Life of Robert Browning

sap in a tree. He remembered his mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters

r, in the yea

res, no, nor ca

that should a

lone, one lif

n Mr. Browning was absent - to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she showed them was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them, discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams), copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev. William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts. Mr. Fox agreed with Miss Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. The originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new thing for him: from a dream, vague, if

Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the l

hase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais". What an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it was a May night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of gold," and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden,

s first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life he was fain, like his "wis

without heart

om a

very passion of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the Ode to a Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in "Epipsychidion", haunted him above all others: and again and again

at the school, possibly from his own reticence in self-disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any school-mate deeply. We hear of no one who "knew Browning at school." His best education, after all, was at home. His father and mother i

in which we now regard it, a matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a large publi

mental studies in technical science. In the evenings, after his preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company of his father, he read and assiduously wrote. After poetry, he cared most fo

w, I rudely

te wants, yet

ense of power

ugh those shadow

elt in me, and

g session, 1829-30. "I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long" (wrote a friend, in the `Times', Dec. 14:'89), "and I well recollect the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students. He was then a bright, h

r was helped thereto by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for, and that, if need be, there was sufficient for himself also. There was of course but one way open to him. He would not have been a true poet, an artist, if he had hesitated. With a strange misconception of the artistic spirit, some one has awarded the poet great credit for his choice, because he had "the singular courage to decline

natural even, had his father wavered. The outcome of their deliberations was that Robert's fur

d authority, that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover for this wooer. Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known. W

m this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic

the major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic "epic". He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented emphatically enou

ntensely the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in "The Return of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, "no draught coming as from a sepulchre" saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, `Hakeem!' - or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book", where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the l

ic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginative persons, not mine,' which I have since written 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 w

e fact of "Richmon

e end of the pref

ent misstatements as

om Camberwell in or

tells me that his father

connected with `Paulin

ystifi

world was never to guess that such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same notable person. . . . Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in my fo

f thought. That he was not more severe was accepted by his son as high praise. The author had, however, little hope of seeing it in print. Mr. Browning was not anxious to provide a publisher with a pres

career he had forecast for himself, but his progress might have been retarded or thwarted to le

was issued by them in January 1833. It seems to us, who read it now, so manifestly a work of exceptional promise, and, to a certain extent, of high accomplishment, that

n it the long series culminating in "Asolando" is foreshadowed, as the oak is observable in the sapling. The poem is prefaced by a Latin motto from the `Occult Philosophy' of Cornelius Agrippa, and has also a note in French, set forth as being by P

oor friend will not be a

o be read of this

culated than any o

n never be anything b

r, whether in striving

would not run the ri

ich so singular a pr

erably precise idea

y indicate. This u

ich first increases, and

the soul, this sudde

friend's quite pec

ns almost impossibl

and others still mor

paper, which otherwise

I believe none the les

n that principle of Sh

ccording to which c

their conception tha

to fear that the fir

riend, and I much doubt

uire the second. It wou

n I do?" -

judgment, as well as upon real if exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. An almost fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a ma

debt to Shelley, whom he apostrophises as "Sun-treader", and invokes in strains of lofty emotion - "Sun-treader - life and light be thine for e

mber one warm m

he earth, and Spr

moist hills - the

e bare wood,

e were white w

side of a sorrow

ening from sle

nary Browning, a Sh

fate from whic

light in cau

in darkness c

ome ocea

he real B

ng on - fast

rse being as th

.

p of an int

s down to "Their spirit dwe

wandering after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos - his second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those

ever morn brok

stered isles i

and white temples

ver will surp

ide the naked

rehead with Pro

Plato, and the more rem

all it shows - the King Treading

ning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the surest conserver of th

ndered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, an end comprising every joy." Again: "Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to turn my mind against itself . . . at length I was restored, yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me thus far back to peace." No reader, alert to the subtle

evere strictures: mainly, however, because of its radical importance to the student who would arrive at a broad and true estimate of the power and scope and shaping constituents of its author's genius. Almost every quality of h

y with alien emotion to that wherewith they strive to possess their souls in patience over some one o

or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk and through its rustling foliage "look for the dim stars;" or, again, can live the life of the bird, "leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;" or be

lose by me, th

tree-tops hides

soft br

a and Sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with "the thunder like a whole sea overhead." Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan picture of morning, over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with the high boughs swinging in the wind above the

laugh sets all

fled tempest:

from the stupo

ngled branch r

loose dark's clingi

ory. Prone the

tent with moistu

eaves each plant

ade's glory-g

d "Pauline" will forg

s wild-wood retreat, the

mound of matted shrubs,

a new, an unmist

bank go shelvi

hroated snake re

tones lie maki

cross them dry

tive of the forest-pool in depths of savage woodland

trees

d men watch a

tterance in the lines where Pauline's lover speaks of the blood in her lips pulsing

rain in a quick shower has beat down mist, And cl

bleed like a mountain berry'"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature the youthful poet was, and with what

ny on that sad day when the tidings from Venice sent a thrill of start

I believe in G

ove;

hiefly when

s wakes pleasan

ate is happy -

ch of

brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The Browning who might have been is here: henceforth the Browning we know and love stands unique among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, to the young Dionysos upon whose forehead was the light of another destiny than that which descended upon h

e little bo

mly shaped my

ght did I build

hangs cell to

ll go on: my m