Chapter XI: Section 54 (2)

And now, what took place at the very first of all,
I cannot tell, as I never could learn it:
Jacynth constantly wished a curse to fall
On that little head of hers and burn it
If she knew how she came to drop so soundly
Asleep of a sudden, and there continue
The whole time, sleeping as profoundly {500}
As one of the boars my father would pin you
‘Twixt the eyes where life holds garrison,
--Jacynth, forgive me the comparison!
But where I begin my own narration
Is a little after I took my station
To breathe the fresh air from the balcony,
And, having in those days a falcon eye,
To follow the hunt through the open country,
From where the bushes thinlier crested
The hillocks, to a plain where’s not one tree. {510}
When, in a moment, my ear was arrested
By--was it singing, or was it saying,
Or a strange musical instrument playing
In the chamber?--and to be certain
I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain,
And there lay Jacynth asleep,
Yet as if a watch she tried to keep,
In a rosy sleep along the floor
With her head against the door;
While in the midst, on the seat of state, {520}
Was a queen--the gypsy woman late,
With head and face downbent
On the lady’s head and face intent:
For, coiled at her feet like a child at ease,
The lady sat between her knees,
And o’er them the lady’s clasped hands met,
And on those hands her chin was set,
And her upturned face met the face of the crone
Wherein the eyes had grown and grown
As if she could double and quadruple {530}
At pleasure the play of either pupil
--Very like, by her hands’ slow fanning,
As up and down like a gor-crow’s flappers
They moved to measure, or bell-clappers.
I said, “Is it blessing, is it banning,
Do they applaud you or burlesque you--
Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?”
But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue,
At once I was stopped by the lady’s expression:
For it was life her eyes were drinking {540}
From the crone’s wide pair above unwinking,
--Life’s pure fire, received without shrinking,
Into the heart and breast whose heaving
Told you no single drop they were leaving,
--Life that, filling her, passed redundant
Into her very hair, back swerving
Over each shoulder, loose and abundant,
As her head thrown back showed the white throat curving;
And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,
Moving to the mystic measure, {550}
Bounding as the bosom bounded.
I stopped short, more and more confounded,
As still her cheeks burned and eyes glistened,
As she listened and she listened:
When all at once a hand detained me,
The selfsame contagion gained me,
And I kept time to the wondrous chime,
Making out words and prose and rhyme,
Till it seemed that the music furled
Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped {560}
From under the words it first had propped,
And left them midway in the world,
Word took word as hand takes hand,
I could hear at last, and understand,
And when I held the unbroken thread,
The gypsy said:--

“And so at last we find my tribe.
And so I set thee in the midst,
And to one and all of them describe
What thou saidst and what thou didst, {570}
Our long and terrible journey through,
And all thou art ready to say and do
In the trials that remain:
I trace them the vein and the other vein
That meet on thy brow and part again,
Making our rapid mystic mark;
And I bid my people prove and probe
Each eye’s profound and glorious globe,
Till they detect the kindred spark
In those depths so dear and dark, {580}
Like the spots that snap and burst and flee,
Circling over the midnight sea.
And on that round young cheek of thine
I make them recognize the tinge,
As when of the costly scarlet wine
They drip so much as will impinge
And spread in a thinnest scale afloat
One thick gold drop from the olive’s coat
Over a silver plate whose sheen
Still through the mixture shall be seen. {590}
For so I prove thee, to one and all,
Fit, when my people ope their breast,
To see the sign, and hear the call,
And take the vow, and stand the test
Which adds one more child to the rest--
When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,
And the world is left outside.
For there is probation to decree,
And many and long must the trials be
Thou shalt victoriously endure, {600}
If that brow is true and those eyes are sure;
Like a jewel-finder’s fierce assay
Of the prize he dug from its mountain tomb,--
Let once the vindicating ray
Leap out amid the anxious gloom,
And steel and fire have done their part,
And the prize falls on its finder’s heart;
So, trial after trial past,
Wilt thou fall at the very last
Breathless, half in trance {610}
With the thrill of the great deliverance,
Into our arms forevermore;
And thou shalt know, those arms once curled
About thee, what we knew before,
How love is the only good in the world.
Henceforth be loved as heart can love,
Or brain devise, or hand approve!
Stand up, look below,
It is our life at thy feet we throw
To step with into light and joy; {620}
Not a power of life but we employ
To satisfy thy nature’s want;
Art thou the tree that props the plant,
Or the climbing plant that seeks the tree--
Canst thou help us, must we help thee?
If any two creatures grew into one,
They would do more than the world has done;
Though each apart were never so weak,
Ye vainly through the world should seek
For the knowledge and the might {630}
Which in such union grew their right:
So, to approach at least that end,
And blend,--as much as may be, blend
Thee with us or us with thee,--
As climbing plant or propping tree,
Shall some one deck thee over and down,
Up and about, with blossoms and leaves?
Fix his heart’s fruit for thy garland crown,
Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves,
Die on thy boughs and disappear {640}
While not a leaf of thine is sere?
Or is the other fate in store,
And art thou fitted to adore,
To give thy wondrous self away,
And take a stronger nature’s sway?
I foresee and could foretell
Thy future portion, sure and well:
But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
Let them say what thou shalt do!
Only be sure thy daily life, {650}
In its peace or in its strife,
Never shall be unobserved;
We pursue thy whole career,
And hope for it, or doubt, or fear,--
Lo, hast thou kept thy path or swerved,
We are beside thee in all thy ways,
With our blame, with our praise,
Our shame to feel, our pride to show,
Glad, angry--but indifferent, no!
Whether it be thy lot to go, {660}
For the good of us all, where the haters meet
In the crowded city’s horrible street;
Or thou step alone through the morass
Where never sound yet was
Save the dry quick clap of the stork’s bill,
For the air is still, and the water still,
When the blue breast of the dipping coot
Dives under, and all is mute.
So at the last shall come old age,
Decrepit as befits that stage; {670}
How else wouldst thou retire apart
With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
And gather all the very least
Of the fragments of life’s earlier feast,
Let fall through eagerness to find
The crowning dainties yet behind?
Ponder on the entire past
Laid together thus at last,
When the twilight helps to fuse
The first fresh with the faded hues, {680}
And the outline of the whole,
As round eve’s shades their framework roll,
Grandly fronts for once thy soul.
And then as, ‘mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh and the soul awakes,
Then”--
Ay, then indeed something would happen!
But what? For here her voice changed like a bird’s; {690}
There grew more of the music and less of the words;
Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen
To paper and put you down every syllable
With those clever clerkly fingers,
All I’ve forgotten as well as what lingers
In this old brain of mine that’s but ill able
To give you even this poor version
Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering!
--More fault of those who had the hammering
Or prosody into me and syntax, {700}
And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks!
But to return from this excursion,--
Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest,
The peace most deep and the charm completest,
There came, shall I say, a snap--
And the charm vanished!
And my sense returned, so strangely banished,
And, starting as from a nap,
I knew the crone was bewitching my lady,
With Jacynth asleep; and but one spring made I {710}
Down from the casement, round to the portal,
Another minute and I had entered,--
When the door opened, and more than mortal
Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.
She was so different, happy and beautiful,
I felt at once that all was best,
And that I had nothing to do, for the rest,
But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful. {720}
Not that, in fact, there was any commanding;
I saw the glory of her eye,
And the brow’s height and the breast’s expanding,
And I was hers to live or to die.
As for finding what she wanted,
You know God Almighty granted
Such little signs should serve wild creatures
To tell one another all their desires,
So that each knows what his friend requires,
And does its bidding without teachers. {730}
I preceded her; the crone
Followed silent and alone;
I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered
In the old style; both her eyes had slunk
Back to their pits; her stature shrunk;
In short, the soul in its body sunk
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard.
We descended, I preceding;
Crossed the court with nobody heeding;
All the world was at the chase, {740}
The court-yard like a desert-place,
The stable emptied of its small fry;
I saddled myself the very palfrey
I remember patting while it carried her,
The day she arrived and the Duke married her.
And, do you know, though it’s easy deceiving
One’s self in such matters, I can’t help believing
The lady had not forgotten it either,
And knew the poor devil so much beneath her
Would have been only too glad, for her service, {750}
To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise,
But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it,
Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it.
For though, the moment I began setting
His saddle on my own nag of Berold’s begetting
(Not that I meant to be obtrusive),
She stopped me, while his rug was shifting,
By a single rapid finger’s lifting,
And, with a gesture kind but conclusive,
And a little shake of the head, refused me,-- {760}
I say, although she never used me,
Yet when she was mounted, the gypsy behind her,
And I ventured to remind her,
I suppose with a voice of less steadiness
Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me,
--Something to the effect that I was in readiness
Whenever God should please she needed me,--
Then, do you know, her face looked down on me
With a look that placed a crown on me,
And she felt in her bosom,--mark, her bosom-- {770}
And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom,
Dropped me. . .ah! had it been a purse
Of silver, my friend, or gold that’s worse,
Why, you see, as soon as I found myself
So understood,--that a true heart so may gain
Such a reward,--I should have gone home again,
Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself!
It was a little plait of hair
Such as friends in a convent make
To wear, each for the other’s sake,-- {780}
This, see, which at my breast I wear,
Ever did (rather to Jacynth’s grudgment),
And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
And then,--and then,--to cut short,--this is idle,
These are feelings it is not good to foster,--
I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
And the palfrey bounded,--and so we lost her.

-- 501. you: ethical dative; there are several examples in the poem, and of “me”; see especially v. 876.

586. impinge: to strike or fall upon or against; in the following passage used ethically:--

“For I find this black mark impinge the man, That he believes in just the vile of life.”--The Ring and the Book: The Pope, v. 511.

567-689. “When higher laws draw the spirit out of itself into the life of others; when grief has waked in it, not a self-centred despair, but a divine sympathy; when it looks from the narrow limits of its own suffering to the largeness of the world and the sorrows it can lighten, we can dimly apprehend that it has taken flight and has found its freedom in a region whither earth-bound spirits cannot follow it. Surely the Gypsy’s message was this--if the Duchess would leave her own troubles and throw herself into the life of others, she would be free. None can give true sympathy but those who have suffered and learnt to love, therefore she must be proved,--‘Fit when my people ope their breast’, etc. (vv. 592-601). Passing from the bondage she has endured she will still have trials, but the old pain will have no power to touch her. She has learnt all it can teach, and the world will be richer for it. The Gypsy Queen will not foretell what her future life may be; the true powers of self-less love are not yet gauged, and the power of the union of those that truly love has never been tried. ‘If any two creatures grew into one’, etc. (vv. 626-631). Love at its highest is not yet known to us, but the passionate eyes of the Duchess tell us it will not be a life of quiescence. Giving herself out freely for the good of all she can never be alone again,--‘We are beside thee in all thy ways’. The great company of those who need her, the gypsy band of all human claims. Death to such a life is but ‘the hand that ends a dream’. What was to come after not even the Gypsy Queen could tell.”-- Mrs. Owen (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part IV. p. 52*).

712. had: past subj., should have.

753. that pitiful method: i.e., patting her palfrey.

784. And then,--and then: his feelings overcome him.

16.

When the liquor’s out why clink the cannikin?
I did think to describe you the panic in
The redoubtable breast of our master the manikin, {790}
And what was the pitch of his mother’s yellowness,
How she turned as a shark to snap the spare-rib
Clean off, sailors say, from a pearl-diving Carib,
When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness
--But it seems such child’s play,
What they said and did with the lady away!
And to dance on, when we’ve lost the music,
Always made me--and no doubt makes you--sick.
Nay, to my mind, the world’s face looked so stern
As that sweet form disappeared through the postern, {800}
She that kept it in constant good humor,
It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do more.
But the world thought otherwise and went on,
And my head’s one that its spite was spent on:
Thirty years are fled since that morning,
And with them all my head’s adorning.
Nor did the old Duchess die outright,
As you expect, of suppressed spite,
The natural end of every adder
Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder: {810}
But she and her son agreed, I take it,
That no one should touch on the story to wake it,
For the wound in the Duke’s pride rankled fiery;
So, they made no search and small inquiry:
And when fresh gypsies have paid us a visit, I’ve
Noticed the couple were never inquisitive,
But told them they’re folks the Duke don’t want here,
And bade them make haste and cross the frontier.
Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it,
And the old one was in the young one’s stead, {820}
And took, in her place, the household’s head,
And a blessed time the household had of it!
And were I not, as a man may say, cautious
How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous,
I could favor you with sundry touches
Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess
Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness
(To get on faster) until at last her
Cheek grew to be one master-plaster
Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse: {830}
In short, she grew from scalp to udder
Just the object to make you shudder.

-- 793. Carib: a Caribbee, a native of the Caribbean islands.

17.

You’re my friend--
What a thing friendship is, world without end!
How it gives the heart and soul a stir-up
As if somebody broached you a glorious runlet,
And poured out, all lovelily, sparklingly, sunlit,
Our green Moldavia, the streaky syrup,
Cotnar as old as the time of the Druids--
Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids; {840}
Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs,
Gives your life’s hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts
Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees
Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease.
I have seen my little lady once more,
Jacynth, the gypsy, Berold, and the rest of it,
For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before;
I always wanted to make a clean breast of it:
And now it is made--why, my heart’s blood, that went trickle,
Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets, {850}
Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle,
And genially floats me about the giblets.
I’ll tell you what I intend to do:
I must see this fellow his sad life through--
He is our Duke, after all,
And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall.
My father was born here, and I inherit
His fame, a chain he bound his son with;
Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it,
But there’s no mine to blow up and get done with: {860}
So, I must stay till the end of the chapter.
For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter,
Be it a thing to be glad on or sorry on,
Some day or other, his head in a morion
And breast in a hauberk, his heels he’ll kick up,
Slain by an onslaught fierce of hiccup.
And then, when red doth the sword of our Duke rust,
And its leathern sheath lie o’ergrown with a blue crust,
Then I shall scrape together my earnings;
For, you see, in the churchyard Jacynth reposes, {870}
And our children all went the way of the roses:
It’s a long lane that knows no turnings.
One needs but little tackle to travel in;
So, just one stout cloak shall I indue:
And for a staff, what beats the javelin
With which his boars my father pinned you?
And then, for a purpose you shall hear presently,
Taking some Cotnar, a tight plump skinful,
I shall go journeying, who but I, pleasantly!
Sorrow is vain and despondency sinful. {880}
What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labor, then only, we’re too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?
And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees
(Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil),
I hope to get safely out of the turmoil
And arrive one day at the land of the gypsies,
And find my lady, or hear the last news of her
From some old thief and son of Lucifer, {890}
His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop,
Sunburned all over like an Aethiop.
And when my Cotnar begins to operate
And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate,
And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent,
I shall drop in with--as if by accident--
“You never knew, then, how it all ended,
What fortune good or bad attended
The little lady your Queen befriended?”
--And when that’s told me, what’s remaining? {900}
This world’s too hard for my explaining.
The same wise judge of matters equine
Who still preferred some slim four-year-old
To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold,
And, for strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine,
He also must be such a lady’s scorner!
Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau:
Now up, now down, the world’s one seesaw.
--So, I shall find out some snug corner
Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight, {910}
Turn myself round and bid the world goodnight;
And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet’s blowing
Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen)
To a world where will be no further throwing
Pearls before swine that can’t value them. Amen!

-- 845. I have seen: i.e., in imagination, while telling the story.

864. morion: a sort of helmet.

884. What age had Methusalem: the old man forgets his Bible.

906. He also must be such a lady’s scorner: he who is such a poor judge of horses and wines.

910. Orson the wood-knight (Fr. ‘ourson’, a small bear): twin-brother of Valentine, and son of Bellisant. The brothers were born in a wood near Orleans, and Orson was carried off by a bear, which suckled him with her cubs. When he grew up, he became the terror of France, and was called “The Wild Man of the Forest”. Ultimately he was reclaimed by his brother Valentine, overthrew the Green Knight, his rival in love, and married Fezon, daughter of the duke of Savary, in Aquitaine.--‘Romance of Valentine and Orson’ (15th cent.). Brewer’s ‘Reader’s Handbook’ and ‘Dictionary of Phrase and Fable’.

The Last Ride Together.

1.

I said--Then, dearest, since ‘tis so,
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,
Since this was written and needs must be--
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave,--I claim
Only a memory of the same,
--And this beside, if you will not blame,
Your leave for one more last ride with me.

-- St. 1. Browning has no moping melancholy lovers. His lovers generally reflect his own manliness; and when their passion is unrequited, they acknowledge the absolute value of love to their own souls. As Mr. James Thomson, in his ‘Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning’, remarks (‘B. Soc. Papers’, Part II., p. 246), “Browning’s passion is as intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle, and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited {George Meredith} has defined passion as ‘noble strength on fire’; and this is the true passion of great natures and great poets; while sentimentalism is ignoble weakness dallying with fire; . . . Browning’s passion is of utter self-sacrifice, self-annihilation, self-vindicated by its irresistible intensity. So we read it in ‘Time’s Revenges’, so in the scornful condemnation of the weak lovers in ‘The Statue and the Bust’, so in ‘In a Balcony’, and ‘Two in the Campagna’, with its

“‘Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.’

Is the love rejected, unreturned? No weak and mean upbraidings of the beloved, no futile complaints; a solemn resignation to immitigable Fate; intense gratitude for inspiring love to the unloving beloved. So in ‘A Serenade at the Villa’; so in ‘One Way of Love’, with its

“‘My whole life long I learned to love.
This hour my utmost art I prove
And speak my passion.--Heaven or Hell?
She will not give me Heaven? ‘Tis well!
Lose who may--I still can say,
Those who win Heaven, blest are they!’

So in ‘The Last Ride Together’, with its

“‘I said--Then, dearest, since ‘tis so,’” etc.

2.

My mistress bent that brow of hers;
Those deep dark eyes where pride demurs
When pity would be softening through,
Fixed me a breathing-while or two
With life or death in the balance: right!
The blood replenished me again;
My last thought was at least not vain:
I and my mistress, side by side,
Shall be together, breathe and ride,
So, one day more am I deified.
Who knows but the world may end to-night?

3.

Hush! if you saw some western cloud
All billowy-bosomed, over-bowed
By many benedictions--sun’s
And moon’s and evening-star’s at once--
And so, you, looking and loving best,
Conscious grew, your passion drew
Cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too,
Down on you, near and yet more near,
Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!--
Thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear
Thus lay she a moment on my breast.

4.

Then we began to ride. My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll
Freshening and fluttering in the wind.
Past hopes already lay behind.
What need to strive with a life awry?
Had I said that, had I done this,
So might I gain, so might I miss.
Might she have loved me? just as well
She might have hated, who can tell!
Where had I been now if the worst befell?
And here we are riding, she and I.

5.

Fail I alone, in words and deeds?
Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
We rode; it seemed my spirit flew,
Saw other regions, cities new,
As the world rushed by on either side.
I thought,--All labor, yet no less
Bear up beneath their unsuccess.
Look at the end of work, contrast
The petty done, the undone vast,
This present of theirs with the hopeful past!
I hoped she would love me: here we ride.

6.

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 fleshy screen?
We ride and I see her bosom heave.
There’s many a crown for who can reach.
Ten lines, a statesman’s life in each!
The flag stuck on a heap of bones,
A soldier’s doing! what atones?
They scratch his name on the Abbey-stones.
My riding is better, by their leave.

7.

What does it all mean, poet? Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell
What we felt only; you expressed
You hold things beautiful the best,
And pace them in rhyme so, side by side.
‘Tis something, nay ‘tis much: but then,
Have you yourself what’s best for men?
Are you--poor, sick, old ere your time--
Nearer one whit your own sublime
Than we who have never turned a rhyme?
Sing, riding’s a joy! For me, I ride.

8.

And you, great sculptor--so, you gave
A score of years to Art, her slave,
And that’s your Venus, whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn!
You acquiesce, and shall I repine?
What, man of music, you grown gray
With notes and nothing else to say,
Is this your sole praise from a friend,
“Greatly his opera’s strains intend,
But in music we know how fashions end!”
I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine.

9.

Who knows what’s fit for us? Had fate
Proposed bliss here should sublimate
My being--had I signed the bond--
Still one must lead some life beyond,
Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried.
This foot once planted on the goal,
This glory-garland round my soul,
Could I descry such? Try and test!
I sink back shuddering from the quest.
Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride.

10.

And yet--she has not spoke so long!
What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life’s best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life’s flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two,
With life forever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,--
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, forever ride?

By the Fireside.

1.

How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn evenings come;
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life’s November too!

--
St. 1, v. 3. is: present used for the future, shall then be.

2.

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book, as beseemeth age;
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!

--
St. 2. Not verse now, only prose: he shall have reached
the “years which bring the philosophic mind”.

3.

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,
“There he is at it, deep in Greek:
Now then, or never, out we slip
To cut from the hazels by the creek
A mainmast for our ship!”

4.

I shall be at it indeed, my friends!
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And I pass out where it ends.

--
St. 4. Greek puts already such a branch-work forth as will soon extend
to a vista opening far and wide, and he will pass out where it ends
and retrace the paths he has trod through life’s pleasant wood.

5.

The outside frame, like your hazel-trees--
But the inside-archway widens fast,
And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
And we slope to Italy at last
And youth, by green degrees.

6.

I follow wherever I am led,
Knowing so well the leader’s hand:
Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands,
Laid to their hearts instead!

--
St. 5, 6. He will pass first through his childhood, in England,
represented by the hazels, and on, by green degrees, to youth and Italy,
where, knowing so well the leader’s hand, and assured as to whither
she will conduct him, he will follow wherever he is led.

7.

Look at the ruined chapel again
Half-way up in the Alpine gorge!
Is that a tower, I point you plain,
Or is it a mill, or an iron forge
Breaks solitude in vain?

--
St. 7. Look: to be construed with “follow”.

8.

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things;
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
Through the ravage some torrent brings!

9.

Does it feed the little lake below?
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!

10.

On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept ‘twixt the gorge and it
By bowlder-stones, where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block.

11.

Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,
And thorny balls, each three in one,
The chestnuts throw on our path in showers!
For the drop of the woodland fruit’s begun,
These early November hours,

12.

That crimson the creeper’s leaf across
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,
O’er a shield else gold from rim to boss,
And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped
Elf-needled mat of moss,

13.

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening--nay, in to-day’s first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,
Where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew
Of toad-stools peep indulged.

14.

And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge
That takes the turn to a range beyond,
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge,
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
Danced over by the midge.

15.

The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish-gray and mostly wet;
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dike.
See here again, how the lichens fret
And the roots of the ivy strike!

16.

Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,
Gathered within that precinct small
By the dozen ways one roams--

17.

To drop from the charcoal-burners’ huts,
Or climb from the hemp-dressers’ low shed,
Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread
Their gear on the rock’s bare juts.

18.

It has some pretension too, this front,
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise
Set over the porch, Art’s early wont:
‘Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
But has borne the weather’s brunt--

19.

Not from the fault of the builder, though,
For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating--good thought of our architect’s--
‘Five, six, nine, he lets you know.

20.

And all day long a bird sings there,
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;
The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.

--
St. 20. aware: self-conscious.

“. . .in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
* * * * *
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”
--Hood’s ‘Sonnet on Silence’.

21.

My perfect wife, my Leonor,
O heart, my own, Oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path gray heads abhor?

-- St. 21. He digresses here, and does not return to the subject till the 31st stanza, “What did I say?--that a small bird sings”. The path gray heads abhor: this verse and the following stanza are, with most readers, the CRUX of the poem; “gray heads” must be understood with some restriction: many gray heads, not all, abhor --gray heads who went along through their flowery youth as if it had no limit, and without insuring, in Love’s true season, the happiness of their lives beyond youth’s limit, “life’s safe hem”, which to cross without such insurance, is often fatal. And these, when they reach old age, shun retracing the path which led to the gulf wherein their youth dropped.

22.

For it leads to a crag’s sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops--
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life’s safe hem!

23.

With me, youth led. . .I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Mutely, my heart knows how--

--
St. 23. With me: the speaker continues,
youth led:--we are told whither, in St. 25, v. 4, “to an age
so blest that, by its side, youth seems the waste instead”.
I will speak now: up to this point his reflections have been silent,
his wife, the while, reading, mutely, by fire-light,
his heart knows how, that is, with her heart secretly responsive
to his own. The mutual responsiveness of their hearts is expressed
in St. 24.

24.

When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff
Response your soul seeks many a time,
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.

25.

My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?

26.

My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, ‘twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked
In each now: on, the new stream rolls,
Whatever rocks obstruct.

27.

Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?

28.

Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!

--
St. 28. “The conviction of the eternity of marriage meets us
again and again in Browning’s poems; e.g., ‘Prospice’,
‘Any Wife to any Husband’, ‘The Epilogue to Fifine’.”
The union between two complementary souls cannot be dissolved.
“Love is all, and Death is nought!”

29.

But who could have expected this
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life’s daily thirst
With a thing men seldom miss?

30.

Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!

31.

What did I say?--that a small bird sings
All day long, save when a brown pair
Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings
Strained to a bell: ‘gainst noonday glare
You count the streaks and rings.

--
St. 31. Here he returns to the subject broken off at St. 21.

32.

But at afternoon or almost eve
‘Tis better; then the silence grows
To that degree, you half believe
It must get rid of what it knows,
Its bosom does so heave.

33.

Hither we walked then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,
And still I questioned or replied,
While my heart, convulsed to really speak,
Lay choking in its pride.

34.

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco’s loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.

35.

Stoop and kneel on the settle under,
Look through the window’s grated square:
Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare,
As if thieves don’t fear thunder.

36.

We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder’s date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,
Take the path again--but wait!

37.

Oh moment one and infinite!
The water slips o’er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How gray at once is the evening grown--
One star, its chrysolite!

38.

We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.

-- St. 37, 38. “Mr. Browning’s most characteristic feeling for nature appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate significance; which seem to be charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure; in his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima and Sebald {in ‘Pippa Passes’}, like an angelic sword plunged into the gloom, when the tender twilight with its one chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery, and sound, and silence, mingle together two human lives forever {‘By the Fireside’}, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven {‘Christmas Eve’}, when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity {‘Saul’},--then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather, through nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man.”--Edward Dowden.

39.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!

40.

Had she willed it, still had stood the screen
So slight, so sure, ‘twixt my love and her:
I could fix her face with a guard between,
And find her soul as when friends confer,
Friends--lovers that might have been.

41.

For my heart had a touch of the woodland time,
Wanting to sleep now over its best.
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime,
But bring to the last leaf no such test!
“Hold the last fast!” runs the rhyme.

42.

For a chance to make your little much,
To gain a lover and lose a friend,
Venture the tree and a myriad such,
When nothing you mar but the year can mend:
But a last leaf--fear to touch!

43.

Yet should it unfasten itself and fall
Eddying down till it find your face
At some slight wind--best chance of all!
Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place
You trembled to forestall!

44.

Worth how well, those dark gray eyes,
That hair so dark and dear, how worth
That a man should strive and agonize,
And taste a veriest hell on earth
For the hope of such a prize!

45.

You might have turned and tried a man,
Set him a space to weary and wear,
And prove which suited more your plan,
His best of hope or his worst despair,
Yet end as he began.

46.

But you spared me this, like the heart you are,
And filled my empty heart at a word.
If two lives join, there is oft a scar,
They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far.

47.

A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

48.

The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.

49.

How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself--to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!

-- St. 49. “Those periods of life which appear most full of moral purpose to Mr. Tennyson, are periods of protracted self-control, and those moments stand eminent in life in which the spirit has struggled victoriously in the cause of conscience against impulse and desire. With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and those periods of our history are charged most fully with moral purpose, which take their direction from moments such as these. . . . In such a moment the somewhat dull youth of ‘The Inn Album’ rises into the justiciary of the Highest; in such a moment Polyxena with her right woman’s-manliness, discovers to Charles his regal duty, and infuses into her weaker husband, her own courage of heart {‘King Victor and King Charles’}; and rejoicing in the remembrance of a moment of high devotion which determined the issues of a life, the speaker of ‘By the Fireside’ exclaims,-- ‘How the world is made for each of us!’” etc.--Edward Dowden.

50.

Be hate that fruit, or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man,
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan;
Each living his own, to boot.

51.

I am named and known by that moment’s feat;
There took my station and degree;
So grew my own small life complete,
As nature obtained her best of me--
One born to love you, sweet!

52.

And to watch you sink by the fireside now
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how!

53.

So, earth has gained by one man the more,
And the gain of earth must be heaven’s gain too;
And the whole is well worth thinking o’er
When autumn comes: which I mean to do
One day, as I said before.

Prospice.

--
* ‘Prospice’ (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual
conflict, exultant with the certainty of victory, glowing
with the prospective joy of reunion with one whom death has
sent before.--Mrs. Orr.
--

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall, {10}
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold. {20}
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

--
25. first a peace out of pain: original reading, “first a peace,
then a joy”.

Amphibian.

1.

The fancy I had to-day,
Fancy which turned a fear!
I swam far out in the bay,
Since waves laughed warm and clear.

2.

I lay and looked at the sun,
The noon-sun looked at me:
Between us two, no one
Live creature, that I could see.

3.

Yes! There came floating by
Me, who lay floating too,
Such a strange butterfly!
Creature as dear as new:

4.

Because the membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused, were things
Like soul and naught beside.

5.

A handbreadth over head!
All of the sea my own,
It owned the sky instead;
Both of us were alone.

6.

I never shall join its flight,
For naught buoys flesh in air.
If it touch the sea--goodnight!
Death sure and swift waits there.

7.

Can the insect feel the better
For watching the uncouth play
Of limbs that slip the fetter,
Pretend as they were not clay?

8.

Undoubtedly I rejoice
That the air comports so well
With a creature which had the choice
Of the land once. Who can tell?

9.

What if a certain soul
Which early slipped its sheath,
And has for its home the whole
Of heaven, thus look beneath,

10.

Thus watch one who, in the world,
Both lives and likes life’s way,
Nor wishes the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say?

11.

But sometimes when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free one’s self of tether,
And try a life exempt

12.

From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought,--why, just
Unable to fly, one swims!

13.

By passion and thought upborne,
One smiles to one’s self--“They fare
Scarce better, they need not scorn
Our sea, who live in the air!”

14.

Emancipate through passion
And thought, with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven--poetry:

--
St. 14. for: instead of.

15.

Which sea, to all intent,
Gives flesh such noon-disport
As a finer element
Affords the spirit-sort.

16.

Whatever they are, we seem:
Imagine the thing they know;
All deeds they do, we dream;
Can heaven be else but so?

17.

And meantime, yonder streak
Meets the horizon’s verge;
That is the land, to seek
If we tire or dread the surge:

--
St. 17. We can return from the sea of passion and thought,
that is, poetry, or a deep spiritual state, to the solid
land again, of material fact.

18.

Land the solid and safe--
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress.

--
St. 18. Man, in his earth life, cannot always be “high
contemplative”, and indulge in “brave translunary things”;
he must welcome again, it must be confessed, “land the solid
and safe”. “Other heights in other lives, God willing”
(‘One Word More’).

19.

Does she look, pity, wonder
At one who mimics flight,
Swims--heaven above, sea under,
Yet always earth in sight?

--
St. 19. does she: the “certain soul” in 9th St., “which
early slipped its sheath”.

James Lee’s Wife.

I. James Lee’s Wife speaks at the Window.

--
* In the original ed., 1864, the heading to this section
was ‘At the Window’; changed in ed. of 1868.
--

1.

Ah, Love, but a day,
And the world has changed!
The sun’s away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky’s deranged:
Summer has stopped.

-- St. 1. Ah, Love, but a day: Rev. H. J. Bulkeley, in his paper on ‘James Lee’s Wife’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, iv., p. 457), explains, “One day’s absence from him has caused the world to change.” It’s better to understand that something has occurred to cause the world to change in a single day; that James Lee has made some new revelation of himself, which causes the wife’s heart to have misgivings, and with these misgivings comes the eager desire expressed in St. 3, to show her love, when he returns, more strongly than ever.

2.

Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?

3.

Thou art a man,
But I am thy love.
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell, its dove;
And for thee--(oh, haste!)
Me, to bend above,
Me, to hold embraced.

II. By the Fireside.

1.

Is all our fire of shipwreck wood,
Oak and pine?
Oh, for the ills half-understood,
The dim dead woe
Long ago
Befallen this bitter coast of France!
Well, poor sailors took their chance;
I take mine.

2.

A ruddy shaft our fire must shoot
O’er the sea;
Do sailors eye the casement--mute
Drenched and stark,
From their bark--
And envy, gnash their teeth for hate
O’ the warm safe house and happy freight
--Thee and me?

3.

God help you, sailors, at your need!
Spare the curse!
For some ships, safe in port indeed,
Rot and rust,
Run to dust,
All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:
That is worse.

4.

Who lived here before us two?
Old-world pairs.
Did a woman ever--would I knew!--
Watch the man
With whom began
Love’s voyage full-sail,--(now, gnash your teeth!)
When planks start, open hell beneath
Unawares?

III. In the Doorway.

1.

The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water’s in stripes like a snake, olive-pale
To the leeward,--
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
“Good fortune departs, and disaster’s behind”,--
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

--
St. 1. Note the truth of color in vv. 3-5.

2.

Our fig-tree, that leaned for the saltness, has furled
Her five fingers,
Each leaf like a hand opened wide to the world
Where there lingers
No glint of the gold, Summer sent for her sake:
How the vines writhe in rows, each impaled on its stake!
My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled.

-- St. 2. her five fingers: referring to the shape of the fig-leaf.

3.

Yet here are we two; we have love, house enough,
With the field there,
This house of four rooms, that field red and rough,
Though it yield there,
For the rabbit that robs, scarce a blade or a bent;
If a magpie alight now, it seems an event;
And they both will be gone at November’s rebuff.