious over the Florentines. In 1341 the Pisans besieged Lucca, in order to prevent the entry of the Florentines, to whom the city had been sold by Martino della Scala. The Florentines obtained Porto Talamone from Siena, and established a navy of their own. They attacked the harbour of Pisa, and carried away its chains, which they triumphantly bore to Florence, and suspended in front of the Baptistery, where they remained till 1848. As the war continued the Pisans suffered more and more. In 1369 they lost Lucca; in 1399 Visconti captured Pisa, and in 1406 the Florentines made another attack upon the city, besieging it both by sea and land. As the defenders were starving, they succeeded in entering the city on October 9th. The orders of the Ten of War at Florence were to crush every germ of rebellion and drive out its citizens by measures of the utmost harshness and cruelty. Mr. Browning's play has for its object to show how Pisa fell under the dominion of its powerful rival. The characters are Luria, a Moorish commander of the Florentine forces; Husain, a Moor, his friend; Puccio, the old Florentine commander, now Luria's chief officer; Braccio, commissary of the republic of Florence; Jacopo, his secretary; Tiburzio, commander of the Pisans; and Domizia, a noble Florentine lady. The scene is Luria's camp, between Florence and Pisa. The time extends only over one day, and the five Acts are named "Morning," "Noon," "Afternoon," "Evening," and "Night." A battle is about to take place which will decide the issue of the war. Luria is Browning's Othello, and one of the noblest of his characters. He is a simple, honest, whole-souled creature, incapable of guile, and devoted to the welfare of Florence. Puccio was formerly at the head of the Florentine army; he has been deposed for some state reason, and the Moorish mercenary substituted, he remaining as the subordinate of that general. The reasons which have induced the Seigniory to abstain from entrusting the command of its army to a Florentine are the most despicable that could influence any public body. They were understood to be afraid that they would have to reward the victorious general, or that he might use his power and influence with the people to make himself master of their city. So they choose a man whom they merely pay to fight for them--a Moor, who can have no friends amongst the citizens, and a stranger who can have no other claim upon them than his wages. They go further: they proceed to try him secretly for treason before he has committed it; they set spies to watch his every movement and to record his every word; they employ for this purpose unscrupulous men, well versed in the art of manufacturing evidence; they weave their toils so skilfully that by the time Luria has won their battle for them, they will have accumulated all the evidence which is required, and the death sentence will be pronounced as the victory is won. The appointment of the displaced Puccio to a secondary position in command was one of the steps taken for this end: he would naturally be discontented, and become a ready tool in the hands of the cold, skilful Braccio, all intellect, and practised in the most devious ways of statecraft. Professor Pancoast, in his valuable papers on Luria in Poet Lore, vol. i, p. 555, and vol. ii., p. 19, says: "It is possible that Mr. Browning may have found the suggestion for this situation in a passage in Sapio Amminato's Istoria Fiorentine, relating to this expedition against Pisa. "And when all was ready, the expedition marched to the gates of Pisa, under the command of Conte Bartoldo Orsini, a Ventusian captain in the Florentine service, accompanied by Filippo di Megalotti, Rinaldo di Gian Figliazzi, and Maso degli Albizzi, in the character of commissaries of the commonwealth. For, although we have every confidence in the honour and fidelity of our general, you see it is always well to be on the safe side. And in the matter of receiving possession of a city, ... these nobles with the old feudal names! We know the ways of them! An Orsini might be as bad in Pisa as a Visconti, so we might as well send some of our own people to be on the spot. The three commissaries therefore accompanied the Florentine general to Pisa." (Am. xvii., Lib. Goup. 675.) These words throw an instructive light on Mr. Browning's drama, and seem to justify its motive. From this background of treachery and deceit the grand figure of Luria, honest, transparently ingenuous, generous, and true to the core, boldly stands forth to claim our admiration and our esteem. He knows nothing of their devious ways, can only go straightforward to his aim, and on this eve of the great battle he receives from Tiburzio, the commander of the Pisan forces, a letter which has been intercepted from Braccio to the Florentine Seigniory; he is desired to read it, as it exposes the plots which the Florentines are hatching against him. Luria declines to read the letter, tears it to pieces, and gives battle to the enemy. The victory is a great one: Pisa is in his hands; then he sends for Braccio, charges him with the treachery, and learns what the letter would have told him if he had read it. Braccio does not deny what Luria divines; charges have been prepared against him,--he will be tried that night. He maintains the absolute right of Florence to do as she has done. Domizia, whose brothers suffered shame and death in such manner at the hands of Florence, protests that Florence needs must mistrust a stranger's faith. At this moment Tiburzio, the Pisan general, enters, testifies to the faith of the man who has defeated him, and offers to resign to him his charge, the highest office, sword and shield, with the help which has just arrived from Lucca. He begs him to adopt their cause, and let Florence perish in her perfidy. Here was temptation indeed to Luria: his own victorious troops would not have turned their arms against him, and Pisa would have eagerly accepted him. But Luria dismisses Tiburzio, thanks him, bids him go: he is free,--"join Lucca!" And then, he reflects, he has still time before his sentence comes; he has it in his power to ruin Florence. Would it console him that his Florentines walked with a sadder step? He has one way of escape left him: he has brought poison from his own land for use in an emergency such as this; he drinks,--

"Florence is saved: I drink this, and ere night,--die!"

=Madhouse Cells.= The two poems Johannes Agricola in Meditation and Porphyria's Lover were published in Dramatic Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, No. III., under the general title MADHOUSE CELLS. In the Poetical Works of 1863 the general title was given up.

=Magical Nature.= (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems: 1876.) The beauty of a flower is at the mercy of the destroying hand of time; the beauty of a jewel is independent of it. The petals drop off one by one, the flower perishes; every facet of the jewel may laugh at time. Mere fleshly graces are those of the flower; the soul's beauty is best symbolised by the gem.

=Malcrais.= (Two Poets of Croisic.) Paul Desforges Maillard assumed the name of Malcrais when he sent his poems to the Paris Mercure, pretending they were the work of a lady.

="Man I am and man would be, Love."= The fourth lyric in Ferishtah's Fancies begins with this line.

=Marching Along.= (No. I. of Cavalier Tunes.) Originally appeared in Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.

=Martin Relph.= (Dramatic Idyls, First Series: 1879.) This poem deals with a profound psychological problem. How far do we understand the mystery of our own heart? How far can we analyse our own motives? Out of two powerful motives, either of which may equally move us to do or leave undone a certain thing, can we infallibly tell which one has ultimately prompted our action? Are we less an enigma to ourselves than to others? The Scripture warns us that we may not trust our imaginations, by reason of the deceit which is within our breast. All his life the old man Martin Relph had been trying to solve a mystery of this kind. He wants to know whether he is a murderer or only a coward; and every year, till his beard is as white as snow, has he gone to a hill outside the town where he lived to ask this question, and to protest with all his power of speech--despite the misgiving at his heart--that he was a coward. And this was his story. When a youth he, with the rest of the villagers, had been crowded up in this spot by the soldiers who held the place, that they might see, for a terrible warning, the execution of a young woman for playing the spy, and so interfering in the King's military concerns. It was in the reign of King George, and there had been a rebellion, and the rebels had learned the strength of the troops sent against them by means of some spy. A letter had been intercepted written by a girl to her lover, and the poor creature had told him such news of the movements of the troops as she thought would interest him, not knowing she was doing any harm. In all this the authorities smelt treason. Her lover was Vincent Parkes, one of the clerks of the King, "a sort of lawyer," and therefore dangerous. To give the girl a chance of clearing herself from suspicion, the commander of the troops sent for this Parkes, who was in a distant part of the country, bidding him come and dispel the cloud hanging over the girl if he could, and giving him a week for the journey. The week is up. Parkes has taken no notice of the letter; and the girl, tried by court-martial, is to be shot that day. And now poor Rosamund Page, with pinioned arms and bandaged face, is left to die. Her faithless lover, who could have saved her, has not appeared, and there is no help for her but in God. The villagers are assembled to see the sight; and Martin Relph, who also loved the girl, is there also. The word is given: up go the guns in a line, and the paralysed spectators close their eyes and kneel in prayer,--all except Martin, who stands in the highest part of the hill and sees a man running madly, falling, rising, struggling on, waving something white above his head; and no one in all the crowd sees the messenger but Martin Relph. And he is speechless, makes no sign, for hell-fire boils in his brain; and the volley is fired and the woman dead, while stretched on the field, half a mile off, is Vincent Parkes, dead also, with the King's letter in his hand that proclaims his sweetheart's innocence. He had been hampered and hindered at every turn by formalities and frivolous delays on the part of the authorities, and so was too late. Martin Relph, had he called out, could have stayed the execution. Why did he remain silent? The thought had flashed through his mind, as he recognised the position, "She were better dead than his!" and so he had not spoken; but he has told his heart a thousand times that fear kept him silent, and he has passed his life in trying to convince himself it was so indeed. But, deceitful as the human heart may be, deep down in its recesses he knew he was a murderer.

=Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli.= (Jocoseria, 1883.) Mary Wollstonecraft was the foundress of the Women's Rights movement. She was born in 1759, and early gave evidence of the possession of superior mental powers and of bold ideas of her own. Her first attempt in literature was a pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She was of a very energetic spirit, with considerable confidence in her own powers. "I am going to be the first of a new genus," she wrote to her sister Everina in 1788. "I tremble at the attempt; yet if I fail, I only suffer. Freedom, even uncertain freedom, is dear. This project has long floated in my mind. You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track; the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on." At this time she had secured employment as literary adviser to Mr. Johnson, the publisher of her pamphlet. At this gentleman's house she met many interesting people; amongst others the author, William Godwin, and the artist, Henry Fuseli. She now began to attack the established order of society in the most violent manner. She heartily sympathised with the French Revolution, and denounced Lords and Commons, the clergy and the game laws, with great violence. She will be best remembered by her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her idea was that the women of her time were fools, and that men kept women in ignorance that they might retain their authority over them. "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it," she pleads: her idea being that men kept women either as slaves or playthings. She now became greatly interested in Fuseli, who did not in the least reciprocate her affection, but was annoyed by it. He was a married man, and though, no doubt, he could see that at first her love for him was platonic, it was rapidly assuming a more ardent character. She wrote him many letters full of affection, and actually ventured to ask Mrs. Fuseli to accept her as an inmate in her family. Finding that Fuseli remained impervious to her attacks upon his heart, she went to Paris, sending him a letter asking his pardon "for having disturbed the quiet tenor of his life." In Paris she soon consoled herself with a gentleman named Gilbert Imlay, with whom she lived without taking what she termed the "vulgar precaution" of marriage. Shortly after forming this connection Imlay cruelly deserted her. She left Paris, hurried to London, found her worst fears confirmed, and attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself from Putney Bridge. She was picked up, living to regret the "inhumanity" which had rescued her from death. She heard no more of Imlay; but five years after meeting William Godwin for the first time at Mr. Johnson's she met him again by chance at the house of a mutual friend. As Mary's opinion about the "vulgar formality" of marriage remained unchanged, and as Godwin held with her on the subject, the formality was once more dispensed with; but ultimately it was considered advisable so far to conciliate the prejudices of society as to go through the ceremony, which was performed at Old St. Pancras Church, and Mary Wollstonecraft became Mrs. Godwin in due form. In September 1797 her troubled life came to a premature close. She died before completing her thirty-ninth year. Mary left two children; the younger of these, her daughter by Godwin, became the wife of the poet Shelley. The elder, Imlay's daughter, poisoned herself, leaving a slip of paper stating that she had done so "to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate." The authoress of the Rights of Woman had neglected to consider the rights of Mrs. Fuseli and of the fruit of her illicit connection with Imlay when she devoted herself to the emancipation of her sex. In the poem Mary prates vainly of what she would do if only she were loved; and as the Rev. John Sharpe, M.A., says in his paper on Jocoseria with reference to the question, "Wanting is----what?" (a question which seems to preside over all the poems in the volume to which it is a prologue): "Deeds, not words, are wanted. Perfect love awakens love in the indifferent by perfect deeds of loving self-sacrifice."

=Master Hugues Of Saxe-Gotha.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) An organist in a church where they have just concluded the evening service determines to have a colloquy with the old dead composer Master Hugues as to the meaning of the compositions known as fugues for which he was celebrated. They were mountainous in their structure--the ideas were piled one upon another till their meaning was lost in cloudland. So, while the church is emptying and the altar ministrants are putting things to rights, he will look into the matter of the old quaint arithmetical music in fashion before Palestrina brought back music to the service of melody. There is but one inch of candle left in the socket, so the composer must tell him what he has to say quickly. First he delivers his phrase; he gives but a clause. He asserts nothing, puts forward no proposition; nevertheless there is an answer, though a needless one, and the two start off together. (It will be seen that the poet suggests five impersonations of characters taking part in the discussion or mangle of the composition.) A third interposes, and volunteers his help; a fourth must have his say, and a fifth must needs interfere. So the disputation is like that of a knot of angry politicians, who all want to speak at once, and will scarcely allow each other to utter a complete sentence. This is a perfect description of a fugue, which even to the uninstructed listener is a musical wrangle plainly enough. In the fugue the organist sees a moral of life, with its zigzags, dodges, and ins and outs. Truth and Nature are over our heads. God's gold here and there shines out in our soul-manifestations, if we would but let truth and Nature have their way with us, the gold would be all the plainer to see; but with our evasions, our pretences, shams and subterfuges we have all but obliterated it, just as the inventor of the fugue has buried his melody under a mountain of musical tricks and pedantic finger puzzles. The organist pauses; he will have no more of it as a moral of life. The Jesuit's casuistry, which went to prove that all sorts of evil things might under certain circumstances and under such and such restrictions become actual virtues, was swept away by Pascal's clear-sighted common sense. So Master Hugues and his fugues shall vanish before the full organ blaring out the mode Palestrina--the grave, pure, truthful music of the Church. As Pascal to Escobar, so is Palestrina to Master Hugues; quibbles, shams, fencings with truth, overlay God's gold with the cobwebs of tradition, and must be brushed away. "Rochell has quite correctly perceived that the approximate best symbol of the uncreated heaven is music. In the evolution of harmonies in the upper and lower notes, and their mutual conflict; in the solution of strife and tension into blessed calm; in the transmutation of the ever-recurring theme into new phrases; in the constant reappearance of the motif, of the question which seeks a reply through every evolution of the notes, and which leads the reply into a new process--in this we see the temporal symbol of the eternal rhythm, the eternal circular movement in God's heaven, where melodious colours and radiant notes are interwoven with each other; where nothing lies in stagnant repose, but all is in motion; where unity and harmony are eternally effected by means of the contrasted, movements and action." (Martensen's Jacob Boehme, page 167.)

NOTES.--Hugues is a purely imaginary composer. Verse i. "mountainous fugues": "A fugue is a short, complete melody, which flies (hence the name) from one part to another, while the original part is continued in counterpoint against it. The beginning of this art-form dates from very primitive times" (Sir G. Macfarren). Probably Bach's fugues are meant in the poem, vi., Aloys and Jurien and Just, sacristan's assistants; "darn the sacrament lace": the lace on the altar linen. The actual sacrament linen is washed by the clergy in the Roman Catholic Church. The church plate (i.e., chalice, paten, etc.) is cleaned by the clergy also, viii., claviers, the keyboard of the organ ix., "great breves as they wrote them of yore": a breve is the longest note in music, and was formerly square in shape. In the old Spanish cathedrals I have seen the music-books used in the services of such a size that it required two men to carry them. The notes in such books are very large, xvi., "O Danaides, O Sieve!" the Danaides were the daughters of Danaus, who were condemned for their crimes to pour water for ever in the regions below into a vessel with holes in the bottom. xvii., Escobar, y Mendoza, was a Spanish casuist, the general tendency of whose writings was to find excuses for human frailties. Pascal severely criticised him in his Provincial Letters. His doctrines were disapproved at Rome. Escobar himself was a most excellent man. He died in 1669. xviii., "Est fuga, volvitur rota" == it is a flight, the wheel rolls itself round. xix., risposting == riposting, a term in fencing; in this case equal to making a repartee. xx., ticken == ticking, a twill fabric very closely woven. xxviii., meâ pœnâ == at my risk of punishment; Gorgon, a monster with a terrible head, with hair and girdle of snakes; "mode Palestrina": Giovanni P. da Palestrina (1524-1594), now universally distinguished as the Prince of Music, emancipated his art from the trammels of pedantry, which, ignoring beauty as the most necessary element of music, was tending to reduce it to mere arithmetical problems.

=May and Death.= (Published first in The Keepsake, 1857; in 1864 published in Dramatis Personæ.) Mrs. Orr, in her Life and Letters of Robert Browning, says that the poet wrote this poem in remembrance of one of his boy companions, the eldest of "the three Silverthornes, his neighbours at Camberwell, and cousins on the maternal side." The name of Charles in the poem stands for the old familiar Jim. Mrs. Silverthorne was the aunt who paid for the printing of Pauline. The verses express the wish that all the delights of spring had died with his friend; yet he would have spared one plant of the woods in May which has in its leaves a streak of spring's blood. Where'er the leaf grows in a wood they know the red drop comes from the poet's heart. The question has often been asked "What is the plant referred to in the fourth stanza?" The following reply was given in the Browning Society's Papers:--"Surely the Polygonum Persicaria or Spotted Persicaria is the plant referred to. It is a common weed, with purple stains upon its rather large leaves; these spots varying in size and vividness of colour according to the nature of the soil where it grows." The Rev. H. Friend, in Flowers and Flower Lore (p. 5), says:--"Respecting the Virgin, I have recently found the country folk in one part of Oxfordshire retaining an interesting legend which connects the name of her ladyship with the Spotted Persicaria. It will be remembered that, in consequence of the dark spot which marks the centre of every leaf belonging to this plant, popular tradition asserts that it grew beneath the Cross, and received this distinction through the drops of blood which fell from the Saviour's wounds touching its leaves. The Oxonian however, says that the Virgin was wont of old to use its leaves for the manufacture of a valuable ointment, but that on one occasion she sought it in vain. Finding it afterwards, when the need had passed away, she condemned it, and gave it the rank of an ordinary weed. This is expressed in the local rhyme:--

'She could not find in time of need, And so she pinched it for a weed.'

The mark on the leaf is the impression of the Virgin's finger, and the persicaria is now the only weed that is not useful for something." Again (p. 191) he says, "We are told that in some parts of England the arum, commonly called lords and ladies, cows and calves, parson in the pulpit, or parson and clerk, is known as Gethsemane, because it is said to have been growing at the foot of the cross, and to have received on its leaves some of the blood:--

'Those deep unwrought marks, The villager will tell you, Are the flower's portion from the atoning blood On Calvary shed. Beneath the Cross it grew.'

The same tradition clings to the purple orchis and the spotted persicaria. We have already seen how many plants are supposed to have gained their purple hue or ruddy colour from blood of hero, god, or martyr. A similar legend seems to have been at one time attached to the purple-stained flowers of the wood-sorrel, which is by Italian painters, including Fra Angelico, occasionally placed in the foreground of their pictures representing the Crucifixion. This plant is called Alleluia in Italian, which may have had something to do, however, with its association with the Cross of Christ, 'as if the very flowers round the Cross were giving glory to God.' The wallflower, that 'scents the dewy air,' is in Palestine called 'the blood-drops of Christ'; and its deep hue has led to its being called by a similar name in the West of England. The rose-coloured lotus, or melilot, was said to have sprung in like manner from the blood of the lion slain by the Emperor Adrian. It is probable that the story was the modification of some earlier myth. Mr. Conway tells us he has somewhere met with a legend telling that the thorn-crown of Christ was made from rose-briar, and that the drops of blood that started under it and fell to the ground blossomed to roses. Mrs. Howe, the American poetess, beautifully alludes to this in the lines--

'Men saw the thorns on Jesus' brow, But angels saw the Roses.'"

=Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning.= (Originally published as NIGHT AND MORNING in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, VII.: 1845.) The speaker is a man who joyfully seeks his happy seaside home at night, where he rejoins the wife from whom the demands of his daily work have separated him. In the sequel (Parting at Morning) the rising sun calls men to work: the man of the poem to work of a lucrative character; and excites in the woman (if we interpret the slightly obscure line correctly) a desire for more society than the seaside home affords. Commentators on these poems have evidently "jumped the difficulty."

=Melander.= The author whose work "Joco-Seria" suggested the title of Mr. Browning's volume of poems Jocoseria (q.v.).

=Melon-Seller, The.= (Ferishtah's Fancies, II.) The second of the lessons learned by Ferishtah on his way to dervishhood. He sees a well-remembered face in a melon-seller near a bridge. He was once the Shah's Prime Minister: he peculated, and was disgraced. Shocked at the contrast between what the man was and has now become, Ferishtah asks him if he did not curse God for the twelve years' bliss he enjoyed only to end in misery like that? The beggar contemptuously asked his questioner if he were unwise enough to think him such a fool as to repine at God's just punishment on sin, and to reproach Him with the happiness he had tasted in the past? Job said: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and evil not receive?" This was just what the melon-seller said. "But great wits jump"; and Ferishtah, having learned the great lesson, went his way to dervishhood. The Lyric asks for a little severity from Love: so much undeserved bliss has been imparted, that a little injustice seems requisite to balance things.

=Memorabilia.= (Men and Women, 1855--when the title was Memorabilia (on Seeing Shelley); Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man with a soul crosses a vast moor, a blankness of miles, but on one hand-breadth spot he spies an eagle's feather, which he cherishes. An eagle's feather meant something to the man with the soul, the miles of blank moor had nothing to say to him; and so once he saw Shelley plain, and even spoke to him. The man had lived long before and had lived long after, but the sight of Shelley and the words he spoke made just that hand-breadth of his life something different from all the colourless remainder. [Some there are who love to say the same of Robert Browning!] Mr. Browning early in his youth (1825) fell under the influence of Shelley. Mr. Sharp, in his Life of Browning, says that, as he was one day passing a bookstall, "he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as 'Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem,--very scarce.' He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the Dæmon of the World and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto constituted a literary piracy." He discovered that there was such a poet as Shelley; that he had written several volumes, and was dead. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, which she had some difficulty in doing, as several booksellers to whom she applied knew nothing of them. The books were ultimately purchased at Ollier's shop, in Vere Street. Shelley, as Mr. Sharp says, "enthralled" Browning. His first work, Pauline, was written under the dominance of the Shelley passion. He refers to Shelley in Sordello. Memorabilia was composed in the Roman Campagna in the winter of 1853-54.

=Men and Women.= (Published in 1855, in two vols.; now dispersed in vols. iii., iv. and v. of Poetical Works, 1868.) The poems included under this general title were fifty-one in number.

Vol. 1. contained the following:--"Love among the Ruins," "A Lovers' Quarrel," "Evelyn Hope," "Up at a Villa--Down in the City," "A Woman's Last Word," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "By the Fireside," "Any Wife to any Husband," "An Epistle of Karshish," "Mesmerism," "A Serenade at the Villa," "My Star," "Instans Tyrannus," "A Pretty Woman," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "Respectability," "A Light Woman," "The Statue and the Bust," "Love in a Life," "Life in a Love," "How it Strikes a Contemporary," "The Last Ride Together," "The Patriot," "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Memorabilia."

Vol. II.: "Andrea del Sarto," "Before," "After," "In Three Days," "In a Year," "Old Pictures in Florence," "In a Balcony," "Saul," "De Gustibus----," "Women and Roses," "Protus," "Holy-Cross Day," "The Guardian Angel," "Cleon," "The Twins," "Popularity," "The Heretic's Tragedy," "Two in the Campagna," "A Grammarian's Funeral," "One Way of Love," "Another Way of Love," "Transcendentalism," "Misconceptions," "One Word More."

In the six-volume edition of Poetical Works the poems comprised under the title of Men and Women are the following, and it is these which are generally understood now by the Men and Women poems:--"Transcendentalism," "How it Strikes a Contemporary," "Artemis Prologuises," "An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician," "Pictor Ignotus," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Cleon," "Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli," "One Word More."

Unquestionably in these works we have the very flower of Mr. Browning's genius. There is not one of them which the world will willingly let die. As Mr. Symons says, their distinguishing feature is "the monologue brought to perfection. Such monologues as Andrea del Sarto, or The Epistle of Karshish, never have been, and probably never will be, surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order."

=Mesmerism.= (Dramatic Romances: 1855.) A description of an influence of one mind upon another, which would in modern medical parlance be termed hypnotism. When an operator has this power, and has frequently exercised it upon his subject, it is undoubtedly true that what is here described in so lifelike a manner may actually take place. The subject may have been led to expect that she would be required to undertake the journey in question, and the mind in that case would contribute to the success of the operation. Hypnosis and somnambulism are not produced by any fluid which escapes from the mesmeriser's body, but by the fact that the subject has been induced to form a fixed idea that he is being hypnotised. Braid asserts that the imagination of the subject is an indispensable element in the success of the experiment; he declares that the most expert hypnotiser will exert himself in vain unless the subject is aware of what is passing and surrenders himself body and soul. Binet and Frere, in their valuable work on Animal Magnetism, p. 96, say that "a whole series of purely physical agents exist, which prove that sleep can be induced without the aid of the subject's imagination, against his will, and without his knowledge." The incidents of the poem may all be accounted for by the doctrine of expectant attention. The use of hypnotic suggestion for criminal purposes is referred to in stanzas xxvi. and xxvii.--a very real danger from a medico-legal point of view, as some think. At night, when all is quiet but the noises peculiar to the hours of darkness, the mesmeriser of the poem desires that the woman under the influence of his will-power shall forthwith make her way to him through the rain and mud straight to his house. In due time she enters without a word. Recognising the wonderful influence which one mind may exercise upon another, the operator prays that he may never abuse it, and he reflects that one day God will call him to account for its exercise.

=Mihrab Shah.= (Ferishtah's Fancies, 6.) THE MYSTERY OF EVIL AND PAIN. An inquirer, while culling herbs, has had his thumb nipped by a scorpion. He wishes to know "Why needs a scorpion be? Why, in fact, needs any evil or pain happen to man if God be wholly good and omnipotent?" Ferishtah replies that when he awoke in the morning he was thankful that his head did not tumble off his neck. "But," says the inquirer, "heads do not fall unchopped." Says the dervish, "They might do so by natural law; why might not a staff loosed from the hand spring skyward as naturally as it falls to the ground?" What would be the bond 'twixt man and man if pain were abolished? Take away from man thanks to God and love to man, what is he worth? The lyric explains the compensations of existence. The ardent soul is enshrined in feeble flesh, the sluggish soul in a robust frame. What one person lacks is found in another, and this creates a bond of sympathy between our spirits. No one has everything. What we lack we admire when present in another, and so our own defects are pardoned for what in us is excellent.

=Mildred Tresham.= (A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.) The lady who is loved by Lord Henry Mertoun, and visited by him in secret at night. She dies when she learns that her brother has killed her lover.

=Misconceptions.= (Men and Women, 1855.) A beautiful fancy of a branch on which a bird has rested a moment bursting into bloom for pride and joy that it has been so honoured. The poet treats it as symbolical of a heart which has thrilled for a moment under the smiles of a queen ere she went on to her true-love throne.

=Mr. Sludge, "The Medium."= (Dramatis Personæ: 1864.) Mr. Sludge is a "medium" who has been detected by his dupe in the act of cheating. He has worked upon his patron's love for his dead mother, has pretended that he has had communications with the spirit world, and has found it a profitable business. However, he is found out, the game is up, he is half throttled by the man whom he has swindled, and is about to be kicked out of his house. He admits the cheating, but tries to make out that it was prompted by a low species of spirit (elementals as they are called). He offers, if liberally paid, to explain how the fraud has been carried out. He pretends one moment that he is repentant, the next he proposes to increase his guilt by falsely accusing his too confiding benefactor. He is prepared to swear that he picked a quarrel with him to get back the presents he had given. The bargain is made; and the medium, seated again at the "dear old table" which has so often been the partner of his performances, proceeds to explain that it is much more the fault of the public that they are cheated, than that of the artful folk who are always ready to meet demand by supply. In many things, but especially in affairs relating to the unseen world, people are willing to be deceived; and, as Demosthenes said, "Nothing is more easy than to deceive ourselves, as our affections are subtle persuaders."

"It's all your fault, you curious gentlefolk!"

said Sludge. "Everybody is interested in ghosts, and everybody will listen to the ghost-seer. A poor lad, the son of a servant in your house, talks to you about money, and you immediately suspect him of having stolen some; if he talk to you about seeing spirits, you encourage him to tell his story, and you listen with open ears. You make allowances for the unexplained 'phenomena,' and you are not disconcerted by his blunders. So the boy is encouraged to try again, to see more, hear more and stranger things. You have patience with the primary manifestations,' always weak at first; you discourage doubts as always fatal to them, and thus educate the boy in his cheating. He is compelled to invent; you prompt him, your readiness to be deceived confirms him in his readiness to deceive. It is not that the boy starts as a liar; he will soon enough develop into that; at first however,

"'It's fancying, fable-making, nonsense-work-- What never meant to be so very bad.'

He brightens up his dull facts till they shine, and you no longer recognise them as dull, but brilliant. He hears what other mediums have done, he estimates your demands of him; you push him to the brink, he is compelled to dive. Let him confess his deception, and he has to go back to the gutter from which you have taken him. Let him keep on, and he lives in clover. And so he manufactures for you all you demand. He has heard raps and seen a light. 'Shaped somewhat like a star?' you eagerly inquire. 'Well, like some sort of stars, ma'am.' 'So we thought!' you say. 'And any voice?' 'Not yet.' 'Try hard next time!' Next time you have the voice. The medium is launched in the rapids. The falls are hard by: nothing can hinder but he must go over. He becomes the medium which has been required of him. The spirits forthwith speak up and become familiar and confidential. If any complain that the spirits do not fulfil our expectation of what the ghosts of Bacon, Cromwell, or Beethoven should be and do, the answer is ready and assumes two forms. If Bacon is deficient in spelling, does not know where he was born or in what year he died, this is no argument against spiritualism. The spirits are of all orders; and many, perhaps most, are tricksy, undeveloped, and delight to deceive. Or, again, the explanation is put in this way:--What is a medium? He is the means, and the only means, by which the spirits can hold converse with mortals. They have no organs; they must use ours. The medium holding converse with the spirit of Beethoven, not being much of a musician, is, of course, only able very imperfectly to express the composer's musical soul. He pours in--to Sludge's soul--a sonata. If it comes out the Shakers' Hymn in G, that is the defect of the means or medium by which the master has been driven to express himself." Sludge tells his dupe that it was thus he helped him out of every scrape; and the fools who attended every seance did not criticise. Why should they? They did not criticise his wine or his furniture--why should they criticise his medium? Of course they sometimes doubted. "Ah!" says the host, "it was just this spirit of doubt pervading the circle which confused the medium and accounted for his errors!" Sludge often got out of his difficulties that way. Sometimes, however the awful aspect of truth would present itself so sternly before him as to spoil all the cockering and cosseting he received, and he would gnash his teeth at the thought of the ruin of his soul by the humbug forced upon him. The cheating was nursed out of the lying. He would have stopped, but his dupes were for progress; they always demanded fresh and more striking "phenomena"--from talking to writing, from writing to flowers from the spirit world. If he actually were detected in jogging the table, or making squeaks with his toes, he would be accused of joking; if he pretended he was not, then he was at once in the dupe's power. Then the cheating is so easy! A master of an ordinary trade can perform miracles to the untaught. The glass-blower, pipe maker, even the baker, by long practice, can puzzle the uninitiated; practise table-tilting, joint-cracking, playing tricks in the dark, and the phenomena of the medium's business become easy as an old shoe. But, apart from this actual trickery, can the hardest head detect where the cheating begins, even if he is on his guard? There is a real love of a lie, and liars have no difficulty in attracting those who are only waiting to be deceived, and the most sceptical are just the most likely to be caught. Then the Solomon of saloons, the philosophic diner-out,--these were his patrons. They "wanted a doctrine for a chopping-block." They had to be singular, and hack and hew common sense to show their skill in dialectics. These had Sludge injured. Then he reminds his patrons that the Bible teaches spiritualism. We all start with a stock of it; and stars even, we are taught, are not only worlds and suns, but stand for signs when we should set about our proper business. Sludge declares he has taught himself to live by signs: he is broken to the way of nods and winks. He has not waited for the tingle of the bell, but has obeyed the tap of knuckles on the wall. Suppose he blunders nine times out of ten as to the meaning of the knuckle summons, is he not a gainer if the tenth time he guesses right? Everybody blunders even as he. The thing is to imitate the ant-eater, and keep his tongue out to catch all nature's motes for food. It is wisdom to respect the infinitely little, for God comes close behind the animalcule, life simplified to a mere cell. All was not cheating either: he has told his lie and seen truth follow. He knows not why he did what he never tried to do, described what he never saw, spoke more than he ever intended; and though he believes everybody can and does cheat, he is not less sure that every cheat's every inspired lie contains a germ of truth. Pervade this world by an influx from the next, and all the dead, dry, dull facts of existence spring into life and freshness, as at the touch of harlequin's wand; and harlequin's wand is Sludge's lie, for which the inanimate world was waiting. You see the real world through the false, and so you have the golden age all by the help of a little lying. At most, Sludge is only a poet who acts the books which poets write. The more to his honour! But all his specious reasoning fails to reassure his awakened dupe, who gives him the notes he promised and dismisses him. No sooner is the medium out of the presence of the man whom he has deceived than he pours out a volley of abuse, and wishes he dare burn down the house; he will declare that he throttled his "sainted mother"--the old hag--in such a fit of passion as his throat had just felt the effects of; he reproaches himself for not having prophesied he would die within a year; but he consoles himself with counting his money, and reflecting that his awakened dupe is not the only fool in the world. "Sludge" is D. D. Home, the American medium. Mrs. Browning was an ardent spiritualist, and Mr. Browning, in consequence, had considerable experience of the ways of mediums and the talk and arguments of their followers. Although no medium ever reasoned with such skill and subtlety as Sludge, the main arguments used by this impostor are precisely those put forward by spiritualists. The mediums are a wretchedly weak, invertebrate order of beings, quite incapable of any such virile processes of thought as those expressed in the poem. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that Mr. Browning intended to make any defence for any phase of spiritualism whatever: he has simply gathered into a poem the best which could be put forward for spiritualism, and directed it upon the personality of Sludge. Intimate friends of the Brownings assure me that Mr. Browning with great difficulty restrained his disgust at the practices of spiritualists, and his annoyance at the fact that his wife devoted so much time and attention to this aspect of human folly. Perhaps the feature which angered him most was the habit of trading upon and outraging the most sacred feelings of the human heart, in the endeavour to gain clients for a money-making occupation.

NOTES.--Catawba wine: a white wine of American make, from grapes first discovered about 1801 near the banks of the Catawba river. Its praises have been sung by Longfellow. Greeley: Horace Greeley, the eminent American editor. His history was identified with the fortunes of his paper the Tribune. "Nothing lasts, as Bacon came and said": Bacon's Essay LVIII. is Of the Vicissitude of Things. Phenomena: the spiritualists' term for the antics of tables, pats, twitchings, ghostly lights, tinkling of bells, etc., at their séances. The Horseshoe: the great waterfall of that name at Niagara. Pasiphae: the daughter of the Sun and of Perseis, who married Minos, King of Crete. She was enamoured of a bull, or more probably of an officer named Taurus (a bull). Odic Lights: Od, the name given by Reichenbach to an influence he believed he had discovered; it was held to explain the phenomena of mesmerism, and to account for the luminous appearances at spirit-rapping circles. "Canthus of my eye" == the corner of the eye. Stomach cyst, an animalcule which is nothing more than a bag, without limbs or organs; one of the infusoria, the simplest of creatures endowed with animal life. "The Bridgewater book": The Earl of Bridgewater (1758-1829) devised by his will £8,000 at the disposal of the President of the Royal Society, to be paid to the authors of treatises "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation." Several of the treatises are now famous books, as Bell on The Hand, Kirby on Habits and Instincts of Animals, and Whewell's Astronomy. Eutopia == Utopia.

=Molinos.= See MOLINISTS.

=Molinists, The= (Ring and the Book), were followers of Michael Molinos, a Spanish priest and spiritual director of great repute in Rome, who was a cadet of a noble Spanish family of Sarragossa. He was born on December 21st, 1627. In 1675 he published, during his residence in Rome, his famous work entitled The Spiritual Guide, a book which taught the doctrine known as that of Quietism. This species of mysticism had previously been taught by John Tauler and Henry Suso, as also by St. Theresa and St. Catherine of Siena, but in a different and more orthodox form than that in which it was presented by Molinos. Butler, in his Life of St. John of the Cross, says that the system of perfect contemplation called Quietism chiefly turned upon the following general principles:--1. In perfect contemplation the man does not reason, but passively receives heavenly light, the mind being in a state of perfect inattention and inaction. 2. A soul in that state desires nothing, not even its own salvation; and fears nothing, not even hell itself. 3. That when the soul has arrived at this state, the use of the sacraments and of good works becomes indifferent. Pope Innocent XI., in 1687, condemned sixty-eight propositions extracted from this author as heretical, scandalous and blasphemous. Molinos was condemned by the Inquisition at Rome, recanted his errors, and ended his life in imprisonment in 1696.

=Monaldeschi.= (Cristina and Monaldeschi.) The Marquis Monaldeschi, the grand equerry of Queen Cristina of Sweden. He was put to death at Fontainebleau by order of Cristina, because he had betrayed her.

=Monsignore the Bishop.= (Pippa Passes.) He comes to Asolo to confer with his "Intendant" in the palace by the Duomo; he is contriving how to remove Pippa from his path, when her song as she passes stings his conscience, and he punishes his evil counsellor who suggested mischief concerning her.

=Morgue, The=, at Paris. (Apparent Failure.) The place by the Seine where the dead are exposed for identification.

=Muckle-Mouth Meg= ("Big-Mouth Meg"). (Asolando, 1889.) Sir Walter Scott was a descendant of the house of Harden, and of the famous chieftain Auld Watt of that line. Auld Watt was once reduced in the matter of live stock to a single cow, and recovered his dignity by stealing the cows of his English neighbours. Professor Veitch says "the Scots' Border ancestry were sheep farmers, who varied their occupation by 'lifting' sheep and cattle, and whatever else was 'neither too heavy nor too hot.'" The lairds of the Border were, in fact, a race of robbers. Sir Walter Scott was proud of this descent, and his fame as a writer was due to his Border history and poetry. The poem describes the capture red-handed of the handsome young William Scott, Lord of Harden, who was defeated in one of these forays, and taken prisoner by Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, who ordered him to the gallows. But the Laird's dame interposed, asking grace for the callant if he married "our Muckle-mouth Meg." The young fellow said he preferred the gallows to the wide-mouthed monster. He was sent to the dungeon for a week; after seven days of cold and darkness he was asked to reconsider his decision. He found life sweet, and embraced the ill-favoured maiden.

=Muléykeh=, (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880.) A tale of an Arab's love for his horse. The story is a common one, and seems adapted from a Bedouin's anecdote told in Rollo Springfield's The Horse and his Rider. Hóseyn was despised by strangers for his apparent poverty. He had neither flocks nor herds, but he possessed Muléykeh, his peerless mare, his Pearl: he could afford to laugh at men's land and gold. In the race Muléykeh was always first, and Hóseyn was a proud man. Now, Duhl, the son of Sheybán, withered for envy of Hóseyn's luck, and nothing but the possession of the Pearl would satisfy him: so he rode to Hóseyn's tent, told him he knew that he was poor, and offered him a thousand camels for the mare. Hóseyn would not consider the proposal for a moment. "I love Muléykeh's face," he said, and dismissed her would-be purchaser. In a year's time Duhl is back again at Hóseyn's tent. This time he would not offer to buy the Pearl. He tells him his soul pines to death for her beauty, and his wife has urged him to go and beg for the mare. Hóseyn said, "It is life against life. What good avails to the life bereft?" Another year passes, and the crafty Duhl is back again--this time to steal what he can neither buy nor beg. It is night. Hóseyn lies asleep beside the Pearl, with her headstall thrice wound about his wrist By Muléykeh's side stands her sister Buhéyseh, a famous mare for fleetness too: she stands ready saddled and bridled, in case some thief should enter and fly with the Pearl. Now Duhl enters as stealthily as a serpent, cuts the headstall, mounts her, and is "launched on the desert like bolt from bow." Hóseyn starts up, and in a minute more is in pursuit on Buhéyseh. They gain on the fugitive, for Muléykeh misses the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit--the secret signs by which her master was wont to urge her to her utmost speed. Now they are neck by croup, what does Hóseyn but shout--

"Dog Duhl. Damned son of the Dust, Touch the right ear, and press with your foot my Pearl's left flank!"

Duhl did so: Muléykeh redoubled her pace and vanished for ever. When the neighbours saw Hóseyn at sunrise weeping upon the ground, he told them the whole story, and when they laughed at him for a fool, and told him if he had held his tongue, as a boy or a girl could have done, Muléykeh would be with him then:--

"'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hóseyn: 'You never have loved my Pearl.'"

=Music Poems.= The great poems dealing with music are "Abt Vogler," "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," and "Charles Avison." Other poems which are musical in a lesser degree are "Saul," "A Grammarian's Funeral," "The Serenade," "Up at a Villa," "The Heretic's Tragedy." "Balaustion's Adventure" and "Fifine" also have incidental music references.

=My Last Duchess--Ferrara.= (Published first in Bells and Pomegranates, III., under Dramatic Lyrics, with the title "Italy," in 1842; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A stern, severe, Italian nobleman, with a nine-hundred-years' name, is showing his picture gallery, to the envy of a Count whose daughter he is about to marry. He is standing before the portrait of his last duchess, for he is a widower, and is telling his companion that "the depth and passion of her earnest glance" was not reserved for her husband alone, but the slightest courtesy or attention was sufficient to call up "that spot of joy" into her face. "Her heart," said the duke, "was too soon made glad, too easily impressed." She smiled on her husband (she was his property, and that was right); she smiled on others (on every one, in fact), and that was an infringement of the rights of property which this dealer in human souls could not brook, so he "gave commands,"--"then all smiles stopped together." The concentrated tragedy of this line is a good example of the poet's power of compressing a whole life story in two or three words. The heartless duke instantly dismisses the memory of his duchess and her fount of human love sealed up "by command." "We'll go together down, sir,"--and as they descend he draws his guest's attention to a fine bronze group, and discusses the question of the dowry he is to receive with the woman who is to succeed his last duchess.

NOTE.--Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck are imaginary artists. Without very careful attention several delicate points in this poem will be lost. When the duke said "Fra Pandolf" by design, he desired to impress on the envoy, and his master the Count, the sort of behaviour he expected from the woman he was about to marry. He intimated that he would tolerate no rivals for his next wife's smiles. When he begs his guest to "Notice Neptune----taming a sea horse," he further intimated how he had tamed and killed his last duchess. All this was to convey to the envoy, and through him to the lady, that he demanded in his new wife the concentration of her whole being on himself, and the utmost devotion to his will.

=My Star.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) To one observer a beautiful star may appear in iridiscent colours unobserved by others; just as, by looking at a prism from a certain angle, we catch a play of rainbow tints which they might miss by adopting a different point of view. Where strangers see a world, the singer obtains access to a soul which opens to him all its glory, as the prism reveals the constituent colours which combine to make the cold white ray of light. The poem has been considered to be a tribute to Mrs. Browning.

=My Wife Gertrude.= See BOOT AND SADDLE.

=Naddo= (Sordello) was a troubadour, and the Philistine friend and counsellor of Sordello. He told Sordello not to try to introduce his own ideas to the world: poetry should be founded in common-sense and deal with the common ideas of mankind. The poet should, above all things, try to please his audience. People like calm and repose. He must not attempt to rise to an intellectual level his readers have not reached. Sordello, he said, should be satisfied with being a poet, and not aim at being a leader of men as well. Mr. Browning is in all this defending himself and satirising the popular view of the poet's province.

=Names, The.= A poem written for the "Show-Book" of the Shakespearean Show at the Albert Hall, May 1884, held on behalf of the Hospital for Women in the Fulham Road, London:--

"Shakespeare!--to such name's sounding, what succeeds Fitly as silence? Falter forth the spell,-- Act follows word, the speaker knows full well, Nor tampers with its magic more than needs. Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads With his soul only: if from lips it fell, Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven, and hell, Would own, 'Thou didst create us!' Nought impedes We voice the other name, man's most of might, Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love Mutely await their working, leave to sight All of the issue as--below--above-- Shakespeare's creation rises: one remove, Though dread--this finite from that infinite." ROBERT BROWNING, March 12th, 1884.

Reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette of May 29th.

The Hebrews will not pronounce the sacred tetragrammaton [Hebrew: YHWH]. They substitute Adonai in reading the ineffable name. Jahwé (with the J pronounced as Y) is the correct pronunciation of the unspeakable name. Yet the learned hold that the true mirific name is lost, the word "Jehovah" dating only from the Masoretic innovation. See a discussion of the whole matter in Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky), vol. ii. p. 398,--a work which contains a good deal of real learning mixed with infinite rubbish.

=Napoleon III.= See PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU.

=Nationality in Drinks.= Under this title we have three poems, originally published separately--namely, Claret, Tokay, and Beer. The first and second were published in Hood's Magazine, in June 1844. In 1863 the poems were brought under their present title in the Poetical Works. In Claret the fancy of the poet sees in his claret-flask, as it drops into a black-faced pond, a resemblance to a gay French lady, with her arms held beside her and her feet stretched out, dropping from life into death's silent ocean. In Tokay the bottle suggests a pygmy castle-warder, dwarfish, but able and determined, strutting about with his huge brass spurs and daring anybody to interfere with him. Beer is in memory of the beverage drunk to Nelson's memory off Cape Trafalgar: it includes an authentic anecdote given to the poet by the captain of the vessel. He said they show a coat of Nelson's at Greenwich with tar still on the shoulder, due to the habit he had of leaning one shoulder up against the mizzen-rigging.

=Natural Magic.= (Pacchiarotto and other Poems, 1876.) Hindū conjurors are exceedingly clever, and will produce a tree from apparently nothing at all, in all stages of growth. In the case described the narrator locks a nautch girl in an empty room and takes his stand at the door; in a short time the conjuror is embowered in a mass of verdure, fruit and flowers. In the same way, by the magic of a charming personality, the singer's life has been transformed from coldness and gloom to warmth and beauty. The poem illustrates the supreme power which spirit exerts over matter. The power of the ideal world, the all-absorbing influence of faith in the unseen to the Christian, is always being exerted to produce such effects in the souls of men and women whose lives are spent in the most squalid and unlovely surroundings.

="Nay, but you who do not love her."= (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, 1845; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) The first line of a song in praise of some tresses of a lady's hair. Even those who do not love her must admit she is pure gold. As for him, he cannot praise her, he loves her so much: he will leave the praise for those who do not.

=Ned Bratts.= (Published in Dramatic Idyls, first series, 1879; written at Splügen.) The story is taken from The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, by John Bunyan, the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, and published in London 1680. "At a Summer Assizes holden at Hartfort, while the Judge was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old Tod into the Court, cloathed in a green suit, with a Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom open and all in a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and being come in, he spake aloud as follows: 'My Lord,' said he, 'Here is the veriest rogue that breathes upon the face of the earth. I have been a thief from a child; when I was but a little one I gave myself to rob orchards, and to do other such-like wicked things, and I have continued a thief ever since. My Lord, there has not been a robbery committed these many years, so many miles of this place, but I have either been at it, or privy to it." The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the Justices, they agreed to indict him; and so they did, of several felonious actions, to all which he heartily confessed Guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time." In the poem, Ned Bratts, the scene is laid at Bedford. The assizes are held on a broiling day in June; the court-house is crammed; horse stealers, rogues, puritans and preachers are being tried and sentenced, when through the barriers there burst Publican Ned Bratts and Tabitha his wife, loudly confessing they were the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged," and detailing the various high crimes and misdemeanours of which they had long been guilty. He tells of the laces they had bought of the Tinker in the Bedford cage, and of

"His girl,--the blind young chit who hawks about his wares";

tells of the Book which the girl gave him, the Book her father wrote in prison, which told of "Christmas" [he meant "Christian"]. "Christmas was meant for me," he says,--he must get rid of his burden and hurry from "Destruction," which to him is Bedford town. So fearful are the converted couple that they will fall again into their old sins, and so miss Heaven's gate, they beg the judges to

"Sentence our guilty selves; so, hang us out of hand!"

Ned sank upon his knees in the old court-house, while his wife Tab wheezed a hoarse "Do hang us, please!" The Lord Chief Justice wondered what judge ever had such a case before him since the world began, and having thought the matter over, said--

"Hanging you both deserve, hanged both shall be this day!"

And so they were.

=Never the Time and the Place.= (Jocoseria, 1883.) It is impossible to doubt that in this exquisite poem is enshrined the memory of Mrs. Browning. Joy and beauty are all around, time and place are all that heart could wish, but the loved one is absent, and nothing can fill her place. Yet beyond the reach of storms and stranger they will meet! The eternal value of human love is again asserted in this poem.

=Norbert.= (In a Balcony.) The young man with whom the Queen has fallen in love, but whose heart is given to Constance.

="Not with my Soul Love."= The tenth lyric in Ferishtah's Fancies begins with these words.

=Now.= (Asolando, 1889.) The value of "the quintessential moment," a theme on which Mr. Browning frequently dilates, is emphasized in this poem--

"The moment eternal--just that and nothing more,"

when the assurance comes that love has been definitely won despite of time future and time past.

=Nude in Art, The=, is defended by the poet in Francis Furini and The Lady and the Painter.

=Numpholeptos.= (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems, 1876.) The word means "caught or entranced by a nymph." Primitive man always has invested natural objects with some form of life more or less resembling our own. The Greeks and Romans believed the hills, the woods and the streams to be the peculiar dwelling-places of nymphs, the spirits of external Nature. They were the maidens of heaven, daughters of Zeus. The nymphs of the rivers and fountains were called Naiads; those of the forests and mountains were Dryads, Hamadryads, and Oreades. Plutarch, in his Life of Aristides, says that "when the hero sent to Delphi to inquire of the oracle, he was told that the Athenians would be victorious if they addressed prayers to Jupiter, Juno, Pan, and the nymphs Sphragitides." The cave of these nymphs was "in one of the summits of Mount Cithæron, opposite the quarter where the sun sets in the summer; and it is said in that cave there was formerly an oracle, by which many who dwelt in those parts were inspired, and therefore called Nympholepti." There was an unnatural idea about a human being enchained by a nymph, just as in the Rhine legends the connection of sailors with the water maidens always brought mischief to the human being so fascinated. It was thought by the Greeks that the Nympholepti lost their reason, though they gained superior wisdom of the inferior gods. See De Quincey on the Nympholeptoi. (Works, Masson's Ed., vol. viii., pp. 438, 442.) In Mr. Browning's poem the nymph is a pure, superhuman woman creature, who has entranced a young man enamoured of her heavenly perfections. She has set him an impossible task; from the centre of pure white light she bids him trace ray after ray of light, which is broken into rainbow tints; and she bids him return to her untinctured by the coloured beams he has been compelled to traverse. The poem is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of Mr. Browning's works. It is his largest use of his favourite light metaphor--the breaking up of pure white light into the coloured rays of the solar spectrum. A ray of white light (it is unnecessary, perhaps, to explain) is composed of the seven primary colours--violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. A solar ray of light can be separated by a prism into these seven colours. These again, when painted side by side upon a disc which is rapidly revolved, are, as the poet says, "whirled into a white." The nymph dwells in a realm of this white light. Before the light reaches the young man the imperfection of the medium which conveys it, or of his soul which receives it, breaks up the white light into its constituent coloured rays. He is bidden by her to travel down each red and yellow ray line, and work in its tint, but return to her without a stain, as pure as the original beams which rayed forth from her dwelling-place. This he is unable to do. He returns again and again, exciting her disgust at his appearance; and he starts off on another path, only to return coloured by the medium in which he has lived, as before. I have discussed this poem at length in my chapter on "Browning's Science, as shown in Numpholeptos," in my Browning's Message to his Time, second edition, 1891. The poem was debated at the Browning Society on May 31st, 1891; and so many different explanations were suggested, none of them in the least satisfactory, that the meeting requested Dr. Furnivall to ask Mr. Browning's assistance in the matter. He did so, and received the following reply:--"Is not the key to the meaning of the poem in its title, νυμφοληπτος [caught or entranst by a nymph], not γυναικεραστἡς [a woman lover]? An allegory, that is, of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who, all the while, cannot quite blind himself to the demonstrable fact that the possessor of knowledge and purity obtained without the natural consequences of obtaining them by achievement--not inheritance,--such a being is imaginary, not real, a nymph and no woman; and only such an one would be ignorant of and surprised at the results of a lover's endeavour to emulate the qualities which the beloved is entitled to consider as pre-existent to earthly experience, and independent of its inevitable results. I had no particular woman in my mind; certainly never intended to personify wisdom, philosophy, or any other abstraction; and the orb, raying colour out of whiteness, was altogether a fancy of my own. The 'seven spirits' are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron,--a common image."

="Oh Love! Love!"= The lyric of Euripides in his Hippolytus (B.C. 428). Translated in J. P. Mahaffy's "Euripides," in Macmillan's Classical Writers. After quoting Euripides' two stanzas, Mr. Mahaffy says (p. 115):--"Mr. Browning has honoured me (Dec. 18th, 1878), with the following translation of these stanzas, so that the general reader may not miss the meaning or the spirit of the ode. The English metre, though not a strict reproduction, gives an excellent idea of the original one":--

I.

"Oh Love! Love, thou that from the eyes diffusest Yearning, and on the soul sweet grace inducest-- Souls against whom thy hostile march is made-- Never to me be manifest in ire, Nor, out of time and tune, my peace invade! Since neither from the fire-- No, nor the stars--is launched a bolt more mighty Than that of Aphrodité Hurled from the hands of Love, the boy with Zeus for sire.

II.

"Idly, how idly, by the Alpherian river, And in the Pythian shrines of Phœbus, quiver Blood-offering from the bull, which Hellas heaps: While Love we worship not--the Lord of men! Worship not him, the very key who keeps Of Aphrodité when She closes up her dearest chamber-portals: Love, when he comes to mortals, Wide-wasting, through those deeps of woes beyond the deep!"

=Og.= See note to Jochanan Hakkadosh in the Sonnets on the Talmudic legend of the giant Og's bones and bedstead. Jewish scholars say the Hebrew work quoted has no existence, and that Mr. Browning's stock of Hebrew was very small.[2]

=Ogniben.= (A Soul's Tragedy.) He was the astute Pope's legate who went to Faenza to suppress the insurrection. He smoothed matters by getting Chiappino to leave the city, and he then complacently went away, saying he had known "four-and-twenty leaders of revolt."

=Old Gandolf.= (The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church.) The Bishop's predecessor in his see, and the man whose tomb he desires to outdo.

=Old Pictures in Florence.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) On a warm March morning the poet from a height looks down upon Florence, gleaming in the translucent air, with all the glory of the beautiful city lying on the mountain side; and of all he saw the startling bell-tower of Giotto was the best to see. But he reproaches Giotto because he has played him false. This was unkind, as he loved him so. And this reflection, in its turn, leads him to think upon Giotto's brother artists. He recalls the ancient masters, and sees them haunting the churches and cloisters where their work was done, and lamenting the decay and neglect of their frescoes. In particular, he reflects on the wronged great soul of a painter whose work is peeling from the walls,--"a lion who dies of an ass's kick." The world wrongs its forgotten great souls, and hums round its famous Michael Angelos and its Raphaels; but perhaps they do not regard it, safe in heaven seeing God face to face, and all, as Browning hopes, attained to be poets. He thinks they can hardly be "quit of a world where their work is all to do," where the little wits have no ability to understand the relationship of artist to artist, and how one whom the world is pleased to honour derives in direct line from another who is forgotten. Not a word is heard now of men who in their day were as famous as the rest--Stefano, for example,--

"Called Nature's Ape and the world's despair For his peerless painting."

He then reflects on the development of the artist Greek art reuttered the truth of man, and Soul and Limbs, each betokened by the other, were made new in marble. Our weakness is tested by the strength, our meagre charms by the beauty of the matchless forms of Greek sculpture. This taught us the perfection of the body, but the artists one day awoke to the beauty and perfection of Soul, and then they worked for eternity, as the Greeks for time. This Greek art was perfect; these bodies could be no more beautiful. Consequently, so far there was arrest of development; they could never change, being whole and complete. Having learned all they have to teach, we shall see their work abolished. But in painting Souls, the artificer's hand can never be arrested, for soul develops eternally, and things learned on earth are practised in heaven. This is illustrated by the case of Giotto. At a stroke he drew a perfect ○. This could be done no better: it was perfect, complete, not to be surpassed. But Giotto planned a bell-tower, wonderful for beauty, but not even yet completed. The conception outran the power to bring to perfection. Round O's can be completed; campaniles are still to finish. And so the Greeks finished their bodies. The early masters who began by depicting souls have their work still to finish. Their work is not completed--can, in fact, never be finished--because the soul is infinite. No doubt, he says, the early painters had to meet the objection, "What more can you want than Greek art?" They answered, "To paint man--to make his new hopes shine through his flesh." New fears glorify his rags. To bring the invisible full into daylight, what matters if the visible go to the dogs? How much they dared, these early masters! The first of this new development, however imperfect, beats the best of the old. Then he reflects that there is a fancy which some lean to (it is an Eastern fancy, now popularised by the Theosophists), that when this life is over we shall begin a fresh succession of lives--lives wherein we shall repeat in large what here we practise in little; and so through an infinite series of lives on a scale that is to be changed. But this is not at all to the poet's mind. He thinks he has learned his lesson here. He has seen

"By the means of evil that good is best,"

and considers that the uses of labour may consequently be garnered. He hopes there is rest; he has had troubles enough. And now he turns away from abstract conceptions on this deep problem to concrete matters--to the actual men who have carved and painted the forms he loves; and he brings up the memories of Nicolo the Pisan sculptor, and of the painter Cimabue, and goes on to speak of Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo. Alas! their ghosts are watching their peeling frescoes, their blistered or whitewashed works. He recalls the names of many a draughtsman and craftsman whose works are left to stealers and dealers. Suddenly the poet remembers the grudge he has against Giotto. There was a precious little picture, which Michael Angelo eyed like a lover, which was lost, but which has just turned up; and Browning wanted it, he thinks that he ought to have been prompted by the spirit of Giotto to go to the right quarter for it, and now it is sold--to whom?--he cannot discover. But he shall have it yet, his jewel! Then he expresses his hope that Italy may soon see the last of the hated Austrian; and then what will not the new Italian republic accomplish for man and art. The Bell-tower of Giotto shall soar up to its proper stature,

"Completing Florence, as Florence Italy."

He wonders if he will be alive the morning the scaffold is taken down, and the golden hope of the world springs from its sleep.

NOTES.--Verse 8, Da Vinci: Leonardo Da Vinci, born 1452, died 1519, artist, sculptor, architect, musician, and man of letters; in addition to these he was a scientist and explorer. 9, Dello, the Florentine painter, born towards the end of the fourteenth century, registered under the name of Dello di Niccolo Delli. He was a sculptor as well as a painter, and was employed by the king of Spain: Stefano: a celebrated Italian painter of Florence (1301?-1350?); his naturalism earned him the title of "Scimia della Natura" (Ape of Nature). Vasari says, "He not only surpassed all those who preceded him in the art, but left even his master, Giotto himself, far behind. Thus he was considered, and with justice, to be the best of all the painters who had appeared down to that time." He excelled in perspective and foreshortening; Nature's Ape: Christofano Landino, in the Apology preceding his commentary on Dante, says, "Stefano is called 'The Ape of Nature' by every one, so accurately does he express whatever he designs to represent"; Vasari, Georgio, the author of the Lives of the Painters; Theseus, one of the statues of the Parthenon of Athens, now in the British Museum. 13, Son of Priam == Paris; Apollo, the snake-slayer, the Belvedere as described in the Iliad; Niobe, chief figure of the celebrated group of statues "Niobe all tears for her children," in the Uffizi gallery at Florence; the Racer's frieze of the Parthenon; dying Alexander, a fine piece of ancient Greek sculpture at Florence. 17, Giotto and the "○": Pope Benedict XI. sent a messenger to Giotto to bring him a proof of the painter's power. Giotto refused to give him any further example of his talents than a ○, drawn with a free sweep of the brush from the elbow. The Pope was satisfied, and engaged Giotto at a great salary to adorn the palace at Avignon (Professor Colvin); Campanile, the bell-tower by the side of the Duomo at Florence. This is greatly praised by Ruskin, who says: "The characteristics of power and beauty occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But altogether, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building of the world--the Campanile of Giotto." 23, Nicolo the Pisan: born between 1205 and 1207, died 1278; a sculptor and architect; Cimabue, Giotto's teacher (1240-1302), the great art reformer; Ghiberti, Lorenzo (1381-1455): he executed the wonderful bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence, which were said by Michael Angelo to be worthy to have been the gates of Paradise; Ghirlandajo, Domenico, Florentine painter (1449-98), was the son of Tommaso del Ghirlandajo. 26, Bigordi: this is stated by some to have been the family name of Ghirlandajo, but it is disputed; Sandro Botticelli, born at Florence in 1457, died 1515; a celebrated Florentine painter; "the wronged Lippino," or Filippo Lippi, known as Filippino or Lippino (1460-1505), a Florentine painter, son of Fra Lippo Lippi. Some of his pictures were attributed to other artists, hence the expression "wronged"; Frà Angelico (1387-1455)--Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole--was the great Dominican Friar-Painter of Florence, the greatest of all painters of sacred subjects. He was a most holy man, shunning all advancement, and devoted to the poor. He never painted without fervent prayer; Taddeo Gaddi: an Italian painter and architect of the Florentine school (1300-1366), son of Gaddo Gaddi; he was one of Giotto's assistants for twenty-four years; when Giotto died he carried on the work of the Campanile; intonaco, rough cast, plaster, paint; Jerome, St. Jerome, the translator of the Scriptures into Latin; Lorenzo Monaco, Don Lorenzo, painter and monk, of the Angeli of Florence. First noticed as a painter, 1410. He executed many works in the Camaldoline monastery of his order. He was highly esteemed for his goodness. Verse 27, Pollajolo, Antonio (1433-98), a great painter and sculptor of Florence. He began life, as many of the great Italian artists did, as a goldsmith; tempera, a mixture of water and the yoke of eggs--used to give body to colours: the same as distemper; Alesso Baldovinetti, a Florentine painter (1422-99): he worked in fresco and mosaic. 28, Margheritone of Arezzo, painter, sculptor, and architect (1236-1313); held in high estimation by painters who worked in the Greek manner. He was the first in painting on wood to cover the surface with canvas; barret, a cloak. 29, Zeno, the founder of the sect of the Stoics; Carlino, a painter. 30, "a certain precious little tablet," a lost picture which turned up while Mr. Browning was in Florence; Buonarroti == Michael Angelo. 31, San Spirito == "Holy Spirit," a church in Florence, so named; Ognissanti == "All Saints'," name of a church of Florence; "Detur amanti," let it be given to the lover; "Jewel of Giamschid": Byron calls it "the jewel of Giamschid," Beckford "the carbuncle of Giamschid" (see Brewer's Reader's Handbook); Persian Sofi, the name of a dynasty (1499-1736). 32, "worst side of Mont St. Gothard," the Swiss side; Radetzky, Count, field-marshal Austria (1766-1858), and famous in the wars against the insurrections against Austria by the Lombardians; Morello, a mountain near Florence; 33, Witanagemot, the great national council, the assent of which was necessary for all the laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings; so in Mrs. Browning's poem she refers to "a parliament of lovers of Italy"; Ex: "Casa Guidi": Mrs. Browning's noble poem on Italian liberty; "quod videas ante," the which see above; Loraine's, i.e., the Guises of unrivalled eminence in the sixteenth century; Orgagna (1315-76), a painter of Florence. 34, prologuize, to introduce with a formal preface; Chimæra, a fabulous animal. 35, "curt Tuscan": Tuscan is the literary language of Italy, therefore more dignified and freer from colloquialisms and vulgarisms than more modern forms; -issimo, termination of the superlative degree; Cambuscan, king of Sarra, in Tartary, the model of all royal virtues (see Brewer's Handbook); "alt to altissimo," high to the highest; beccaccia, a woodcock; "Duomo's fit ally": Giotto's lovely Bell-tower is a fit companion to the cathedral; braccia, a cubit.

="O Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird."= The first line of the invocation to the spirit of Mrs. Browning in Book I. of The Ring and the Book. Some stupid readers have thought this poem an invocation to our Lord, catching at the words "to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer, or to die." They thought they detected some familiar words heard in church; and one incompetent critic went so far as to write, "Though Lyric Love is here a quality personified, it seems to be so interchangeably with Christ.... This is the interpretation we attach to the lines, though we have heard that some interpreters have actually considered them to be addressed to his wife!" (The Religion of our Literature, by George McCrie, p. 87.) There is really no difficulty about the lines until we come to parse them. Dr. Furnivall has done this in his grammatical analysis of the poem (Browning Society's Papers, No. IX., p. 165). An old lady who had read and profited by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was advised to read Dr. Cheever's Lectures in explanation of the allegory; asked how she liked the latter work, she said she understood the Pilgrim's Progress, and hoped, before she died, to understand Dr. Cheever's interpretation. I think I understand 'O Lyric Love': I can never hope to understand Dr. Furnivall's analysis. It was called, at the time he wrote it, "Furnivall's Jubilee Puzzle."

="Once I saw a Chemist take a Pinch of Powder"= (Ferishtah's Fancies). The first line of the eighth lyric.

=One Way Of Love.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A song of unrequited love. The lover has strewn the month's wealth of June roses on his lady's path: she passes them without notice. For months he has striven to learn the lute: she will not listen to his music. His whole life long he has learned to love, and he has lost. Let roses lie, let music's wing be folded: he will but say how blest are they who win her. A noble, dignified way of accepting defeat in love! Another Way of Love is a sequel to this poem. In this case the roses of June are actually tiresome to the man to whom they are offered. The woman in the first poem did not notice her roses, the man in the sequel confesses himself weary of their charms. His lady is satirical at his expense, and severely says he may go, and she will be recompensed if June mend the bower which his hand has rifled. June may also bestow her favours on a more appreciative recipient. She may also revenge herself by the lightning she uses to clear away insects and other rose-bower spoilers.

NOTE.--Verse 2, Eadem semper, always the same.

=One Word More.= (To E. B. B. [Elizabeth Barrett Browning], 1855.) This poem was originally appended to the collection of poems called Men and Women (q.v.) Browning's Men and Women, containing amongst other noble poems his Epistle to Karshish, Cleon, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Andrea del Sarto, were fifty in number, and the concluding poem, One Word More, formed the dedication to his wife. The volume was in one sense a return for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, in which she poured out her love to Mr. Browning. In this poem he not less warmly declares his love for his wife, his "moon of poets." The dedication is happy, because his interest in men and women had been quickened and deepened by his marriage. They had studied human nature together, and each poetic soul had reacted upon the other. He explains why he has desired to give something of his best, some gift which is not a gift to the world but to the woman he loves; and as the meanest of God's creatures--

"Boasts two soul-sides: one to face the world with One to show a woman when he loves her!"

The poor workman, the most unskilful artisan, will strive to do something which shall express his utmost effort, to present to his love, and the greatest geniuses of the world have been actuated by a similar motive. Raphael, not content with painting, must pour out his soul in poetry for the woman of his heart (did she love the volume of a hundred sonnets all her life?), and Mr. Browning says he and his poet-wife would rather read that volume than wonder at the Madonnas by which his name will be ever known. But that volume will never be read. Guido Reni treasured it, but, as treasures do disappear, it vanished. Dante once proposed to paint for Beatrice an angel--traced it perchance with the corroded pen with which he pricked the stigma in the brow of the wicked--"Dante, who loved well because he hated": hating only wickedness, and that because it hinders loving. Mr. Browning would rather study that angel than read a fresh Inferno, but that picture we shall never see. No artist lives and loves who desires not for once and for one to express himself in a language natural to him and the occasion, but which to others is but an art; and so the painter will forgo his painting and write a poem, the writer will try to paint a picture "once and for one only"--

"So to be the man and leave the artist."

Why is this? When a man comes before the world as leader, teacher, prophet, artist or poet, in any capacity which is his proper business, he is open to the unsympathetic criticism of a world which is ever exacting and always ungrateful in exact proportion to the magnitude of the work done for it. Under these circumstances the real self in the man seldom appears; when, however, he presents himself before the sympathetic soul of the woman who loves him, he no longer works for the critic, no longer acts a part, no longer appears in a character distasteful to himself. When Moses smote the rock and saved the Israelites, he had mocking and sneering for his reward: the ungrateful and unbelieving multitude behaved after their manner. Could Moses forget the ancient wrong he bore about him? Dare the man ever put off the prophet? But were there in all that crowd a woman's face--a woman he could love--he would for her sake lay down the wonder-working rod, for he would be as the camel giving up its store of water with its life. But the poet says he shall never paint pictures, carve statues, nor express himself in music: for his wife he stands on his power of verse alone, and so he bids her take the lines of this love poem, which he has written for her, as the artist in fresco will steal a hair-pencil and cramp his spirit into missal painting for his lady, and the musician who sounds the martial strain will breathe his love through silver to serenade his princess; so he--the Browning men knew for other work--may this once whisper a love song to the ear of his wife. He will speak to her not dramatically, as he spoke in the poems in his book, but in his own true person. She knows him under both aspects, as the moon of Florence is the same which shines in London, though she has put off her Italian glory, and hurries dispiritedly through the gloomy skies of England. Could the moon really love a mortal, she has a side she could turn towards him, unseen as yet by herdsman or astronomer on his turret. Dumb to Homer, to Keats even, she would speak to him. And so the poet has for his love

"A side the world has never seen,"

the novel

"Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of."

NOTES.--Verse 2, Century of Sonnets. I can find no evidence that Raphael wrote a hundred sonnets. Some three, or at most four, are all about which I can find anything. Michael Angelo wrote many impassioned sonnets, and was undoubtedly a fine poet; but if Raphael wrote many sonnets, they are, as Mr. Browning says, lost. Probably the whole story is an example of poetical licence. There is a very mediocre sonnet (as Mr. Samuel Waddington describes it in the notes to his Sonnets of Europe) by Raphael, which he has inscribed on one of his drawings now exhibited at the British Museum:--

SONNET.

BY RAPHAEL.

"Un pensier dolce erimembrare e godo Di quello assalto, ma più gravo el danno Del partir, ch'io restai como quei c'anno In mar perso la stella, s'el ver odo. Or lingua di parlar disogli el nodo A dir di questo inusitato inganno Ch' amor mi fece per mio grave afanno, Ma lui più ne ringratio, e lei ne lodo. L'ora sesta era, che l'ocaso un sole Aveva fatto, e l'altro sur se in locho Ati più da far fati, che parole. Ma io restai pur vinto al mio gran focho Che mi tormenta, che dove lon sole Desiar di parlar, più riman fiocho."

"There are also two other sonnets," says Mr. Waddington, "attributed to Raphael, but they can hardly be considered worthy of his illustrious name." Raphael's "lady of the sonnets" was Margherita (La Fornarina), the baker's daughter, of whom Raphael was devotedly fond, and whose likeness appears in several of his most celebrated pictures. "Else he only used to draw Madonnas:" Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Madonna, gives the following list of Raphael's famous Madonnas: del Baldacchino, delle Candelabre, del Cardellino, della Famiglia Alva, di Foligno, de Giglio, del Passeggio, dell' Pesce, della Seggiola, di San Sisto. Verse 3, "Her San Sisto names": the Madonna di S. Sisto is the glory of the Dresden gallery. Little is known of its history; no studies or sketches of it exist. It much resembles the Madonna di Foligno, but is less injured by restoration. "Her, Foligno": the Madonna di Foligno was dedicated by Sigismund Corti, of Foligno, private secretary to Pope Julius II., and a distinguished patron of learning. Sigismund, having been in danger, vowed an offering to Our Lady, to whom he attributed his escape. The picture is in the Vatican. It was painted in 1511. "Her that visits Florence in a Vision": Mr. Browning, in a letter to Mr. W. J. Rolfe, said: "The Madonna at Florence is that called del Granduca, which represents her 'as appearing to a votary in a vision'--so say the describers; it is in the earlier manner, and very beautiful." It is in the Pitti Palace, Florence. Painted about 1506. "Her that's left with lilies in the Louvre" (Paris): on this Mr. Browning explained that, "I think I meant La Belle Jardinière--but am not sure--from the picture in the Louvre." This is a group of three figures: the Mother and Child and St. John. Painted in 1508. Verse 4, "That volume Guido Reni ... guarded": this does not appear to have been a book of Sonnets, as Browning says, but a volume with a hundred designs drawn by Raphael. Reni left this book to his heir Signorini. Verse 5, "Dante once prepared to paint an angel": Dante was master of all the science of his time. He was a skilful draughtsman, and tells us that on the anniversary of the death of Beatrice he drew an angel on a tablet. He was an intimate friend of Giotto, who has recorded that it was from him he drew the inspiration of the allegories of Virtue and Vice for the frescoes of the Scrovegni Palace at Padua. He was also a musician. Verse 7, Bice is Beatrice, Dante's "gentle love." Verse 9, "Egypt's flesh-pots" (Exod. xvi. 3). Verse 10, "Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance" (Exod. xxxiv. 29, 30). Verse 11, Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses (Exod. iii. 1); "Æthiopian bond-slave" (Numb. xii. 1). Verse 14, "Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the Fifty": there is a distinct caution here to those who seek for Browning's real opinions on religion and the various subjects with which he deals, that he is speaking dramatically in these poems, and not "in his true person." Verse 15, Samminiato == San Miniato, a well-known church in Florence. Verse 16, "Zoroaster on his terrace": the celebrated founder of the doctrine of the Persian Magi. Very little is known about him personally, but his religion is well understood. Ancient historians say he lived five thousand years before the Trojan War. His scriptures are the Zend Avesta. He studied at night the aspect of the heavens. "Galileo on his turret": Galileo, as an astronomer, required an observatory. Keats: Browning was much influenced by "the human rhythm" of Keats. There is abundant trace of this in Pauline, and in the second of the Paracelsus songs, "Heap cassia, sandal-buds, etc." "Moonstruck mortal": see Keats' poem Endymion, the fable of Endymion's amours with Diana, or the Moon. The fable probably originated from Endymion's study of astronomy requiring him to pass the night on a high mountain, to observe the heavenly bodies. "Paved work of a sapphire" (Exod. xxiv. 10). Mr. W. M. Rossetti explains some of the allusions in this poem in the Academy for January 10th, 1891:--"I understand the allusions, but Browning is far from accurate in them. 1. Towards the end of the Vita Nuova, Dante says that, on the first anniversary of the death of Beatrice, he began drawing an angel, but was interrupted by certain people of distinction, who entered on a visit. Browning is therefore wrong in intimating that the angel was painted 'to please Beatrice.' 2. Then Browning says that the pen with which Dante drew the angel was perhaps corroded by the hot ink in which it had previously been dipped for the purpose of denouncing a certain wretch--i.e., one of the persons named in his Inferno. This about the ink, as such, is Browning's own figure of speech not got out of Dante. 3. Then Browning speaks of Dante's having 'his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked,' etc. This refers to Inferno, Canto 32, where Dante meets (among the traitors to their country) a certain Bocca degli Abati, a notorious Florentine traitor, dead some years back, and Dante clutches and tears at Bocca's hair to compel him to name himself, which Bocca would much rather not do. 4. Next Browning speaks of this Bocca as being a 'live man.' Here Browning confounds two separate incidents. Bocca is not only damned, but also dead; but further on (Canto 33) Dante meets another man, a traitor against his familiar friend. This traitor is Frate Alberigo, one of the Manfredi family of Faenza. This Frate Alberigo was, though damned, not, in fact, dead; he was still alive, and Dante makes it out that traitors of this sort are liable to have their souls sent to hell before the death of their bodies. A certain Bianca d'Oria, Genoese, is in like case--damned but not dead. 5. Browning proceeds to speak of 'the wretch going festering through Florence.' This is a relapse into his mistake--the confounding of the dead Florentine Bocca degli Abati with the living (though damned) Faentine and Genoese traitors, Frate Alberigo and Bianca d'Oria, who had nothing to do with Florence."

=On the Poet, Objective and Subjective; on the latter's Aim; on Shelley as Man and Poet.= By Robert Browning. (The introductory essay to Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Moxon: 1852.) Dr. Furnivall says: "The cause of Browning's writing this essay was (I believe) as follows:--In or before 1851, a forger clever enough to take in the publishers wrote some 'letters of Shelley and Byron.' Moxon bought the forged Shelley letters, and John Murray the Byron ones. Before they were proved spurious, Moxon printed the Shelley letters, and got Browning to write an introductory essay to them. Murray was slower, and, by the discovery of the forgery, was saved the exposure and annoyance that Moxon incurred in publishing, and then having to suppress, his book. The spurious Shelley letters were, as might have been expected, nugatory, barren of any new revelations of Shelley's character. Browning could actually make nothing of them, and therefore wrote his Essay, not on the Letters, but on the two classes of poets, objective and subjective, and on Shelley. He wanted a chance of writing on the poet he admired; the Letters gave him the chance; and, being told that they were genuine, he accepted them as such without inquiry. Moreover, being in Paris at the time, he had no opportunity of consulting English experts, had even any suspicion of forgery crossed his mind. The worth of his Essay is no way weakened by its having been set before spurious letters." A brief extract from Mr. Browning's Essay will indicate his estimate of the poetic method which he selected as his own. Speaking of the subjective poet, he says: "He, gifted like the objective poet with the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees--the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly in the Divine Hand--it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands--preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak. Such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibres naked to the chalk and stone. He does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes to see those pictures on them. He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner; and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality,--being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated." In these words we have not only Mr. Browning's defence of his work (if any could be needed), but an explanation of the reason why he seems as much interested in dissecting the soul of a villain or a scamp as of a saint and hero. Count Guido in his complex wickedness, brooding in his prison cell, is more interesting to such an analyst than Pompilia fluttering her wings on the borders of heaven. The old roué in the Inn Album, has root fibres worth tracing till they grip the stones. Simple old Rabbi Ben Ezra has nothing to dissect; his innocent soul lies basking in the smile of God. He has nothing to do with him but sit at his feet and listen. This "Essay on Shelley" has been reprinted and published in Part I. of the Browning Society's Papers.

=Optimism.= Browning's optimism is that which perhaps more than anything else distinguishes his whole work from first to last. Most eloquently has this been acknowledged by James Thomson, a pessimist of the pessimists. Unhappily he could not himself feel this confidence in "everything being for the best in the best of all possible worlds," but he could admire it in another. "Browning," he said, "has conquered life, instead of being conquered by it: a victory so rare as to be almost unique, especially among poets in these latter days." It would be easy to give examples of Browning's optimism, which would fill many pages of this work. The following will suffice:--

"God's in His heaven--all's right with the world!" Song in "Pippa Passes."

"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." Abt Vogler.

"Let us cry 'All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'" Rabbi Ben Ezra.

"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.

=Orchestrion.= The musical instrument invented by Abt Vogler (q.v.).

=Ottima.= (Pippa Passes.) The woman who, with her paramour Sebald, murdered her husband Luca.

="Overhead the Tree-Tops meet."= (Pippa Passes.) Pippa sings these words as she passes the Bishop's house.

="Over the Sea our Galleys went."= (Paracelsus.) The hero sings the song of which these are the opening words in Part IV., Paracelsus Aspires.

=Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper.= (Published July 1876, in a volume with Other Poems.) They were: "At the Mermaid," "Home," "Ship," "Pisgah-Sights," "Fears and Scruples," "Natural Magic," "Magical Nature," "Bifurcation," "Numpholeptos," "Appearances," "St. Martin's Summer," "Hervé Riel," "A Forgiveness," "Cenciaja," "Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial," "Epilogue."

=Pacchiarotto= (or =Pacchiarotti=) =Jacopo=, has been confused in history with =Girolamo del Pacchia=, and this fact is referred to in the beginning of the poem. The following account of these painters, who lived about the same time, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, will help to clear the way for the comprehension of this rather difficult poem,--difficult not on account of the story, which is told clearly enough, but for the extraneous matter with which it is intermingled.

[THE MAN.] "Pacchia, Girolamo Del, and Pacchiarotto (or Pacchiarotti) Jacopo. These are two painters of the Sienese school, whose career and art-work have been much mis-stated till late years. One or other of them produced some good pictures, which used to pass as the performance of Perugino; reclaimed from Perugino, they were assigned to Pacchiarotto; now it is sufficiently settled that the good works are by G. del Pacchia, while nothing of Pacchiarotto's own doing transcends mediocrity. The mythical Pacchiarotto, who worked actively at Fontainebleau, has no authenticity. Girolamo del Pacchia, son of a Hungarian cannon-founder, was born probably in Siena, in 1477. Having joined a turbulent club named the Bardotti, he disappeared from Siena in 1535, when the club was dispersed, and nothing of a later date is known of him. His most celebrated work is a fresco of the Nativity of the Virgin, in the chapel of St. Bernardino, Siena: graceful and tender, with a certain artificiality. Another renowned fresco, in the church of St. Catherine, represents that saint on her visit to St. Agnes of Montepulciano, who, having just expired, raises her foot by miracle. In the National Gallery of London there is a Virgin and Child. The forms of G. del Pacchia are fuller than those of Perugino (his principal model of style appears to have been in reality Francialigio); the drawing is not always unexceptionable. The female heads have sweetness and beauty of feature, and some of the colouring has noticeable force. Pacchiarotto was born in Siena in 1474. In 1530 he took part in the conspiracy of the Libertini and Popolani, and in 1533 he joined the Bardotti. He had to hide for his life in 1535, and was concealed by the Observantine fathers in a tomb in the church of St. John. He was stuffed in close to a new-buried corpse, and got covered with vermin and dreadfully exhausted by the close of the second day. After a while he resumed work. He was exiled in 1539, but recalled in the following year; and in that year, or soon afterwards, he died. Among the few extant works with which he is still credited is an Assumption of the Virgin, in the Carmine of Siena."

[THE POEM.] Pacchiarotto must needs take up "Reform." He thought it was his vocation to set things in general to rights. The world he considered needed reforming, and he was quite ready to undertake the task. He found mankind stubborn, however, and not much inclined to listen to him. So he constructed himself a workshop, and painted its walls in fresco with all sorts and conditions of men, from beggar to noble. He drew kings, clowns, popes, emperors, priests, and ladies; then washed his brushes, cleaned his pallet, took off his working dress, and began to lecture his figures which he had painted. He put arguments into their mouths, and of course readily refuted them. He found his figures very meek and complaisant, and he had no trouble at all in disposing of their replies to his own satisfaction. He stripped them one by one of their "cant-clothed abuses," exposed the sophistry of their excuses, and left their vices without a leg to stand upon. Paint-bred men being so easily upset, he was now prepared to deal with those of flesh and blood, so he wished mortar and paint good-bye and descended to the streets. It happened just at this time that there fell upon Siena a famine. This public distress afforded our artist his opportunity: he blamed the authorities for the famine, and set himself to the task of teaching them to manage things better. Now, there was at that time a club of disaffected citizens, who called themselves Bardotti, or "spare-horses"--those which walk by the side of the waggon drawn by the working team--horses doing nothing to draw the load, but ready in case of emergency. Such were these gentry; they did not work, but they were ready for such an emergency as the present. And their advice to the authorities was simply to turn things upside down, make servant master, poverty wealth, and wealth poverty; then things would be righted. Pacchiarotto placed himself in the midst of these folk, and suggested that what they wanted was the right man in the right place, and he was the right man. The words were not out of his mouth ere the Spare-Horses flew at him, and he had to run for his life. Looking everywhere for some place of shelter, he found himself at the cemetery of a Franciscan monastery; and the only place where he could hide himself with safety from the pursuers was in a vault with a recently-buried corpse, so he was obliged to creep through a hole in the brickwork and habituate himself to the strange bedfellow. In this stinking atmosphere, and covered with vermin from the corpse, he lay in misery for two days, praying the saints to set him free, and promising for ever to abandon the attempt to preach change to his fellow-citizens. When he was starved into sanity, he scrambled out of this loathsome hiding-place, looking like a spectre, only much more "alive." He then found his way to the superior of the brotherhood, who had him well cleansed and rubbed with odoriferous unguents. They fed him, clothed him, and then he told his story all unvarnished. Be sure the good monk gave him sound advice. He told him how he had had hopes of converting men by his own preaching, and how hard he had found the task. He had come to the conclusion that work for work's sake was the real need of men: let men work, but not dream, and they would succeed; if present success merely were intended, heaven would begin too soon. He advised him not to be a spare-horse, but a working-horse--to stick to his paint brush and work for his living. Pacchiarotto was mute; he had no need of conversion. He was reformed already, not by a live man's arguments, but by the dead thing--the clay-cold grinning corpse, that had asked him why he was in such a hurry to leave the warm light and join him in the grave. The corpse had told him how earth was a place of rehearsal, at which things seldom go smoothly. The Author, no doubt, had His reasons, which would come out when the play was produced. Meanwhile he advised him not to interfere with its production; he was suffering from a swelling called Vanity, which he would prick and relieve him of. And so Pacchiarotto, having partaken of the monks' good cheer, was restored to sanity and said good-bye. Mr. Browning now addresses his critics. He has told them a plain story, and tried therewith to content them. He considers them as an assembly of May-day sweeps, with tongs and bellows, calling at his house and announcing themselves as

"We critics as sweeps out your chimbly!"

They relieve his flue of the soot, suggest that he burns a deal of coal in his kitchen, and the neighbours do say he ought to consume his own smoke! Browning tells them that his housemaid says they bring more dirt into the house than they remove. But he will not be hard upon them: "'twas God made you dingy," he says. He will give them soap, however, and let them dance away and make a rattle with their brushes, which is a large share of their whole business, he thinks. He bids them not trample his grass, and flings out a liberal largess and bids them be off, or his housemaid will serve them as Xantippe served Socrates once; she will take the first thing that comes to her hand.

NOTES.--Verse 2, "my Kirkup": this was Baron Kirkup, an admirer of art and letters, who was on friendly terms with Browning at Florence. He received a title of nobility from the King of Italy for his services to literature. It was he who discovered Dante's portrait in the Bargello at Florence. San Bernardino: St. Bernardino of Siena became, at the age of twenty-three, one of the most celebrated and eloquent preachers among the Franciscans, but he refused all ecclesiastical honours. He founded the Order of the "Observants" (see note to v. 17). He was born 1380. Bazzi: the Italian painter Giannantonio Bazzi (who, until recent years, was erroneously named Razzi) bore the name "Sodona" or "Il Sodoma," as a family name, and signed it upon some of his pictures. Bazzi was corrupted into Razzi, and "Sodona" into "Sodoma." He lived c. 1479-1549. Beccafumi: a distinguished painter of the Siena school, who lived at the beginning of the sixteenth century. v. 3, Sopra sotto, topsy-turvy. v. 5, Quiesco, I rest; "priest armed with bell, book, and candle": in the major excommunication the bell is rung, the sentence read from the book, and the lighted candle extinguished. v. 6, frescanti, painters in fresco. v. 8, Boanerges: sons of Thunder--an appellation given by Jesus Christ to His disciples James and John. v. 9, Juvenal: the celebrated Roman satirist; flourished at Rome in the latter half of the first century. He severely chastised the follies and vices of his times. He was particularly outspoken concerning the licentiousness of the Roman ladies. "Quæ nemo dixisset in toto, nisi (ædepol) ore illoto": which things no one would have spoken about fully, unless (by Gad) he had a dirty mouth. (Juvenal's satires about the Roman ladies are inconceivably filthy, and if the things were true it was ill to speak of them in this manner. St. Paul was equally severe, but adopted another method.) Apage: away! begone! v. 11, "non verbis sed factis": not by words but by deeds. v. 12, "fetch grain out of Sicily": Sicily has always been famous for its wheat. Even at the present day the best wheat for making Naples macaroni comes from this beautiful island, and the people take in return the inferior wheat of Italy. Sicily was in ancient times sacred to Ceres, the goddess of the corn-lands. v. 13, "Freed Ones," "Bardotti": a revolutionary club so called, which was broken up by the authorities in 1535. Pacchia and Pacchiarotto both seem to have had some connection with it; bailiwick: the precincts in which a bailiff has jurisdiction. v. 15, "kai tà loipa," Και τα λειπομενα == and so forth; kappas, taus, lambdas (κ.τ.λ.): the initial letters of the above Greek words, commonly used in learned books. v. 16, "per ignes incedis": thou art treading upon fires. Not quite correctly quoted, as to the order of the words, from Horace (Od. II. i. 6), "Et incedis per ignes, suppositos cineri doloso." v. 17, St. John's Observance: "The Italians call the Franciscans Osservanti, in France Pères ou Frères de l'Observance, because they observed the original rule as laid down by St. Francis, went barefoot, and professed absolute poverty. This order became very popular" (Mrs. Jameson's Monastic Orders). v. 18, "haud in posse sed esse mens": mind as it is, not as it might be. v. 21, thill-horse, a thiller horse, a horse which goes between the shafts, or thills. v. 22, imposthume, an abscess or boil. v. 23, "sæculorum in sæcula!" for ever and ever; Benedicite: Bless ye! May you be blessed. v. 27, aubade [Fr.], open-air music performed at daybreak before the window of the person whom it is intended to honour. v. 27, skoramis, a vessel of dishonour. v. 28, karterotaton belos, the strongest dart (see Pindar's 1st Olympic Ode). "which Pindar declares the true melos" == mode. ad hoc, hitherto. os frontis, the forehead. "hebdome, hieron emar," the seventh, the holy day. "tei gar Apollona chrusaora, egeinato Leto": on which the golden-sworded Apollo was born of Latona.

=Painting Poems.= The great poems of this class are Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, and Fra Lippo Lippi. (Vasari's Lives of the Painters should be read in connection with the poems which deal with the Italian artists.)

=Palma.= The heroine of Sordello. She was the daughter of Eccelino, the Ghibelline, by Agnes Este. The historical personage represented by Browning's Palma was Cunizza.

=Pambo.= (Jocoseria, 1883.) The poem is based upon a passage in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus, Lib. iv., cap. xviii., "concerning Ammon the Monk, and divers religious men inhabiting the Desert." In the time of St. Antony, in the Nitrian desert, A.D. 373, there was a monk named "Pambo, a simple and an unlearned man, who came unto his friend to learn a Psalm; and hearing the first verse of the thirty-ninth Psalm, which is there read: 'I said, I will take heed unto my ways, that I offend not with my tongue'--would not hear the second, but went away saying, 'This one verse is enough for me, if I learn it as I ought to do.' And when his teacher blamed him for absenting himself a whole six months, he answered for himself that he had not well learned the first verse. Many years after that, when one of his acquaintances demanded of him whether he had learned the verse, he said again, that in nineteen years he had scarce learned in life to fulfil that one line." His life is taken from Palladius, in Lausiac and Rufin. Hist. Patr. Sozomen. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, under the date September 6th, gives the following interesting account of the character, whose history was apparently only partially known by Mr. Browning, as in the second verse of the poem he says he does not know who he was:--"St. Pambo betook himself in his youth to the great St. Antony in the desert, and, desiring to be admitted among his disciples, begged he would give him some lessons for his conduct. The great patriarch of the ancient monks told him he must take care always to live in a state of penance and compunction for his sins, must perfectly divest himself of all self-conceit, and never place the least confidence in himself or in his own righteousness; must watch continually over himself, and study to act in everything in such a manner as to have no occasion afterward to repent of what he had done; and that he must labour to put a restraint upon his tongue and his appetite. The disciple set himself earnestly to learn the practice of all these lessons. The mortification of gluttony was usually laid down by the fathers as one of the first steps towards bringing the senses and the passions into subjection: this, consisting in something exterior and sensible, its practice is more obvious, yet of great importance towards the reduction of all the sensual appetites of the mind, whose revolt was begun by the intemperance and disobedience of our first parents. Fasting is also, by the Divine appointment, a duty of the exterior part of our penance. What a reproach are the austere lives which so many saints have led to those slothful and sensual Christians whose god is the belly, and who walk enemies to the Cross of Christ, or who have not courage, at least by frequent self-denials, to curb this appetite! No man can govern himself who is a slave to this base gratification of sense. St. Pambo excelled most other ancient monks in the austerity of his continual fasts. The government of his tongue was no less an object of his watchfulness than that of his appetite. A certain religious brother to whom he had applied for advice began to recite to him the thirty-ninth psalm: 'I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue.' Which words Pambo had no sooner heard, but, without waiting for the second verse, he returned to his cell, saying that was enough for one lesson, and that he would go and study to put it in practice. This he did by keeping almost perpetual silence, and by weighing well, when it was necessary to speak, every word before he gave any answer. He often took several days to recommend consultations to God, and to consider what answer he should give to those who addressed themselves to him. By his perpetual attention not to offend in his words, he arrived at so great a perfection in this particular that he was thought to have equalled, if not to have excelled, St. Antony himself; and his answers were seasoned with so much wisdom and spiritual prudence that they were received by all as if they had been oracles dictated by heaven. Abbot Poemen said of our saint: 'Three exterior practices are remarkable in Abbot Pambo: his fasting every day till evening, his silence, and his great diligence in manual labour.' St. Antony inculcated to all his disciples the obligation of assiduity in constant manual labour in a solitary life, both as a part of penance and a necessary means to expel sloth and entertain the vigour of the mind in spiritual exercises. This lesson was confirmed to him by his own experience, and by a heavenly vision related in the Lives of the Fathers as follows: 'Abbot Antony, as he was sitting in the wilderness, fell into a grievous temptation of spiritual darkness; and he said to God: "Lord, I desire to be saved; but my thoughts are a hindrance to me. What shall I do in my present affliction? How shall I be saved?" Soon after he rose up, and, going out of his cell, saw a man sitting and working, then rising from his work to pray; afterward sitting down again and twisting his cord, after this rising to pray. He understood this to be an angel sent by God to teach him what he was to do, and he heard the angel say to him: "Do so, and thou shalt be saved." Hereat the Abbot was filled with joy and confidence, and by this means he cheerfully persevered to the end.' St. Pambo most rigorously observed this rule, and feared to lose one moment of his precious time. Out of love of humiliations, and a fear of the danger of vain-glory and pride, he made it his earnest prayer for three years that God would not give him glory before men, but rather contempt. Nevertheless God glorified him in this life, but made him by His grace to learn more perfectly to humble himself amidst applause. The eminent grace which replenished his soul showed itself in his exterior by a certain air of majesty, and a kind of light which shone on his countenance, like what we read of Moses, so that a person could not look steadfastly on his face. St. Antony, who admired the purity of his soul and his mastery over his passions, used to say that his fear of God had moved the Divine Spirit to take up His resting-place in him. St. Pambo, after he left St. Antony, settled in the desert of Nitria, on a mountain, where he had a monastery. But he lived some time in the wilderness of the Cells, where Rufinus says he went to receive his blessing in the year 374. St. Melania the Elder, in the visit she made to the holy solitaries who inhabited the deserts of Egypt, coming to St. Pambo's monastery on Mount Nitria, found the holy abbot sitting at his work, making mats. She gave him three hundred pounds weight of silver, desiring him to accept that part of her store for the necessities of the poor among the brethren. St. Pambo, without interrupting his work, or looking at her or her present, said to her that God would reward her charity. Then, turning to his disciple, he bade him take the silver and distribute it among all the brethren in Lybia and the isles who were most needy, but charged him to give nothing to those of Egypt, that country being rich and plentiful. Melania continued some time standing, and at length said: 'Father, do you know that here is three hundred pounds weight of silver?' The Abbot, without casting his eye upon the chest of silver, replied: 'Daughter, He to whom you made this offering very well knows how much it weighs without being told. If you give it to God, who did not despise the widow's two mites, and even preferred them to the great presents of the rich, say no more about it.' This Melania herself related to Palladius. St. Athanasius once desired St. Pambo to come out of the desert to Alexandria, to confound the Arians by giving testimony to the divinity of Jesus Christ. Our saint, seeing in that city an actress dressed up for the stage, wept bitterly; and being asked the reason of his tears, said he wept for the sinful condition of that unhappy woman, also for his own sloth in the Divine service, because he did not take so much pains to please God as she did to ensnare men. When Abbot Theodore begged of St. Pambo some words of instruction: 'Go,' said he, 'and exercise mercy and charity toward all men. Mercy finds confidence before God.' To the priest of Nitria who asked him how the brethren ought to live, he said: 'They must live in constant labour and the exercise of all virtues, watching to preserve their conscience free from stain, especially from giving scandal or offence to any neighbour.' St. Pambo said, a little before his death: 'From the time that I came into this desert, and built myself a cell in it, I do not remember that I have ever ate any bread but what I had earned by my own labour, nor that I ever spoke any word of which I afterward repented. Nevertheless, I go to God as one who has not yet begun to serve Him.' He died seventy years old, without any sickness, pain, or agony, as he was making a basket, which he bequeathed to Palladius, who was at that time his disciple, the holy man having nothing else to give him. Melania took care of his burial, and having obtained this basket, kept it to her dying day. St. Pambo is commemorated by the Greeks on several days. It was a usual saying of this great director of souls in the rules of Christian perfection, 'If you have a heart, you may be saved.' The extraordinary austerities and solitude of a St. Antony or a St. Pambo are not suitable to persons engaged in the world,--they are even inconsistent with their obligations; but all are capable of disengaging their affections from inordinate passions and attachment to creatures, and of attaining to a pure and holy love of God, which may be made the principle of their thoughts and ordinary actions, and sanctify the whole circle of their lives. Of this all who have a heart are, through the Divine grace, capable. In whatever circumstances we are placed, we have opportunities of subduing our passions and subjecting our senses by frequent denials, of watching over our hearts by self-examination, of purifying our affections by assiduous recollection and prayer, and of uniting our souls to God by continual exterior and interior acts of holy love. Thus may the gentleman, the husbandman, or the shopkeeper, become an eminent saint, and make the employments of his state an exercise of all heroic virtues, and so many steps to perfection and to eternal glory."--Mr. Browning, in the last verse, addresses his critics in a jocular manner. He owns he is very much like Pambo,--he has spent much time in looking to his ways; yet, as he is so often reminded by his reviewers and critics, he still feels, he says, that he offends with his tongue!

NOTE.--"Arcades sumus ambo": "we are both alike eccentric." From Vergil's Eclogues (vii.), where Corydon and Thyrsis are described as both Arcadians.

=Pan and Luna.= (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880.) Pan was the god of shepherds, of huntsmen, and of all the inhabitants of the country. He was a monster in appearance, had two small horns on his head, his complexion was ruddy, his nose flat, and his legs, thighs, and feet and tail, were those of a goat. The god of shepherds lived chiefly in Arcadia, and he is described by the poets as frequently occupied in deceiving and entrapping the nymphs of the neighbourhood. Luna was the same as Diana or Cynthia--names given to the moon. Mr. Browning quotes from Vergil, Georgics, iii., 390, at the head of the poem the words, "Si credere dignum est" (if we may trust report), the context giving the account according to Vergil--

"'Twas thou, with fleeces milky-white, (if we May trust report) Pan, god of Arcady, Did bribe thee, Cynthia; nor didst thou disdain, When called in woody shades, to cure a lover's pain."

The legend was the poetical way of accounting for an eclipse of the moon. The naked maid-moon flying through the night sought shelter in a fleecy cloud mass caught on some pine-tree top. "Shamed she plunged into its shroud," when she was grasped by rough red Pan, the god of all that tract, who had made a billowy wrappage of wool tufts to simulate a cloud. Vergil says that Luna was a not unwilling conquest; Mr. Browning does more justice to the supposed austerity of the goddess of night. It is evident, however, that the moral of the poem is that she yielded herself to the love of Pan out of compassion. Pan exalted himself in aspiring to her austere purity; Luna voluntarily subjected herself to the lower nature out of sympathy, thus preserving her modesty by sanctifying it with sacrifice.

=Paracelsus.= [THE MAN.] Paracelsus was the son of a physician, William Bombast von Hohenheim, who taught him the rudiments of alchemy, surgery, and medicine; he studied philosophy under several learned masters, chief of whom was Trithemius, of Spanheim, Abbot of Wurzburg, a great adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. Under this teacher he acquired a taste for occult studies, and formed a determination to use them for the welfare of mankind. He could hardly have studied under a better man in those dark days. Tritheim himself was well in advance of most of the teachers of his time; he was of the Theosophists or Mystics, for they are of the same class, and probably, in their German form, derived their origin from the labours of Tauler of Strasburg, who afterwards, with "the Friends of God," made their headquarters at Basle. The mysticism which is so dear to Mr. Browning, and which perhaps finds its highest expression in the poem which we are considering, is not therefore out of place. When he left his home he went to study in the mines of the Tyrol. There, we are told, he learned mining and geology, and the use of metals in the practice of medicine. "I see," he says, "the true use of chemistry is not to make gold, but to prepare medicines." Paracelsus is rightly termed "the father of modern chemistry." He discovered the metals zinc and bismuth, hydrogen gas, and the medical uses of many minerals, the most important of which were mercury and antimony. He gave to medicine the greatest weapon in her armoury--the tincture of opium. His celebrated azoth some say was magnetised electricity, and others that his magnum opus was the science of fire. He acted as army surgeon to several princes in Italy, Belgium, and Denmark. He travelled in Portugal and Sweden, and came to England; going thence to Transylvania, he was carried prisoner to Tartary, visiting the famous colleges of Samarcand, and went thence with the son of the Khan on an embassy to Constantinople. All this time he had no books. His only book was Nature; he interrogated her at first-hand. He mixed with the common people, and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews, gipsies, and tramps, so gaining scraps of knowledge wherever he could, and giving colourable cause to his enemies to say he was nothing but a drunken vagabond fond of low company. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old country nurse than from a university lecturer, and was denounced accordingly and--naturally. If there was one thing he detested more than another, it was the principle of authority. He bent his head to no man. Paracelsus, as we find him in his works, was full of love for humanity, and it is much more probable that he learned his lessons while travelling, and mixing amongst the poor and wretched, and while a prisoner in Tartary, where he doubtless imbibed much Buddhist and occult lore from the philosophers of Samarcand, than that anything like the Constantinople drama was enacted. Be this as it may, we have abundant evidence in the many extant works of Paracelsus that he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit and doctrines of the Eastern occultism, and was full of love for humanity. A quotation from his De Fundamento Sapientiæ must suffice: "He who foolishly believes is foolish; without knowledge there can be no faith. God does not desire that we should remain in darkness and ignorance. We should be all recipients of the Divine wisdom. We can learn to know God only by becoming wise. To become like God we must become attracted to God, and the power that attracts us is love. Love to God will be kindled in our hearts by an ardent love for humanity, and a love for humanity will be caused by a love to God." In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basle, where he was fortunate in curing Froben, the great printer, by his laudanum, when he had the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, who was associated with Œcolampadius; and soon after, upon the recommendation of Œcolampadius, he was appointed by the city magnates a professor of physics, medicine and surgery, with a considerable salary; at the same time they made him city physician, to the duties of which office he requested might be added inspector of drug shops. This examination made the druggists his bitterest enemies, as he detected their fraudulent practices: they combined to set the other doctors of the city against him, and as these were exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, poor Paracelsus found himself in a hornet's nest. We find him then at Basle University in 1526, the earliest teacher of science on record. He has become famous as a physician, the medicines which he has discovered he has successfully used in his practice; he was now in the eyes of his patients at least,

"The wondrous Paracelsus, life's dispenser, Fate's commissary, idol of the schools and courts."

In 1528 we find him at Colmar, in Alsatia. He has been driven by the priests and doctors from Basle. He had been called to the bedside of some rich cleric who was ill; he cured him, but so speedily that his fee was refused. Though not at all a mercenary man (for he always gave the poor his services gratuitously) he sued the priest, but the judge refused to interfere, and Paracelsus used strong language to him, and had to fly to escape punishment. The closing scene of the drama is laid in a cell in the hospital of Salzburg. It is the year 1541, his age but forty-eight, and the divine martyr of science lies dying. Recent investigations in contemporary records have proved that he had been attacked by the servants of certain physicians who were his jealous enemies, and that in consequence of a fall he sustained a fracture of the skull, which proved fatal in a few days. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, but in 1752 his bones were removed to the porch of the church, and a monument was erected to his memory by the archbishop. When his body was exhumed it was discovered that his skull had been fractured during life. Writers on magic, of whom Dr. Hartmann is one, describe azoth as being "the creative principle in Nature; the universal panacea or spiritual life-giving air--in its lowest aspects, ozone, oxygen, etc." Much ridicule has been cast upon Paracelsus for his belief in the possibility of generating homunculi; but after all he may only mean that chemistry will succeed in bridging the gulf between the living and the not-living by the production of organic bodies from inorganic substances. Paracelsus held that the constitution of man consists of seven principles: (1) The elementary body; (2) The archæus (vital force); (3) The sidereal body; (4) The animal soul; (5) The rational soul; (6) The spiritual soul; (7) The man of the new Olympus (the personal God). Those who are familiar with Indian philosophy will recognise this anthropology as identical with its own. Paracelsus, in his De Natura Rerum, says, "The external man is not the real man, but the real man is the soul in connection with the Divine Spirit." We understand now what Mr. Browning means when he says that "knowing is opening the way to let the imprisoned splendour escape." His idea that all Nature was living, and that there is nothing which has not a soul hidden within it--a hidden principle of life--led him to the conclusion that, in place of the filthy concoctions and hideous messes that were in vogue with the doctors of his time, it was possible to give tinctures and quintessences of drugs, such as we now call active principles,--in a word, that it is more reasonable and pleasant to take a grain or two of quinine than a tablespoonful of timber. He set himself to study the causes and the symptoms of disease, and sought a remedy in common-sense methods. Mr. Browning is right when he makes him say he had a "wolfish hunger after knowledge"; and surely there never lived a man whose aim was to devote its fruits to the service of humanity more than his. There are many hints in his works that he knew a great deal more than he cared to make known. Take this example. He said: "Every peasant has seen a magnet will attract iron. I have discovered that the magnet, besides this visible power, has another and a concealed power." Again: "A magnet may be prepared out of some vital substance that will attract vitality." Mesmer, who lived nearly three hundred years after him, reaped the glory of a discovery made, as Lessing says, by the martyred fire-philosopher who died in Salzburg hospital. "Matter is the visible body of the invisible God," says Paracelsus. Matter to him was not dead. "Matter is, so to say, coagulated vapour, and is connected with spirit by an intermediate principle which it receives from the spirit." We cannot understand Paracelsus and the science of his time without a little inquiry as to what was meant by the search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and the universal medicine. It is very difficult to discern what was really intended by these phrases. Dr. Anna Kingsford, who paid considerable attention to the hermetic philosophy, says: "These are but terms to denote pure spirit and its essential correlative, a will absolutely firm, and inaccessible alike to weakness from within and assault from without." Another writer ingeniously tries to explain the universal solvent as really nothing but pure water, which has the property of more or less dissolving all the elements. His alcahest--as he termed it--as far as I can make out was nothing more than a preparation of lime; but writers of this school only desired to be understood by the initiated, and probably the words actually used meant something quite different. There was a reason for using an incomprehensible style for fear of the persecutions of the Church, and these books, like the rolls in Ezekiel, were "written within and without." Many great truths, we know, were enshrouded in symbolic names and fanciful metaphors. It is certain that Paracelsus, like his predecessors, sought to possess the elixir of life. It does not appear from his writings that he thought it possible to render the physical body immortal; but he held it to be the duty--as the medical profession holds it still--of the physician to preserve life as long as possible. A great deal of matter attributed to Paracelsus on this subject is spurious, but there are some of his authentic writings which are very curious and entertaining. He describes the process of making the Primum Ens Melissæ, which after all turns out to be nothing but an alkaline tincture of the leaves of the common British plant known as the Balm or Melissa officinalis. Some very amusing stories are told of the virtues of this concoction by Lesebure, a physician to Louis XIV., and which speak volumes for the credulity of the doctors of those times. Another of his great secrets was his Primum Ens Sanguinis. This is extremely simple, being nothing more than the venous injection of blood from the arm of "a healthy young person." In this we see that he anticipated our modern operation of transfusion. His doctrine of signatures was very curious and most absurd. He thought that "each plant was in a sympathetic relation with the Macrocosm and consequently with the Microcosm." "This signature," he says, "is often expressed even in the exterior forms of things." So he prescribed the plant we call euphrasy or "eye bright" for complaints of the eyes, because of the likeness to an eye in the flower; small-pox was treated with mulberries because their colour showed that they were proper for diseases of the blood. This sort of thing still lingers in country domestic medicine. Pulmonaria officinalis or Lungwort, so called from its spotted leaves looking like diseased lungs, has long been used for chest complaints. (See my "Paracelsus the Reformer of Medicine" in Browning's Message to his Time.)

=Paracelsus.= [THE POEM, 1835.] PARACELSUS ASPIRES: BOOK I. (Würzburg, 1512.) Paracelsus the student is talking with his friends Festus and Michal on the eve of his departure to seek knowledge of the deeper sort, that cannot be learned from books,--in the great world of men. It is a time to arouse young men. The dark night of ignorance yields to the rising sun of learning, for the art of printing and the glories of the Revival of Learning have liberated the minds of men. Authority no longer suffices: the men of Germany will see for themselves. So Paracelsus, pupil of the learned Abbot Trithemius, resolves to forsake the monastery cell and the ancient books, and go out to seek for himself knowledge in the byways of the world. His friends are timid. They mistrust his method; they call him proud and too self-confident, advise him to stick to the beaten ways of learning, nor venture into the tangled forests and pathless deserts which God has evidently closed against man's rash intrusion. Paracelsus, on the contrary, feels that he has a great commission from God: he dare not subdue the vast longings which fill his soul. God's command is laid upon him, and he must answer to His will. Festus objects that a man must not presume to serve God save in the appointed channels. God looks to means as well as ends, and Paracelsus ought not to scorn the ordinary means of learning. The impatient student suggests that his fierce energy, his striving instinct, the irresistible force which works within him, are proofs that he possesses a God-given strength never imparted in vain. He will abjure the idle arts of magic. New hopes animate him, new light dawns upon him: he is set apart for a great work. "Then," replies his friend, "pursue it in an approved retreat; turn not aside from the famed spots where Learning dwells. Rome and Athens shall teach you; leave seas and deserts to their desolation." Paracelsus declares his aspiration to be no less than a passionate yearning to comprehend the works of God, God Himself, all God's intercourse with the human mind. He goes to prove his soul. God, who guides the bird in his trackless way, will guide him: he will arrive in God's good time. His friends think that all this may be but self-delusion; at least, he is selfish to attempt this work alone. Festus declares that were he elect for such a task he would encircle himself with the love of his fellows, and not cut himself off from human weal; for there is nothing so monstrous in the world as a being not knowing what love is. Michal, the tender woman friend, urges him to cast his hopes away--warns him that he is too proud. He will find what he seeks, but will perish so! Paracelsus protests that he does not lightly give up either the pleasures of life or the love they praise. Truth, he says, is within ourselves; knowing consists in opening a way where the splendour imprisoned within the soul may escape. It comes not from outward things. He offers, therefore, no defiance to God in desiring to know. Humanity may beat the angels; yet, if once man rises to his true stature, Festus believes, and so does Michal, that Paracelsus will succeed. He plunges for the pearl; they wait his rise.

PARACELSUS ATTAINS: BOOK II. The scene is laid in a Greek conjuror's house at Constantinople, 1521. Paracelsus is mentally taking stock of his attainments--what gained, what lost. He has made discoveries, but the produce of his toil is fragmentary--a confused mass of fact and fancy. He can keep on the stretch no longer: he will learn by magic what he has failed to learn by labour. His overwrought brain demands rest; even in failure he will have rest. True, he had hoped for attainment once, but that is past. His heart was human once. He had loving friends in Würzburg; but love has gone, and his life's one idea has absorbed him, to obtain at all costs his reward in the lump. God may take pleasure in confounding such pride. He may have been fighting sleep off for death's sake. Is his mind stricken? He believes that God would warn him before He struck. And now from within he hears a voice. It is that of Aprile, the spirit of a departed poet, who has aspired to love beauty only. As Paracelsus has sought knowledge alone, Aprile would love infinitely all forms of art and all the delights of Nature. Paracelsus demands he should do obeisance to him, the Knower. Aprile refuses to acknowledge the kingship of one who knows nothing of the loveliness of life. Paracelsus now sees the error into which both have fallen. He has excluded love, as Aprile has excluded knowledge. They are two halves of one dissevered world. Paracelsus, learning now wherein lies his defect, feels that he has attained.

PARACELSUS: BOOK III. At Basle, 1526. Paracelsus meets his friend Festus, who has come to the famous university town to see the wondrous physician, whom they call "life's dispenser, idol of the courts and schools." He has heard him lecture from his Professor's chair; has seen the benches thronged with eager students; has gathered from their approving murmurs full corroboration of his hopes: his pupils worship him. Paracelsus admits his outward success, but confides to his friend that he is indeed most miserable at heart. The hopes which fed his youth have not been realised. He aspired to know God: he has attained--a professorship at Basle! He has wrought certain cures by means of drugs whose uses he has discovered; he has a pile of diplomas and licences; he has received (what he values most) a generous acknowledgment of his merit from Erasmus; and he has a crowded class-room, and, in place of his high aims, there have sprung up in his soul like fungi at the roots of a noble tree, a host of petty, vile delights. As for his eager following, mere novelty and ignorant amazement, coupled with innate dulness and the opposition to the regular system of the schools, will account for it. Seeing all this, and feeling that the work to which he has addressed himself is too hard for him, he has sunk in his own esteem, fallen from his ambition, and has become brutal, half-stupid and half-mad. He feels that he precedes his age in his contempt and scorn for all who worked before him on the same path. He has in public burned the books of Aetius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna, and Averroes.

PARACELSUS ASPIRES. BOOK IV. The scene is at Colmar, in Alsatia, at an inn, 1528. Yet once more Paracelsus aspires. He has sent for his friend Festus to tell him that he is exposed to the world as a quack, that he is cast off by those who erstwhile worshipped him, and denounced by those whom he has served. He has saved the life of a church dignitary, who not only refused afterwards to pay his fee, but made Basle impossible for him. His pupils grew tired of him when he attempted to teach them and gave up amusing them. The faculty drew off from him when their old methods were interfered with; and so he turned his back on the university. And once more the philosopher has started on his travels, seeking to know with all the enthusiasm of his youth--with the old aims, but not by the same means. No longer the lean ascetic, debarring his soul of her rightful pleasures; but embracing all the joys of life, and combining pleasure with knowledge. This is to be his new method. His appetites, he must own, are degraded--his joys impure. Festus warns him that the base pleasures which have superseded his nobler aims will never content him. Paracelsus declares he lives to enjoy all he can and to know all he can. He has cast off his remorseless care, is hardened in his fault; and as he sings the song of--

"The men who proudly clung To their first fault, and perished in their pride,"

his friend Festus, alarmed at this impiety, urges him to renounce the past, to wait death's summons amid holy sights, and return with him to Einsiedeln. Paracelsus declares this to be impossible: his baser life forbids; a sneering devil is within him; he is weary; the wine-cup, in which he has long tried to drown his disappointment, fails him now; he can hardly sink deeper. Festus attempts to comfort and advise: he too has felt sorrow: sweet Michal is dead. This rouses Paracelsus to endeavour on his part to comfort Festus by declaring his faith in the soul's immortality.

PARACELSUS ATTAINS. BOOK V. In a cell in the hospital of Salzburg, in 1541, Paracelsus lies dying. His faithful friend is by his side, watching through the weary night; and as he watches the patient, he prays for the tortured champion of man. He has sinned, but surely he has sought God's praise. Had God granted him success, it must have been to His honour. Say he erred, God fashioned him and knew how he was made. Festus could have sat quietly at the feet of God. He could never have erred in this great way. God is not made like us. It will be like Him to save him! Now Paracelsus awakes; his failing strength struggles like the flame of an expiring taper. At first, in half-delirious phrases, he tells of the hissing and contempt which struck at his heart at Basle--the measureless scorn heaped on him, as they called him quack and cheat and liar. And now he cries that human love is gone; he dreams of Aprile; he calls on God for one hour of strength to set his heart on Him and love. And then, with a clearer consciousness, he recognises Festus, who tells him that God will take him to His breast, and on earth splendour shall rest upon his name for ever,--the name of the master-mind, the thinker, the explorer. He sings of the gliding Mayne they knew so well; and the simple words loose the dying man's heart, for he knows he is dying, and his varied life drifts by him. There is time yet to speak; but he will rise and speak standing, as becomes a teacher of men. He has sinned, he feels his need for mercy, and he can trust God. It was meant to be with him as had fallen out. His fevered thirst for knowledge was born in him. He has learned so much of God: His joy in creation; His intentions with regard to man. His final work the product of the world's remotest ages; its æons of preparation; the love mingling with everything that tended towards the highest work of creation; the progress which is the law of life. The tendency to God he can descry even in man's present imperfection. He sees now where his error lay: how he overlooked the good in man; how he had failed to note the good in evil, and to detect the love beneath the mask of hate; how he had denied the half-reasons, the faint aspirings, the struggles for truth; the littleness in man, despite his errors; the upward tendency in all his weakness. All this he knew not, and he failed. Yet if he

"Stoop Into a dark, tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time."

He "shall emerge one day." And so he sinks to rest. And this is Browning's Paracelsus.

It is in Paracelsus (the work that posterity will probably estimate as Browning's greatest) that we must look for the strongest proof of his sympathy with man's desire to know and bend the forces of Nature to his service. To some students this magnificent work will appear only the string of pearls and precious stones that some of us consider Sordello to be. To others it is a drama illustrating the contending forces of love and knowledge; others, again, find in it only an elaborate discussion on the Aristotelian and Platonic systems of philosophy. It is none of these alone: rather, if a single sentence could describe it, it is the Epic of the Healer, not of the hero who stole from heaven a jealously-guarded fire, but of him who won from heaven what was waiting for a worthy recipient to take and help us to. In so far as Paracelsus came short, it was deficiency of love that hindered him; of his striving after knowledge, and what he won for man, the epic tells in words and music that, to me at least, have no equal in the whole range of literature. It is most remarkable that long before the scientific men of our time had given Paracelsus credit for the noble work he did for mankind, and the lasting boon many of his discoveries conferred upon the race, Mr. Browning, in this wonderful poem, recognised both his labours and their results at their true value, and raising his reputation at this late hour from the infamy with which his enemies and biographers had covered it, set him in his proper place amongst the heroes and martyrs of science. We owe the poet a debt of gratitude for this rehabilitation. No man could have written this transcendent poem who had less than Browning's power of thrusting aside the accidents and accretions of a character, and getting at the naked germ from which springs the life of the real man. That no follower of medicine, no chemist, no disciple of science, did this for Paracelsus is, in the splendid light of Mr. Browning's research and penetration, a remarkable instance of the fact that the unjust verdicts of a time and a class need to be reversed in a clearer atmosphere, and in freedom from class prejudices not often accorded to contemporary biographers. A poet alone could never have done us this service; and a single attentive perusal of this work is enough to show that the intimate blending of the scientific with the poetic faculty could alone have effected the restoration. How lovingly the poet has taken this world-benefactor's remains from the ditch into which his profession had cast them, and laid them in his own beautiful sepulchre, gemmed, chiselled, and arabesqued by all the lovely imagery of his fancy, no reader of Browning's Paracelsus needs to be told.

[For a complete study of the life and work of Paracelsus, and Mr. Browning's poem thereon, see the chapter "Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine," in my Browning's Message to his Time (Sonnenschein).]

NOTES TO BOOK I.--Würzburg is one of the most ancient and historically important towns of Germany. Its bishops were made dukes of Franconia in 1120. Its university was founded in 1582. Trithemius of Spanheim was abbot of Würzburg, and was a great astrologer and alchemist. Einsiedeln, in Canton Schwyz, Switzerland, is a noted place of pilgrimage on the Alpbach, thirty miles from Zurich, under the Herrenberg, with an abbey founded in 861, containing a black statue of the Virgin. Immense quantities of missals, rosaries, etc., are produced there. Zwingle was a priest here 1515-19; and not far from the town is the house where Paracelsus was born. Population now about 7650. Gier-eagle: supposed to be a small vulture (Lev. xi. 18). Black arts: Black magic == sorcery, as opposed to white magic == science. The Stagirite: Aristotle, who was born at Stagira, in Macedon.

NOTES TO BOOK II.--Constantinople, the city of the East where many astrologers practised their art. "A Turk verse along a scimitar": the Arabs use verses of the Koran in the decoration of their walls, pottery, arms, etc. The Alhambra at Granada is profusely decorated in this way. The Arabic, Persian, and Turkish letters lend themselves admirably to ornamental purposes. Arch-genethliac: a genethliac is a calculator of nativities--an astrologer.

NOTES TO BOOK III.--Pansies: if these flowers were, as is said, favourites with Paracelsus, the choice was appropriate. Pensées for "the thinker, the explorer," and "heartsease" for the anxious and overworked man. Rhasis, or Rhazes, was a distinguished physician of Bagdad (925-6). Basil == Basel, Basle. Œcolampadius, a Reformer of Basle, friend of Erasmus. Castellanus was Pierre Duchatel, a French prelate. When at Basle, Erasmus procured him employment as a corrector of the press with Frobenius. He was bishop of Tulle in 1539, of Maçon in 1544, and in 1551 of Orleans. He was a tolerant man in an intolerant age. Munsterus, a Christian Socialist, connected with the Peasants' War; executed 1525. Frobenius, the friend of Erasmus, cured by Paracelsus. He was a famous printer at Basle. Rear mice: probably a device in the arms on the gate. Lachen, a village of 1200 inhabitants, on the margin of the lake of Zurich. The holy hermit Meinrad, the founder of Einsiedeln, originally lived on the top of the Etzel, near here. "Cross-grained devil in my sword": the long sword of Paracelsus is famous:--

"Bumbastus kept a devil's bird Shut in the pummel of his sword, That taught him all the cunning pranks Of past and future mountebanks." (HUDIBRAS, Part II., Cant. 3.)

Naudæus (in his "History of Magic") observes of this familiar spirit, "that though the alchymists maintain that it was the secret of the philosopher's stone, yet it were more rational to believe that, if there was anything in it, it was certainly two or three doses of his laudanum, which he never went without, because he did strange things with it, and used it as a medicine to cure almost all diseases." "Sudary of the Virgin": a handkerchief, a relic of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Suffumigation, a medical fumigation, such as was used by Hippocrates. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam in 1466. The home of his old age was Basel, to which place he was attracted by the fame of the printing press of Frobenius. Here he made the acquaintance of Zwingle and Holbein, and other men full of the desire for learning. "Ape at the bed's foot": patients who suffer from delirium frequently see apes, rats, cats, and other animals and figures, mocking them at the foot of the bed. "Spain's cork-groves": cork is the bark of the cork-oak (Quercus suber). It grows in Spain, and is most abundant in Catalonia and Valencia. "Præclare! Optime!" == Bravo! well done! "I precede my age": it has only recently been discovered how much our modern science owes to the labours and researches of Paracelsus. Aëtius was an Arian doctor, who was very skilful in medical disputation. He died at Constantinople in 367. Oribasius was the court physician of Julian the Apostate (326-403). Galen was a great anatomist and a physiological physician. Rhasis (see note, p. 324). Serapion, an Alexandrian physician, "a great name in antiquity." Avicenna, an Arabian philosopher and physician, born about A.D. 980, who presented to his countrymen the doctrines of Galen blended with those of Aristotle. Averröes, an Arabian philosopher and physician, born at Cordova in 1126, the interpreter of the Aristotelian philosophy to the Mohammedans. Zuinglius == Zwingle the Reformer, of Zurich. Carolstadius, or Carlstadt, one of the first Reformers. He was professor of divinity at Wittemberg, and early joined Luther in the new religion. He became the leader of the fanatical sect of iconoclasts at Wittemberg, and excited them to excesses. He was banished, and died at Basle in 1541. Suabia, the name of an ancient duchy in the south-west part of Germany. Oporinus: lived two years in close intimacy with Paracelsus as his secretary, and has been suspected of defaming his memory. "Sic itur ad astra": such is the way to immortality. Liechtenfels, a canon who was cured by Paracelsus when he was in danger of death, and refused afterwards to pay the stipulated fee.

NOTES TO BOOK IV.--"Quid multa?" why say more? Cassia, an inferior kind of cinnamon. "Sandal-buds": the sandal is a low tree, like a privet, and has a great fragrance. "Stripes of labdanum" or ladanum: a fragrant, resinous exudation from the plants Cystus creticus and Cystus ladaniferus. Aloes: the fragrant resin of the agalloch or lign-aloe of Scripture. Nard == spikenard; very fragrant. "Sweetness from Egyptian shroud": the faint odour from the spices used to embalm the mummy. "Fiat experientia corpore vili," or fiat experimentum in corpore vili: Let the experiment be made on a body of no value (a hospital patient, e.g.!)

NOTES TO BOOK V.--Salzburg: the beautifully situated old city of Austria, eighty-seven miles S.E. of Munich. "Jove and the Titans": the Titans were the sons of Saturn, who made war against Jupiter; and though they were of gigantic size, they were subdued. Phæton, the son of Phœbus and Clymene, who requested his father to give him leave to drive his chariot. The rash youth was unable to bear the light and heat, and dropped the reins. To prevent a general conflagration Jupiter struck him with thunder, and he dropped into the river Eridanus. Galen of Pergamos: an eminent physician of the time of Trajan. Persic Zoroaster "was one of the greatest teachers of the East, the founder of what was the national religion of the Perso-Iranian people from the time of the Achæmenidæ to the close of the Sassanian period." He founded the wisdom of the Magi. The Zend-Avesta is the great Zoroastrian bible. "Thus he dwells in all," etc., down to "Man begins anew a tendency to God," is a faithful representation of the teaching of the Kabbalah (see Encyc. Brit., vol. xiii., p. 812, last ed.): "The whole universe, however, was incomplete, and did not receive its finishing stroke till man was formed, who is the acme of the creation and the microcosm. 'Man is both the import and the highest degree of creation, for which reason he was formed on the sixth day. As soon as man was created everything was complete, including the upper and nether worlds, for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms'" (Zohar, iii., 48).

=Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day.= To wit: Bernard de Mandeville, Daniel Bartoli, Christopher Smart, George Bubb Dodington, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison. Introduced by A Dialogue between Apollo and the Fates; concluded by Another between John Fust and his Friends. The title-page stands thus, and the following dedication is on the next page: "In Memoriam J. Milsand. Obiit iv. Sept. MDCCCLXXXVI. Absens absentem auditque videtque." Published 1887. M. Milsand was a well-known French critic, and was an early admirer of Mr. Browning's works. Sordello was dedicated to M. Milsand in its revised edition. The Parleyings volume is dealt with in a lucid and sympathetic manner in Mr. Nettleship's Essays and Thoughts.

=Parting at Morning.= See MEETING AT NIGHT, to which this poem is the sequel.

=Patriot, The.= AN OLD STORY. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A patriot who has been the people's idol, and now, having fallen from his pedestal, is on his way to execution. A year ago that very day they would have given him the sun from their skies had he asked it in that city whose air was a mist of joy bells. He strove his hardest to pluck down that sun to give them, and to-day the year is run out, and he goes bound, with bleeding forehead from the pelting stones, to the shambles. But God will repay, and he feels safe with that. It has been thought that this poem refers to Arnold of Brescia. Mr. Browning contradicted this.

=Paul Desforges Maillard.= (Two Poets of Croisic.) He is the second of the Poets, René Gentilhomme being the first. He competed for a prize at the French Academy, and was unsuccessful. The poem tells how he made his name known through his sister's influence.

=Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession= (1832). The first work of the poet, and his embryonic work, because it contains in their rudiments all the peculiarities and powers of his genius. He wrote nothing which was not the legitimate development of the forces which we see in this inchoate work. It is nebulous, but it is a nebula which has within itself the potentiality of worlds of thought. Misty and vague as it everywhere seems, it is influenced by laws which will concentrate its thought into stars and planets, such as Paracelsus, and the Ring and the Book. It is autobiographical, and admits us into the laboratory of the writer's thought; it is marvellously consistent with the latest utterances of the poet on the subjects nearest to his heart. High thoughts, which through the years of a long life will live in royal splendour in his brain, are born here in travail, as regal things are wont to be. It was a boy's work,--the poet was only twenty years old when he wrote it,--but a competent critic could have detected evidence that in the anonymous author of Pauline a psychological poet had arisen, one who determined to probe to their depths the mysteries of the human soul. From Mr. Gosse's article in The Century Magazine we learn that the young poet had produced a quantity of verses while a mere child, and had planned a number of soul-studies of a similar character to Pauline. He published the poem anonymously in 1833, when he was twenty years old. It was reprinted in 1867, with the following note: "The first piece in the series (Pauline) I acknowledge and retain with extreme repugnance, indeed purely of necessity; for not long ago I inspected one, and am certified of the existence of other transcripts, intended sooner or later to be published abroad: by forestalling these I can at least correct some misprints (no syllable is changed), and introduce a boyish work by an exculpatory word. The thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry, always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which I have written since according to a scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular dramatis persona it would fain have reproduced; good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time." With the "good draughtsmanship" and "right handling" of the work we need not concern ourselves; what is of paramount importance is the fact that in Pauline we have "the god, though in the germ." If the mature artist was ashamed of his puerile performance, his disciples have always loved and admired it, and his deeper students have delighted to trace in its pages the nuclei of principles which have in his maturer works dowered the world with a priceless treasure. The poem is a fragment of a confession from a young man to a young woman whom he loves. It concerns Pauline very little, but is the revelation of the man as a study of the poet's own naked soul. It is not a confession of deeds, but of moods and mental attitudes. He who could unpack his own heart so completely would be likely to reveal the innermost recesses of the characters with which he should deal in the future. It is the revelation of a soul all self-centred. A soul's awakening, a soul in terror at its own capabilities, desires and forces too hard to be controlled--"made up of an intensest life"--imbued with "a principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all"--a soul terrified at its own vast shadow, fearing to face its own spectres, and instinctively "building up a screen" of woman's love to be shut in with from a brood of fancies with which he dare not wrestle. Had he never left her side he had been spared this shame. He is sure of her love, though ghosts of the past haunt them. He has not the love to offer which befits her; but he has faith, and he trusts her as we trust the east for morning light. He has communed with her, but she knew not the shame which lurked behind his words and smiles, and she drove away despair from him. He has fallen, is ruined; he has felt in dreams he was a fiend chained in darkness, till, after ages had passed came a white swan to remain with him, and it contented him. And again, he had seemed to be a young witch who drew down a god to sing of heaven, and as he sang he perished grinning, but murmuring "I am still a god to thee." He has thought that his early life, his songs and wild imaginings, were the only worthy things standing out distinct amid the fever of the after years. And this was his (Shelley's) award. He, the Sun-treader, had drawn out from his worshipper the one spark of love remaining in his soul, and in his tears he praises him. He loved Shelley in his shame, and now he is renowned he watches him as a star, as one altered and worn and full of tears looks to heaven. He strips his mind bare, has a most clear consciousness of self, and recognises that of all his powers an imagination which has been an angel to him is the one which saves his soul from utter death. He feels a need, a trust, a yearning after God, which somehow is reconciled with a neglect of all he deemed His laws. He sees God everywhere, yet can love nothing; has had high dreams and low aims, and so lost himself. Then he turned to song, he gazed without fear on the works of mighty bards, for in them he recognised thoughts his own heart had also borne; then came the outburst of the soul's power, a key to a new world, a sound as of angelic mutterings. He vowed himself to liberty. Men should be gods, earth,--heaven. His soul rose to meet the new life. As one watches for a fair girl that comes forth a withered hag, so all these high-born fancies dwindled into nothing; faith in man, freedom, virtue, motives, power, human loves, all vanished. They were not missed, for wit and mockery and pleasure came in their stead. His powers grew, his soul became as a temple; only God was gone, and a dark spirit sat in His seat, and mocking shadows cried "Hail!" to him. He resolved to wear himself out with joy, then to win men's praise by undying song, and the mockery laughed out again. Then he met Pauline and knew she loved him; he looked in his heart for a love to return, and love and faith were gone, and selfishness wears him as a flame, and hunger for pleasure has become pain. Then came a craving after knowledge, as a sleepless harpy. He begins now to know what hate is. Yet with it all he has learned the great truth that his restless longings, his all encompassing selfishness, only prove that earth is not his sphere, because he cannot so narrow himself but he exceeds it. Hateful as his selfishness has grown to be, he can pass from such thoughts. Andromeda, rock-chained, awaiting the snake, causes you no fear for her safety: God will come in thunder from the stars to save her, so he will triumph over his decay; when the calm comes again after the fever has subsided, he will do something equal to his conjecture. He can project himself into all forms of Nature, live the life of plants, mount bird-like, breathe in a fish the morning air in the sun-warm water. He will build a thought-world; he is inspired. Pauline shall come with him to the world of fancy through the ghostly night and sun-warmed morning; he is concentrated, he drinks in the life of all, yet cannot be immortal for all these struggling aims. What is this passionate hunger for the All--this insatiable thirst for utmost pleasure? It is man's cry for the satisfying presence of God in his soul. The alone to the Alone; nothing intervening can give peace and rest to the spirit of man; flame-like it tends upwards to its source. The only One, the Crucified, the Risen Christ--"Christus Consolator" is recognised as the remedy for his sense of infinite loss; and as he recognises the Divine love he is united with the purest earthly soul he knows:--"Pauline, I am thine for ever." "Love me, Pauline--leave me not." And so the hideous past shall be the past, and he will go forward with her--

"Feeling God loves us, and that all that errs, Is a strange dream which death will dissipate."

Again he will go o'er the tracts of thought, again will beauteous shapes come to him and unknown secrets be divulged,--priest and lover as of old--"Shelley, Sun-treader," he cries, "I believe in God, and truth, love--I would lean on thee." Professor Johnson, in his paper on "Conscience and Art in Browning," gives the following as the theme of the poem:--"The Divine call and anointing of the poet, so to speak; his sin, which consists in a self-divorce; his decline and degradation as he sinks into the 'dim orb of self'; finally, his redemption and restoration by Divine love, mediated to him by human love."

NOTES.--"His award," "Him whom all honour," "Thou didst smile, poet," "Sun-treader" (lines 142, 144, 151, 1020): all these refer to Shelley. "A god wandering after beauty" (line 321): Apollo seeking Daphne. Apollo pursued Daphne, who fled from him, seeking the aid of the gods, who changed her into a laurel. "A giant standing vast in the sunset" (line 322): Atlas, one of the Titans, is referred to here.

"_A high-crested chief Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos_" (line 324):

"After the fall of Troy, many of the Greek chiefs, among them Nestor, set sail for home, while others, at the desire of Agamemnon, remained behind to sacrifice to Pallas. Those who set sail went to the island of Tenedos, where they made offerings to the gods" (Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 244; Homer, Odyssey, iii.). "The dim clustered isles in the blue sea" (line 321): the islands of the Ægean Sea, east of Greece.

"_Who stood beside the naked swift-footed, Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair_" (line 334):

the swift-footed was Hermes, the name of Mercury among the Greeks. He was the messenger of the gods. He was presented by the King of Heaven with a winged cap, called petasus, and with wings for his feet, called talaria. Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres by Jupiter. "As Arab birds float sleeping in the wind" (line 479): this is considered by some to refer to the pelican, by others to the Birds of Paradise.

"_The king Treading the purple calmly to his death_" (line 568):

Agamemnon, to whom his loved Cassandra foretells his doom in vain:--

"Well, sire, I yield me vanquished by thy voice; I go, treading on purple, to my house." (Potter's "Agamemnon" of Æschylus, 1017.)

"The boy with his white breast," etc. (line 574): see Potter's "Choephoræ" of Æschylus, 1073: Orestes avenged his father's death by assassinating his mother Clytemnestra and the adulterer Ægisthus. Andromeda (line 656): Andromeda was ordered to be exposed to a sea-monster, and was tied naked to a rock; but Perseus delivered her, changed the monster into a rock, and married her. "The fair pale sister went to her chill grave" (line 963): Antigone interred by night the remains of her brother Polynices against the orders of Creon, who commanded her to be buried alive. She, however, killed herself before the sentence could be executed (see "Antigone" of Sophocles). The long Latin preface to Pauline from the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius-Agrippa is thus englished in Mr. Cooke's Browning Guide-Book:--"I doubt not but the title of our book, by its rarity, may entice very many to the perusal of it. Among whom many of hostile opinions, with weak minds, many even malignant and ungrateful, will assail our genius, who in their rash ignorance, hardly before the title is before their eyes, will make a clamour. We are forbidden to teach, to scatter abroad the seeds of philosophy, pious ears being offended, clear-seeing minds having arisen. I, as a counsellor, assail their consciences; but neither Apollo nor all the Muses, nor an angel from heaven, would be able to save me from their execrations, whom now I counsel that they may not read our books, that they may not understand them, that they may not remember them, for they are noxious--they are poisonous. The mouth of Acheron is in this book: it speaks often of stones: beware, lest by these it shape the understanding. You, also, who with fair wind shall come to the reading, if you will apply so much of the discernment of prudence as bees in gathering honey, then read with security. For, indeed, I believe you about to receive many things not a little both for instruction and enjoyment. But if you find anything that pleases you not, let it go that you may not use it, for I do not declare these things good for you, but merely relate them. Therefore, if any freer word may be, forgive our youth; I, who am less than a youth, have composed this work." The preface is dated London, January 1833. V.A. XX. is the Latin abbreviation of Vixi annos viginti, I was twenty years old.

=Pearl, A, a Girl.= (Asolando, 1889.) According to Eastern fable there is a great power in a pearl: if you could speak the right word, you could call a spirit from the simple-looking stone which would make you lord of heaven and earth. Be this as it may, the poet says if you utter the right word, that evokes for you the love of a girl--held, perhaps, in little esteem by the world--her soul escapes to you, and you are creation's lord!

="Periods" of Browning.= It is usual with students to divide the poet's work into some four or five periods. Mr. Fotheringham's classification is as good as any: he makes the periods five.--Period I., "a time of youth and prelude" (1832-1840), the time of Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello. During this time the poet was trying the nature and compass of his theme and forming his style.--Period II., "the time of early manhood" (1841-1846), the time of the dramas and early dramatic lyrics. All the dramas except Strafford belong to this time. In this period he was studying how best to use his poetical powers.--Period III. is "the time of maturity," his manhood and married life (1846-1869). Now he has found his standpoint; he is firm, vigorous, and confident. During this time he gave us Christmas Eve, Men and Women, Dramatis Personæ, and The Ring and the Book.--Period IV. is "the time of his later maturity" (1870-1878). Now the casuistic and argumentative element becomes more prominent; the dramatic aspect retires into the background, the philosophical teacher advances. "His hardest and least poetic work," it has been said, was put forth in this period: Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, etc.--Period V. (1879-1889), "the time of the latest works." A period of criticism of life, as in Ferishtah and the Parleyings.

=Peter Ronsard.= (The Glove.) He tells the story of Sir De Lorge, and how he leaped amongst the lions to recover his lady's glove.

=Pheidippides.= (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Pheidippides, an athlete, has been commissioned by the Athenian government to run a race,--to reach Sparta for military assistance in a great crisis in Greek history. Persia has invaded Greece: in her extremity she implores help from the neighbouring Spartans; for two days and two nights Pheidippides the fleet-footed youth ran over hills and along the dales, as fire runs through stubble, and so he bounded on his way with his message. He broke into the midst of the Spartan assembly, told his story, and prayed the prayer of Athens; but Sparta, ever jealous and mistrustful of her great neighbour, heard it coldly, and cast about for excuses. Then the passionate runner cried to the gods of his country--to Pallas Athene, protector of the city, to Apollo, to Diana--to influence the deliberations of the council gathered to hear his message, and to say to them "Ye must!" And no bolt fell from heaven, as they still delayed. At last they gave their answer,--their religion forbade them to go to war while the moon was half-orbed in the sky; her circle must be full ere they could assist; Athens must wait in patience! The youth wasted neither word nor look on the false and vile Spartans, but turned his face homewards, crying to the gods of his land; rushing past the woods and streams where they had often manifested themselves to mortals he reproached them with faithlessness and ingratitude,--his countrymen had honoured them with sacrifice and libation, and in their extremity they disregarded their cry for help. All at once, as he ran by the ridge of Parnassus, there in the cool of a cleft was seated the majestical god Pan! Grave, kindly were his eyes, his face amused at the mortal's awe of him. "Halt, Pheidippides!" he cried; and with his brain in a whirl the youth stood still. "Hither to me! Why pale in my presence?" he graciously began. "How is it Athens only in Hellas holds me aloof?" Then the god told the young man how they might trust him; that he was to bid Athens take heart,--that when the Persians were not only lying dead on their soil, but cast into the sea, then they were to praise great Pan, who had fought in their ranks and made one cause with the free and the bold Athenians. And for a pledge he gave him the fennel he grasped in his hand. He went on to speak of reward for himself, but of that Pheidippides would not speak; if he ran before, now he flew indeed; he touched not the earth with his foot, the air was his road. "Praise Pan!" he cried, as he reached Athens, "we stand no more in danger!" Then Miltiades asked him what his own reward should be? What had the god promised for him? "Release from the racer's toil," he said. "But he would fight and be foremost in the field of fennel, pounding Persia to the dust; then marry a certain maid when Athens was free, and in the coming days tell his children how the god was awful, yet so kind." The brave youth fought at Marathon; and when Persia was dust. "Once more run," they cried, "Pheidippides, to Akropolis, say Athens is saved, thank Pan,--go shout!" Then the youth flung down his shield and ran as before. "Rejoice! we conquer!" he cried; and with joy bursting his heart he died. He had gained the reward promised by Pan,--release from the racer's toil, no vulgar reward in praise or in pelf,--he could desire no greater bliss. Herodotus tells the whole story (Book VI., 94-106). Darius was desirous of subduing those people of Greece who had refused to give him earth and water. He sent against Eretria and Athens Datis, who was a Mede by birth, and Artaphernes, son of Artaphernes, his own nephew; and he despatched them with strict orders, having enslaved Athens and Eretria, to bring the bondsmen into his presence. 102. "Having subdued Eretria, and rested a few days, they sailed to Attica, pressing them very close, and expecting to treat the Athenians in the same way as they had the Eretrians. Now, as Marathon was the spot in Attica best adapted for cavalry, and nearest to Eretria, Hippias, son of Pisistratus, conducted them there. 103. But the Athenians, when they heard of this, also sent their forces to Marathon; and ten generals led them, of whom the tenth was Miltiades.... 105. And first, while the generals were yet in the city, they despatched a herald to Sparta, one Pheidippides, an Athenian, who was a courier by profession, one who attended to this very business. This man, then, as Pheidippides himself said, and reported to the Athenians, Pan met near Mount Parthenion, above Tegea; and Pan, calling out the name of Pheidippides, bade him ask the Athenians why they paid no attention to him, who was well inclined to the Athenians, and had often been useful to them, and would be so hereafter. The Athenians, therefore, as their affairs were then in a prosperous condition, believed that this was true, and erected (after Marathon presumably), a temple to Pan beneath the Akropolis, and in consequence of that message they propitiate Pan with yearly sacrifices and the torch race. 106. This Pheidippides, being sent by the generals at that time when he said Pan appeared to him, arrived in Sparta on the following day after his departure from the city of the Athenians, and on coming in presence of the magistrates, he said, 'Lacedæmonians, the Athenians entreat you to assist them, and not to suffer the most ancient city among the Greeks to fall into bondage to barbarians; for Eretria is already reduced to slavery, and Greece has become weaker by the loss of a renowned city,' He accordingly delivered the message according to his instructions, and they resolved indeed to assist the Athenians; but it was out of their power to do so immediately, as they were unwilling to violate the law; for it was the ninth day of the current month, and they said they could not march out on the ninth day, the moon's circle not being full. They therefore waited for the full moon." How the Athenians won the famous battle of Marathon, "following the Persians in their flight, cutting them to pieces, till, reaching the shore, they called for fire and attacked the ships," should be read also. Herodotus says the Persians lost about six thousand four hundred men; the Athenians only one hundred and ninety-two. Mr. Browning seems unduly severe on the Spartans, for Herodotus tells us (120) that "two thousand of the Lacedæmonians came to Athens after the full moon, making haste to be in time; that they arrived in Attica on the third day after leaving Sparta. But having come too late for the battle, they nevertheless desired to see the Medes; and having proceeded to Marathon, they saw the slain; and afterwards, having commended the Athenians and their achievement, they returned home."

NOTES.--Χαιρετε, νικωμεν: Rejoice! we conquer! Zeus, the Defender: Jupiter was worshipped under many aspects, such as "the Lightning Flasher," "the Thunderer," "the Flight Stayer," "the Best and Greatest," etc. "Her of the aegis and spear" == Minerva, who was represented with a shield and spear. "Ye of the bow and the buskin" == Diana, who was represented with a bow and buskined legs of a huntress. Pan, the goat-god. "Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix" (tettix, a grasshopper): the Athenians sometimes wore golden grasshoppers in their hair as badges of honour, because these insects are supposed to spring from the ground, and thus they showed they were sprung from the original inhabitants of the country. Sparta, the capital of Laconia, also called Lacedæmon. The distance from Athens to Sparta is from 135 to 140 miles. The trained couriers had great physical strength and powers of endurance, being regularly employed for such occasions as this. "Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute": "Darius (B.C. 493) sent heralds into all parts of Greece to require earth and water in his name. This was the form used by the Persians when they exacted submission from those they were desirous of bringing under subjection." (Rollins' Ancient History, vol. ii., p. 267.) Eretria, one of the principal cities of Eubœa, which is the largest Island in the Ægean Sea, now called Negroponte. Hellas == Greece. Athené, Minerva. Phoibos, an epithet of Apollo; Artemis, the Greek name of Diana. Olumpos == Olympus, the mountain in Greece believed to be the seat of the gods. Filleted victim: sacrificial victims were generally decked out with ribbons and wreaths, and sometimes the cattle had their horns gilded. Fulsome libation--fulsome in the sense of rich, liberal. Libations were offerings of oil or wine poured on the ground in honour of the deity. Parnes: the mountain is called Parthenion above Tegea, by Herodotus. Ivy: the Greeks highly esteemed the ivy. It was consecrated to Apollo, and Bacchus had his brows and spear decked with it; Miltiades, the Greek general who commanded the Athenians at the battle of Marathon; Marathon day: "The victory of Marathon preserved the liberties of Greece, and perhaps of Europe, from the dominion of Persia; was fought in the month of September, B.C. 490" (Wordsworth's Greece, p. 109). Akropolis, the citadel or stronghold of Athens. Fennel-field: Marathon in Greek meant this; when Pan gave the handful of fennel to the courier he gave him Μαραθρον--that is to say, the fennel field where the battle was to be. "Rejoice!" χαιρετε: the first of the two Greek words which are at the head of the poem. Pan (lit. "the pasturer"--from the same root as the Lat. pastor, shepherd, and panis, bread). He was the protecting deity of flocks and herds and hunters. He was represented by the ancients with a pug nose, very hairy, and with horns and feet of a goat. He was described as wandering about in the woods and dales and hills, playing with the nymphs and looking after the flocks. He was sleepy in the noonday sun, and did not like to be disturbed; at such times, therefore, shepherds did not play their pipes. His voice and appearance used to frighten those who saw him--so much so, that our word "panic" is derived from his name. It is said that he won the fight at Marathon for the Athenians by causing a "panic" amongst the Persians. He was the god of prophecy, and there were oracles of Pan. Pan as the Universe, the All, is a misinterpretation of his name. The Romans identified Pan with their Faunus. [Mrs. Browning's fine poem The Dead Pan should be read in this connection.]

=Pictor Ignotus.= FLORENCE, 15--. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845.) The subject is not historical, but is conceived in the true spirit which animated the work of the great religious (chiefly monastic) painters of the middle ages. The speaker says he could have painted pictures like those of a certain youth whose praise is in every one's mouth. He could have executed all his soul conceived: hand and brain were pair, and all he saw he could have committed to his canvas. Each passion written on the countenance, whether Hope a-tiptoe for embrace, or Rapture with drooping eyes, or Confidence lighting up the forehead, all that human faces gave him, has he saved. He has dreamed of going forth in his pictures to pope or kaiser, to the whole world, with flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight, through streets re-named from the triumphal passing of his picture, to the house where learning and genius should greet his coming; and the thought has frightened him, and he has shrunk from the popularity as a nun shrinks from the gaze of rough soldiery; it terrified him to think of his works dragged forth to be bought and sold as household stuff, to have to live with people sunk in their daily pettiness, to see their faces, listen to their prate, and hear his work discussed. If at times he feels his work monotonous, as he goes on filling the cloisters and eternal aisles with the same Virgins, Babes, and Saints, with the same cold, calm, beautiful regard, at least no merchant traffics in his heart. The sacredness of the place where his pictures moulder and grow black will protect him from vain tongues which would criticise and discuss his work. This poem has been much misunderstood. Some have seen in it the bitter complaint and the wail of half-suppressed longing of one whom fame has passed unnoticed; he has failed to please the world, and will now retire to pursue his art in the cloister. Nothing could be further from the poet's purpose in this work. Others, and those the majority of critics, have found in the poem a revelation of the true art-spirit, as though Mr. Browning had made a great discovery in this connection. The plain fact is that this spirit of retirement, this abhorrence of working for the praise of men, this hatred of applause-seeking and of self-advertisement, was that which animated the men of old Catholic times who built our cathedrals and our abbeys, and who painted our great pictures and glorified all Europe with works of art. The poem might fairly be considered as uttered by a Fra Angelico with reference to Raffaele. The great monastic painters, like Angelico, painted under the eye of God, looking upon their work as immediately inspired by His Spirit: for God and through God, not through men and for men, was their work done. It has been the life-work of Mr. Ruskin to point this out. These men were not actuated by the vain advertising spirit which animates so much of our modern work of all kinds. Humility is a virtue now little appreciated: it was the life of these old artists' souls. Pictor Ignotus was not jealous of the popular youth whose pictures were decked with flowers by the people as they were borne through the streets which were re-named in their honour. He did not want the mob's applause; he shrank from the appreciations of the thoughtless street folk as a nun would shrink from the compliments of a band of rough soldiery. All this beautiful spirit is fast dying out. When a writer like Browning reminds us that there were once, in "15--," in a place like Florence, men animated by it, critics cry out, "What a discovery! How wonderful!" It is a discovery like ours of gold in South Africa, where the men of old time went to Ophir to find the precious metal.

NOTE.--Vasari says that the Borgo Allegri at Florence took its name from the joy of the inhabitants when a Madonna by Cimabue was carried through it in procession.

=Pied Piper of Hamelin, The.= (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842.) Written to amuse little Willie Macready. The story told in the poem is one of a class of legends dealing with the subject of cheating magicians of a promised reward for services rendered. Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1634), has the story on which apparently Mr. Browning's poem is written. "A piper named Bunting undertook for a certain sum of money to free the town of Hamelin, in Brunswick, of the rats which infested it; but when he had drowned all the rats in the river Weser, the townsmen refused to pay the sum agreed upon. The piper, in revenge, collected together all the children of Hamelin, and enticed them by his piping into a cavern in the side of the mountain Koppenberg, which instantly closed upon them, and a hundred and thirty went down alive into the pit (June 26th, 1284). The street through which Bunting conducted his victims was Bungen, and from that day to this no music is ever allowed to be played in this particular street." The same tale is told of the fiddler of Brandenberg: the children were led to the Marienberg, which opened upon them and swallowed them up. When Lorch was infested with ants, a hermit led the multitudinous insects by his pipe into a lake, where they perished. As the inhabitants refused to pay the stipulated price, he led their pigs the same dance, and they, too, perished in the lake. Next year a charcoal burner cleared the same place of crickets; and when the price agreed upon was refused, he led the sheep of the inhabitants into the lake. The third year came a plague of rats, which an old man of the mountain piped away and destroyed. Being refused his reward, he piped the children of Lorch into the Tannenberg. There are similar Persian and Chinese tales. (See Dr. Brewer's Reader's Handbook.) Hamlin or Hamelin is a town in the province of Hanover, Prussia. "Some trace the origin of the legend to the 'Child Crusade,' or to an abduction of children. For a considerable time the town dated its public documents from the event" (Encyc. Brit.). Julius Wolff wrote a poem on the subject (Berlin, 1876). See S. Baring Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 2nd ser., 1868; Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, Berlin, 1866; and Reitzenstein's edition of Springer's Geschichte der Stadt Hameln, Hameln, 1861. Some authorities consider the story a myth of the wind.

=Pietro Comparini= (The Ring and the Book) was the reputed father of Pompilia, and was murdered with his wife by Count Guido.

=Pietro of Abano.= (Dramatic Idyls, second series, 1880.) [THE MAN.] Dr. Furnivall, in a note to Mr. Sharpe's excellent paper on Pietro of Abano in the Browning Society's Reports, No. V., gives the following particulars of the character from the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle, Paris, 1855, i. 29-31. "Pietro of A'bano, Petrus de A'pano or Aponensis, or Petrus de Padua, was an Italian physician and alchemist; born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He is said to have studied Greek at Constantinople, mathematics at Padua, and to have been made Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy at Paris. He then returned to Padua, where he was Professor of Medicine, and followed the Arabian physicians, especially Averroes. He got a great reputation, and charged enormous fees. He hated milk and cheese, and swooned at the sight of them. His enemies, jealous of his renown and wealth, denounced him to the Inquisition as a magician. They accused him of possessing the philosopher's stone, and of making, with the devil's help, all money spent by him come back to his purse, etc. His trial was begun; and had he not died naturally in time, he would have been burnt. The Inquisitors ordered his corpse to be burnt; and as a friend had taken that away, they had his portrait publicly burnt by the executioner. In 1560 a Latin epitaph in his memory was put up in the church of St. Augustine. The Duke of Urbino set his statue among those of illustrious men; and the Senate of Padua put one on the gate of its palace, beside those of Livy, etc. His best-known work is his Conciliator Differentiarum quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos versantur (Mantua, 1472, and Venice, 1476, fol.); often reprinted. Other works are: 1. De Venenis, eorumque Remediis, translated into French by L. Boet (Lyons, 1593, 12mo); 2. Geomantia (Venice, 1505, 1556, 8vo); 3. Expositio Problematum Aristotelis (Mantua, 1475, 4to); 4. Hippocrates de Medicorum Astrologia Libellus, in Greek and Latin (Venice, 1485, 4to); 5. Astrolabium planum in tabulis ascendens, continens qualibet hora atque minutæ æquationes Domorum Cæli, etc. (Venice, 1502, 4to); 6. Dioscorides digestus alphabetico ordine (Lyons, 1512, 4to); 7. Heptameron (Paris, 1474, 4to); 8. Textus Mesues noviter emendatus, etc. (Venice, 1505, 8vo); 9. Decisiones physionomiæ (1548, 8vo); 10. Questiones de Febribus (Padua, 1482); 11. Galeni tractatus varii a Petro Paduano, latinitate donati, MS. in St. Mark's Library, Venice; 12. Les Eléments pour opérer dans les Sciences magiques, MS. in the Arsenal Library, Paris." Murray's Guide to Northern Italy says that "Abano may be visited either from Padua or from Monselice. Its baths have retained their celebrity from the time of the Romans. The place is also remarkable as being the birthplace of Livy, and also of the physician and reputed necromancer, Pietro d'Abano, in whom the Paduans take almost equal pride. This village is about three miles from the Euganean hills." The medicinal springs procured this place its ancient name of Aponon, derived from α, privative, and πονος, pain. At Padua is the Palazzo della Ragione, built by Pietro Cozzo between 1172 and 1219, a vast building standing entirely upon open arches, surrounded by a loggia. Murray says: "The history of this hall is as remarkable as its aspect. It was built in 1306 by an Austin friar, Frate Giovanni, a great traveller; and he asked no other pay for his work than the wood and tiles of the old roof which he was to take down. The interior of the hall is covered by strange, mystical paintings designed by Giotto according to the instructions of Pietro d'Abano." Pietro d'Abano was the first reviver of the art of medicine in Europe; and he travelled to Greece for the purpose of learning the language of Hippocrates and Galen, and of profiting by the stores which the Byzantine libraries yet contained. He practised with the greatest success; and his medical works were considered as amongst the most valuable volumes of the therapeutic library of the middle ages. His bust is over one of the doors of the hall; the inscription placed beneath it indignantly repudiates the magic and sorcery ascribed to him; but the votaries of the occult sciences smiled inwardly at this disclaimer. His treatises upon necromancy, geomancy, amulets and conjuration, were circulated from hand to hand. When at Padua, some years since, the Rev. John Sharpe found a stone set in the wall of the vestibule of the Sacristy of the Church of the Eremitani, to Pietro of Abano. It bore the following inscription:--

PETRI APON. CINERES OB. AN. 1315 AET. 66.

[THE POEM.] Peter was a magician. He had been of all trades, architect, astronomer, astrologer, beside physician. Even worse than astrologer, for men scrupled not to accuse him of having dealings with the devil. This was the Middle Age way with men of science, and it must be confessed that the mystical manner of their writings and the uncanny nature of some of their doings give colour to the accusation. It was convenient, also, to accuse Peter of diabolic arts. When he had built a tower or cured a prince, it was an economical way of discharging the debt to accuse the old man of wizardry. So they cursed him roundly and then rid themselves of their liability. But Peter grinned and bore it all. He seems to have invented a steamboat which would have whirled through the water had not the priests broken up his evil-looking machine, and bastinadoed him beside. One night, as he reached his lodgings, some one plucked his sleeve and asked an interview with him. It was a young Greek, who professed great admiration for the mage. He tells him that he has heard that the price he pays for his potent arts is that he may not drink a drop of milk; but he has discovered this is not to be taken literally,--it is to be considered figuratively, as he will explain. He asks the master leave to become the friend of mankind, and that by being himself their model. He begs, therefore, to be taught the true magic, to learn the art of making fools subserve the man of mind. A prince is inspired with the idea of building a palace by an architect. The architect uses the prince as the means of furthering his own interests--his ambition to be honoured as a great architect. The workmen who build the mansion are animated by their desire for wages, and so the architect uses both prince and artisan as his tools. The young Greek wants to use men of high and low degree for similar ends. The magician says if he were to comply with his desire he would only make one ingrate more; he has been so often deceived this way. The Greek replies that what he wants is the milk of human kindness. He has not been animated by love of his species in what he has done for mankind. He has wrought wonders, but not for love. This is the meaning of his enforced abstinence from milk; but let him confer upon his supplicant this favour he asks, and he will earn his love and gratitude, which will remove from him his curse. Every step he lifts him up, by so much greater will the reward of the benefactor be. The magician determines to comply: he will test this man's heart. "Shuffle the cards once more," he says. Suddenly the young man becomes aware that he has undergone a great change. He was talking Plato to the master but a while ago; now he is surrounded by wealth, and has many friends. A year has passed when one day, lounging at his ease in his villa, his servant announces an old friend who desires to speak with him. It is old Peter, who is sore beset by his enemies, who want to burn him. He has come to the young man who owes him everything, to beg a hiding-place and a crust. The ingrate will not for a moment listen to his plea; he cannot think of harbouring him, as if it were to be discovered it would compromise him. He takes the opportunity, however, to ask for a greater favour,--he wishes to learn how to rule men and subject them to his pleasure. Then, if he will wait awhile, he may be able to show his gratitude. The old man turns his back and leaves the house. He is no sooner away than the spell begins to work. Politics were the prize now. He became a statesman and a friend of the Emperor. One day, after a council, he was pacing his closet, when there was a knock at the door, and Peter entered. He reminds him that ten years have passed since he refused him the favour he demanded. He had given him a mansion, out of which he only begged the use of a single chamber, that will no longer suffice. He now comes to beg a stronghold where he may be safe from his enemies: grant him this, and he will trouble the young man no more. But the latter is concerned only with thoughts of more power for himself: he wants now to rule the souls of men; from the temporal power he would rise to the spiritual; he would be no less than Pope. Having then reached the highest rung of the ladder, he promises to pay the debt he owes to the full. Once more old Peter turns to go, and already the influence is felt. He is at Rome, has been elected Pope, and has reached the summit of his desires. Seated in the palace of the Lateran, one day an intruder pushes aside the arras. It is old Peter again; he is ninety now, and does not care if they burn him; he has lived his day. He has, however, a favour to ask: he has written a great book, and he wants it preserved for the use of posterity. Will the Pope see to this? The Pontiff eyes the frowsy parchment with disgust, and when the old man kneels to kiss his foot, he spurns him. "We're Pope,--once Pope, you can't unpope us!" In a moment the vision was over. The three trial scenes of the Greek's life were played out: he was himself again. The magic was dissolved; he had been tested, had been shown the corruption of his own heart in a moment, though it seemed a lifetime in the passing of the vision. Peter lived out his life, but he had never yet learned love. Perhaps in another life that lesson was to come. As for the Greek, nothing is recorded of him. The poet says he may go his way--he is too selfish not to thrive! The moral of the story is that to win men's love we must not merely help them, not merely fling favours at them, but must consecrate ourselves to their service. In the loving service of, and the self-sacrificing endeavour to benefit our fellow-men, lies the secret of winning happiness for ourselves. It is more blessed to give than to receive only when the giving is to man for God's sake--for the love of God manifested by efforts on behalf of our fellow-men.

NOTES.--Verse 2, Petrus ipse, Peter the very same. v. 9, True moly: "A fabulous herb of secret power, having a black root and white blossoms, said by Homer to have been given by Mercury to Ulysses, as a counter-charm against the spells of Circe" (Webster's Dict.). v. 10, "Mark within my eye its iris mystic-lettered": Letters of the alphabet have been seen marked on the human eye as figures on a dial. Mr. Browning said, "that there was an old superstition that, if you look into the iris of a man's eye, you see the letters of his name or the word telling his fate." (See Echo, 23rd March, 1896.) v. 14, "Petri en pulmones," Behold, the lungs of Peter! v. 15, "Ipse dixi," I have said. v. 16, Hans of Halberstadt: a canon of Halberstadt, in Germany, who was a magician who rode upon a devil in the shape of a black horse, and who performed the most incredible feats. (See Browning's poem Transcendentalism.) v. 19, "De corde natus haud de mente," born of heart, not of mind. Bene: the first syllables of Benedicite; here the charm begins to work. v. 23, Plato on "the Fair and Good": Emerson, in his essay on Plato, says: Plato taught this as "the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, He wished that all things should be as much as possible like Himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth. All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of everything beautiful." v. 26, Sylla: the debauched Roman dictator, who gave up his command and retired to a solitary retreat at Puteoli. v. 27, "Hag Jezebel and her paint and powder": Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, who "painted her face and tired her head, and looked out at a window" (2 Kings ix. 30). Jam satis, already, enough! v. 33, "Tantalus's treasure": Tantalus was tortured in hell by having food and drink apparently always within his reach, but always eluding his grasp. v. 37, "Per Bacco": by Bacchus,--an Italian oath. v. 38, "Salomo si nôsset," if Solomon had but known this! "Teneor vix," I can hardly contain myself! v. 39, hactenus, up to this time. "Nec ultra plus!" nothing further. Spelter, zinc. Peason, peas. v. 43, "Pou sto," where I may stand. Archimedes said he could move the world if he had a place to stand on. v. 46, Lateran: the church of St. John Lateran, in Rome; "the mother and head of all the city and the world," as it is called, was the principal church of Rome after the time of Constantine. Five important councils have been held here. Adjoining it is the Lateran Palace. "Gained the purple": i.e., the cardinalate, from the scarlet hat, stockings, and cassock worn by cardinals. "Bribed the Conclave": the meeting of the members of the Sacred College of Cardinals for the election of a pope is called a conclave. "Saw my coop ope": the cardinals go into conclave on the tenth day after the death of the Pope, attended usually by only one person. No access to the conclave is permitted. An opening is left for food to be passed in. The voting must all be done in this assembly. Each cardinal has a boarded cell in the Vatican assigned him by lot. Voting is carried on till some cardinal is found who has the requisite majority of two-thirds of those who are present. v. 47, Tithon: a son of Laomedon, king of Troy. He was so beautiful that Aurora fell in love with him and carried him away. He begged her to make him immortal, and the goddess granted the favour. As he forgot to ask her also to preserve his youth, he became old and decrepid, and begged to be removed from the world. As he could not die, she changed him into a grasshopper. v. 48, "Conciliator Differentiarum," conciliator of differences. "De Speciebus Ceremonialis Magiæ": concerning the kinds of the ceremonial of magic. "The Fisher's ring, or foot that boasts the Cross": one of the titles of the Pope is "the Fisherman," after St. Peter. His signet is the ring of the Fisherman; the cross is worked on his slipper. v. 49, "Apage, Sathanas!" begone Satan! "Dicam verbum Salomonis," I command it in the name of Solomon. Peculiar significance is attached by mystical writers to this word Sol-Om-On (the name of the sun in three languages). Dicite: the closing syllables of "benedicite," so that the visions had all taken place between bene--and--dicite. v. 50, Benedicite! a word of good omen, a blessing. "Idmen, idmen!" we know, we know! v. 51, Scientiæ Compendium, compendium of science. "Admirationem incutit": it inspires admiration. Antipope: an opposition pope, of which there have been several examples in history; they were usurpers of the popedom. v. 53, Tiberius Cæsar (born 42 B.C., died 37 A.D.): Emperor of Rome. When at Padua he consulted the oracle of Geryon, he drew a lot by which he was required to throw golden tali into the fountain of Aponus for an answer to his questions; he did so, and the highest numbers came up. The fountain is situated in the Euganean hills, near Padua. Oracle of Geryon: Geryon was a mythical king in Spain who had three bodies, or three heads. Suetonius Tranquilius: author of the biographies of the first twelve Roman emperors. v. 54, Venus: the highest throw with the four tali, or three tesseræ. The best cast of the tali (or foursided dice) was four different numbers; but the best cast of the tesseræ (or ordinary dice) was three sixes. The worst throw was called canis--three aces in tesseræ, and four aces in tali. (Brewer's Handbook.)

=Pillar at Sebzevah, A.= (Ferishtah's Fancies, II. Key-note: "Love is better than knowledge.") Sage and pupil argue as to which is the better, knowledge or love. The sage says that love far outweighs knowledge; it is objected that an ass loves food, and perhaps the hand that feeds it--why depose knowledge in favour of love? Ferishtah says that all his knowledge only suffices to enable him to say that he loves boundlessly, endlessly. He had knowledge when a youth, but better knowledge came as he grew older, and pushed it aside; it has been so ever since--the gain of to-day is the loss of to-morrow. It is, in fact, no gain at all: knowledge is not golden, it is but lacquered ignorance. It has a prize: the process of acquiring knowledge is the only reward. But love is victory. In love we are sure to succeed,--there is no delusion there. A child grasps an orange, though he fails to grasp the sun he strives to reach; he may find his orange not worth holding, but the joy was in the shape and colour, and these were better for him than the sun, which would have only burned his fingers. If we can say we are loved in return for the love we bestow, this is to hold a good juicy orange, which is better than seeking to know the mystery of all created things: if we succeeded, it would only be to our own hurt, as the sun would have scorched the child who cried for it. There was a pillar in Sebzevah with a sun-dial fixed upon it. Suppose the townsmen had refused to make use of the dial till they knew the history of the man and his object in erecting the pillar? Better far to go to dinner when the dial says "Noon," and ask no questions. If we love, we know enough. Suppose in crossing the desert we are thirsty, we stoop down and scoop up the sand, and water rises: what need have we to dig down fifty fathoms to find the spring? The best thing we can do is to quench our thirst with the water which is before us: we do not, under the circumstances, require a cisternful. There is one unlovable thing, and that is hate. If out of the sand we get nothing but sand, let us not pretend to be finding water; let us not nickname pain as pleasure. If knowledge were all our faculty, God must be ignored; but love gains God at first leap. The lyric bids us not ask recognition for our love: the deepest affection is the most silent. Words are a poor substitute for the silence of a long gaze and the touch which reveals the soul.

NOTES.--Mushtari, the planet Jupiter (Persian). Hudhud: fabulous bird of Solomon, according to Eastern legend: the lapwing, a well-known bird in Asia. Sitara: Persian for a star.

=Pippa Passes: A Drama.= (Bells and Pomegranates, No. I., 1841.) Pippa is the name of a girl employed at the silk mills at Asolo, in the Trevisan, in Northern Italy. In the whole year she has but one holiday: it is New Year's day, and she determines to make the most of it. She springs out of bed as day is breaking, mapping out as she dresses herself what she will do with Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night. She thinks of the four persons whose lot is most to be envied in the little town, and will imagine herself each of these in turn. But she claims that the day will be fine and not ill-use her. There is the great, haughty Ottima, whose husband, old Luca, sleeps in his mansion while his wife makes love; her lover Sebald will be just as devoted, however the rain may beat on the home. Jules, the sculptor, will wed his Phene to-day: nothing can disturb their happiness, their sunbeams are in their own breasts. Evening may be misty, but Luigi and his lady mother will not heed it. Monsignor will be here from Rome to visit his brother's house: no storm will disturb his holy peace. But for Pippa, the silkwinder, a wet day would darken her whole next year. So her morning fancy starts her as Ottima: all the gardens and the great storehouse are hers. But this is not the kind of love she envies; there's better love, she knows. Her next choice shall give no cause for the scoffer--wedded love, like that of Jules and Phene, for example. But still improvement can be made even upon that: it is, after all, but new love; hers should have lapped her round from the beginning: "only parents' love can last our lives." She will be Luigi, communing with his mother in the turret. But if we come to that, God's love is better even than that of Monsignor the holy and beloved priest, for to-night Pippa will in fancy have her dwelling in the palace by the Dome.--I. MORNING. Ottima is with her paramour, the German Sebald, in the shrub-house. They have murdered Luca, and are talking calmly of their sin, and contrasting their present freedom with the restraint of last New Year's day. Ottima's husband can no longer fondle her before her lover's face. But there is the corpse to remove, and as Sebald reflects, he begins to regret his treachery to the man who fed and sheltered him. Ottima tells him she loves him better for the crime. They caress each other, and as Sebald fondles Ottima the voice of Pippa singing as she passes is heard from without: "God's in His heaven." Sebald starts, conscience-stricken; Ottima says it is only "that ragged little girl!" At once Sebald is disenchanted; he sees the woman in all the naked horror of her crimes; all her grace and beauty are gone; he hates and curses her. The woman takes the guilt all upon her own head, and prays for him, not for herself: forgetting self, she thinks only of Sebald. "Not me--to him, O God, be merciful!" To her guilty soul also comes the reflection, "God's in His heaven." In self-sacrifice begins her redemption. Pippa has converted both. While Pippa is passing to Orcana, some students from Venice are discussing a jest they have played off on Jules. They have, by means of sham letters which they have concocted between them and sent him as coming from the girl he loves, induced him to believe she was a cultivated woman, and he has been deceived into marrying her.--II. NOON. When the ceremony is over the truth is told him. He gives his bride gold, and is preparing to separate from her, when Pippa passes, singing "Give her but a least excuse to love me!" Jules reasons, Here is a woman with utter need of him. She has an awakening moral sense, a soul like his own sculptured Psyche, waiting his word to make it bright with life--he will evoke this woman's soul in some isle in far-off seas! He forgives her. Pippa's song has worked the reconciliation.--III. EVENING. Luigi and his mother are conversing in the turret on the hill above Asolo. Luigi is what has been termed a "patriot"; he is suspected of belonging to the secret society of the Carbonari, and is at the moment actually discussing with his mother a plot to kill the Emperor of Austria. His mother tells him that half the ills of Italy are feigned, that patriotism seems the easiest virtue for a selfish man to acquire. She urges him to delay his journey to Vienna till the morning. Endeavouring to dissuade him thus, he is on the point of yielding, when Pippa passes, singing "No need the king should ever die!" "Not that sort of king," says Luigi. "Such grace had kings when the world began!" continues the passing Pippa. Luigi says, "It is God's voice calls," and he goes away. He thereby escapes the police, who had just arranged that if he remained at the turret over the night, he was to be arrested at once. Pippa goes on from the turret to the Bishop's brother's home, near the Cathedral.--IV. NIGHT. And here we are shown how little we poor puppets know of the strings which prompt our movements. Pippa would be Ottima, the murderess; and as she, the poor but good and happy silkwinder, trudges on her way to make the holiday of the year, the voluptuous murderess is purifying her wicked soul in agony. She sings in the lightness of her heart, and a line of her morning hymn is the arrow of God to two sinful souls. She would be the bride of Jules--the bride who has just been detected in fraud, on the point of rejection, and who has been redeemed by the snatch of Pippa's innocent monition. She would be the happy Luigi, who would have failed in a purpose he deemed to be a noble one, and would have been a prisoner in the hands of the Austrian police if he had not been nerved by her careless eulogy of good kings. And now, as she approaches her ideally perfect persons, the holy Monsignor is actually engaged in taking steps for her ruin. His superintendent is explaining a plan he has elaborated for getting rid of Pippa, who is the child of his brother, and to whom the property he is holding rightfully belongs. The superintendent has found an English scoundrel named Bluphocks, residing in the locality, who will entrap the girl and take her to Rome to lead a vicious life, which will kill her in a few years. The bishop is listening to the tempter, when Pippa passes, singing one of her innocent little songs, ending with the line--

"Suddenly God took me."

This awakens the conscience of the ecclesiastic, who calls his servants to arrest the villain. All unconscious, as night falls Pippa re-enters her chamber. She has been in fancy the holy Monsignor, Luigi's gentle mother, Luigi himself, Jules the sculptor's bride, and Ottima as well. Tired of fooling, she notices that the sun has dropped into a black cloud, and as night comes on she wonders how nearly she has approached these people of her fancy, to do them good or evil in some slight way; and as she falls asleep she murmurs--

"All service ranks the same with God-- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first."

The drama shows us how near God is to us in conscience. "God stands apart," as the poet says, "to give man room to work"; but in every great crisis of our life, if we listen we may hear Him warning, threatening, guiding, revealing. Not near to answer problems of existence, or to solve the mystery of life: this would interfere with our development of soul; but near to save us from the dangers that await us at every step. The drama shows us, too, our mutual interdependence. Pippa, the silk-girl, had a mission to convert Ottima, Sebald, Jules, and the Bishop. We look for great things to work for us: it is ever the unseen, unfelt influences which are the most potent. We are taught, also, that there is nothing we do or say but may be big with good or evil consequences to many of our fellows of whom we know nothing. People whom we have never seen, of whose very existence we are ignorant, are affected for good or evil eternally by our lightest words and our most thoughtless actions.

NOTES.--For an account of Asolo see p. 49 of this work. Silk in large quantities is manufactured in this part of Italy. There is no historical foundation for any of the incidents of the poem. The song in Part II., which Jules and Phene hear, relates, however, to Caterina Carnaro, the exiled Queen of Cyprus. Possagno: an obscure village situated amongst the hills of Asolo, famous as the birthplace of Canova, the sculptor. Cicala: a grasshopper.--I. MORNING. "The Capuchin with his brown hood": the Capuchin monks are familiar to all travellers in Italy. They are a branch of the great Franciscan Order. The habit is brown. The Order was established by St. Francis in the thirteenth century. "Cappuccino" means playfully "little hooded fellow." "Campanula chalice": the bell of a flower, as of a Canterbury-bell. "Bluphocks": the name means "Blue Fox," and is a skit on the Edinburgh Review, which is bound in a cover of blue and fox. "Et canibus nostris," even to our dogs. Canova, Antonio (1757-1822), one of the greatest sculptors of modern times. He was born at Passagno, near Asolo, the scene of Pippa's drama. "Psiche-fanciulla": Psyche as a young girl with a butterfly, the personification of man's immaterial part. This sculpture is considered as the most faultless and classical of Canova's works. Pietà: sculpture representing the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ on her knees. Malamocco: "The Lagoon, immediately opposite to Venice, is closed by a long shoaly island, Malamocco" (Murray). Alciphron: lived in the age of Alexander the Great. He was a philosopher of Magnesia. Lire: the lira is an Italian coin of the value of a franc (say, tenpence). Tydeus, a son of Œneus, king of Colydon. He was one of the great heroes of the Theban war.--II. NOON. Coluthus, a native of Lycopolis, in Egypt, who wrote a poem on the rape of Helen of Troy. He lived probably about the beginning of the sixth century. Bessarion: Cardinal Bessarion discovered the poem of Coluthus in Lycopolis in the fifteenth century. Odyssey: Homer's poem which narrates the adventures of Ulysses. Antinous: One of the suitors of Penelope during the absence of Odysseus. He attempted to seize the kingdom and was killed by Odysseus on his return. Almaign Kaiser: the German Emperor. Hippolyta: a queen of the Amazons, who was conquered by Hercules, and by him given in marriage to Theseus. Numidia: a country of North Africa, now called Algiers. Hipparchus: a son of Pisistratus, and tyrant of Athens. He was a great patron of literature. His crimes led to his assassination by a band of conspirators, the leaders of which were Harmodius and Aristogiton. Archetype: the pattern or model of a work. Dryad: a wood-nymph. Primordial, original. Cornaro: Queen of Cyprus. Venice took her kingdom from her, and compelled her to resign, assigning her a palace at Asolo. Ancona: a city of central Italy, on the shores of the Adriatic. Intendant, a superintendent. "Celarent, Darii, Ferio": coined words used in logic. "Bishop Beveridge": there was a bishop of that name; but this is a pun, and means beverage (drink). Zwanziger: a twenty-kreuzer piece of money. "Charon's wherry": Charon was a god of hell, who conducted souls across the river Styx. Lupine-seed, in plant-lore "lupine" means wolfish, and is suggestive of the Evil One. (Flower-lore, by Friend, p. 59.) Hecate, a goddess of Hell, to whom offerings were made of eggs, fish, and onions. Obolus, a silver coin of the Greeks, worth 8_d._ They used to put it into the mouth of the corpse as Charon's fee. "To pay the Stygian ferry": the river Styx, in the infernal regions, across which Charon conducted the souls, and received an obolus for his fee. Prince Metternich (1773-1859): a celebrated Austrian statesman. Panurge: a character of Rabelais'. He was a companion of Pantagruel's. He was an impecunious rake and dodger, a boon companion and licentious coward. Hertrippa: one of Rabelais' characters in his Gargantua and Pantagruel. Carbonari: the name of an Italian secret society which arose in 1820. Spielberg: the name of a hill near Brünn, in Moravia, on which stands the castle wherein Silvio Pellico the patriot was confined.--III. EVENING. Lucius Junius Brutus, whose example animated the Romans to rise against the tyranny of the infamous Tarquin. Pellicos: Silvio Pellico was an Italian dramatist and patriot (1788-1854). He was arrested as a member of a secret society by the Austrian Government, and imprisoned for fifteen years in Spielberg Castle, near Brünn. "The Titian at Treviso": Treviso is a town in Italy, seventeen miles from Venice. In the cathedral of San Pietro there is a fine Annunciation by Titian (1519). Python: the monster serpent slain by Apollo near Delphi. Breganze wine: of Breganza, a village north of Vicenza.--IV. NIGHT. Benedicto benedicatur: a form of blessing. Assumption Day: the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. It is kept on August 15th. Correggio: one of the great Italian painters (1494-1534). Podere, a manor. Cesena: an episcopal city lying between Bologna and Ancona. Soldo, a penny. "Miserere mei, Domine," "Have mercy on me, O God!" Brenta, a river of North Italy. Polenta, a pudding of chestnut flour, etc.

=Pisgah-Sights.= (Pacchiarotto volume, 1876.) 1. From a high mountain the roughness and smoothness of the distant landscape seem to blend into a harmonious picture, the uncouthness is hidden by the grace, the angles are blunted into roundness, its harshness is reconciled into a beautiful whole. If we could be taken by angelic hands and be borne a few miles beyond the surface of the earth, all her mountains would dwindle down till the rough, scarred and furrowed earth would become a perfect orb. A little nearer heaven, and a little farther away from the scene of our pilgrimage here, and evil and sorrow and pain and want will all soften down and be lost in good and joy and blessedness. We are too close to things here to get the right view of their proportions; a handbreadth off, and things which are mysteries to us now will be clear as the daylight. All will be seen as lend and borrow, good will be recognised as the brother of evil, and joy will be seen to demand sorrow for its completion. Why man's existence must so be mixed we cannot say; the majority only begin to see the round orb of things as they near the end of their journey. 2. If we could live our life over again, would we strive any longer? Would we exercise greed and ambition, burrow for earth's treasures, soar for the sun's rights, or not rather be content with turf and foliage--just plain learners of life's lessons, with no attempt to teach, with no desire to rearrange anything at all? Should we not be stationary while the march of hurrying men defiling past us, made us complacent at our post, reflecting that the only possibility of fearing, wondering at, or loving anything at all, lay in our keeping, at a respectful distance from everything which men were hurrying to seek? 3. If it be better to forget than to forgive, so is it better than living to die, to let body slumber while soul, as Indian sages tell, wanders at large, fretless and free, encumbered nevermore by body's grossness, soul in sunshine and love, body under mosses and ferns.

NOTE.--V. 2, Deniers, small copper French coins of insignificant value.

=Plot-Culture.= (Ferishtah's Fancies, 10: "God's All-Seeing Eye.") "If all we do or think or say be marked minute by minute by the Supreme, may not our very making prove offence to the Maker's eye and ear?" Thus argued a disciple. The Dervish answers, "There is a limit-line rounding us, severing us from the immensity, cutting us from the illimitable. All of us is for the Maker; all the produce we can within the circle produce for the Master's use is His in autumn. He wants to know nothing of the manure which fertilises the soil--of this we are masters absolute; but we must remember doomsday. In the lyric the singer indicates the uses of Sense as distinguished from Soul. "Soul, travel-worn, toil-weary," is not for love-making; for that let Sense quench Soul!

=Poetics.= (Asolando, 1889.) The singer says the foolish call their Love "My rose," "My swan," or they compare her to the maid-moon blessing the earth below. He will have none of this: he tells the rose there is no balm like breath; bids the swan bend its neck its best,--his love's is the whiter curve. Let the moon be the moon,--he is not afraid to place his Love beside it. She is her human self, and no lower words will describe her.

=Polyxena.= (King Victor and King Charles.) The wife of King Charles: full of resolution, and instinctively sees the right thing, and does it at the appropriate moment. Her "noble and right woman's manliness," as Mr. Browning calls it, enables her to counteract her husband's weakness and to clear his mental vision. Magnanimous and loyal to all, especially to herself and truth, she is one of the poet's finest female characters.

=Pompilia.= (The Ring and the Book.) She was the wife of Count Guido Franceschini, and he killed her, with her foster-parents, when she escaped from his cruel treatment and fled to Rome with the good priest Caponsacchi. She is Browning's noblest and most beautiful female character. There is an excellent study of Pompilia in Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 263. The keynote of her character is found in the line of the poem--

"I knew the right place by foot's feel; I took it, and tread firm there."

=Ponte dell' Angelo= (Venice) == The Angel's Bridge. (Asolando, 1889.) Boverio, in his Annals, 1552, n. 69, relates this legend of Our Lady. It is recorded at length in The Glories of Mary, by St. Alphonsus Liguori (p. 192), a curious work which contains a great number of such stories, which have for their moral the efficacy of prayers to Our Lady as a protection from the devil. On one of the large canals at Venice is a house with the figure of an angel guarding it from harm. Once upon a time (says Father Boverio in his Annals) this house belonged to a lawyer, who was a cruel oppressor of all who sought his advice; never was such an extortionate rascal, though a devout one. On one occasion, after a particularly lucrative week, he determined to ask some holy man to dinner, as he could not get the memory of a widow whom he had wronged out of his mind; so he invited the chief of the Capucins to disinfect his house by his holy presence. The monk duly presented himself, and was informed that a most admirable helpmate in the house was an ape, who worked for him indefatigably. The host leaves his guest for awhile, that he may go below to see how the dinner progresses. No sooner had the lawyer left the room than the monk, by the instinct which saints possess for detecting the devil under every disguise, adjures the ape to come out of his hiding-place and show himself in propriâ personâ. Satan stands forth, and explains that he is there to convey to hell the lawyer who plagued the widows and orphans by his exactions. The monk asks how it came to pass that he had so long delayed God's commission by acting as servant where he should have been a minister of justice. The devil explains that the lawyer had placed himself under the Virgin's protection by the prayers which he never intermitted; thus the man is armed in mail, and cannot be lugged off to hell while saying, "Save me, Madonna!" If he should discontinue that prayer, Satan would pounce on him at once. He waits, therefore, hoping to catch him napping. The holy man adjures him to vanish. The fiend says he cannot leave the house without doing some damage to prove that his errand had been fulfilled. The saint bade him make his exit through the wall, and leave a gap in the stone for every one to see, which, having duly been done, the monk goes downstairs to dinner with a good appetite. The host asks what has become of the ape, whose assistance he requires, and is terrified to see his guest wringing blood from the table napkin. It is explained that the miracle is performed to show him how he has wrung blood from his clients, and the host is bidden to go down on his knees and swear to make restitution. The man consents, and absolution following, he is forthwith taken upstairs to see the hole in the wall left by the devil exorcised by his saintship. The lawyer fears that Satan may use the aperture of exit for an entry to his dwelling at a future time, when the Capucin bids him erect the figure of an angel and place it by the aperture, which holy sign will frighten the fiend away. And this is why the house by the bridge has the angel on the escutcheon, and why the bridge itself is called the Angel's Bridge, though Mr. Browning thinks the Devil's Bridge would have been as good a name for it.

=Pope, The.= (The Ring and the Book.) The final appeal in the Franceschini murder case being to the Pope, he has to decide the fate of the Count. He reviews the whole case in the tenth book, and gives his decision for the execution of the murderers. Browning's old men are some of his greatest creations, and The Pope is perhaps the finest of such conceptions. There is an excellent essay on The Pope in Poet Lore, vol i., p. 309, by Professor Shackford.

=Pope, The, and the Net.= (Asolando, 1889.) It is generally supposed that this poem refers to Pope Sixtus V. Mr. Browning possibly obtained the idea from Leti's well-known biography of the Pope, which is full of fables. Dr. Furnivall, however, thinks that Mr. Browning invented the story. It is said that the character of Sixtus V. suits the poem better than any other. The pope in question--Felice Peretti--was born in 1521, of poor parents, but the story of his having been a swineherd in his youth seems to be mere legend. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) says he was created cardinal in 1570, when he lived in strict retirement; affecting, it is said, to be in a precarious state of health. According to the usual story, which is probably at least exaggerated, this dissimulation greatly contributed to his unexpected elevation to the papacy on the next vacancy (April 24th, 1585). "Sixtus V. left the reputation of a zealous and austere pope--with the pernicious qualities inseparable from such a character in his age--of a stern and terrible, but just and magnanimous temporal magistrate, of a great sovereign in an age of great sovereigns, of a man always aiming at the highest things, and whose great faults were but the exaggerations of great virtues." The best view of his character is that given by Ranke. Mr. Browning makes his Pope to be the son of a fisherman, who, on his elevation to the cardinalate, kept his fisher-father's net in his palace-hall on a coat-of-arms, as token of his humility. When, however, he became Pope, the net was removed because it had caught the fish.

=Popularity.= (Men and Women, vol. ii., 1855.) This poem is a tribute to Keats. Shelley and Keats soon displaced Pope and Byron from the mind of the youthful poet who gave us Pauline: it is not difficult to trace in that first work of Browning's the influence of both. When, as a boy, he made acquaintance with the then little-known works of Keats, we can guess, even if biographers had not told us, how the author of Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes would charm the young poet's soul. "Remember," he says here, "one man saw you, knew you, and named a star!" Then he fancies him as a fisherman on Tyrian seas, plundering the ocean of her purple dye: kings' houses shall be made glorious and their persons beautiful with the product of the coloured conchs. Then he sees merchants bottling the extract and selling it to the world. They eat turtle and drink claret, but who fished up the murex? How does he live? What mean food had John Keats all his struggling life? He taught men to paint their ideas in glowing word-tints and images luxuriant. These men gorge, while the man who ransacked the ocean of thought and the world of fancy is left to starve.

NOTES.--Verse 6, Tyrian shells: the genera Murex and Purpura have a gland called the "adrectal gland, which secretes a colourless liquid, which turns purple upon exposure to the atmosphere, and was used by the ancients as a dye" (Encyc. Brit.). It was a discovery of the Phœnicians, and was known to the Greeks in the Homeric age. The juice collected from the shells was placed in salt, and heated in metal vessels; then the wool or silk was dyed in it. Tyrian purple wool in Cæsar's time cost £43 10_s._ a pound. Purple robes were used from very early times as a mark of dignity. Tyre was a very ancient city of Phœnicia, with great harbours and very splendid buildings. Astarte: the Venus of the Greeks and Romans, a powerful Syrian divinity. She had a great temple at Hieropolis, in Syria, with three hundred priests. v. 12, Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes: fancy names, of course--meaning the men who profit by other men's labours. They bottle and sell the precious things for which the brave fisherman risks his life and spends his days and nights, after all receiving but a miserable fraction of the gain. v. 13, Murex: the genus of molluscs from which the Tyrian purple dye was obtained. It was of the class GASTROPODA, order AZYGOBRANCHIA, sub-order Siphonochlamyda, *Rachiglossa, family Muricidæ. Purpura also was used (hence purple), of the same sub-order--family Buccinidæ. "What porridge had John Keats?" John Keats, the poet, was born Oct. 29th, 1795, and died of consumption in Rome, Feb. 23rd, 1821, when only twenty-six years old. His Ode to a Nightingale will serve to immortalise him, even if he had written nothing else. After this his best poems are his Endymion, Hyperion, and the Eve of St. Agnes. His straitened circumstances and his ill-health made him hysterical and fretful; but though he was certainly cruelly used by his reviewers, it is only a ridiculous legend that he was killed by an article against him in the Quarterly Review. Bitter reviews of our books do not introduce to our lungs the microbes of tuberculosis.

=Porphyria's Lover.= (Published first in Mr. Fox's Monthly Repository in 1836, over the signature "Z." Reprinted as II. "Madhouse Cells," in Dramatic Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.) In the midst of a storm at night, to a man sitting alone by a burnt-out fire in his room, enters the woman whom he loves, but of whose love he has never been sure in return. She glides in, shuts out the storm, kneels by the dull grate and makes a cheerful blaze, takes off her dripping cloak, lets down her damp hair, sits by his side, speaks to him, puts her arm around him, rests his cheek on her bosom, and murmuring that she loves him, gives herself to him for ever. At last, then, he knows it; his heart swells with joyful surprise, he realises the tremendous wealth of which he is thus suddenly possessed; and lest change should ever come, lest the wealth should ever be squandered, the possession ever be lost, he will kill her that moment: and so, as she reposes there, he winds her beautiful long hair in a cord thrice round her little throat, and she is strangled--painlessly, he knows, but his unalterably, because dead. And God, he says, has watched them as they sat the night through, and He has not said a word! This poem was Browning's first monologue.

=Potter's Wheel, The.= The figure of the potter's wheel in Rabbi Ben Ezra is taken from Isaiah lxiv. 8, Jeremiah xviii. 2-6, and Romans ix. 20, 21. See a similar use of the figure in Quarles' Emblems (Book III., Emblem 5).

=Pretty Woman, A.= (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) Here is a beautiful woman--simply a beauty, nothing more. What, then, is not that enough? Why cannot we let her just adorn the world like a beautiful flower? Why do we demand more of her than to gladden us with her charms? So the craftsman makes a rose of gold petals with rubies in its cup, all his fine things merely effacing the rose which grew in the garden. The best way to grace a rose is to leave it; not gather it, smell it, kiss it, wear it, and then throw it away. Leave the pretty woman just to beautify the world,--it needs it!

=Prince Berthold.= (Colombe's Birthday.) He claims, by right, the duchy which is held by Colombe.

=Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society= (1871). Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents the Emperor Napoleon III. Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents France. The name is formed from that of one of the Bavarian royal castles called Hohen-Schwangau. Visitors to the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play will remember the beautiful and luxurious castles which the mad king built and furnished in so costly a manner in the midst of the picturesque scenery of the Bavarian Alps. The poem deals with the subjective processes which Browning supposed animated Napoleon III. in his character as Saviour of Society. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is not precisely a soul-portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III. Mr. Browning does not draw portraits--he analyses characters. He has therefore used the Emperor as a model is used by an artist. The artist does not simply paint the model's portrait, he uses him for a higher purpose of art. Mrs. Browning was greatly interested in Louis Napoleon, enthusiastically entered into the spirit of his ambitions, and considered him as "the Saviour of Society." She loved Italy so passionately that the destroyer of the power of Austria over the land which she loved could not fail to win her admiration; and this, probably, was the chief reason of her esteem for him. Her poem Napoleon III. in Italy should be read in this connection; each verse ends "Emperor Evermore." She says:--

"We meet thee, O Napoleon, at this height At last, and find thee great enough to praise. Receive the poet's chrism, which smells beyond The priest's, and pass thy ways! An English poet warns thee to maintain God's word, not England's;--let His truth be true, And all men liars! with His truth respond To all men's lie."

She goes on to call him "Sublime Deliverer," and praises him for that "he came to deliver Italy."

[THE MAN.] For some of my younger readers, who may not be familiar with the career of the late Emperor of France, it may be necessary to remind them of the following facts in his history. He was born at Paris on April 20th, 1808. The revolution of 1830, which dethroned the Bourbons, first launched Louis Napoleon on his eventful career. With his elder brother he joined the Italian bands who were in revolt against the pope. This revolt was suppressed by Austrian soldiers. The law banishing the Bonapartes exiled him on his return to Paris, and he came to England at the age of twenty-three. In a few weeks he went to Switzerland, and wrote an essay on that country. Returning to France, he was arrested and sent to America by Louis Philippe in 1836. He returned to Switzerland next year, but shortly after left for England again, living this time in Carlton Terrace. In 1840 he made his descent upon France; his party were shot or imprisoned, Louis being condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the castle of Ham, on the Somme. He escaped after six years, and once more went to London, living at 10, King Street, St. James's. When Louis Philippe died, in 1848, Louis went to France and offered himself to the provisional government. He was ordered to withdraw from France, which he did. In April 1848 he acted as a special constable in London at the time of the Chartist disturbances. Soon after, he was elected in France to the Assembly, in three departments. In December 1848 he was elected president of the Republic by above five million votes. On the 2nd December, 1851, he executed the coup d'état, and soon after was made Emperor by the votes of nearly eight million persons. For eighteen years Louis Napoleon was sovereign of France. He married Eugénie de Montigo, Countess of Teba, Jan. 30th, 1853. On the 4th June was fought the battle of Magenta, for the liberation of Italy; and he entered Milan the next morning in company with Victor Emmanuel. He met the Emperor of Austria at Villafranca on July 11th, and the preliminaries of peace were arranged. He was hurried into the war with Germany by the clerical party at court in 1870, his advisers seeing no hope for the permanence of his dynasty but in a successful war. At the defeat of Sedan he was made prisoner, with ninety thousand men. He was incarcerated at Wilhelmshöhe, near Cassel, from which he subsequently retired to England. He lived with the Empress at Chislehurst, dying there on Jan. 9th, 1873.

[THE POEM.] The Prince is talking with Lais, an adventuress, in a room near Leicester Square. He is explaining that he has not been actuated in his past life by any desire to make anything new, but merely to conserve things, and carry on what he found ready for him: thus he has been a conserver, a saviour of society. He has lived to please himself, though he recognises God and considers himself as His instrument. God is not to every one the same; to the woman of the town with whom he is conversing, He is the Providence that helps her to pay her way. God is to all men just what they conceive him to be: a shopkeeper's God and a king's God differ,--it is just as they conceive Him. For his own part he has tried on a large scale to please himself; but he has an eye to another world also, so he must carry out God's wishes so far as he understands them,--he must preserve what he found established. He thinks himself a great man because a great conservator of order. There have been changes by God's acts, but he has held it his object in life to find out the good already existing, and preserve it. It is only the inspired man who can change society from round to square; he is himself only the man of the moment; if he succeeds, the inspired man will be the first to recognise the value of his work. He will touch nothing unless reverently; he has no higher hope than to reconcile good with hardly-quite-as-good; he will not risk a whiff of his cigar for Fourier and Comte, and all that ends in smoke. He thinks it best to be contented with what is bad but might be worse. For twenty years he has held the balance straight, and so has done good service to humanity; he has not trodden the world into a paste, that he might roll it out flat and smooth; it has been no part of his task to mend God's mistakes. All else but what a man feels is nothing, and the thing on which he congratulates himself as a ruler of men is that everything he knows, feels, or can conceive, he can make his own. He thinks that God made all things for him, and himself for Him. To learn how to set foot decidedly on some one path to heaven makes it worth while to handle things tenderly; we might mend them, but also we might mar them; meanwhile they help on so far, and therefore his end is to save society. He has no novelties to offer, he creates nothing, has no desire to renew the age,--his task is to cooperate, not to chop and change. All the good we know comes from order; he will not interfere with evil, because good is brought about by its means. When a chemist wants a white substance, and knows that the dye can be obtained from black ingredients, what a fool he would be if he were to insist that these also should be white! The Prince does not disapprove this bad world, and has no faith in a perfectly good one here. Is there any question as to the wisdom of saving society? Did he work aright with the powers appointed him for this end? On reviewing his work he finds more hope than discouragement: what he found he left, what was tottering he kept stable. It is God's part to work great changes. He discovered that a solitary great man was worth the world. It was his work to tend the cornfield, to feed the myriads of hungry men who sought for daily bread and nothing more. Was he to turn aside from that to play at horticulture, look after the cornflowers and rear the poppies? "I am Liberty, Philanthropy, Enlightenment, Patriotism," cried each: "flaunt my flag alone!" He objected, "What about the myriads who have no flag at all?" If he had to choose between faith and freedom, aristocracy and democracy, or effecting the freedom of an oppressed nation, he would ask, "How many years on an average do men live in the world?" "Some score," he is told. To this he replies, if he had a hundred years to live he might concentrate his energies on some great cause. But he has a cause, a flag and a faith: it is Italy. There was a time when he was voice and nothing more, but only like his censors; then he was full of great aims. Has he failed in promise or performance? He thinks in neither; he found that men wanted merely to be allowed to live, and so he consulted for his kind that have the eyes to see, the mouths to eat, the hands to work. Nature told him to care for himself alone in the conduct of his mind; he was to think as if man had never thought before, and act as if all creation watched him. Nature has evolved her man from the jelly-fish through various stages, till he has reached the headship of creation. He, too, the Prince, has been evolved, and can sympathise with all classes of men. Men in the main have little wants, not large; it was his duty to help the least wants first: if only he could live a hundred years instead of the average twenty, he could experiment at ease. Men want meat; they can't chew Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in exchange. Obstacles, he has discovered, are good for mankind; medicines are impeded in their action, and so are state remedies; it is not possible always to effect precisely what is intended, neither would it be always best in the long run. He illustrates this by a story of an artist's trick he saw in Rome once. An artist had covered up the sons and serpents of a Laocoön group, leaving only the central figure, with nothing to show the purpose of his gesture; then a crowd was called to give their opinion of the gesture of the figure. Every one thought it showed a man yawning, except one man, who said "I think the gesture strives against some obstacle we cannot see." Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau would like this far-sighted individual to write his history: he would be able to tell the world how he who was so misunderstood has tried to be a man. And here, he says, ends his autobiography. He will now give some idea to his companion (Lais, a not unsuitable auditor for his apologia) of what he might have been if his visions had become realities. Had his story been told by an historian of the Thiers-Hugo sort, he might have appeared thus. The nation chose the Assembly first to serve her, chose the President afterward chiefly to see that her servants did good service; when the time came that the head servant must vacate his place, and it was patent that his fellow-servants were all knaves or fools, seeing that everybody was working to serve his own purposes, that they were only waiting for the president's term of office to expire, to see their own longings crowned, he appealed to the Assembly, showed how his fellow-servants had been plotting and scheming while he alone had been faithful to the nation which had trusted him, and suggested that he should be made "master for the moment." Let him be entrusted with the utmost power they could confer upon him, he would use it faithfully. And the nation answered, with a shout,--

"The trusty one! no tricksters any more!"

Up to the time when his term of office as president must expire he had let things go their own way, knowing all, seeing everything, but letting things develop. Not that this was unsuspected by his enemies: they guessed that he was meditating some stroke of state; they saw through him, as he through them, and were on their guard. He was re-elected, and there was uprising. "The knaves and fools, each trickster with his dupe," dropped their masks, unfurled their flags, and brandished their weapons. Then fell his fist on the head of craft and greed and impudence; the fancy patriot, and the night hawk prowling for his prey, all alike were reduced to order and obedience. Of course it was demurred that he was too prodigal of life and liberty, too swift, too thorough; and Sagacity complained that he had let things go on unnoticed till severe measures had been required: he should have frustrated villainy in the egg; so for want of the by-blow had to come the butcher's work. To all this he replies that his oath had restrained him; he had rather appealed to the people for the commission to act as he had done. And then began his sway; and his motto had been, Govern for the many first, think of the poor mean multitude, all mouths and eyes primarily, and then proceed to help the few, the better favoured. His aim had been to try to equalise things a little, and this by way of reverence. He did his work with might and main, and not a touch of fear, but with confidence in God who comes before and after; irresolute as he was at first, now that the cankers of society were laid bare before him, he wrenched them out without a touch of indecision. And so, when the Republic, violating its own highest principle, bade Hohenstiel-Schwangau (really France) fasten in the throat of a neighbour (Italy), and deprive her of liberty, in this he saw an infamy triumphant; and when he came into power, he saw, too, that it demanded his interference. Sagacity said, "Let the wrong stand over,--he was not to blame for the wrong, it was there before his time." But he was prompt to act. Out came the canker, root and branch, with much abuse for him from friend and foe. Sagacity said he had been precipitate, rash, and rude, though in the right: he should have blown a trumpet-blast to let the wrong-doers know they must set their house in order. He replies that he would have broken another generation's heart by the respite to the iniquity. And so the war came. "But France," said Sagacity, "had ever been a fighter, and would continue to be so till the weary world interfered." Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau recognises this, and says war for war's sake is damnable. He will prevent the growth of this madness. This, however, does not imply that there shall be no war at all, when the wickedness he denounces comes from the neighbour. He will deliver Italy from the rule of Austria, smite her oppressor hip and thigh till he leaves her free from the Adriatic to the Alps. Sagacity suggests that this should not be all for nought: "there ought to be some honorarium paid--Savoy and Nice, for example." But the Prince says "No; let there be war for the hate of war." So Italy was free. But there were other points noteworthy and commendable in the man's career: he was resolute, fearless, and true, and by his rule the world had proof a point was gained. He had shown he was the fittest man to rule; chance of birth and dice-throw had been outdone here. Sagacity often advised him to confirm the advance, and bade him wed the pick of the world; if he married a queen, he might tell the world that the old enthroned decrepitudes acknowledged that their knell had sounded, and that they were making peace with the new order. Or let him have a free wife for his free state. Sagacity desires to prop up the lie that the son derives his genius from the sire, but God does not work like this. He drops His seed of heavenly flame where He wills on earth; the rock all naked and unprepared is as likely to receive it as the accumulated store of faculties:

"The great Gardener grafts the excellence On wildings where He will."

He tells the story of the manner in which the succession of priests was maintained at an old Roman temple. Each priest obtained his predecessor's office by springing from ambush and slaying him,--his initiative rite was simply murder under a religious sanction; so he says it is, and ever shall be with genius and its priesthood in the world, the new power slays the old. Thus did the Prince refute Sagacity, always whispering in his ear that Fortune alternates with Providence, and he must not reckon on a happy hit occurring twice. But he will trust nothing to right divine and luck of the pillow; rulers should be selected by supremacy of brains; a blunder may ensue; it cannot be worse than the rule of the legitimate blockhead. By this time poor Lais has gone to sleep (little wonder!). The Prince leaves off imagining what the historian of the Thiers-Hugo school might have written, of the life he might have led, and the things he might have done. All this was in cloud-land. In the inner chamber of the soul the silent truth fights the battle out with the lie, truth which unarmed pits herself against the armoury of the tongue. We must use words though; and somehow--as even do the best rifled cannon--words will deflect the shot.

NOTES.--Œdipus, son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta. He was exposed to the persecutions of Juno from his birth. He murdered his father and committed incest with his mother. Riddle of the Sphinx: Œdipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a terrible monster which devoured all those who attempted its solution and failed. The enigma was this: "What animal in the morning walks upon four feet, at noon upon two, and in the evening upon three?" Œdipus said: "Man, in the morning of his life, goes on all fours; when grown to manhood, he walks erect; and in old age, the evening of life, supports himself with a stick." "Home's stilts": the spirit-rapper, D. D. Home, is here referred to. (See, for Mr. Browning's opinion of Spiritualism, his poem Mr. Sludge the Medium. Sludge is really Home.) Corinth, an ancient city of Greece, celebrated for its wealth and the luxury of its inhabitants. Thebes: the Sphinx resorted to the neighbourhood of this city. It was the capital of Bœotia, and one of the most ancient cities of Greece. Laïs, a celebrated courtesan who lived at Corinth, and ridiculed the philosophers. Thrace, an extensive country between the Ægean, Euxine and Danube. Residenz (Ger.): the residence of a prince and count. Pradier Magdalen: the statue of St. Mary Magdalen by James Pradier, in the Louvre. Pradier was born at Geneva in 1790, and died in Paris 1852. He was a brilliant and popular sculptor. His chief works are the Son of Niobe, Atalanta, Psyche, Sappho (all in the Louvre), a bas-relief on the triumphal arch of the Carousel, the figures of Fame on the Arc de l'Etoile, and Rousseau's statue at Geneva. Fourier: Charles Fourier was a Frenchman who recommended the reorganisation of society into small communities, living in common. Comte, Auguste: the author of the Positive Philosophy, the key to which is "the Law of the Three States'--that is to say, there are three different ways in which the human mind explains phenomena, each way succeeding the other. These three stages are the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive. The Positive stage is that in which the relation is established between the given fact and some more general fact. "But, God, what a Geometer art Thou!" This is Plato's. Browning uses the same idea in Easter Day (see the notes to that poem). Hercules, substituting his shoulder for that of Atlas: Atlas was one of the Titans, and was fabled to support the world on his shoulders. Hercules was said to have eased for some time the labours of Atlas by taking upon his shoulders the weight of the heavens. Œta, a mountain range in the south of Thessaly. Proudhon was a revolutionary writer (1809-65). His answer to the question, "Qu'est ce-que la Propriété?" is famous: "La Propriété, c'est le vol," he replied. His greatest work was the "Système des Contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère." His violent utterances led to his imprisonment for three years. Great Nation: to the French their country is "La Grande Nation." Leicester Square: all the foreign refugees in England gravitate towards Leicester Square. Cayenne: the capital of French Guiana, and a penal settlement for political offenders. It is anything but "cool," the temperature throughout the year being from 76° to 88° Fahr. It is fever-stricken, and very unhealthy generally. Xerxes and the Plane-tree: Xerxes going from Phrygia into Lydia, observed a plane-tree, which on account of its beauty, he presented with golden ornaments. (Herodotus vii. 31.) Kant: Emmanuel Kant, author of the Critique of Pure Reason (1724-1804). He was the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century. This celebrated work of Kant's penetrated to all the leading universities, and its author was hailed by some as a second Messiah. The falls of Terni, on the route from Perugia to Orte, in Central Italy, have few rivals in Europe in point of beauty and volume of water. They are the celebrated falls of the Velino (which here empties itself into the Nera) called the Cascate delle Marmore, and are about 650 feet in height. Laocoön, a Trojan, priest of Apollo, who was killed at the altar by two serpents. The famous group of sculpture called by this name is in the Vatican Museum, in the Cortile del Belvedere. According to Pliny, it was executed by three Rhodians, and was placed in the palace of Titus. It was discovered in 1506, and was termed by Michael Angelo a marvel of art. Thiers, Louis Adolphe (1797-1877), "liberator of the territory," as France calls him. He wrote the History of the French Revolution. Victor Hugo, born 1802, a famous politician and novelist of France, was exiled by Louis Napoleon after the coup d'état. He fulminated against the Emperor from Jersey his book Napoleon the Little. He was detested almost fanatically by Napoleon III. "Brennus in the Capitol": Brennus was a leader of the Gauls, and conqueror at the Allia, a small river eleven miles north of Rome, on the banks of which the Gauls inflicted a terrible defeat on the Romans on July 16th, B.C. 390. After this defeat the Romans, terrified by this sudden invasion, fled into the Capitol and left the whole city in the possession of the enemy. The Gauls climbed the Tarpeian rock in the night, and the Capitol would have been taken if the Romans had not been alarmed by the cackling of some geese near the doors, when they attacked and defeated the Gauls. Salvatore, == Salvator Rosa, a renowned painter of the Neapolitan school. Clitumnus, a river of Italy, the waters of which, when drunk, were said to render oxen white. Nemi: the lake of Nemi, in the Alban mountains, near Rome, was anciently called the Lacus Nemorensis, and sometimes the Mirror of Diana, from its extreme beauty. Remains have been discovered of a temple to that goddess in the neighbourhood, and from her sacred grove, or nemus, the present name is derived.

="Prize Poems."= Dining one day last year at Trinity College, Cambridge, with that enthusiastic young Browning scholar, Mr. E. H. Blakeney (himself a poet of great promise), we discussed the question of the comparative popularity of Browning's shorter poems, and it was decided that he should ask the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette to put it to the vote in his columns. A prize was offered for the list of fifty poems which came nearest to the standard list obtained by collating the lists of all the competitors. The fifty "prize poems" selected by the plébiscite as Browning's best, arranged in the order of the votes they severally received, were the following:--

1. How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.

2. Evelyn Hope.

3. Abt Vogler. Saul.

5. Rabbi Ben Ezra.

6. The Lost Leader.

7. The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

8. Prospice.

9. Hervé Riel.

10. Andrea del Sarto.

11. The Last Ride Together.

12. A Grammarian's Funeral.

13. Home Thoughts from Abroad.

14. The Boy and the Angel.

15. Epilogue to Asolando.

16. By the Fireside. Fra Lippo Lippi.

18. Caliban upon Setebos.

19. One Word More.

20. Any Wife to Any Husband.

21. An Epistle of Karshish.

22. Incident of the French Camp.

23. The Guardian Angel.

24. Love among the Ruins.

25. Apparent Failure. A Forgiveness.

27. A Death in the Desert. A Woman's Last Word.

29. Count Gismond.

30. In a Gondola.

31. The Patriot.

32. A Toccata of Galuppi's.

33. My Last Duchess.

34. The Worst of It. Truth and Art.

36. The Statue and the Bust.

37. The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church.

38. Cristina.

39. Clive.

40. Confessions.

41. Two in the Campagna.

42. Summum Bonum.

43. After.

44. Holy Cross Day. The Italian in England.

46. Up at a Villa.

47. Before.

48. James Lee's Wife. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

50. Old Pictures in Florence.

=Prologue to Dramatic Idyls.= (Second Series.) When we are suffering from bodily illness, doctors often disagree as to the diagnosis of our complaint. We go from specialist to specialist, and each physician declares that we are suffering from that disorder which he makes his special study: the brain doctor says it is all brain trouble; the heart man, the liver and lung specialists, are all pretty certain to diagnose their own favourite malady. And so even the wisest are ignorant of man's body. But when we come to soul, there is no difficulty at all: they pounce on our malady in a trice. They can see the body, and cannot tell what is the matter with it; the soul, which they cannot see, presents no difficulties whatever to their wise heads! Mr. Sharp, in his paper on Dramatic Idyls II., says this Epilogue is the key to the leading idea of each poem in the volume. Echetlos deals with patriotic action. We think Miltiades and Themistocles true patriots, but history shows that they only served their own turn. Clive dreaded death less than a lie, yet committed suicide: was this due to courage or fear? Mulyekeh loved his mare, but sacrificed her to his pride. Pietro of Abano did benevolent actions, yet had no love in his heart. Doctor ---- did good actions from a motive of hate. Pan and Luna: this poem deals with an act of love from opposite extremes--Pan gross and brutal, Luna pure and modest; yet she does not spurn Pan. This was not due to want of modesty, but to the power of love, and Pan was not actuated by brute passion. The Epilogue is to oppose the idea that poets sing spontaneously about anything. Browning says his rocks are hard and forbidding, yet they hold, like Alpine crags, pine seeds of truth.

=Prologue to Ferishtah's Fancies.= This is intended to describe the peculiar construction of the volume of poems. The poet tells his readers how ortolans are eaten in Italy: the birds are stuck on a skewer, some dozen or more, each having interposed between himself and his neighbour on the spit a bit of toast and a strong sage leaf; and the eater is intended to bite through crust, seasoning, and bird altogether, so the lusciousness is curbed and the full flavour of the delicacy is obtained. The poem, we are told, is dished up on the same principle. We have sense, sight and song here, and all is arranged to suit our digestion. We have the fancy or fable, then a dialogue, and a melodious lyric to conclude; so, in the twelve poems, we may see twelve ortolans, with their accompanying toast and sage leaf.

NOTES.--Ortolans (Emberiza hortulana): the garden bunting, a native of Continental Europe and Western Asia. It is very much like the yellowhammer. They are netted, and fed in a darkened room with oats and other grain. They soon become very fat, and are then killed for the table; the birds are much prized by gourmands. Gressoney, a village in the valley of the Aosta. Val d'Aosta, valley of the Aosta, in northern Piedmont.

=Prologue to Pacchiarotto.= The poet is imprisoned on a long summer day with his feet on a grass plot and his eyes on a red brick wall. True, the wall is clothed with a luxuriant creeper through which the bricks laugh, and the robe of green pulsates with life, beautifying the barrier. He reflects that wall upon wall divide us from the subtle thing that is spirit: though cloistered here in the body-barrier, he will hope hard, and send his soul forth to the congenial spirit beyond the ring of neighbours which, like a fence of brick and stone, divides him from his love.

=Prospice= == "Look forward" (Dramatis Personæ, 1864) was written in the autumn following Mrs. Browning's death. St. Paul speaks of those "who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage": the author of Prospice and the Epilogue to Asolando was not of this class. Few men have written as nobly as he on the awful "minute of night," and its fight with the "Arch Fear." Estimating it at its fullest import, as only a great imaginative mind can do, he is in face of "the black minute" and "the power of the night"--the Mr. Greatheart of the pilgrims to the dark river. Nothing grander has been written on the subject than the poems we have named. In the short poem Prospice is concentrated the strength of a great soul and the courage of one who is prepared for the worst, with eyes unbandaged. As an example of the poet's power nothing can be finer. The dramatic intensity of the opening lines--the fog, the mist, the snow, and the blasts which indicate the journey's end, "the post of the foe"--is unsurpassed even by Shakespeare himself. It is a defiance of death, a challenge to battle.

=Protus.= (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) There is no historical foundation for the poem. In the declining years of the Roman Empire such rapid transitions of power were not uncommon. A baby Emperor Protus is described in some ancient work as absorbing the interest of the whole empire: queens ministered at his cradle. The world rose in war till he was presented at a balcony to pacify it. Greek sculptors and great artists strove to impress his graces on their work, his subjects learned to love the letters of his name; and on the same page of the history it was recorded how the same year a blacksmith's bastard, by name John the Pannonian, arose and took the crown and wore it for six years, till his sons poisoned him. What became of the young Emperor Protus was then but mere hearsay: perhaps he was permitted to escape; he may have become a tutor at some foreign court, or, as others say, he may have died in Thrace a monk. "Take what I say," wrote the annotator, "at its worth."

=Puccio.= (Luria.) The officer in the Florentine army who was superseded by the Moorish leader Luria.

=Queen, The.= (In a Balcony.) The middle-aged woman who, though married, falls in love with Norbert, the lover of Constance. She prepares to divorce her husband and marry her officer. When, however, she discovers the truth about the young lovers, she is the prey of jealousy and offended dignity, and the drama closes with ominous prospects for the unfortunate couple.

=Queen Worship.= Under this title were originally published two poems: i., Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli; and ii., Cristina.

=Quietism.= See MOLINISTS.

=Rabbi Ben Ezra.= (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) The character is historical. The Encyclopædia Britannica gives the name as Abenezra, or Ibn Ezra, the full name being Abraham Ben Meir Ben Ezra; he was also called Abenare or Evenare. "He was one of the most eminent of the Jewish literati of the Middle Ages. He was born at Toledo about 1090, left Spain for Rome about 1140, resided afterwards at Mantua in 1145, at Rhodes in 1155 and 1166, in England in 1159, and died probably in 1168. He was distinguished as a philosopher, astronomer, physician, and poet; but especially as a grammarian and commentator. The works by which he is best known form a series of Commentaries on the books of the Old Testament, which have nearly all been printed in the great Rabbinic Bibles of Bomberg (1525-26), Buxtorf (1618-19), and Frankfurter (1724-27). Abenezra's commentaries are acknowledged to be of very great value. He was the first who raised biblical exegesis to the rank of a science, interpreting the text according to its literal sense, and illustrating it from cognate languages. His style is elegant, but is so concise as to be sometimes obscure; and he occasionally indulges in epigram. In addition to the commentaries, he wrote several treatises on astronomy or astrology, and a number of grammatical works." He appears to have possessed extraordinary natural talents; to these he added "indefatigable ardour and industry in the pursuit of knowledge, and he enjoyed besides, in his youth, the advantage of the best teachers, among whom was the Karaite, Japhet Hallevi or Levita, to whom he is believed to have owed his taste for etymological and grammatical investigation, and his preference for the literal to the allegorical and cabalistic interpretation of Scripture. He was afterwards married to Levita's daughter." He did not consider his life a fortunate one as men look upon life. "I strive to grow rich," he said; "but the stars are against me. If I sold shrouds, none would die. If candles were my wares the sun would not set till the day of my death." The cause of his leaving Spain was an outbreak against the Jews. Hitherto, he said of himself, he had been "as a withered leaf; I roved far away from my native land, from Spain, and went to Rome with a troubled soul." He seems to have written no books until after his exile, and then he actively engaged in literary work. The most complete catalogue of his works is contained in Furst's Bibliotheca Judaica (Leipzig, 1849). "Maimonides, his great contemporary, esteemed his writings so highly for learning, judgment, and elegance, that he recommended his son to make them for some time the exclusive object of his study. By Jewish scholars he is preferred, as a commentator, even to Raschi in point of judiciousness and good sense; and in the judgment of Richard Simon, confirmed by De Rossi, he is the most successful of all the rabbinical commentators in the grammatical and literal interpretation of the Scriptures" (Imp. Dict. Biog.). According to Rabbi Ben Ezra, man's life is to be viewed as a whole. God's plan in our creation has arranged for youth and age, and no view of life is consistent with it which ignores the work of either. Man is not a bird or a beast, to find joy solely in feasting; care and doubt are the life stimuli of his soul: the Divine spark within us is nearer to God than are the recipients of His inferior gifts. So our rebuffs, our stings to urge us on, our strivings, are the measure of our ultimate success: aspiration, not achievement, divides us from the brute. The body is intended to subserve the highest aims of the soul: it will do so if we live and learn. The flesh is pleasant, and can help soul as that helps the body. Youth must seek its heritage in age; in the repose of age he is to take measures for his last adventure. This he can do with prospect of success proportionate to his use of the past. Wait death without fear, as you awaited age. Sentence will not be passed on mere "work" done: our purposes, thoughts, fancies, all that the coarse methods of human estimates failed to appreciate, these will be put in the diamond scales of God and credited to us. God is the Potter; we are clay, receiving our shape and form and ornament by every turn of the wheel and faintest touch of the Master's hand. The uses of a cup are not estimated by its foot or by its stem; but by the bowl which presses the Master's lips to slake the Divine thirst. We cannot see the meaning of the wheel and the touches of the potter's hand and instrument; we know this, and this only,--our times are in His hand who has planned a perfect cup.--I am indebted to Mr. A. J. Campbell for the following notes, the result of his researches in endeavouring to trace the real Rabbi Ibn Ezra in the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra. His fellow-religionists say of the Rabbi that he was "a man of strongly marked individuality and independence of thought, keen in controversy, yet genial withal; and it is in words such as these that the final estimate of his own people is given. 'He was the wonder of his contemporaries and of those who came after him ... profoundly versed in every branch of knowledge, with unfailing judgment, a man of sharp tongue and keen wit' (Dr. J. M. Jost, Geschichte des Judenthums, 2nd Abth., p. 419). And again: 'This man possessed an immense erudition; but his masterly spirit is far more to be wondered at than the mass of knowledge he acquired' (Id., Geschichte des Israeliten, 6{te} Theil, p. 162)." Mr. Campbell thinks that the distinctive features of the Rabbi of the poem were drawn by Mr. Browning from the writings of the real Rabbi, and that the philosophy which he puts into the mouth of Rabbi Ben Ezra was actually that of Rabbi Ibn Ezra. "It was no worldly success that gave peace to his age; but he had won a spiritual calm, no longer troubled by the doubts that at one time or another must come to all who think. 'While this remarkable man was roving about from east to west and from north to south, his mind remained firm in the principles he had once for all accepted as true.... His advocacy of freedom of thought and research, his views concerning angels, concerning the immortality of the soul, are the same in the earlier commentaries ... as with [those] which were written later; the same in his grammatical works as in his theological discourses'" (Dr. M. Friedlander, Essays on Ibn Ezra, Preface and p. 139). "Our times are in His hand," says Browning's Rabbi; so, too, Ibn Ezra, in a poem quoted by Dr. Michael Sachs (Die Religiose Poesie der Juden in Spanien, p. 117)--"In deiner Hand liegt mein Geschichte." Says Dr. Friedlander, "He had very little money, and very much wit, and was a born foe to all superficiality. So he had spent his youth in preparing himself for his future career by collecting and storing up materials, in cultivating the garden of his mind so that it might at a later period produce the choicest and most precious fruits" (Ibn Ezra's Comment., Isaiah, Introduction by Dr. Friedlander). Mr. Campbell says that the keynote of Ibn Ezra's teaching is that the essential life of man is the life of the soul. "Man has the sole privilege of becoming superior to the beast and the fowl, according to the words 'He teacheth him to raise himself above the cattle of the earth'" (Ibn Ezra, Comment., Job xxxv. 11). "He ascribes to man's soul a triple nature, or three faculties roughly corresponding to the division of St. Paul of man into body, soul and spirit. The soul of man, he holds, can exist with or without the body, and did, in fact, pre-exist" (Friedlander, Essays on Ibn Ezra, pp. 27-8). This is Browning's theory in verse 27. In Browning's poem the Rabbi describes man's life as the lone way of the soul (verse 8). Ibn Ezra, in his Commentary, Psalm xxii. 22, says, "The soul of man is called lonely because it is separated during its union with the body from the universal soul, into which it is again received when it departs from its earthly companion." When Rabbi Ben Ezra, in Mr. Browning's poem, speaks of the body at its best projecting the soul on its way (verse 8), he is uttering the thought of Ibn Ezra, who says, "It is well known that, as long as the bodily desires are strong, the soul is weak and powerless against them, because they are supported by the body and all its powers: hence those who only think of eating and drinking will never be wise. By the alliance of the intellect with the animal soul [sensibility, the higher quality of the body] the desires [the lower quality or appetite of the body] are subordinated, and the eyes of the soul are opened a little, so as to comprehend the knowledge of material bodies; but the soul is not yet prepared for pure knowledge, on account of the animal soul which seeks dominion and produces all kinds of passion; therefore, after the victory gained with the support of the animal soul over the desires, it is necessary that the soul should devote itself to wisdom, and seek its support for the subjection of the passions, in order to remain under the sole control of knowledge" (Ibn Ezra, Comment., Eccl. vii. 3). Mr. Campbell has shown how much Mr. Browning has assimilated Ibn Ezra's philosophy in many other points in the poem. (For an extended explanation of the poem see my Browning's Message to his Time, pp. 157-72.)

=Rawdon Brown.= "Mr. Rawdon Brown, an Englishman of culture, well known to visitors in Venice, died in that city in the summer of 1883. He went to Venice for a short visit, with a definite object in view, and ended by staying forty years. During one of his rare runs to England, I met him at Ruskin's at Denmark Hill, somewhere about 1860. He englished, abstracted, and calendared for our Record Office, a large number of the reports of the Venetian Ambassadors in England in the days of Elizabeth, etc. His love for Venice was so great, that some one invented about him the story which Browning told in the following sonnet, which was printed by Browning's permission, and that of Mrs. Bronson--at whose request it was written--in the Century Magazine 'Bric-à-Brac' for February 1884" (Dr. Furnivall in Browning Society's Papers, vol. i., p. 132*).

"Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii."--Venetian Saying. (Tr. Everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine.)

Sighed Rawdon Brown: "Yes, I'm departing, Toni! I needs must, just this once before I die, Revisit England: Anglus Brown am I, Although my heart's Venetian. Yes, old crony-- Venice and London--London's 'Death the bony' Compared with Life--that's Venice! What a sky, A sea, this morning! One last look! Good-bye. Cà Pesaro! No, lion--I'm a coney To weep--I'm dazzled; 'tis that sun I view Rippling the--the--Cospetto, Toni! Down With carpet-bag, and off with valise-straps! Bella Venezia, non ti lascio più!" Nor did Brown ever leave her: well, perhaps Browning, next week, may find himself quite Brown!

Nov. 28th, 1883. ROBERT BROWNING.

=Reason and Fancy.= The discussion between Reason and Fancy is in La Saisiaz.

=Red Cotton Night-cap Country, or Turf and Towers= (1873). This may be termed a pathological poem, a study of suicidal mania and religious insanity in a young man of dissipated habits whose "mind" was scarcely worthy of the poet's analysis. The title given to the work was so bestowed in consequence of Mr. Browning having met Miss Thackeray in a part of Normandy which she jokingly christened "White Cotton Night-cap Country," on account of its sleepiness. Mr. Browning having heard the tragedy which his story tells, said "Red Cotton Night-cap Country" would be the more appropriate term. The alternative title, "Turf and Towers," is much more likely to have been suggested by the scenery of the place than by the more fanciful reasons which have sometimes been imagined for it. The scene of the story is in the department of Calvados, close to the city of Caen. The whole country is very interesting, from its historical associations and architectural remains, and the scenery is exceedingly beautiful. M. de Caumont, the distinguished archæologist of Caen, enumerates nearly seventy specimens of the Norman architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries existing in it. Battlemented walls furnished with towers, picturesque chateaux, old churches and tall spires in a landscape of luxuriant pastures and grey and purple hills, justified the title "Turf and Towers," even apart from the particular circumstances connected with the story. Mr. Browning visited St. Aubin's in 1872, and was interested in the singular history of the family which owned Clairvaux, a restored priory in the locality. Léonce Miranda, the son and heir of a wealthy Paris jeweller, led a dissipated life in his times of leisure, but industriously pursued his calling in strictly business hours. After devoting his attentions to a number of light-o'-loves, he one day fell in love with an adventuress, one Clara Mulhausen, who succeeded in securing him in her toils. As she was already married, the connection was of a nature to be carried on in seclusion, and the jeweller accordingly left a manager in charge of his business, retiring with the woman to Clairvaux, where his father had already purchased property. For five years the couple lived together in what was considered to be happiness. Then Miranda was suddenly called to Paris to account to his mother for his extravagance: he had spent large sums in building operations, having amongst other things erected a Belvedere (a sort of tower above the roof built for viewing the scenery). He so felt the reproaches of his mother that he attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. He was saved, however, and having been restored by Clara's nursing, was convalescent when he was again urgently summoned to his mother, only to find her dead. He was told that his conduct was responsible for his mother's death; and his relatives, careless of the consequences to a mind so unhinged as Miranda's, spared him none of their upbraidings. All this had the anticipated effect: he gave up the bulk of his property to his relatives, reserving only enough for his decent support and that of Clara. When the day arrived for the legal arrangements to be completed, he was found in a room reading and burning in the fire a number of letters. He had afterwards, so it was discovered, placed a number of the papers in a bag and held it in the fire till his hands were destroyed, at the same time crying, "Burn, burn and purify my past." If anything more than what had already happened were necessary to prove the man's insanity, the fact that he inflicted this terrible injury upon himself was sufficient evidence on the point. He declared that he was working out his salvation, and had to be dragged from the room protesting that the sacrifice was incomplete: "I must have more hands to burn!" He lay in a fevered condition for three months, raving against the temptress. When he was sufficiently restored to health he took her back to his heart, saying however, "Her sex is changed: this is my brother--he will tend me now." He disposed of the jeweller's shop to his relatives, and went back to Clairvaux with the woman. At this point Mr. Browning brings the would-be suicide under the influence of religion; the man devoted his substance liberally to the poor, and made many gifts to the Church: it was "ask and have" with this kind Miranda, who was striving to save his soul by acts of charity. It happened that there was a pilgrimage chapel of La Déliverande near Clairvaux, called in the poem, rather oddly, "The Ravissante." The Norman sailors and peasants have resorted to this place of devotion for the last eight hundred years. Murray says: "It is a small Norman edifice. The statue of the Virgin, which now commands the veneration of the faithful, was resuscitated in the reign of Henry I. from the ruins of a previous chapel destroyed by the Northmen, through the agency of a lamb constantly grubbing up the earth over the spot where it lay. Such is the tenor of the legend. The reputation of the image for performing miracles, especially in behalf of sailors, has been maintained from that time to the present." Of course Miranda paid many visits to Our Lady's shrine; many prayers had been heard and answered there,--why should not La Déliverande help him? One splendid day in spring he mounts the stairs of his view-tower, and, as the poet imagines, addresses the Virgin in exalted phrase. He declares that he burned his hands off because she had prompted, "Purchase now by pain pleasure hereafter in the world to come." He had lightened his purse even if his soul still retained forbidden treasure, and "Where is the reward?" He reproaches Our Lady that she has done nothing to help him. She is Queen of Angels: will she suspend for him the law of gravity if he casts himself from the tower? He tells her it will restore religion to France, to the world, if this miracle is worked. He sees Our Lady smile assent: he will trust himself. He springs from the balustrade, and lies stone dead on the turf the next moment. "Mad!" exclaimed a gardener who saw him fall. "No! Sane," says Mr. Browning. "He put faith to the proof. He believed in Christianity for its miracles, not for its moral influence on the heart of man; better test such faith at once--'kill or cure.'" By a later will Miranda had bequeathed all his property to the Church, reserving sufficient for the support of Clara. Of course the relatives interfered, with the idea of securing the property for themselves. This led to a trial, which was decided in the lady's favour, and she was châtelaine of Clairvaux where Browning saw her in 1872. The real names of the persons and places are not given in the poem, and there is no good purpose to be served by giving a key to them.

NOTES.--[The pages are those of the first edition of the Poem.] Page 2, "Un-Murrayed": unfrequented by tourists who carry Murray's or Bædeker's guide-books. p. 4, Saint-Rambert == St. Aubin, a pretty bathing-place in Calvados, Normandy; Joyous-Gard: the estate given by King Arthur to Sir Launcelot of the Lake for defending Guinevere. p. 6, Rome's Corso: the principal modern thoroughfare of Rome is the Corso. p. 18, Guarnerius, Andreas, and his son Giuseppe, early Italian violin makers; Straduarius, Antonio: a famous violin maker of Cremona (1649-1737). p. 19, Corelli (1653-1713): a celebrated violin player and composer; cushat-dove == the ring-dove or wood-pigeon; giga == gigg: a jig, a dance; Saraband: a grave Spanish dance in triple time. p. 23, "Quod semel, semper, et ubique": what was once, and is always and everywhere. This would seem to be intended for the celebrated rule of St. Vincent of Lerins as to the Catholic Faith--"Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ad omnibus creditum est. Hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum" (Comm., c. 3)--that is to say, the Catholic doctrine is that which has been believed in all places, at all times, and by all the faithful. p. 24, Rahab-thread: see Joshua ii. 18. p. 25, Octroi: a tax levied at the gate of Continental cities on food, etc., brought within the walls. p. 29, The Conqueror's country: Normandy, the native country of William the Conqueror. p. 30, Lourdes and La Salette: celebrated places of pilgrimage in France. p. 37, Abaris: a priest of Apollo; he rode through the air, invisible, on a golden arrow, curing diseases and giving oracles. p. 42, Madrilene, of Madrid. p. 73, Father Secchi: the great Jesuit astronomer of Rome. p. 83, Acromia: in anatomy, the outer extremities of the shoulder-blades. p. 84, Sganarelle: the hero of Molière's comedy Le Mariage Forcé. A man aged about fifty-four proposes to marry a fashionable young woman, but he has certain scruples which, however, are allayed by the cudgel of the lady's brother. p. 87, Caen: an ancient and celebrated city of Normandy. p. 88, "Inveni ovem [meam] quæ perierat": "I have found my sheep which was lost" (St. Luke xv. 6). p. 108, Favonian breeze: the west wind, favourable to vegetation; Auster: an unhealthy wind, the same as the Sirocco. p. 140, L'Ingegno, Andrea Luigi. p. 141, Boileau: the great French poet, born at Paris 1636; Louis Quatorze: Louis XIV., king of France; Pierre Corneille: the great dramatic poet (1606-84), born at Rouen. p. 177, "Religio Medici": a doctor's religion; the title of the celebrated book of Sir Thomas Browne, a devout Christian writer; the new religion of the hyper-scientific school of doctors is mere materialism. p. 193, Rouher, Eugene: French politician (1814-84); Œcumenical Assemblage at Rome: a general or universal council of the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. p. 202, fons et origo: the fount and origin. p. 203, "On Christmas morn--three Masses": the first is the midnight mass, the second at break of day, the third is the Christmas morning mass. p. 204, Cistercian monk: of an Order established at Citeaux, in France, by Robert, abbot of Moleme. The Order is very severe; but its rule is similar to that of the Benedictines; Capucin: a monk of the Order of St. Francis; Benedict: St. Benedict, "the most illustrious name in the history of Western monasticism": he was born at Nursia, in Umbria, about the year 480; Scholastica: St. Scholastica was the sister of St. Benedict: she established a convent near Monte Cassino. p. 210, Star of Sea: Stella Maris, one of the titles of Our Lady, because mare means "the sea" in Latin. p. 229, Commines (more correctly Comines): Philippe de Comines (1445-1509), called "the father of modern history." Hallam says that his Memoirs "almost make an epoch in modern history." p. 234, "Queen of Angels": one of the titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary. p. 235, "Legations to the Pope": ambassadors or envoys to the Pope of Rome. p. 238, Alacoque: the Ven. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who founded the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in France; "Renan burns his book": Ernest Renan, born 1823, the famous French philologist and historian, author of the Rationalistic Life of Jesus, which of course he did not burn! "Veuillot burns Renan": Louis Veuillot (1813-83), a celebrated French writer of the Ultramontane school, who would gladly have suppressed Renan if he had had the opportunity; "The Universe": the famous Catholic journal edited by Veuillot. p. 245, Lignum vitæ: Guaiacum wood, used in rheumatism, etc.; grains of Paradise: an aromatic drug with carminative properties, like ginger. p. 268, "Painted Peacock": the butterfly whose scientific name is the Vanessa io; Brimstone-wing: the species of butterfly so called from its bright yellow colour. Its scientific name is the Rhodocera Rhamna.

=Religious Belief of Browning.= There was little or no dogmatism in Browning's religious faith. He was at least a Theist. "He believed in Soul, and was very sure of God." Whether the orthodox would consider him a Christian in the sense of the old churches is a matter we cannot discuss here; in the widest sense, however, he has given abundant evidence that he was a Christian. Those who maintain him to be a believer in the Divinity of Christ ground their opinion on such poems as A Death in the Desert and The Epistle of Karshish--which, nevertheless, it is objected, are merely dramatic utterances, and cannot fairly be held to set forth the poet's own convictions; to such an opponent I should be content to point to the following letter, published just after the poet's death in The Nonconformist, and reprinted in the Transactions of the Browning Society. It was written by Browning in 1876 to a lady, who, believing herself to be dying, wrote to thank him for the help she had derived from his poems, mentioning particularly Rabbi Ben Ezra and Abt Vogler, and giving expression to the deep satisfaction of her mind that one so highly gifted with genius should hold, as Browning held, to the great truths of our religion, and to a belief in the glorious unfolding and crowning of life in the world beyond the grave:--"19, Warwick Crescent, W., May 11th, 1876. Dear Friend,--It would ill become me to waste a word on my own feelings, except inasmuch as they can be common to us both in such a situation as you described yours to be--and which, by sympathy, I can make mine by the anticipation of a few years at most. It is a great thing--the greatest--that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a witness to the power and love of God. I dare congratulate you. All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope--and that, by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary; and for your sake I would wish it to be true that I had so much of 'genius' as to permit the testimony of an especially privileged insight to come in aid of the ordinary argument. For I know I myself have been aware of the communication of something more subtle than a ratiocinative process, when the convictions of 'genius' have thrilled my soul to its depth, as when Napoleon, shutting up the New Testament, said of Christ--'Do you know that I am an understander of men? Well, He was no man!' ('Savez-vous que je me connais en hommes? Eh bien, celui-là ne fut pas un homme.') Or as when Charles Lamb, in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to appear suddenly in flesh and blood once more--on the final suggestion, 'And if Christ entered this room?' changed his manner at once, and stuttered out--as his manner was when moved, 'You see--if Shakespeare entered, we should all rise; if He appeared, we must kneel.' Or, not to multiply instances, as when Dante wrote what I will transcribe from my wife's Testament--wherein I recorded it fourteen years ago--'Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamoured.' Dear Friend, I may have wearied you in spite of your good will. God bless you, sustain, and receive you! Reciprocate this blessing with yours affectionately, ROBERT BROWNING." The Agnostic school is indefatigable in endeavouring to secure Browning as a great representative of their "know-nothingism," whatever that may be. They might as reasonably claim Robert Browning on the side of Agnosticism as John Henry Newman on the side of Atheism, which also certain wiseacres in their crass hebetude or vain affectation have pretended to do.

=Religious Poems.= (1) More or less expressions of the poet's own faith are "La Saisiaz," "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," "The Epistle of Karshish," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "The Pope" (in The Ring and the Book), and "Prospice." (2) Dramatic utterances concerning religion may be found in "Caliban upon Setebos," "A Death in the Desert," "Saul," and "Johannes Agricola," amongst many others.

=Renan= (Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ). The "second speaker" in the Epilogue is described as Renan. Joseph Ernest Renan, philologist, member of the Institute of France, was born Feb. 27th, 1823. He is best known by his Life of Jesus.

=Rephan= (Asolando, 1889). "Suggested," as the poet says in a note prefixed to the poem, "by a very early recollection of a pure story by the noble woman and imaginative writer, Jane Taylor, of Norwich."[3] It will assist the reader to understand the poem if I give an outline of the story which lived so long in Browning's memory and suggested these verses. "Rephan" is the star mentioned in Jane Taylor's beautiful story "How it Strikes a Stranger," contained in the first volume of her work entitled The Contributions of Q. Q. Mrs. Oliphant, in her Literary History of the Nineteenth Century, vol. ii., p. 351, thus describes "How it Strikes a Stranger." "A little epilogue in which the supposed impression made upon the mind of an angel whose curiosity has tempted him, even at the cost of sharing their mortality, to descend among men, is the theme, recurs to our mind from the recollections of youth with considerable force." In one of the most ancient and magnificent cities of the East there appeared, in a remote period of antiquity, a stranger of extraordinary aspect. He had no knowledge of the language of the country, and was ignorant of its customs. One day, when residing with one of the nobles of the city, after having been taught the language of the people and having learned something of their modes of thought, he was seen to be gazing with fixed attention upon a certain star in the heavens. He explained that this was his home: he was lately an inhabitant of that tranquil planet, from whence a vain curiosity had tempted him to wander. When the first idea of death was explained to him, he was but slightly moved; but when he was informed that the happiness or misery of the immortal life depended upon a man's conduct in the present stage of existence, he was deeply moved, and demanded that he should be at once minutely instructed in all that was necessary to prepare himself for death. He lost all interest in wealth and pleasures, and astonished his friends by his absorption in the thoughts which concerned another life. Soon, people treated him with contempt, and even enmity; but this did not annoy him,--he was always kind and compassionate to those about him. To every invitation to do anything inconsistent with his real interests, his one answer was, "I am to die! I am to die!" As we might expect, Mr. Browning takes this simple and beautiful story, and imbues it with his own philosophy till he has made it his own. In the poem the wanderer from the star (Rephan), in compliance with the request of his friends, gives some account of the manner of his life before his human existence began upon our planet. In the land he has left--his native realm--all is at most, nowhere deficiency or excess; on this planet we but guess at a mean. In "Rephan" there is no want; whatever should be, is. There is no growth, for that is change; nothing begins and nothing ends; it fell short in nothing at first, no change was required to mend anything. The stranger explains that, to convey his thoughts, he has to use our language: his own no one who heard him could understand. In "Rephan" better and worse could not be contrasted; all was perfection. Blessing and cursing were alike impossible. There are neither springs nor winters. Time brings no hope and no fear: as is to-day so shall to-morrow be. All were happy, all serene. None were better than he: that would have proved that he lacked somewhat; none worse, for he was faultless. How came it that his perfection grew irksome? How was it his desire arose to become a mortal on our earth? How did soul's quietude burst into discontent? How long had he stagnated there, where weak and strong, wise and foolish, right and wrong are merged in a neutral Best? He could not say, neither could he tell how the passion arose in his breast. He knew not how he came to learn love by hate, to aspire yet never reach, to suffer that one whom he loved might be happy, to wing knowledge for ignorance. He tells his hearers that they fear, they agonise and die, and he asks them have they no assurance that after this earth-life wrong will prove right? Do they not expect that making shall be mending in the sphere to which their yearnings tend? And so when in his pregnant breast the yearnings grew, a voice said to him: "Wouldst thou strive, not rest? burn and not smoulder? win by contest; no longer be content with wealth, which is but death? Then you have outlived "Rephan," you are beyond this sphere. There is a higher plane for you. Thy place now is Earth!" It is the old Browning story, the true mark of his highest teaching: the necessity of evil to evoke the highest good, the need of struggle for development, of contest for strength and victory. Simple, good Jane Taylor would not recognise her pretty fable as it comes from Browning's alembic in the form of Rephan.

=Respectability.= (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) The world will let us do just what we like, provided only we take out its licence; import what we like, only we must pay the customs duty; bring into the place what we please, only we must not omit the octroi. Defy or evade these, and the stamp of respectability being withheld, we lose caste. Everything depends on the Government stamp which the officers chalk-mark on our baggage. By conforming we gain the guinea stamp, but run a risk of losing the gold itself. The world proscribes not love, allows the caress, provided only we buy of it our gloves. What the world fears is our contempt for its licence. It is, however, exceedingly placable, and is quite ready to license anything if we pay it the fee and do it the homage. At the Institute, for example, Guizot, hating Montalembert (as Liberalism hates Ultramontanism in theory), will receive him with courtesy, not to say affection. "We are passing the lamps: put your best foot foremost!"

=Return of the Druses, The.= A TRAGEDY. (Bells and Pomegranates, IV., 1843.) [THE HISTORICAL FACTS.] The Syrian Druses occupy the mountainous region of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon. They are found also in the Auranitis and in Palestine proper, to the north-west of the Sea of Tiberias. Crypto-Druses--Druses not by race, but by religion--are believed to dwell in Egypt, near Cairo. It is said that the Syrian Druses number over eighty thousand warriors. They covet no proselytes, and are an exceedingly mysterious, uncommunicative people, though they keep on good terms, as far as possible, with their Christian and Mahometan neighbours. They respect the religion of others, but never disclose the secrets of their own. Of their origin very little has with certainty been ascertained. They do not accept the name of Druses, and regard the term as insulting. They call themselves "disciples of Hamsa," who was their Messiah, who came to them in the tenth century from the Land of the word of God. Next in rank to Hamsa are the four throne-angels. One of these was the missionary Bohaeddin. Mr. Browning probably refers to him under the name of Bahumid the Renovator. Moktana Bohaeddin committed the Word to writing and intrusted it to a few initiates. They speak Arabic; but the Druses are not considered by ethnologists to belong to the Semitic family. They have a tradition that they belonged originally to China. Whatever may have been the origin of this people, it is evident that they are now a very mixed race, as their religion also is compounded of Judaism, Christianity, and Mahometanism. Mackenzie says: "They have a regular order of priesthood, and a kind of hierarchy. There is a regular system of passwords and signs." It is certain that there are to be found in their religion traces of Gnosticism and Magianism. One theory of their origin, to which the poet refers in the drama, is to the effect that the Druses are the descendants of a crusader, Count Dreux, who left Godfrey de Bouillon's army to settle in the Lebanon. "The rise and progress of the religion which gives unity to the race," according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, vol. vii., p. 484, "can be stated with considerable precision. As a system of thought it may be traced back in some of its leading principles to the Shiite sect of the Batenians, or Batiniya, whose main doctrine was that every outer has its inner, and every passage in the Koran an allegorical sense; and to the Karamatians, or Karamita, who pushed this method to its furthest limits; as a creed it is somewhat more recent. In the year 386 A.H. (996 A.D.) Hakim Biamrillahi (i.e., he who judges by the command of God), the sixth of the Fatimite caliphs, began to reign; and during the next twenty-five years he indulged in a tyranny at once so terrible and so fantastic, that little doubt can be entertained of his insanity. As madmen sometimes do, he believed that he held direct intercourse with the Deity, or even that he was an incarnation of the Divine intelligence; and in 407 A.H., or 1016 A.D., his claims were made known in the mosque at Cairo, and supported by the testimony of Ismael Darazi.[4] The people showed such bitter hostility to the new gospel that Darazi was compelled to seek safety in flight; but even in absence he was faithful to his god, and succeeded in winning over the ignorant inhabitants of Lebanon. According to Druse authority this great conversion took place in the year 410 A.H. Meanwhile, the endeavours of the caliph to get his divinity acknowledged by the people of Cairo continued. The advocacy of Hasan ben Haidara Fergani was without avail; but in 408 A.H. the new religion found a more successful apostle in the person of Hamze ben Ali ben Ahmed, a Persian mystic, feltmaker by trade, who became Hakim's vizier, gave form and substance to his creed, and by his ingenious adaptation of its various dogmas to the prejudices of existing sects, finally enlisted an extensive body of adherents. In 411 the caliph was assassinated by contrivance of his sister Sitt Almulk; but it was given out by Hamze that he had only withdrawn for a season, and his followers were encouraged to look forward with confidence to his triumphant return. Darazi, who had acted independently in his apostolate, was branded by Hamze as a heretic; and thus, by a curious anomaly, he is actually held in detestation by the very sect which probably bears his name. The propagation of the faith, in accordance with Hamze's initiation, was undertaken by Ismael ben Muhammed Temins, Muhammed ben Wahab, Abulkhair Selama, ben Abdalwahab ben Samurri, and Moktana Bohaeddin, the last of whom was known by his writings from Constantinople to the borders of India. In two letters addressed to the Emperor Constantine VIII. and Michael the Paphlagonian, he endeavours to prove that the Christian Messiah reappeared in the person of Hamze (or Hasam)." The Druses call themselves Unitarians or Muahhidin, and believe in the absolute unity of God. He is the essence of life, and although incomprehensible and invisible, is to be known through occasional manifestations in human form. Like the Hindus, they hold that he was incarnated more than once on earth. Hamsa was the precursor of the last manifestation to be (the tenth avatar), not the inheritor of Hakem, who is yet to come. Hamsa was the personification of the "universal wisdom." Bohaeddin, in his writings, calls him the Messiah. They hold ideas on transmigration which are Pythagorean and cabalistic. They have seven great commandments, which are imparted equally to all the initiated. These would seem to be incorrectly given by most of the encyclopædias. Professor A. L. Rawson, of New York, who is an initiate into the mysteries of the religion of the Druses, gives the following as the actual tenets of the faith. (They are termed the seven "tablets").--1. The unity of God, or the infinite oneness of Deity; 2. The essential excellence of truth; 3. The law of toleration as to all men and women in opinion; 4. Respect for all men and women as to character and conduct; 5. Entire submission to God's decrees as to fate; 6. Chastity of body and mind and soul; 7. Mutual help under all conditions. The Druses believe that all other religions were merely intended to prepare the way for their own, and that allegorically it may be discovered in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They treat with the utmost reverence what are called the Four Books on Mount Lebanon. These are the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Koran. All are bound to keep the seven commandments of Hamsa above mentioned. [THE DRAMA.] Mr. Browning's drama does not appear to be founded upon any historical facts. The time occupied by the tragedy is one day. Djabal is an initiated Druse, a son of the last Emir, who, when his family was massacred in the island which is the scene of the drama, had made his escape to Europe. He has resolved to return to this islet of the southern Sporades, colonised by the Lebanon Druses and garrisoned by the Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes. He has felt within him a Divine call to liberate his country and restore them to the land from which they are exiled. He dwells upon the wrongs which the people have suffered at the hands of their oppressors, and in his passionate love for his country, and a desire to gratify his revenge for the slaughter of his kindred, has determined to become their liberator. The tragedy opens with the deliberations of the Druse initiates, who are expecting the manifestation of the Hakeem, the incarnation of the vanished Khalif who is to free their people, and who is believed by them to have appeared in the person of Djabal, now returned to the oppressed tribe. The island is governed by a prefect appointed by the Knights of Rhodes in Europe. This prefect has used his authority in a cruel and oppressive manner. Djabal has taken upon himself the redemption of his people, and during his stay in Europe has made a firm friend of a young nobleman, Lois de Dreux, who is about to join the Order of the Knights of Rhodes. His period of probation is to be passed in the island, and for this purpose he has accompanied Djabal on his return. Djabal has secretly resolved that upon his return to his people the cruel prefect, who has almost extirpated the sheikhs, shall be slain. He has secured also the alliance of the Venetians, who have promised that a fleet of their ships shall be prepared to transport the Druses to their home in the Lebanon, and shall be in readiness to receive them when the murder of the prefect shall have liberated his countrymen. The complicated part of the story now begins. Anael is a Druse maiden whose devotion to her nation is the strongest passion of her soul, and who has vowed to wed no one but the man who has delivered her people from the tyranny which oppresses them. That he may win her heart Djabal has declared himself to be the Hakeem, who has become incarnate for the salvation of the Druse nation. He has declared himself to be the long hoped and prayed for divinity, and offered himself to the people in that character. His plan has perfectly succeeded. Anael and her tribe believe that Djabal is the real Hakeem, and that he will liberate the people, show himself as Divine, and exalt her with himself when the work is perfected. He has decreed the death of the tyrant, and Anael knows this. To Anael, Djabal is her God as well as her lover; yet she cannot worship him as Divine. "'Oh, why is it,' she asks,

'I cannot kneel to you? Never seem you--shall I speak the truth?-- Never a God to me! 'Tis the man's hand, Eye, voice!'"

Djabal has deceived himself into a half belief in the sanctity of his mission; but as the day approaches when he is to fulfil his promises his heart fails him, and he loses faith in himself. He struggles with his own heart, and endeavours to be true to himself and people; but he has gone too far, the circumstances in which he is placed are too strong for him, and he is driven forward on the course on which he has entered. He now resolves to solve the difficulty by flight. He will make his escape, but before he does so will kill the prefect with his own hands. He is on his way to the tyrant's chamber when he meets Anael, and learns from her that she has slain the prefect. He now tells her everything. At first she declines to believe in his falseness; but when a conviction of the truth is forced upon her she refuses to drive him from her heart. The Divine nature of Djabal has been in a sense an obstacle to her love in his character as Hakeem. He has seemed too remote for her merely human affection, and she has never deemed herself worthy to be associated with him in his exaltation. In her determination to kill the tyrant, and in the accomplishment of that act of patriotism, she has been actuated principally by her desire to elevate herself to his level, so that she might have a principal share in the liberation of her nation. They now discover that the murder need not have been committed. Lois de Dreux, the young nobleman who has accompanied Djabal from Europe, has fallen in love with Anael also; and though prohibited by the rules of the Order of knighthood of which he is a postulant, to entangle himself with women, he has aspired to win her love. Lois has represented to the chapter of the Order the cruelties inflicted by their prefect on the people, and has succeeded in obtaining an order for his removal. The young Frankish knight has been elevated by the Order to the position occupied by the deposed governor, so that the liberation of the Druses is now close at hand. Anael urges Djabal to confess his deception and own his imposition to his people. This he refuses to do. She cannot forgive him. When she finds him false and cowardly she takes upon herself to denounce him to the European rulers of the island. Djabal is brought to trial. His accuser is Anael, who is closely veiled till the appropriate moment, when the veil drops, and he is confronted by his lover. His life hangs upon her words. He urges her to speak them; but this she cannot do. Djabal is now man, and man only: he is not separated from her by his Divine nature. She could hardly hope to be one with him in his glory: she can at least be united with him in his degradation and disgrace. All her love for him rises within her, and she hails him "Hakeem!" and falls dead at his feet. The human heart has proved victorious, and the man has conquered the god. Djabal, committing the care of the Druses to his friend Lois, and bidding him guard his people home again and win their blessing for the deed, stabs himself as he bends over the body of the faithful Anael. As he dies the Venetians enter the place and plant the Lion of St. Mark. Djabal's last cry mingles with their shouts, "On to the mountain! At the mountain, Druses!"

NOTES--Act i., Rhodian cross: that of the Knights of St. John (see below). Osman, who founded the Ottoman empire in Asia. White-cross knights: the Knights Hospitallers. They wore a white cross of eight points on a black ground. From 1278 till 1289, when engaged on military duties, they wore a plain straight white cross on a red ground. Patriarch: in Eastern churches a dignitary superior to an archbishop, as the Patriarch of Constantinople, Alexandria, etc. Nuncio: an ambassador from the Pope to an emperor or king. Hospitallers: an order of knights who built a hospital at Jerusalem, in A.D. 1042, for pilgrims. They were called Knights of St. John, and after the removal of the order to Malta Knights of Malta. Candia: the ancient Crete. It was sold to the Venetians in 1194. Rhodes: an island of the Mediterranean. "pro fide": for the faith. "Bouillon's war": the crusade of Godfrey de Bouillon.--Act ii., "sweet cane": Acorus calamus. It grows in the Levant and in this country; is very aromatic, having a smell when trodden on like incense. Miss Pratt says it has been used from time immemorial for strewing the floors of Norwich Cathedral. Lilith: Adam's first wife (see note to ADAM, LILITH and EVE, and art. LILITH). "incense from a mage-king's tomb": students of occult science say that sweet odours have been known to issue from the tombs of magicians, and lamps have been found burning therein when broken open. khandjar: an Eastern weapon.--Act. iii., The venerable chapter: the meeting of an order or community. Bezants: gold coins of Byzantium. "Red-cross rivals of the Temple": the order of the "Knights Templars" (see notes to The Heretics' Tragedy). They wore a red cross of eight points.--Act iv., Tiar: a tiara.--Act v., Biamrallah: Hakem Biamr Allah, sixth Fatimite Caliph of Egypt. Fatemite, or Fatimite: named from Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed and wife of Ali, from whom the founder of the dynasty of Fatimites professed to have sprung. "Romaioi, Ioudaioite kai proselutoi" (Gr., Acts ii. 10, 11): "Strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes."

=Reverie.= (Asolando, 1889.) In Mr. Browning's last volume, published in London as he lay dying in Venice, the two closing poems seem strangely and nobly intended to gather into a focus his whole philosophy of life, and give to the world, in two of his most exquisite poems, his fullest and clearest expressions of the faith of his heart and the quintessence of his teaching. Had the poet known they were the last lines he should write, had he foreseen that these were the last accents of his message, it is impossible to imagine that he could have risen higher than he has done in Reverie and the "Epilogue." The purport of Reverie is to reconcile the ideas of Power and Love--to reconcile by proving them indeed to be one. "Power is Love." When power is no longer limited, then is the reign of love. As Mr. Browning says in Paracelsus, "with much power always much more love." That "The All-Great" is "The All-Loving too," is the teaching of Christianity. That power, in its perfection, must necessarily be love, is a point in Mr. Browning's philosophical system arrived at independently of dogma. It is the monistic conception of the forces that mould life, as opposed to the dualistic conception. The Power everywhere visible in the universe, pervading everything, in all things from the atom to the sun, making man feel his utter helplessness and insignificance, requires no further demonstration. We are assured that Power is dominant. Our only difficulty is about Love. In face of the evil in the world, the inequalities in life, the dominance of evil, can we say with truth that the All-Powerful is the All-Loving too? Browning in Reverie says that truth comes before us here "fitful and half guessed, half seen, grasped at, not gained, held fast." Notwithstanding this defect, a single page of the world's wide book, properly deciphered, explains the whole. We must try the clod ere we test the star; know all our earth elements ere we apply the spectroscope to Mars. It is true that good struggles but evil reigns; yet earth's good is proved good and incontrovertibly worth loving, and evil can be nothing but a cloud stretched across good's orb--no orb itself. There is no doubt whatever about the infinity of the power. There is equally no doubt about the value of the good so far as it goes. Let power "but enlarge good's strait confine," and perfection stands revealed. "Let on Power devolve Good's right to co-equal reign!" What is wanted is some law which abolishes everywhere that which thwarts good. And the poet avows his confidence that somewhen Good will praise God unisonous with Power.

=Richard, Count of St. Bonifacio= (father and son). (Sordello.) Guelfs. In a secret chamber in his palace Palma and Sordello hold earnest conference with each other in the first book of the poem.

=Ring and the Book, The.= In twelve books. Published in four volumes, each consisting of three books, from 1868 to 1869.

BOOK I.--When a Roman jeweller makes a ring, he mingles his pure gold with a certain amount of alloy, so as to enable it to bear file and hammer; but, the ring having been fashioned, the alloy is dissolved out with acid, and the ring in all its purity and beauty of pure gold remains perfect. So much for the Ring. For the Book it happened thus:--Mr. Browning was one day wandering about the Square of St. Lorenzo, in Florence, which on that occasion was crammed with booths where odd things of all sorts were for sale; and in one of them he purchased for eightpence an old square yellow book, part print, part manuscript, with this summary of its contents:--

"A Roman murder case; Position of the entire criminal cause Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman, With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay. Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death By heading or hanging as befitted ranks, At Rome, on February Twenty-Two, Since our Salvation Sixteen Ninety-Eight: Wherein it is disputed if, and when, Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape The customary forfeit."

As before the ring was fashioned the pure gold lay in the ingot, so the pure virgin truth of the murder case lay in this book; but it was not in a presentable form and such as a poet could use. As the jeweller adds a little alloy to permit the artistic working of the Ring, so the poet must mix his poetic fancy with the simple legal evidence contained in the Book, and in this manner work up the history for popular edification. And thus we have The Ring and the Book. The simple, hard, legal documents opened the story thus. The accuser and the accused said, in the persons of their advocates, as follows:--The Public Prosecutor demands the punishment of Count Guido Franceschini and his accomplices, for the murder of his wife. Then the Patron of the Poor--the counsel acting on behalf of the accused--protests that Count Guido ought rather to be rewarded, with his four conscientious friends, as sustainers of law and society. It is true, he says, that he killed his wife, but he did it laudably. Then the case was postponed. It was argued that the woman slaughtered was a saint and martyr. More postponement. Then it was argued that she was a miracle of lust and impudence. More witnesses, precedents, and authorities called and quoted on both sides:

"Thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they a month,"--

only on paper--all the pleadings were in print. The Court pronounced Count Guido guilty, his murdered wife Pompilia pure in thought, word and deed; and signed sentence of death against the whole five accused. But Guido's counsel had a reserve shot. The Count, as was the frequent custom in those days, was in one of the minor orders of the priesthood, and claimed clerical privilege. Appeal was therefore made to the Pope. Roman society began to talk, the quality took the husband's part, the Pope was benevolent and unwilling to take life: Guido stood a chance of getting off. But the Pope was shrewd and conscientious; and having mastered the whole matter, said, "Cut off Guido's head to-morrow, and hang up his mates." And it was so done. Thus much was untempered gold, as discovered in the little old book. But we want to know more of the matter, and in four volumes (of the original edition) Mr. Browning satisfies us. Who was the handsome young priest, Canon Caponsacchi, who carried off the wife? Who were the old couple, the Comparini, Pietro and his spouse, who, on a Christmas night in a lonely villa, were murdered with Pompilia? Mr. Browning has ferreted it out for us mixed his fancy with the facts to bring them home to us the better. He has been to Arezzo, the Count's city--the wife's "trap and cage and torture place." He stopped at Castelnuovo, where husband and wife and priest for first and last time met face to face. He passed on to Rome the goal, to the home of Pompilia's foster-parents. He conjures up the vision of the dreadful night when Guido and his wolves cried to the escaped wife, "Open to Caponsacchi!" and the door was opened, showing the mother of the two-weeks'-old babe and her parents the Comparini. He ponders all the story in his soul in Italy, and in London when he returns home; till the ideas take clear shape in his mind, and the whole story lives again in his brain, and he can reproduce for us the facts as they must have occurred. Count Guido Franceschini was descended of an ancient though poor family. He was

"A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-haired lord, Lean, pallid, low of stature, yet robust, Fifty years old."

He married Pompilia Comparini--young, good, beautiful--at Rome, where she was born; and brought her to his home at Arezzo, where they lived miserable lives. That she might find peace, the wife had run away, in company of the priest Giuseppe Caponsacchi, to her parents at Rome; and the husband had followed with four accomplices, and catching her in a villa on a Christmas night with her parents (putative parents really), had killed the three; the wife being seventeen years old, and the Comparini, husband and wife, seventy. There was Pompilia's infant, Guido's firstborn son, but he had previously put it in a place of safety.

NOTES.--Line 7, Castellani: a celebrated Roman jeweller (Piazza di Trevi 86), who executes admirable imitations from Greek, Etruscan, and Byzantine models. Chiusi: a very ancient Etruscan city, full of antiquities and famous for its tombs. l. 27, rondure, a round. l. 45, Baccio Bandinelli, a sculptor of Florence (1497-1559). l. 47, "John of the Black Bands": Father of Cosimo I., Giovanni delle Bande Neri. l. 48, Riccardi: the palace of one of the great families of Florence. l. 49, San Lorenzo, the great church so named in Florence. l. 77, Spicilegium, a collection made from the best writers. l. 114, "Casa Guidi, by Felice Church": this was the residence of the Brownings at Florence when he bought the little book. l. 223, Justinian, Emperor of the East A.D. 527. His name is immortalised by his code of laws; Baldo, an eminent professor of the civil law, and also of canon law, born in 1327; Bartolo of Perugia, a professor of civil law, under whom Baldo studied; Dolabella, the name of a Roman family; Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths (c. A.D. 454-526); Ælian, a writer on natural history in the time of Adrian. l. 263, Presbyter, Primæ tonsuræ, Subdiaconus, Sacerdos: these are some of the different steps to the priesthood in the Roman Church--that is to say, First tonsure, subdeacon, deacon, priest. l. 284, Ghetto, the Jewish quarter in Rome. l. 300, Pope Innocent XII. was Antonio Pignatelli. He reigned from 1691 to 1700. He introduced many reforms into the Church, and, after a holy and self-abnegating life, died on September 27th, 1700; Jansenists, followers of Jansen, who taught Calvinism in the Catholic Church; Molinists, followers of Molinos, who taught Arminianism in the Catholic Church; Nepotism, favouritism to relations. l. 435, temporality: the material interests of the Catholic Church. l. 490, "gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes": as the Rhodians were the first who offered sacrifices to Minerva, Jupiter rewarded them by covering the island with a golden cloud, from which he sent showers of treasures on the people. l. 495, Datura: the thorn apple--stramonium. l. 496, lamp-fly == a fire-fly. l. 868, Æacus, son of Jupiter; on account of his just government made judge in the lower regions with Minos and Rhadamanthus. l. 898, "Bernini's Triton fountain:" in the great square of the Barberini Palace, the Tritons blowing the water from a conch-shell. l. 1028, "chrism and consecrative work": Chrism is the oil used in ordination, etc., in the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches. l. 1030, lutanist, one who plays on the lute. l. 1128, "Procurator of the Poor": a proctor, an attorney who acts on behalf of the poor. l. 1161, Fisc, a king's solicitor, an attorney-general. l. 1209, clavicinist, one who plays on the clavichord. l. 1212, rondo == rondeau, a species of lively melody with a recurring refrain; suite, a connected series of musical compositions. l. 1214, Corelli, Arcangelo, Italian musical composer; Haendel, Handel the musician. l. 1311, "Brotherhood of Death": the Confraternity of the Misericordia, or Brothers of Mercy, who prepare criminals for death and attend funerals as an act of charity. l. 1328, Mannai, a sort of guillotine.--This seems a fitting place in which to insert the following note, which serves to explain the origin of the great poem:--

In The Christian Register of Boston for Jan. 19th, 1888, there is an article entitled "An Eagle Feather," by the Rev. John W. Chadwick, of Brooklyn. This clergyman visited Mr. Browning and asked him, "And how about the book of The Ring and the Book? Had he made up that, too, or was there really such a book? There was indeed; and would we like to see it? There was little doubt of that; and it was produced, and the story of his buying it for 'eightpence English just' was told, but need not be retold here, for in The Ring and the Book it is set down with literal truth. The appearance and character of the book, moreover, are exactly what the poem represents. It is part print, part manuscript, ending with two epistolary accounts, if I remember rightly, of Guido's execution, written by the lawyers in the case. It was an astonishing 'find,' and it is passing strange that a book compiled so carefully should have been brought to such a low estate. Mr. Browning did not seem at all inclined to toss it in the air and catch it, as he does in verse. He handled it very carefully, and with evident affection. I asked him if it did not make him very happy to have created such a woman as Pompilia; and he said, 'I assure you that I found her just as she speaks and acts in my poem, in that old book.' There was that in his tone that made it evident Caponsacchi had a rival lover without blame. Of the old pope of the poem, too, he spoke with real affection. He told us how he had found a medal of him in a London antiquary's shop, had left it meaning to come back for it; came back, and found that it had gone. But the shopman told him Lady Houghton (Mrs. Richard Monckton Milnes) had taken it. 'You will lend it to me,' said Mr. Browning to her, 'in case I want it some time to be copied for an illustration?' She preferred giving it to him; had most likely intended doing so when she bought it. It was in a pretty little box, and had a benignant expression, exactly suited to the character of the good pope in the poem. As a further proof that all is grist that comes to some folks' mills, there was a picture of the miserable Count Guido Franceschini on his execution day, which some one had come upon in a London printshop and sent to Mr. Browning."

Mr. Browning having told the incidents of the story in all their principal details, might, in the ordinary way, have considered this sufficient. He has reserved nothing till the last, and in the usual way would have destroyed the interest of his remaining volumes had he been a mere story-teller. His purpose, however, was different. He will now take the principal actors in the tragedy, and separately and at length let them give their account of it in their own language and according to their own view of the case. He will, moreover, give his readers the opposing views of the two halves into which the Roman populace have been divided on the murders. He will introduce us to the Pope considering the course of action he is called upon to pursue as supreme judge of the matter; and the very lawyers, who are preparing their briefs and getting up their speeches, will also have their say. We shall thus have this many-sided subject put before us in every possible way; and we shall be enabled to follow the windings of the human mind on such a subject as though we were centred in the breast, in turn, of each of the actors in the dreadful drama. We have, therefore, in

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