If one could have that little head of hersPainted upon a background of pale gold,Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!No shade encroaching on the matchless mouldOf those two lips, which should be opening softIn the pure profile; not as when she laughs,For that spoils all: but rather as if aloftYon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’sBurthen of honey-colored buds, to kissAnd capture ‘twixt the lips apart for this. {10}Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,How it should waver, on the pale gold ground,Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!I know, Correggio loves to mass, in riftsOf heaven, his angel faces, orb on orbBreaking its outline, burning shades absorb:But these are only massed there, I should think,Waiting to see some wonder momentlyGrow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by), {20}All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eyeWhich fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.
— 1. If one could have: Oh, if one could only have, etc.
9, 10. to kiss and capture: gerundives: to be kissed and captured.
14. Correggio: Antonio Allegri da Correggio, born 1494, died 1534. “He was the first master—the Venetians notwithstanding— to take a scheme of color and chiaro-scuro as the ‘raison d’etre’ of a complete composition, and his brush, responding to the idea, blends light and shade in delicious harmony.”—Woltmann and Woermann’s ‘History of Painting’.
—* The tomb is imaginary; though it is said to be pointedout to visitors to Saint Praxed’s who desire particularlyto see it.—
Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?Nephews—sons mine. . .ah God, I know not! Well—She, men would have to be your mother once,Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,And as she died so must we die ourselves,And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.Life, how and what is it? As here I lie {10}In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;And so, about this tomb of mine. I foughtWith tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:—Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner SouthHe graced his carrion with, God curse the same!Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence {20}One sees the pulpit on the epistle-side,And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,And up into the aery dome where liveThe angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk;And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,And ‘neath my tabernacle take my rest,With those nine columns round me, two and two,The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripeAs fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. {30}—Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,Put me where I may look at him! True peach,Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!Draw close: that conflagration of my church—What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!My sons, ye would not be my death? Go digThe white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,Drop water gently till the surface sink,And if ye find. . . Ah God, I know not, I! . . .Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, {40}And corded up in a tight olive-frail,Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast. . .Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,That brave Frascati villa with its bath,So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,Like God the Father’s globe on both his handsYe worship in the Jesu Church so gay,For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! {50}Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?Did I say, basalt for my slab, sons? Black—‘Twas ever antique-black I meant! How elseShall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchanceSome tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan {60}Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,And Moses with the tables. . .but I knowYe mark me not! What do they whisper thee,Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hopeTo revel down my villas while I gaspBricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertineWhich Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper, then!‘Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieveMy bath must needs be left behind, alas! {70}One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to prayHorses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?—That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line—Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!And then how I shall lie through centuries, {80}And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,And see God made and eaten all day long,And feel the steady candle-flame, and tasteGood strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,Dying in state and by such slow degrees,I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, dropInto great laps and folds of sculptor’s work: {90}And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughtsGrow, with a certain humming in my ears,About the life before I lived this life,And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests,Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,—Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! {100}Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the PopeMy villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,Piece out its starved design, and fill my vaseWith grapes, and add a visor and a Term,And to the tripod ye would tie a lynxThat in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, {110}To comfort me on my entablatureWhereon I am to lie till I must ask“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!For ye have stabbed me with ingratitudeTo death: ye wish it—God, ye wish it! Stone—Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweatAs if the corpse they keep were oozing through—And no more lapis to delight the world!Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,But in a row: and, going, turn your backs {120}—Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,And leave me in my church, the church for peace,That I may watch at leisure if he leers—Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,As still he envied me, so fair she was!
— 1. Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!: “The Bishop on his death-bed has reached Solomon’s conclusion that ‘all is vanity’. So he proceeds to specify his particular vanity in the choice of a tombstone.” —N. Brit. Rev. 34, p. 367. “In ‘The Palace of Art’, Mr. Tennyson has shown the despair and isolation of a soul surrounded by all luxuries of beauty, and living in and for them; but in the end the soul is redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of earth. Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of isolation and such despair are by no means inevitable; there is a death in life which consists in tranquil satisfaction, a calm pride in the soul’s dwelling among the world’s gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty. . . . So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color.” —Edward Dowden.
46. Frascati: a town of central Italy, near the site of the ancient Tusculum, ten or twelve miles S. E. of Rome; it has many fine old villas.
53. Did I say, basalt for my slab, sons?: Note how all things else, even such reflections as are expressed in the two preceding verses, are incidental with the Bishop; his poor, art-besotted mind turns abruptly to the black basalt which he craves for the slab of his tomb; and see vv. 101, 102.
66. travertine: see note to v. 67 of ‘Pictor Ignotus’.
71. pistachio-nut: or, green almond.
79. Ulpian: Domitius Ulpianus, one of the greatest of Roman jurists, and chief adviser of the emperor, Alexander Severus; born about 170, died 228; belongs to the Brazen age of Roman literature.
95. Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount: the poor dying Bishop, in the disorder of his mind, makes a ‘lapsus linguae’ here; see v. 59.
99. elucescebat: “he was beginning to shine forth”; a late Latin word not found in the Ciceronian vocabulary, and therefore condemned by the Bishop; this word is, perhaps, what is meant by the “gaudy ware” in the second line of Gandolf’s epitaph, referred to in v. 78.
1.Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;But, although I take your meaning, ‘tis with such a heavy mind!
— St. 1. Galuppi, Baldassaro (rather Baldassare): b. 1703, in Burano, an island near Venice, and thence called Buranello; d. 1785; a distinguished composer, whose operas, about fifty in number, and mostly comic, were at one time the most popular in Italy; Galuppi is regarded as the father of the Italian comic opera.
2.Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
— St. 2. Saint Mark’s: see Ruskin’s description of this glorious basilica, in ‘The Stones of Venice’.
3.Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ‘tis arched by. . .what you call. . .Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all.
4.Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
5.Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?
6.Well, and it was graceful of them: they’d break talk off and afford—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
— St. 6. Toccatas: the Toccata was a form of musical composition for the organ or harpsichord, somewhat in the free and brilliant style of the modern fantasia or capriccio; clavichord: “a keyed stringed instrument, now superseded by the pianoforte {now called a piano}.”—Webster.
7.What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—“Must we die?”Those commiserating sevenths—“Life might last! we can but try!”
— St. 7. The musical technicalities used in this stanza, any musician can explain and illustrate.
8.“Were you happy?”—“Yes.”—“And are you still as happy?”—“Yes.And you?”—“Then, more kisses!”—“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!
— St. 8. The questions in this stanza must be supposed to be caused by the effect upon the revellers of the “plaintive lesser thirds”, the “diminished sixths”, the “commiserating sevenths”, etc., of the preceding stanza.
9.So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”
10.Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,Death stepped tacitly, and took them where they never see the sun.
11.But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
— St. 11. While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve: the secret of the soul’s immortality.
12.Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
13.“Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it cannot be!
— St. 13. The idea is involved in this stanza that the soul’s continued existence is dependent on its development in this life; the ironic character of the stanza is indicated by the merely intellectual subjects named, physics, geology, mathematics, which do not of themselves, necessarily, contribute to SOUL-development. All from the 2d verse of the 12th stanza down to “Dust and ashes” in the 15th, is what the music, “like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned”, says to the speaker, in the monologue, of the men and women for whom life meant simply a butterfly enjoyment.
14.“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
15.“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
(After he has been extemporizing upon the Musical Instrument of his Invention.)
1.Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willedArmies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,Man, brute, reptile, fly,—alien of end and of aim,Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,—Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!
— St. 1. The leading sentence, “Would that the structure brave”, etc., is interrupted by the comparison, “as when Solomon willed”, etc., and continued in the 2d stanza, “Would it might tarry like his”, etc.; the construction of the comparison is, “as when Solomon willed that armies of angels, legions of devils, etc., should rush into sight and pile him a palace straight”; the reference is to the legends of the Koran in regard to Solomon’s magical powers.
2.Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,Burrow a while and build, broad on the roots of things,Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.
— St. 2. the beautiful building of mine: “Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most poetical; and because it requires most imagination. We do not simply listen to sounds, but whether they be articulate or inarticulate, we are constantly translating them into the language of sight, with which we are better acquainted; and this is a work of the imaginative faculty.” —‘Poetics: an Essay on Poetry’. By E. S. Dallas.
The idea expressed in the above extract is beautifully embodied in the following lines from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’:—
“It was a miracle of rare device,A sunny pleasure-dome, with caves of ice!A damsel with a dulcimerIn a vision once I saw:It was an Abyssinian maid,And on her dulcimer she played,Singing of Mount Abora.Could I revive within meHer symphony and song,To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,That with music loud and long,I would build that dome in air,That sunny dome! those caves of ice!And all who HEARD should SEE them there”, etc.
3.And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,When a great illumination surprises a festal night—Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.
4.In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,Not a point nor peak but found, but fixed its wandering star;Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
5.Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;And what is,—shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
6.All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth.Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list enrolled:—
7.But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, lo, they are!And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught;It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought,And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
8.Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.Never to be again! But many more of the kindAs good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mindTo the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
9.Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;The evil is null, is naught, 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.
10.All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor powerWhose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist,When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
11.And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidenceFor the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;The rest may reason and welcome; ‘tis we musicians know.
— St. 11. And what is our failure here: “As long as effort is directed to the highest, that aim, though it is out of reach, is the standard of hope. The existence of a capacity, cherished and quickened, is a pledge that it will find scope. The punishment of the man who has fixed all his thoughts upon earth, a punishment felt on reflection to be overwhelming in view of possibilities of humanity, is the completest gratification of desires unworthily limited:—
“‘Thou art shutOut of the heaven of spirit; glutThy sense upon the world: ‘tis thineFor ever—take it!’ (‘Easter Day’, xx.).
On the other hand, the soul which has found in success not rest but a starting-point, which refuses to see in the first-fruits of a partial victory the fulness of its rightful triumph, has ever before it a sustaining and elevating vision:—
“‘What stops my despair?This:—‘tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what manWould do!’ (‘Saul’, 18).“‘What I aspired to be,And was not, comforts me;A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.’”(‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, 7).—Rev. Prof. Westcott on Browning’sView of Life (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, iv., 405, 406).
12.Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
“Touch him ne’er so lightly.”{Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls. Second Series.}
— * See ‘Pages from an Album’, in ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’ (Scribner’s), for November 1882, pp. 159, 160, where is given a fac-simile of the poet’s Ms. of these verses and of the ten verses he afterwards added, in response, it seems, to a carping critic. —
“Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he broke:Soil so quick-receptive,—not one feather-seed,Not one flower dust fell but straight its fall awokeVitalizing virtue: song would song succeedSudden as spontaneous—prove a poet-soul!”Indeed?Rock’s the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rageVainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there:Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after ageKnows and names a pine, a nation’s heritage.
1.Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,And did he stop and speak to you,And did you speak to him again?How strange it seems, and new!
2.But you were living before that,And also you are living after;And the memory I started at—My starting moves your laughter!
3.I crossed a moor, with a name of its ownAnd a certain use in the world, no doubt,Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone‘Mid the blank miles round about:
4.For there I picked up on the heatherAnd there I put inside my breastA moulted feather, an eagle-feather!Well, I forget the rest.
I only knew one poet in my life:And this, or something like it, was his way.You saw go up and down Valladolid,A man of mark, to know next time you saw.His very serviceable suit of blackWas courtly once and conscientious still,And many might have worn it, though none did:The cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads,Had purpose, and the ruff, significance.He walked, and tapped the pavement with his cane, {10}Scenting the world, looking it full in face:An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.They turned up, now, the alley by the church,That leads no whither; now, they breathed themselvesOn the main promenade just at the wrong time.You’d come upon his scrutinizing hat,Making a peaked shade blacker than itselfAgainst the single window spared some houseIntact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,—Or else surprise the ferrel of his stick {20}Trying the mortar’s temper ‘tween the chinksOf some new shop a-building, French and fine.He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,The man who slices lemons into drink,The coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boysThat volunteer to help him turn its winch.He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall.He took such cognizance of men and things, {30}If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;If any cursed a woman, he took note;Yet stared at nobody,—you stared at him,And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,He seemed to know you and expect as much.So, next time that a neighbor’s tongue was loosed,It marked the shameful and notorious fact,We had among us, not so much a spy,As a recording chief-inquisitor,The town’s true master if the town but knew! {40}We merely kept a governor for form,While this man walked about and took accountOf all thought, said and acted, then went home,And wrote it fully to our Lord the KingWho has an itch to know things, he knows why,And reads them in his bedroom of a night.Oh, you might smile! there wanted not a touch,A tang of. . .well, it was not wholly ease,As back into your mind the man’s look came.Stricken in years a little, such a brow {50}His eyes had to live under!—clear as flintOn either side o’ the formidable noseCurved, cut and colored like an eagle’s claw.Had he to do with A.‘s surprising fate?When altogether old B. disappeared,And young C. got his mistress,—was’t our friend,His letter to the King, that did it all?What paid the bloodless man for so much pains?Our Lord the King has favorites manifold,And shifts his ministry some once a month; {60}Our city gets new governors at whiles,—But never word or sign, that I could hear,Notified, to this man about the streets,The King’s approval of those letters connedThe last thing duly at the dead of night.Did the man love his office? Frowned our Lord,Exhorting when none heard—“Beseech me not!Too far above my people,—beneath me!I set the watch,—how should the people know?Forget them, keep me all the more in mind!” {70}Was some such understanding ‘twixt the two?I found no truth in one report at least—That if you tracked him to his home, down lanesBeyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,You found he ate his supper in a roomBlazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,And twenty naked girls to change his plate!Poor man, he lived another kind of lifeIn that new stuccoed third house by the bridge,Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise! {80}The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat,Leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog’s back,Playing a decent cribbage with his maid(Jacynth, you’re sure her name was) o’er the cheeseAnd fruit, three red halves of starved winter-pears,Or treat of radishes in April. Nine,Ten, struck the church clock, straight to bed went he.My father, like the man of sense he was,Would point him out to me a dozen times;“St—St,” he’d whisper, “the Corregidor!” {90}I had been used to think that personageWas one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt,And feathers like a forest in his hat,Who blew a trumpet and proclaimed the news,Announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn,And memorized the miracle in vogue!He had a great observance from us boys;We were in error; that was not the man.I’d like now, yet had haply been afraid,To have just looked, when this man came to die, {100}And seen who lined the clean gay garret sides,And stood about the neat low truckle-bed,With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,Doing the King’s work all the dim day long,In his old coat and up to knees in mud,Smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,—And, now the day was won, relieved at once!No further show or need of that old coat, {110}You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the whileHow sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!A second, and the angels alter that.Well, I could never write a verse,—could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.
—* Transcendentalism: a poem in twelve books. It must be understoodthat the poet addressed has written a long poem under this title,and a brother-poet, while admitting that it contains “true thoughts,good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up”, raises the objectionthat they are naked, instead of being draped, as they should be,in sights and sounds.—
Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?‘Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughtsInstead of draping them in sights and sounds.—True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!But why such long prolusion and display,Such turning and adjustment of the harp,And taking it upon your breast, at length,Only to speak dry words across its strings?Stark-naked thought is in request enough: {10}Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,Which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp—Exchange our harp for that,—who hinders you?But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse;Boys seek for images and melody,Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, ‘tis true;We see and hear and do not wonder much: {20}If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!As German Boehme never cared for plantsUntil it happed, a-walking in the fields,He noticed all at once that plants could speak,Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.That day the daisy had an eye indeed—Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.But by the time youth slips a stage or twoWhile reading prose in that tough book he wrote, {30}(Collating and emendating the sameAnd settling on the sense most to our mind)We shut the clasps and find life’s summer past.Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—Another Boehme with a tougher bookAnd subtler meanings of what roses say,—Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, {40}Over us, under, round us every side,Nay, in and out the tables and the chairsAnd musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,—Buries us with a glory, young once more,Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.So come, the harp back to your heart again!You are a poem, though your poem’s naught.The best of all you showed before, believe,Was your own boy-face o’er the finer chordsBent, following the cherub at the top {50}That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.
— 22. German Boehme: Jacob Boehme (or Behmen), a shoemaker and a famous theosophist, b. 1575, at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz; d. 1624. The 24th verse of the poem, “He noticed all at once that plants could speak”, may refer to a remarkable experience of Boehme, related in Dr. Hans Lassen Martensen’s ‘Jacob Boehme: his life and teaching, or studies in theosophy: translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans’, London, 1885: “Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked that he gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.” Martensen, in his biography, follows that by Frankenberg, in which the experience may be given more in detail.
37-40. him of Halberstadt, John: “It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up.”
“The ‘magic’ symbolized, is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or ‘Mage’, is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself. ‘Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadht in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day, to say mass in Halberstadht, in Mayntz, and in Cologne’ (‘Heywood’s Hierarchy’, Bk. IV., p. 253). The ‘prestigious feat’ of causing flowers to appear in winter, was a common one.” —Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s ‘Handbook to the works of Robert Browning’, p. 209.
It may be said that the advice given in this poem, Browning has not sufficiently followed in his own poetry. On this point, a writer in the ‘British Quarterly Review’ (Vol. 23, p. 162) justly remarks: “Browning’s thought is always that of a poet. Subtle, nimble, and powerful as is the intellect, and various as is the learning, all is manifested through the imagination, and comes forth shaped and tinted by it. Thus, even in the foregoing passages {cited from ‘Transcendentalism’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’}, where the matter is almost as purely as it can be the produce of the mere understanding, it is still evident that the method of the thought is poetic. The notions take the form of images. For example, the poet means to say that Prose is a good and mighty vehicle in its way, but that it is not Poetry; and how does the conception shape itself in his mind? Why, in an image. All at once it is not Prose that is thought about, but a huge six-foot speaking-trumpet braced round with bark, through which the Swiss hunters help their voices from Alp to Alp— Poetry, on the other hand, being no such big and blaring instrument, but a harp taken to the breast of youth and swept by ecstatic fingers. And so with the images of Boehme and his book, and John of Halberstadt with his magic rose—still a concrete body to enshrine an abstract meaning.”