ness that makes the three days seem short; and fear of change and chance is but a trifle that his perfect faith over-rides. ('Men and Women,' 1855.)

P. 224. The Lost Mistress is the farewell of a lover who seeks, with a good grace, to suppress his love to the level of that mere friendship whose privileges he must resign, but whose tenderness he transcends. ('Bells and Pomegranates,

P. 225. One way of Love is a "way" so pure and unselfish that though the lover's passion is unrequited he can still see others win heaven without feeling envy. ('Men and Women,' 1855.)

P. 225. Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli. Rudel symbolizes his love as the aspiration of the sunflower that longs only to become like the sun, so losing a flower's true grace, while the sun does not even perceive the flower. He imagines himself as a pilgrim revealing to the Lady of Tripoli by means of this symbol the entire sinking of self in his love for her. Even men's praise of his songs are no more to him than the bees which bask on a sunflower are to it.

Rudel was a Provençal troubadour, and lived in the twelfth century. The Crusaders, returning from the East, spread abroad wonderful reports of the beauty, learning, and wit of the Countess of Tripoli, a small duchy on the Mediterranean, north of Palestine. Rudel, although never having seen her, fell in love with her and composed songs in honor of her beauty, and finally set out to the East in pilgrim's garb. On his way he was taken ill, but lived to reach the port of Tripoli. The countess, being told of his arrival, went on board the vessel. When Rudel heard she was coming he revived, said she had restored him to life by her coming, and that he was willing to die, having seen her. He died in her arms; she gave him a rich and honorable burial in a sepulchre of porphyry on which were engraved verses in Arabic. ('Bells and Pomegranates, No. 3-Dramatic Lyrics,' 1842; appeared as I. under the general title of 'Queen Worship,' 'Cristina' being II.)

P. 226. Numpholeptos is an expression of womanhood as ideally conceived and actually restricted by man. Under the image of a man caught by a nymph (Numpho-leptos) and ensnared to undertake a series of quests colored by the unnatural broken light emanating from this unreal feminity, in the vain hope of gaining a genuine human love from her in return, an implication is given of what ideal womanhood is for man and what actual womanhood could be. The symbol is, therefore, not explicable completely by any one or all ideals of womanhood as related to man. The type presented is complex, unreal, and yet historical, implying associations with the Pagan notions of the nymphs from whom the poem derives its name-the primitive Zeus-begotten daughters of nature; with the passive woman of the Renaissance or of Chivalry, who called on men for ceaseless love and service; with the exalted woman-visions, more or less founded on actual Beatrices and Lauras by the Dantes and Petrarchs; with the divination of what woman has it actually in herself to be when she possesses knowledge and purity as a natural consequence of free individual life, obtaining them not by inheritance and imagination but by achievement. Replying to an inquiry as to the purport of 'Numpho'eptos' Browning wrote:

"An allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man, who, all the while, cannot quite blind himself to the demonstrable fact that the possessor of knowledge and purity obtained without the natural consequences of obtaining them by achievement - not inheritance, - such a being is imaginary, not real, a nymph and no woman: and only such an one would be ignorant of and surprised at the results of a lover's endeavour to emulate the qualities

which the beloved is entitled to consider as pre-existent to earthly experience, and independent of its inevitable results.

"I had no particular woman in my mind; certainly never intended to personify wisdom, philosophy, or any other abstraction; and the orb, raying colour out of whiteness, was altogether a fancy of my own. The 'seven-spirits' are in the Apoc. alypse, also in Coleridge and Byron: a common image." (Pacchiarotto,' 1876.)

P. 230. Appearances symbolizes by means of two illustrative incidents how unimportant externals are in comparison with the life beneath them. (Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems,' 1876.)

P. 230. The worst of it is addressed mentally by a husband to a wife who has been false to him after having given him a year's perfect happiness. Love of her has been so much to him that staunch apology for her rights of choice, and loyal resentment of the imputation of evil she will suffer in the world through having broken his bonds, contend with his own pain, and his secret fear that her womanhood must sustain some real taint, without in the least marring the quality of his own fidelity or altering his obedient renunciation of any right over her. ('Dramatis Personæ,' 1864.)

P. 234. Too Late presents a series of moods of a man who first realizes the full force of his love when the woman he loved is dead. He blames himself now for not having been more determined in his suit. He waited to tell his love until she should sufficiently encourage him with a glance; when she marries some one else, he blames no one, but calmly thinks that Time will give her to him. Either his love will reach out toward her round the obstacle of her husband, or else a miracle will sweep the obstruction entirely away. Now Edith is dead there is no hope. It isn't worth while to vent his rage on the past, nor upon the husband whom he represents as a person very inferior to himself, a poet, who rhymed rubbish that nobody read and incapable of loving Edith. All that is left to him is to get what satisfaction he can by living with his back to the world, kneeling in the imagined presence of Edith, and perfecting in spirit the courtship once planned.—138. Summus Jus, utmost justice. (Dramatis Personæ,' 1864.)

P. 237. Bifurcation presents a case of conflict between love and duty, in the guise of two epitaphs imagined by the lover, which sum up two life-histories: the one of the woman who chooses for herself the smoother and safer path of duty, contenting her heart with bidding her lover to be constant, and to await with her the pleasure of a future life where they need not make a choice between good things, but have both easily; the other of the man, left perforce by her decision upon the rougher road, to proceed against ceaseless pains and hindrances, content only in a faith that does not dissever love from duty nor count the cost of enduring actual imperfection for its sake; both lives, thus set forth, calling for a nice decision as to which person was sinner, which was saint. ('Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems,' 1876.)

P. 238. A Likeness, in giving two instances of the unsympathetic regard which the uninitiated will bestow upon a likeness deeply cherished by its owner, and a third instance in which a friend being too appreciative, the possessor of the likeness feels it no longer peculiarly his own, and half pleased, half vexed, would as soon toss it to his friend as only a duplicate after all, illustrates: first, how the person to whose sympathies an object has especially appealed, is secretly grieved by others' lack of appreciation; and second, the irritation aroused through the loss of the sense of peculiar possession occasioned by the full appreciation of another. 19. Tipton Slasher. An English boxer. .-20. Rarey. The famous horse tamer whose method of subduing the most vicious brutes consisted in firmness and gen

leness..-22. Sayers. The English prize-fighting champion.-55. Festina lentè, hasten slowly. -61. Volpato. An eminent designer and engraver, born at Bassano in 1738; died 1803. (Dramatis Personæ,' 1864.)

P. 240. May and Death. A natural outbreak of irritation at the return of May, with its renewed joys and poignant memories of old associations cut short by Death, the first pang of it, starting the wish that all Spring's joys had died with the friend, softening, for the sake of other such pairs of friends, to the longing to reserve as sacred to the dead merely one little plant whose red-splashed leaf seems to betoken his own bleeding sorrow. -' -The "poem was a personal utterance," Mrs. Orr says, incited by the death of a dearly loved relative.—13. One plant. The Spotted Persicaria or Polygonum Persicaria, whose leaves have purple stains varying in size and brightness according to the nature of the soil where it grows. (The Keepsake,' 1857, included in 'Dramatis Personæ,' 1864.)

P. 241. A Forgiveness presents a conflict between two proud souls, who love each other, but who do not fully understand each other's natures, resulting in crime and repentance on the woman's part, and in self-justified crime on the man's part. The incidents of the story come out in the husband's confession to a priest. The wife, jealous of her husband's attention to state affairs, thinks to teach him her worth in arousing his jealousy by an intrigue with another man, whom she avows to her husband she loves. Scorn at her utter contemptibleness is the result, and though all sympathy is over between them, everything appears to go on smoothly in the eyes of the world. At the end of three years the wife feels that unless she confesses to her husband the truth, that she had loved him and him alone, she will die, and gain the peace she does not deserve. She chooses, therefore, to live, and confessing to him, asks only that she may be allowed to go and burn her life out to ashes. In learning the truth, the husband's scorn is raised to hate. He requires her to write down her confession. She evidently fearing that this change in his attitude means that he now thinks her, according to his code, worthy of death, hopes that her blood for ink will suffice, to which he acquiesces equivocally, while handing her the poisoned weapon that kills her. In her death he tells her, hate is quenched in vengeance, and that dead he pardons her. The final stanza unexpectedly increases the dramatic intensity of the scene by revealing the fact that the confession has been made to the man with whom his wife had intrigued, and who can no longer escape the husband's vengeance. Mary Wilson says of this poem, Nothing could more effectively express the stoic Spaniard, his code and ideal, than the measured punctiliousness, the gradation from contempt to hatred, the selfcommand, the unhasting, unresting vindictiveness, and the exquisite torture devised for his enemy." -99. Which changed for me a barber's basin straight into Mambrino's helm. Mambrino was a Moorish king, in the romantic poems of Bojardo and Ariosto, who was the possessor of an enchanted golden helmet, which rendered the wearer invulnerable. The allusion is to an episode in the 'Adventures of Don Quixote,' when the crazy knight thought he had found the golden helmet in what proved to be nothing but a copper basin, highly polished, which a barber on his way to bleed a patient had put on his head to protect a new hat during a shower. Don Quixote exclaims to Sancho, "Seest thou not yon knight coming toward us on a dapple-grey steed with a helmet of gold on his head?... If I mistake not there cometh one toward us who carries on his head Mambrino's helmet, concerning which thou mayest remember I swore the oath" (chap. xxi.).— 201. arquebus or harquebus, the earliest form of hand gun, resembling the modern musket, first used about 1476.-249. Arms of Eastern workmanship. Browning had in his possession just such a collection of arms. ('Pacchiarotto,' 1876.)

P. 251. Cenciaja is a note throwing light on the passage in Shelley's tragedy of 'The Cenci,' act v. sc. 4, wherein Cardinal Camillo reports the Pope's decision that Beatrice and her brother must die. Browning's poetic commentary on this supplies an account of the historic occurrences connected with Paolo Santa Croce's matricide which determined the Pope's decision in the then pending Cenci case, and incidentally reveals the secret motives which instigated Cardinal Aldobrandini and Judge Taverna to secure the condemnation of Paolo's innocent brother Onofrio; the whole serving in Browning's hands to reinforce Shelley's picture of the time and to illustrate with grim irony how unerring "God's justice" has been when left in men's hands. Of the historic basis of the poem, Browning writes: "I got the facts from a contemporaneous account I found in a MS. volume containing the 'Relations' of the Cenci affair-with other memorials of Italian crime-lent me by Sir J. Simeon; who published the Cenci Narrative, with notes, in the series of the Philobiblon Society. It was a better copy of the 'Relation' than that used by Shelley, differing at least in a few particulars. I believe I have seen somewhere that the translation was made by Mrs. Shelley the note appended to an omitted passage seems a womanly performance." Of the Title and Motto he writes: "Aia' is generally an accumulative yet depreciative termination: 'Cenciaja' - a bundle of rags a trifle. The proverb means 'every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,' and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the kind." ('Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems,' 1876.)

P. 257. Porphyria's Lover relates how, by strangling Porphyria with her own yellow hair, the lover seized and preserved the moment of perfect love when, pure and good, Porphyria left the world she could not forego for his sake, and came to him, for once conquered by her love. A latent misgiving as to his action is intimated in the closing line of the poem.

Remarking upon the fact that Browning removed the original title, 'Madhouse Cells,' which headed this poem, and 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation,' Mrs. Orr says: "Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity. (Fox's Monthly Repository, over the signature "Z," 1836. Reprinted as II. 'Madhouse Cells.' 'Bells and Pomegranates, No. 3- Dramatic Lyrics, 1842.')

P. 259. Filippo Baldinucci is an old man's racy account of an incident of the seventeenth century, recalled to mind by his relish of his nephew's disorderliness in pelting Jews. The boy's prejudices, appearing as a faint reflex of the Christian trick his uncle narrates, are thus dramatically shown to be a heritage from an elder generation, and already growing out of date. The religious tolerance embodied in current laws, on the other hand, falling in line with the larger view of all religions evinced, in the sequel of the old man's story, by the burly young Jew, serves to vindicate and avenge the persecuted and to set forth in a humorous, satirical light the childishness of the piety of the persecutors. The first part of the old man's story is given, as an actual occurrence in the life of the painter Lodovico Buti (1624-1696), in a passage in Filippo Baldinucci's 'Notices of Painters' ('Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in quà,' 1629–1670, published 1681-1728). The Rabbi who remonstrated is there told: "'Your bargain has been fulfilled to the letter, and what else do you want? It is my opinion that you are very presumptuous, that with your sordid money you wished to buy my patron's liberty." The story then closes, thus: Then the Rabbis dispersed discontentedly, but tacitly

acknowledging they were wrong. They said no more about it and no longer tried with their ill-gotten riches to control the piety of good Christians." The sequel, as told in stanzas xxxvii to lvi, is of Browning's own devising, and of course is not to be found in Baldinucci's book, so the poet cleverly accounts for this in stanza xxxvi by making Filippo declare, "plague o' me if I record it in my book!" The initial situation of the boy and his uncle is, also, Browning's own dramatic setting of the Occurrence. - 176. Esaias: " stiff-necked Jews." Isaiah xlviii. 4: "Thy neck is an iron sinew."-397. Leda, Ganymede, Antiope, refers to three of the many loves of Jupiter for whom he abandoned his godlike aspect and assumed for the sake of Leda, the wife of Tyndarus, King of Sparta, the form of a swan; for Ganymede, the fair Trojan boy, the form of an eagle; for Antiope, the daughter of Asopus, the river-god, the form of a satyr.—402. Titian. The great Venetian painter, 14771576. ('Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems,' 1876.)

P. 272. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister gives the ill-natured attitude of mind of a monk, jealous of a brother monk, whom he hates because of his genial nature and goodness, his simple interest in natural life, and his neglect of those narrowminded superstitious forms upon the observance of which the ill-natured monk especially congratulates himself. 10. Salve tibi. Hail to thee.-39. Arian. One who adheres to the doctrines of Arius, a presbyter of the Church in the fourth century, who held Christ to be a created being, inferior to God the Father in nature and dignity, though the first and noblest of created beings. —49. There's a great text in Galatians. Dr. Berdoe writes: "The great text I take to be the tenth verse of the third chapter: 'For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse for it is written, "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them."' 'It is written,' that is to say in the Book of Deuteronomy, xxviii. 15–68, wherein are set forth at length the curses for disobedience. Those arithmetically minded commentators on this poem, who have been disappointed in finding only some seventeen works of the flesh in Galatians v. 19-21, will find an abundant opportunity for their discrimination in the chapter of Deuteronomy to which I refer. The question to settle is 'the twentynine distinct damnations.' St. James says in his epistle (ii. 10) that 'he who offends against the law in one point is guilty of all.' I, therefore, the envious monk could induce his brother to trust to his works instead of to his faith, he would fall under the condemnation of the law, as explained by St. Paul in his epistle."-56. Manichee, a follower of Manes, a Persian, who tried to combine the Oriental philosophy with Christianity, and maintained that there are two supreme principles-light, the author of all good, and darkness, the author of all evil. — 71. Plene gratiâ, Ave, Virgo! Full of grace, Hail, Virgin. Evidently a slight change of Ave Maria gratia plena, demanded by the exigencies of rhyme and metre. ('Bells and Pomegranates, No. 3— Dramatic Lyrics,' 1842. See Notes, P. 43.)

P. 275. The Heretic's Tragedy is an Interlude imagined in the manner of the Middle Ages and typically representing this period of human development in its quaint piety and prejudice, its childish delight in cruelty, and its cumulative legendmaking during the course of two centuries as reflected through the Flemish nature. It is supposed to be sung by an abbot, a choir-singer, and a chorus, in celebration of the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, last Grand Master of the wealthy and powerful secular order of Knights Templars, which came into rivalry with the Church after the Crusades and was finally suppressed by Philip IV. of France and Pope Clement V., Molay's burning at Paris in 1314 being a final scene in their discomfiture and the Church's triumph.-8. Plagal-cadence. A closing progression of chords in which the sub-dominant or chord on the fourth degree of the