take down your Spenser and qualify yourself to join "the small transfigured band" of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their Faerie Queen all through. The company, though small, is delightful, and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who probably knows his Spenser better than you do. Realism will not for ever dominate the world of letters and art-the fashion of all things passeth away but it has already earned a great place: it has written books, composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that "greatness " which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion, means immortality. But against Mr. Browning's later poems it is sometimes alleged that their meaning is obscure because their grammar is bad. A cynic was once heard to observe with reference to that noble poem The Grammarian's Funeral, that it was a pity the talented author had ever since allowed himself to remain under the delusion that he had not only buried the grammarian, but his grammar also. It is doubtless true that Mr. Browning has some provoking ways, and is something too much of a verbal acrobat. Also, as his witty parodist, the pet poet of six generations of Cambridge undergraduates, reminds us: He loves to dock the smaller parts of speech, It is perhaps permissible to weary a little of his i's and o's, but we believe we cannot be corrected. when we say that Browning is a poet whose grammar will bear scholastic investigation better than that of most of Apollo's children. A word about Sordello. One half of Sordello, and that, with Mr. Browning's usual ill-luck, the first half, is undoubtedly obscure. It is as difficult to read as Endymion or the Revolt of Islam, and for the same reason-the author's lack of experience in the art of composition. We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into them. Sordello is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject: He singled out Sordello compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years. He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at him, because forty-two years ago he published, at his own charges, a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then able to read could not understand. Poetry should be vital-either stirring our blood by its divine movement, or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory; to do either is enduring fame. There is a great deal of beautiful poetical writing to be had nowadays from the booksellers. It is interesting reading, but as one reads one trembles. It smells of mortality. It would seem as if, at the very birth of most of our modern poems, The conscious Parca threw Upon their roseate lips a Stygian hue. That their lives may be prolonged is my pious prayer. In these bad days, when it is thought more educationally useful to know the principle of the common pump than Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, one cannot afford to let any good poetry die. But when we take down Browning, we cannot think of him and the "wormy bee" together. He is so unmistakably and deliciously alive. Die, indeed! when one recalls the ideal characters he has invested with reality; how he has described love and joy, pain and sorrow, art and music; as poems like Childe Roland, Abt Vogler, Evelyn Hope, The Worst of It, Pictor Ignotus, The Lost Leader, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Old Pictures in Florence, Hervé Riel, A Householder, Fears and Scruples, come tumbling into one's memory, one over another-we are tempted to employ the language of hyperbole, and to answer the question "Will Browning die?" by exclaiming, "Yes; when Niagara stops." In him indeed we can Discern Infinite passion and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn. But love of Mr. Browning's poetry is no exclusive cult. Of Lord Tennyson it is needless to speak. Certainly amongst his Peers there is no such Poet. Mr. Arnold may have a limited poetical range and a restricted style, but within that range and in that style, surely we must exclaim: Whence that completed form of all completeness? Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness? Rossetti's luscious lines seldom fail to cast a spell by which In sundry moods 'tis pastime to be bound. William Morris has a sunny slope of Parnassus all to himself, and Mr. Swinburne has written some verses over which the world will long love to linger. Dull must he be of soul who can take up Cardinal Newman's Verses on Various Occasions, or Miss Christina Rossetti's poems, and lay them down without recognising their diverse charm. Let us be Catholics in this great matter, and burn our candles at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily in view—two, and two only, truth and beauty. NOTE. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of printing a letter I received from Mr. Browning immediately after the publication of this essay in 1884. MY DEAR SIR, 19 WARWICK Crescent, W. July 30, '84. I received your note last evening and the little book this day. I have just read the two first essays and no more, and if I make haste to say a word about them at once, it is because of an experience I obtained a few weeks ago, when, supposing as I did that the remarkable qualities of a poem which had surprised me were as yet undiscovered by anybody, I ventured to give my opinion with something of the pride of a discoverer, only to find, to my great satisfaction in all other respects, that I had been forestalled by a critical publication the week before. Let me tell you in the hot haste of the minute how much I have been gratified by your goodnatured estimate of my poetry, and by the proofs throughout the Essay that you at least take the trouble to try and understand a matter before you pronounce upon it. So much for me: the notice of Carlyle, whom I knew well, is adequate and admirable. I shall now resume my reading-broken off to say thus much or thus little, but it is something to clearly recognise a friend at first sight and be entitled to call oneself henceforth His cordially, ROBERT BROWNING. ROBERT BROWNING AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE BROWNING HALL SETTLEMENT, Walworth, DECEMBER 12TH, 1897 T 10 meet together to do honour to the memory and extol the genius of a great poet is so becoming, so proper, and so seemly a thing to do, that it needs neither apology nor explanation. We have all come here, I hope, attracted by one and the same force-Robert Browning. He that is to say, his genius-has entered mystically into the lives of many thousands of his countrymen. He lives on in our minds a joint-life with the manifold emotions, the countless joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, doubts and certainties that course one another, like shadows over the hillside, over the very uneven surfaces of our lives. For unless a poet really succeeds in weaving himself into the texture of our days, in mingling himself with the crowded phantasmagoria of life; unless he stands by our side as we feast our eyes on scenes of splendour or of charm; unless we think of him either when alone we tread the wine-press of sorrow, or when we are merry: Flower o' the rose, If I've been merry what matter who knows?— unless a poet, I say, is this, and does this for us, he at all events is not one of our great poets. But if he |