lished in 1841. But in 1840 appeared "Sordello," an epic poem in which Mr. Browning, perhaps in consequence of his failure to get his new plays represented, returned to his former idea of following by minute detail and close analysis the development of an ambitious and imaginative nature. "Sordello" was a poet of Mantua, who lived in the later part of the twelfth century, said to have been the son of Taurello Salinguerra, a Ghibelline soldier who plays an important part in the story. Sordello is mentioned by Dante in the "Purgatorio" as saying to Virgil: "O Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy land," and again in the "De Vulgare Eloquentia " he is said to have created the Italian language. He was one of the first of the ballad-makers, and seems to have filled a large place in his time, being credited by tradition with many brilliant exploits in love and war. This poem is by common consent acknowledged to be the most difficult to understand of all Browning's works. It is, indeed, a proverb for all that is involved, unintelligible, and dull. It serves as a ready-made joke for the wits who would laugh down" the Browning craze," and it is shunned even by the majority of the author's admirers. It is said that Tennyson declared he found but two intelligible lines in it, and they were not true. These were the first and the last: Who will may hear Sordello's story told, and Who would has heard Sordello's story told. In his dedication to the edition of 1863, Mr. Browning says he had spent some time and trouble in an endeavor to turn his work" into what the many might-instead of what the few must-like," but after all he concluded that it was better to let it stand as he had first imagined it. The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so; you, with many known and unknown to me, think so; others may one day think so." It is, indeed, in his most involved and digressive style, and is made still more difficult by its complication with mediæval Italian history and obscure historical characters. Yet a little close attention bestowed on it at the beginning soon opens to the reader the author's manner and brings him to passages of beauty and insight that would now make the fortune of a new poet if published alone. There is scarcely a page of the poem that would not yield some lines which would be taken as proof that a singer of original power had arisen. At the suggestion of Edward Moxon, the publisher, Mr. Browning began in 1841 to issue poems in a series of pamphlets of sixteen doublecolumn pages each. The numbers were sold first at sixpence, then at one shilling, and afterward at two shillings and sixpence each, and appeared, eight of them, at irregular intervals from 1841 to 1846. The title of the series, "Bells and Pomegranates," is taken from the description in Exodus of the decorations upon the hem of the robe of the high-priest. He explained at the end of the series: "I meant by the title to indicate an endeavor toward something like an alternation or mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought, which deep down the middle, Shows a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. In this series were published all the dramas except "Strafford" and the fragment "In a Balcony," many of the "Dramatic Lyrics" and "Dramatic Romances," and some of the poems now in "Men and Women." The initial number contained "Pippa Passes," the first of his works to achieve popularity. The conceit on which it is founded is one to satisfy the sentimentally religious taste; and its bright, clear, high-pitched lyrical strain appeals at once to the lover of poetry. Pippa is a young girl from the silk-mills, who, during a New-Year holiday, when the whole action of the piece takes place, passes singing through the town among or near various persons and groups of persons; and every time her song has some subtle correspondence to the circumstances, or state of mind, or intent of these persons, in whose places she is fancying herself, deeming them most happy and enviable. And all are saved by hearing her songs (which strike a chord in their consciences) from some intended sin or wrong. The "Dramatic Lyrics" included the striking studies" My Last Duchess," "Count Gismond," and "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister"; "Waring," written on the disappearance of Alfred Domett, author of the well-known Christmas hymn and many other poems scarcely known at all; "In a Gondola," inclosing the exquisite love-song "The Moth's Kiss First"; the spirited poem "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," which is a puzzle to readers inexperienced in Browning's turns of expression; and the popular "Pied Piper of Hamelin," which had been thrown off to amuse little Willie Macready. "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," written in five days, presented at Drury Lane Theatre in February, 1843, and published as No. 5 of the "Bells and Pomegranates," is generally regarded as the most powerful of the dramas. The motif of the action, which is the high sense of honor in an ancient English race, the exquisite delineation of the characters of Mildred and Thorold Tresham, the sustained nobleness of the poetic style, together with the directness of expression and the appeal to common sympathies, especially fit it to be the most popular, as well as the best adapted to the stage, of all the dramas. Charles Dickens is reported to have said of it: "Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best affection, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun and no heat in blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigor. . . . And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work." The presentation of this play at Drury Lane was attended by curious circumstances, for an account of which we are indebted to Mr. Gosse. Mr. Macready had assumed the management of the theatre, and had asked Browning to write a play for him. He had expressed great enthusiasm for "The Blot in the 'Scutcheon," and Browning was surprised that, after the other new plays that had been announced were withdrawn, the manager seemed in no haste to bring it out. The truth was that Macready was in serious financial straits, and was hoping that Browning, who was entirely ignorant of this fact, would become indignant at the delay and withdraw his drama. As this was not done, he gave the principal rôle to Mr. Phelps, a new actor, expecting that Mr. Browning would refuse to have it played without Macready himself. When this ruse failed and Mr. Phelps was taken ill, Macready decided to take the part, but changed the title of the piece, cut off the first act, and took out the tragic ending, closing with some lines of his own. To save the drama from this mutilation, the author had it hurriedly brought out by his publisher; and, when Mr. Phelps appeared at the theatre convalescent and expressed his willingness to learn and undertake the part, Mr. Browning took Phelps with him into the green-room, where Macready was already studying the play in its printed form, with the actors around him. "Mr. Browning stopped him, and said: I find that Mr. Phelps, although he has been ill, feels himself quite able to take the part, and I shall be very glad to leave it in his hands.' Mr. Macready rose and said: 'But do you understand that I, I am going to act the part?' I shall be very glad to intrust it to Mr. Phelps,' said Mr. Browning, upon which Macready crumpled up the play he was holding in his hand and threw it to the other end of the room. After such an event, it was with no very hopeful feelings that Mr. Browning awaited the first performance on the next night, Feb. 11. He would not allow his parents or his sister to go to the theater; no tickets were sent to him, but, finding that the stage-box was his, not by favor but by right, he went with no other companion than Edward Moxon. But his expectations of failure were not realized. Phelps acted magnificently, carrying out the remark of Macready that the difference between himself and the other actors was that they could do magnificent things now and then, on a spurt, but that he could always command his effects. Anderson, a jeune premier of promise, acted the young lover with considerable spirit, although the audience was not sure whether to laugh or no when he sang his song 'There's a Woman like a Dewdrop' in the act of climbing in at the window. Finally, Miss Helen Faucit almost surpassed herself as Mildred Tresham. The piece was entirely successful, though Richard H. Horne, who was in the front of the pit, tells me that Anderson was for some time only half serious, and quite ready to have turned traitor if the public had encouraged him. When the curtain went down, the applause was vociferous. ... The Blot in the 'Scutcheon' was announced to be played three times a week until further notice,' and was performed with entire success to crowded houses, until the final collapse of Mac ready's schemes brought it abruptly to a close." Curiously enough, Mr. Browning himself, in some notes that he wrote in 1881 on a biographical sketch, says that Macready and Helen Faucit took the leading characters in the drama at Drury Lane. The play was revived in 1848 by Mr. Phelps, who played it for two weeks at Sadler's Wells Theatre. It was again presented in Washington, D. C., in 1885 by Lawrence Barrett, who took the part of Thorold. In 1844 was published "Colombe's Birthday." Colombe is Duchess of Jülich and Cleves in the seventeenth century; and it has been said in sketches of the author that the play was presented in 1844 as "The Duchess of Cleves" by Miss Cushman, at the Haymarket. Mr. Browning corrected the statement except as regards the title, so that possibly he had given that name at first to his drama. It was not acted until 1852 or 1853, when Miss Faucit took the leading part. It was again performed in St. George's Hall, London, in 1885, with Miss Alma Murray as Colombe. In 1854 it was presented at the Howard Athenæum, Boston, Mass. Of the love scene in the fourth act of this last performance, Moncure D. Conway writes: "I remember well to have seen a vast miscellaneous crowd in an American theatre hanging with breathless attention upon every word of this interview, down to the splendid climax when, in obedience to the duchess's direction to Valence how he should reveal his love to the lady she so little suspects to be herself, he kneels-every heart evidently feeling each word as an electric touch, and all giving vent at last to their emotion in round after round of hearty applause." The character of Colombe, the girlish duchess who develops into a woman in the varied experiences of the single day in which the whole action of the drama takes place, is very beautiful. "The gay girlishness of the young duchess, her joyous and generous light heart, her womanliness, her earnestness, her clear, deep, noble nature, attract us from her first words, and leave us, after the hour we have spent in her presence, with the inalienable uplifting memory that we have of some women whom we meet, for an hour or a moment, in the world or in books." Valence, the man of brains and spirit under a pale and shabby exterior, and Berthold, the man of action and ambition, are drawn with power and spirit, as are also the minor characters, all of whom stand out in distinct individuality. The play is the brightest and most pleasing of Browning's dramatic work. "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" appeared in 1845. It shows the culmination of the passion for magnificent display in art and costliness that might arise from the manner of life of an Italian prelate in the most luxurious age of the Church. In the half-delirium of approaching death, the bishop gives his sons directions how to build his tomb, with a frantic idea that the peace of his slumbers will depend on the perfection of its style, the splendor of its marbles, and the purity of its Latin epitaph, as well as on the despair its beauty will inspire in a hated rival whose bones lie in the same church in the niche the bishop had selected for himself: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe, As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulseOld Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, Put me where I may look at him! True peach, All the time he is all but sure that his sons will seize his possessions and disregard his orders for the tomb, for which he has saved from the conflagration of his church and hidden in a vineyard a great lump of lapis lazuli: So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Of this poem Ruskin says: "I know of no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told as in these lines of the Renaissance spirit-its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice,' put into so many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it that people's patience fails them, and they give up the thing as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be the current of common thought, like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal.” Among the shorter poems included in the series under the titles of "Dramatic Lyrics" and Romances," not already mentioned, were several of those by which Browning is best known to the public that does not concern itself with his more involved works: "Home Thoughts," which has in it the much-admired lines: 66 That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture "How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix "-that of the pacification of Ghent, 1576 -"Saul," "The Lost Leader," "The Glove," which takes a new view of an old story in a whimsical way peculiar to Browning, "Time's Revenges," and the spirited lyrics called “Cavalier Tunes." It has been questioned whether there is foundation in fact for "How they brought the Good News," and who was the original of "The Lost Leader." Mr. Browning says there is no historical foundation for the former poem, and that he wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after he "had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse York," then in his stable at home. As to "The Lost Leader," he says: "I did, in my hasty youth, presume to use the great and venerated 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 faceabout of his special party, was, to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore." The last number of the "Bells and Pomegran ates" (1846) contained the dramas "Luria" and A Soul's Tragedy." Luria is a Moorish general in command of the Florentine army opposed to the army of Pisa. But Florence does not trust him, and there is a secrét plan to bring him to trial and destroy him as soon as his victory shall have been made secure; in fact, a trial is secretly going on at the time. He is made aware of the plot by the Pisan general, who vainly tries to induce him to take revenge by deserting to the Pisan side; for he is not, as the Florentines think, a half-barbarian, whose only desire is military glory; he has a romantic love for Florence, born of his reverence for her beauty and art; and when convinced of her treachery he dies by his own hand on the day when he has gained her the victory. The character is a curious combination of strength and gentleness, the man of action and the man of ideals. "A Soul's Tragedy" is not, as one would infer from the title, the story of the wrecking of a soul naturally noble; it is rather the exposure of a mean and base nature by a set of circumstances specially calcuThe tragedy lated to bring out its baseness. consists in the fact that a possibility of generous and noble action came to such a soul, surprising it by a sudden impulse into one magnanimous step; but an opportunity immediately occurring for turning that step to selfish account, the natural baseness reasserted itself and conquered. Mr. Browning's marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett took place in 1846, soon after the issue of the last number of his serial poems. It is said that he first called to see her, to make acknowledgment of the allusion to him in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," quoted above. She was three years his senior, an invalid worn with suffering and looking forward to an early death. The acquaintance speedily led to love; but their marriage was opposed by Miss Barrett's father, for some unexplained reason. The gossipy Miss Mitford is quoted as writing of it: "It was a runaway match. Never was I so much astonished. He prevailed on her to meet him at church with only the two necessary witnesses. They went by rail to Southampton, crossed to Havre, up the Seine to Rouen, to Paris by railway. There they stayed a week. Happening to meet with Mrs. Jameson, she joined them in their journey to Pisa; and accordingly they traveled by diligence, by railway, by Rhone boat anyhow-to Marseilles, thence took shipping to Leghorn, and then settled themselves at Pisa for six months." On account of Mrs. Browning's health, they took up their residence at Florence in the now famous Casa Guidi, where they spent most of the fifteen years of their married life, which is regarded as the ideal union of literary history. Hawthorne alludes to it in "The Marble Faun": As good as Harriet Hosmer's clasped hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives!" Their love was celebrated by Mrs. Browning in the so-called "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which include some of her finest work, and by Mr. Browning in "One Word More," one of the tenderest and most beautiful of his poems. It is worth while to quote what Hawthorne, who met Mrs. Browning in London and visited at the home in Florence, writes of them in his " Note-Books," both because it describes Mr. Browning's manner in social life and because it disposes of a statement made since his death that both he and his wife were believers in spiritualistic manifestations. In his account of the breakfast at Mr. Milnes's, in London, in 1856, he says: "After we left the table, Mr. Browning introduced himself to me-a younger man than I expected to see, handsome, with brown hair. He is very simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, talking as if his heart were uppermost. He spoke of his pleasure in meeting me and his appreciation of my books, and-which has not often happened to me-mentioned that the Blithedale Romance' was the one he admired most. I wonder why." And of his visit to Casa Guidi, Hawthorne says: "Mr. Browning was very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment-a most vivid and quickthoughted person, logical and common sensible, as I presume poets generally are in their daily talk.... There was no very noteworthy conversation, the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer and her husband an infidel. . . . Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Home, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Home, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvelousness of the fact, as I have read of it and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe and at the sharp touch of his logic, while his wife ever and anon put in a little gentle word of expostulation. I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions." The celebrated medium spoken of by Hawthorne, Daniel D. Home, is supposed to be the original of "Mr. Sludge, the Medium," in Browning's “Dramatis Persona." Mrs. Browning died in 1861, leaving one child, Robert Barrett Browning, then twelve years of age, who has since won distinction as an artist. Prospice," in "Dramatis Personæ," concludes with an allusion to her. The poem is a looking forward to death. And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy, The lines at the close of the introduction to "The Ring and the Book" are another very beautiful address to his wife. In 1850 appeared "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," two poems that more than any other give an idea of the author's relation to Christianity. Of the profound moral import of his work there can be no question; but it is not always easy to see when his use of Christian ideas is dramatic and when he is speaking in his own person. Usually, as in these pieces, there is a free use of Christian symbolism, treated in a broad and lucid way that carries the reader into the heart of the truth symbolized and makes all question of form superfluous. Such is the vision of the judgment in Easter Day" and the dream in the dissenters' chapel of "Christmas Eve," expressing his sympathy with every mood that is sincere and earnest, with, at the same time, a keen sense of the humor of their manifestations; his regard for the substance of worship, not the elegance of its form; his faith in the soul's intuitions; and the conviction found in so many of his poems that "good shall be the final goal of ill"; that "the world's no blot-it means intensely and means good." 66 Men and Women" (1855) includes more of the best and most characteristic of the shorter poems than any other of his volumes. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a striking instance of the power to project human feeling into nature; I know of nothing approaching it but Poe's description of the House of Usher. Every feature of the landscape gives some sinister suggestion of being a conscious creature, either itself suffering or watching in demoniac glee for the mysterious impending doom of the estray caught in the dreadful trap. Bishop Blougram's Apology" is the ingenious argument of a worldly and comfortable churchman, in reply to one curious to know how he reconciles it with his conscience to profess belief in dogmas that can not possibly recommend themselves to his reason. The subject is treated with the humor most characteristic of Browning, which turns things inside out rather than plays over the surface of them. It is generally believed that Cardinal Wiseman is the original of the bishop. "The Statue and the Bust" is founded on a tradition concerning the equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I in the piazza of the SS. Annunziata, Florence, a strange story, whereof the moral, a surprising and unexpected moral, is drawn for us, contrary to his wont, by the author. In reply to an inquiry whether the bust, like the statue, had an actual existence, Browning answered that the story was all fiction, except that the lady was so shut up by a jealous husband, and that the duke placed the statue there as a memorial of his daily rides past the window. This volume also includes some of the most beautiful of the love poems-" One Word More," "The Last Ride together," Love among the Ruins," the remarkable dramatic fragment "In a Balcony," "Love in a Life," and that exquisite expression of self-effacing love, "Misconceptions." "The Grammarian's Funeral," sketches a student of Greek, soon after the revival of letters in Europe, one who was content to go on toiling at the roots of things to lay the foundation of a great thing, letting youth pass by, careless of any results in this life. Among the poems in this book most admired Andrea del Sarto," Fra Lippo Lippi," Master Hugues," "The Strange Medical Experience of Karshish," and "Holy-Cross Day." are 66 In 1864" Dramatis Personæ," another volume of short poems, made its appearance, containing among others the noble religious poems "Rabbi Ben Ezra " and " A Death in the Desert"; "Cal "The Ring and the Book," a poem of more than 20,000 lines, issued in 1868-69, is generally regarded as Mr. Browning's masterpiece. The story of its first suggestion is told in the Introduction. At a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo, in Florence, Mr. Browning found one day, amid a mass of miscellaneous rubbish, a square old yellow book, part print and part manuscript, the title page of which he translates as follows: A Roman murder-case: Position of the entire criminal cause With certain four, the cut-throats in his pay; This book, giving the whole history of the case the evidence, the lawyers' pleas, an account of the murderer's execution, "the instrument of the definitive sentence," establishing the wife's innocence-all these documents found together, he bought for a lira (about eight pence). On this story he founded the poem. The name, as he explains, is symbolical, referring to the manner in which the facts of this old story are mingled with imagination in his work, just as the artificer, when he makes a ring of Etruscan gold, mingles with the pure metal an alloy that renders the gold manageable and is freed after it has served its purpose. The story of the tragedy is told over and over again in the versions of various persons interested, first by the author, then by the half Rome that sympathizes with the husband, then by the half that sympathizes with the wife, then by a certain third party not decided; then follow the versions of the actors themselves, of the lawyers on each side, the Pope's review of the evidence; and lastly the husband is again heard from after his conviction. The portrayals of character, and especially the development of character in the innocent wife and the accused canon, touch the highest point of the poet's achievement in this, his favorite mode of expression. This great epic was followed in 1871 by "Balaustion's Adventure," a story framing a translation of the "Alkestis" of Euripides, and the same year Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Savior of Society," in which an exposition and defense of his course are put into the mouth of Napoleon III-an argument for the policy of taking the world as it is found, and working toward the practicable, rather than throwing away effort on romantic ideals. "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), treats of inconstancy in love in a way most puzzling to the reader, because there is so much humor in the treatment, and the argument proceeds from a character highly imaginative and singularly perverse and contradictory. "The Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers" (1873), has much the same general theme as "Fifine," the opposing attractions of the flesh and the spirit, but is treated in a markedly differing manner. It is founded on a series of events that took place in Normandy and Paris just before the date of the poem. The leading title, it is said, was suggested by Miss Thackeray, who spoke of Normandy as the White Cotton Night-Cap Country-a phrase the poet changed to the one in the title, in allusion to the tragedy going on beneath the simple pastoral life of the country. The second title is supposed to carry an allusion to the sensuous and the spiritual appeals to the allegiance of man, which forms the groundwork of the story. This work probably holds the lowest place of all the longer poems in the estimation of the majority of readers. 66 66 The Inn Album" (1875), is also a story founded on fact-coarse and repulsive in its bare outline, but treated with great power and depth of analysis. Aristophanes's Apology" came out in the same year; in it the Rhodian girl "Balaustion appears again, with a translation of the "Herakles" of Euripides. Next followed Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper, and other Poems" (1876), and "Agamemnon," a translation from Eschylus (1877). In 1878 was published "La Saisiaz," an argument for the immortality of the soul, containing many exquisite passages, and more easily intelligible to the careless reader than the dramatic monologues. It was occasioned by the sudden death of a friend with whom Mr. Browning and his sister were spending a part of the summer of 1877 at La Saisiaz, a villa among the mountains near Geneva. 66 The Two Poets of Croisic" (1878) is the story of some out-of-the-way happenings to two poetasters. One passage gives a hint of Browning's choice and treatment of his themes, and, therefore, seems specially appropriate for quotation. The first of the two poets has made a prophecy, which he believes was conveyed to him in a dream, in reference to the birth of an heir to a princedom, and the prophecy has been fulfilled, and this gives rise to speculation as to how a man might feel who believed himself to have been made the medium of a divine revelation: How fortune fares With such a mediocrity, who cares? Well, I care-intimately care to have Experience how a human creature felt In after-life who bore the burden grave Of certainly believing God had dealt For once directly with him; did not raveA maniac, did not find his reason meltAn idiot, but went on, in peace or strife, The world's way, lived an ordinary life, How many problems that one fact would solve ! An ordinary soul, no more, no less, About whose life earth's common sights revolve, On whom is brought to bear, by thunder-stress, This fact-God tasks him, and will not absolve Task's negligent performer! Can you guess How such a soul-the task performed to pointGoes back to life nor finds things out of joint? The two series of "Dramatic Idyls" followed in 1879 and 1880, including the popular story "Clive." "Jocoseria," a volume of short poems, grave and gay, as the name implies, was published |