Part 24
Take from my head the thorn-wreath brown: No mortal grief deserves that crown. O supreme Love, chief misery, The sharp regalia are for _Thee_, Whose days eternally go on!
For us, ... whatever's undergone, Thou knowest, willest what is done. Grief may be joy misunderstood: Only the Good discerns the good. I trust Thee while my days go on.
Whatever's lost, it first was won! We will not struggle nor impugn. Perhaps the cup was broken here That Heaven's new wine might show more clear. I praise Thee while my days go on.
I praise Thee while my days go on; I love Thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank Thee while my days go on!
And, having in thy life-depth thrown Being and suffering (which are one), As a child drops some pebble small Down some deep well, and hears it fall Smiling--so I! THY DAYS GO ON!
THE CRY OF THE HUMAN
"There is no God," the foolish saith, But none, "There is no sorrow;" And nature oft the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow: Eyes which the preacher could not school By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, "God be pitiful," Who ne'er said, "God be praised." Be pitiful, O God.
The tempest stretches from the steep The shadow of its coming; The beasts grow tame, and near us creep, As help were in the human: Yet while the cloud-wheels roll and grind, We spirits tremble under! The hills have echoes; but we find No answer for the thunder. Be pitiful, O God!
The battle hurtles on the plains-- Earth feels new scythes upon her: We reap our brothers for the wains, And call the harvest--honor. Draw face to face, front line to line, One image all inherit: Then kill, curse on, by that same sign, Clay, clay,--and spirit, spirit. Be pitiful, O God!
We meet together at the feast-- To private mirth betake us-- We stare down in the winecup, lest Some vacant chair should shake us! We name delight, and pledge it round-- "It shall be ours to-morrow!" God's seraphs! do your voices sound As sad in naming sorrow? Be pitiful, O God!
We sit together, with the skies, The steadfast skies, above us; We look into each other's eyes, "And how long will you love us?" The eyes grow dim with prophecy, The voices, low and breathless-- "Till death us part!"--O words, to be Our _best_ for love the deathless! Be pitiful, dear God!
We tremble by the harmless bed Of one loved and departed-- Our tears drop on the lips that said Last night, "Be stronger-hearted!" O God,--to clasp those fingers close, And yet to feel so lonely!-- To see a light upon such brows, Which is the daylight only! Be pitiful, O God!
The happy children come to us, And look up in our faces; They ask us--Was it thus, and thus, When we were in their places? We cannot speak--we see anew The hills we used to live in, And feel our mother's smile press through The kisses she is giving. Be pitiful, O God!
We pray together at the kirk, For mercy, mercy, solely-- Hands weary with the evil work, We lift them to the Holy! The corpse is calm below our knee-- Its spirit bright before Thee-- Between them, worse than either, we Without the rest of glory! Be pitiful, O God!
And soon all vision waxeth dull-- Men whisper, "He is dying;" We cry no more, "Be pitiful!"-- We have no strength for crying: No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine, Look up and triumph rather-- Lo! in the depth of God's Divine, The Son adjures the Father-- BE PITIFUL, O GOD!
ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST
Little Ellie sits alone 'Mid the beeches of a meadow, By a stream-side on the grass; And the trees are showering down Doubles of their leaves in shadow, On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by; And her feet she has been dipping In the shallow water's flow-- Now she holds them nakedly In her hands, all sleek and dripping, While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone, And the smile she softly uses Fills the silence like a speech; While she thinks what shall be done, And the sweetest pleasure chooses, For her future within reach.
Little Ellie in her smile Chooseth--"I will have a lover, Riding on a steed of steeds! He shall love me without guile; And to _him_ I will discover That swan's nest among the reeds.
"And the steed shall be red-roan. And the lover shall be noble, With an eye that takes the breath. And the lute he plays upon Shall strike ladies into trouble, As his sword strikes men to death.
"And the steed it shall be shod All in silver, housed in _azure_, And the mane shall swim the wind: And the hoofs along the sod Shall flash onward and keep measure, Till the shepherds look behind.
"But my lover will not prize All the glory that he rides in, When he gazes in my face. He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes Build the shrine my soul abides in; And I kneel here for thy grace.'
"Then, ay, then--he shall kneel low, With the red-roan steed anear him, Which shall seem to understand-- Till I answer, 'Rise and go! For the world must love and fear him Whom I gift with heart and hand.'
"Then he will arise so pale, I shall feel my own lips tremble With a _yes_ I must not say-- Nathless maiden-brave, 'Fare well,' I will utter, and dissemble-- 'Light to-morrow with to-day.'
"Then he'll ride among the hills To the wide world past the river, There to put away all wrong: To make straight distorted wills, And to empty the broad quiver Which the wicked bear along.
"Three times shall a young foot-page Swim the stream and climb the mountain And kneel down beside my feet-- 'Lo! my master sends this gage, Lady, for thy pity's counting! What wilt thou exchange for it?'
"And the first time I will send A white rosebud for a guerdon, And the second time, a glove: But the third time--I may bend From my pride, and answer--'Pardon-- If he come to take my love.'
"Then the young foot-page will run-- Then my lover will ride faster, Till he kneeleth at my knee: 'I am a duke's eldest son! Thousand serfs do call me master,-- But, O Love, I love but _thee!_
"He will kiss me on the mouth Then; and lead me as a lover Through the crowds that praise his deeds; And when soul-tied by one troth, Unto _him_ I will discover That swan's nest among the reeds."
Little Ellie, with her smile Not yet ended, rose up gayly, Tied the bonnet, donned the shoe-- And went homeward, round a mile, Just to see, as she did daily, What more eggs were with the _two_.
Pushing through the elm-tree copse Winding by the stream, light-hearted, Where the osier pathway leads-- Past the boughs she stoops--and stops! Lo! the wild swan had deserted-- And a rat had gnawed the reeds.
Ellie went home sad and slow: If she found the lover ever, With his red-roan steed of steeds, Sooth I know not! but I know She could never show him--never, That swan's nest among the reeds!
THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
WHAT'S the best thing in the world? June-rose by May-dew impearled; Sweet south-wind, that means no rain; Truth, not cruel to a friend; Pleasure, not in haste to end; Beauty, not self-decked and curled Till its pride is over-plain; Light, that never makes you wink; Memory, that gives no pain; Love, when _so_ you're loved again. What's the best thing in the world?-- Something out of it, I think.
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies. Our ministering two angels look surprise On one another as they strike athwart Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art A guest for queens to social pageantries, With gages from a hundred brighter eyes Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part Of chief musician. What hast _thou_ to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me, A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head; on mine the dew: And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems, where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more. And dost thou lift this house's latch, too poor For hand of thine? and canst thou think, and bear To let thy music drop here unaware In folds of golden fulness at my door? Look up, and see the casement broken in, The bats and owlets builders in the roof! My cricket chirps against thy mandolin. Hush, call no echo up in further proof Of desolation! there's a voice within That weeps--as thou must sing--alone, aloof.
What can I give thee back, O liberal And princely giver, who hast brought the gold And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold, And laid them on the outside of the wall For such as I to take or leave withal, In unexpected largesse? Am I cold, Ungrateful, that for these most manifold High gifts, I render nothing back at all? Not so; not cold, but very poor instead. Ask God, who knows. For frequent tears have run The colors from my life, and left so dead And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done To give the same as pillow to thy head. Go farther! let it serve to trample on.
If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love's sake only. Do not say "I love her for her smile, her look, her way Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day:" For these things in themselves, beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee; and love so wrought May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry: A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby. But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on through love's eternity.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; And ever since it grew more clean and white, Slow to world-greetings, quick with its "Oh list!" When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst I could not wear here plainer to my sight Than that first kiss. The second passed in height The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed, Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed! That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown With sanctifying sweetness did precede. The third upon my lips was folded down In perfect purple state; since when, indeed, I have been proud, and said "My love, my own!"
I LIVED with visions for my company, Instead of men and women, years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me. But soon their trailing purple was not free Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow, And I myself grew faint and blind below Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come--to be, Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts, Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same, As river-water hallowed into fonts), Met in thee, and from out thee overcame My soul with satisfaction of all wants, Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
BELOVED, my beloved, when I think That thou wast in the world a year ago, What time I sat alone here in the snow, And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink No moment at thy voice, but, link by link, Went counting all my chains as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand--why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech, nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
BECAUSE thou hast the power and own'st the grace To look through and behind this mask of me, (Against which years have beat thus blanchingly With their rains!) and behold my soul's true face, The dim and weary witness of life's race; Because thou hast the faith and love to see, Through that same soul's distracting lethargy, The patient angel waiting for his place In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe, Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood, Nor all which others viewing, turn to go, Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,-- Nothing repels thee.--Dearest, teach me so To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!
I THANK all who have loved me in their hearts, With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all Who paused a little near the prison-wall, To hear my music in its louder parts, Ere they went onward, each one to the mart's Or temple's occupation, beyond call. But thou, who in my voice's sink and fall, When the sob took it, thy divinest Art's Own instrument didst drop down at thy foot, To hearken what I said between my tears, Instruct me how to thank thee!--Oh, to shoot My soul's full meaning into future years, That _they_ should lend it utterance, and salute Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise; I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith; I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
A FALSE STEP
Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart. Pass! there's a world full of men; And women as fair as thou art Must do such things now and then.
Thou only hast stepped unaware,-- Malice, not one can impute; And why should a heart have been there In the way of a fair woman's foot?
It was not a stone that could trip, Nor was it a thorn that could rend: Put up thy proud underlip! 'Twas merely the heart of a friend.
And yet peradventure one day Thou, sitting alone at the glass, Remarking the bloom gone away, Where the smile in its dimplement was,
And seeking around thee in vain From hundreds who flattered before, Such a word as,--"Oh, not in the main Do I hold thee less precious,--but more!"
Thou'lt sigh, very like, on thy part:-- "Of all I have known or can know, I wish I had only that Heart I trod upon, ages ago!"
A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD
They say that God lives very high! But if you look above the pines You cannot see our God. And why?
And if you dig down in the mines You never see him in the gold, Though, from him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, he wears a fold Of heaven and earth across his face-- Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place:
As if my tender mother laid On my shut lids her kisses' pressure, Half-waking me at night; and said "Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?"
CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON
I think we are too ready with complaint In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint To muse upon eternity's constraint Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope Must widen early, is it well to droop For a few days consumed in loss and taint? O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,-- And like a cheerful traveler, take the road, Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod To meet the flints?--At least it may be said, "Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!"
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
BY E.L. BURLINGAME
Robert Browning was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812, the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the Bank of England--the one for more than forty and the other for full fifty years. His surroundings were apparently typical of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theorizing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grandmother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first generation to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only question suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished to go to a university, then to become an artist--- both ambitions repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work; to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remarkable vivacity, with unbroken health--altogether a personality thoroughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all traditional ideas of a poet's youth.
Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled himself seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had written 'Pauline' at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus' at twenty-two. At eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition in his chosen career from his father, whose "kindness we must seek," as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, "not only in this first, almost inevitable assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career. 'Paracelsus,' 'Sordello,' and the whole of 'Bells and Pomegranates' were published at his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no return." An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier 'Pauline.'
From this time of his earliest published work ('Pauline' was issued without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biographies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse, like Tennyson; but while healthily social and a man of the world about him, he was not one of whom people tell "reminiscences" of consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in living in his works and escaping the "ripping up" of the personal chronicler.
He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning through a friend,--her cousin,--and through letters from Browning expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse; but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About 1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which continued with rare exceptions to the end of his life. There in 1888 his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the 12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.
[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING.]
'Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of the time of life at which he wrote it,--very young, full of excesses of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression--the "confession" of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:--
"I am made up of an intensest life ... a principle of restlessness Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all--"
this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy--except as all beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his collected poems that he "acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance," shows how fully he recognized this.