The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning

“Who tells of, tracks to source the founts of Soul?”

Music essays to solve how we feel, to match feeling with knowledge. Manifest Soul’s work on Mind’s work, how and whence come the hates, loves, joys, hopes and fears that rise and sink ceaselessly within us? Of these things Music seeks to tell. Art may arrest some of the transient moods of Soul; Poetry discerns, Painting is aware of the seething within the gulf, but Music outdoes both: dredging deeper yet, it drags into day the abysmal bottom growths of Soul’s deep sea.

Notes. – ii., “March”: Avison’s Grand March was possessed in MS. by Browning’s father. The music of the march is added to the poem. iv., “Great John Relfe”: Browning’s music master – a celebrated contrapuntist. Buononcini, Giovanni Battista, Italian musician. He was a gifted composer, declared by his clique to be infinitely superior to Handel, with whom he wrote at one time in conjunction. Geminiani, Francesco, Italian violinist (1680-1762). He came to London under the protection of the Earl of Essex in 1714. His musical opinions are said to have had no foundation in truth or principle. Pepusch, John Christopher, an eminent theoretical musician, born at Berlin about 1667. He performed at Drury Lane in about 1700. He took the degree of Mus. Doc. at Oxford at the same time with Croft, 1713. He was organist at the Charter-House, and died in 1752. v., Hesperus. The song to the Evening Star in Tannhauser, “O Du mein holder Abendstern,” is referred to here (Mr. A. Symons). viii., “Radamista,” the name of an opera by Handel, first performed at the Haymarket in 1720. “Rinaldo,” the name of the opera composed by Handel, and performed under his direction at the Haymarket for the first time on Feb. 24th, 1711. xv., “Little Ease,” an uncomfortable punishment similar to the stocks or the pillory.

Charles I. (Strafford.) The character of this king, who basely sacrifices his best friend Strafford, is founded in fact, but his weakness and meanness are doubtless exaggerated by the poet – to show his meaning, as the artists say.

Cherries. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 9.) “On Praise and Thanksgiving.” All things are great and small in their degree. A disciple objects to Ferishtah that man is too weak to praise worthily the All-mighty One; he is too mean to offer fit praise to Heaven, – let the stars do that! The dervish tells a little story of a subject of the Shah who came from a distant part of the realm, and wandered about the palace wonderingly, till all at once he was surprised to find a nest-like little chamber with his own name on the entry, and everything arranged exactly to his own peculiar taste. Yet to him it was as nothing: he had not faith enough to enter into the good things provided for him. He tells another story. Two beggars owed a great sum to the Shah. This one brought a few berries from his currant-bush, some heads of garlic, and five pippins from a seedling tree. This was his whole wealth; he offered that in payment of his debt. It was graciously received; teaching us that if we offer God all the love and thanks we can, it will gratify the Giver of all good none the less because our offering is small, and lessened by admixture with lower human motives. For the grateful flavour of the cherry let us lift up our thankful hearts to Him who made that, the stars, and us. We know why He made the cherry, – why He made Jupiter we do not know. The Lyric compares verse-making with love-making. Verse-making is praising God by the stars, too great a task for man’s short life; but love-making has no depths to explore, no heights to ascend; love now will be love evermore: let us give thanks for love, if we cannot offer praise the poet’s own great way.

Chiappino. (A Soul’s Tragedy.) The bragging friend of Luitolfo, who was compelled to be noble against his inclination, and who became “the twenty-fourth leader of a revolt” ridiculed by the legate.

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) The story of a knight who has undertaken a pilgrimage to a certain dark tower, the way to which was full of difficulties and dangers, and the right road quite unknown to the seeker. Those who had preceded him on the path had all failed, and he himself is no sooner fairly engaged in the quest than he is filled with despair, but is impelled to go on. At the stage of his journey which is described in the poem he meets a hoary cripple, who gives him directions which he consents to follow, though with misgivings. The day was drawing to a close, the road by which he entered on the path to the tower was gone; when he looked back, nothing remained but to proceed. Nature all around was starved and ignoble: flowers there were none; some weeds that seemed to thrive in the wilderness only added to its desolation; dock leaves with holes and rents, grass as hair in leprosy; and wandering on the gloomy plain, one stiff, blind horse, all starved and stupefied, looking as if he were thrust out of the devil’s stud. The pilgrim tried to think of earlier, happier sights: of his friend Cuthbert – alas! one night’s disgrace left him without that friend; of Giles, the soul of honour, who became a traitor, spit upon and curst. The present horror was better than these reflections on the past. And now he approached a petty, yet spiteful river, over which black scrubby alders hung, with willows that seemed suicidal. He forded the stream, fearing to set his foot on some dead man’s cheek; the cry of the water-rat sounded as the shriek of a baby. And as he toiled on he saw that ugly heights (mountains seemed too good a name to give such hideous heaps) had given place to the plain, and two hills in particular, couched like two bulls in fight, seemed to indicate the place of the tower. Yes! in their midst was the round, squat turret, without a counterpart in the whole world. The sight was as that of the rock which the sailor sees too late to avoid the crash that wrecks his ship. The very hills seemed watching him; he seemed to hear them cry, “Stab and end the creature!” A noise was everywhere, tolling like a bell; he could hear the names of the lost adventurers who had preceded him. There they stood to see the last of him. He saw and knew them all, yet dauntless set the horn to his lips and blew, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”

Notes. – At the head of the poem is a note: “See Edgar’s song in Lear.” In Act III., scene iv., Edgar, disguised as a madman, says, while the storm rages: “Who gives anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, over bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge; made him proud of heart to ride on a bay trotting-horse over four-inched bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. – Bless thy five wits! Tom’s a-cold. – O do de, do de, do, de. – Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking! Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.” At the end of the scene Edgar sings: —

“Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still, – Fie, foh, and fum
I smell the blood of a British man.”

“Childe Roland was the youngest brother of Helen. Under the guidance of Merlin he undertook to bring back his sister from elf-land, whither the fairies had carried her, and he succeeded in his perilous exploit.” – Dr. Brewer. (See the ancient Ballade of Burd Helen.) Childe was a term specially applied to the scions of knightly families before their admission to the degree of knighthood, as “Chyld Waweyn, Loty’s Sone” (Robert of Gloucester).

This wonderful poem, one of the grandest pieces of word-painting in our language, has exercised the ingenuity of Browning students more than any other of the poet’s works. Sordello is difficult to understand, but it was intended by the poet to convey a definite meaning and important lessons, but Childe Roland, we have been warned again and again, was written without any moral purpose whatever. “We may see in it,” says Mrs. Orr, “a poetic vision of life… The thing we may not do is to imagine that we are meant to recognise it.” A paper was read at the Browning Society on this poem by Mr. Kirkman (Browning Society Papers, Part iii., p. 21) suggesting an interpretation of the allegory. In the discussion which followed, Dr. Furnivall said “he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had, on three separate occasions, received an emphatic ‘no’; that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakespeare’s. Browning had written it one day in Paris, as a vivid picture suggested by Edgar’s line; the horse was suggested by the figure of a red horse in a piece of tapestry in Browning’s house… Still, Dr. Furnivall thought, it was quite justifiable that any one should use the poem to signify whatever image it called up in his own mind. But he must not confuse the poet’s mind with his. The poem was not an allegory, and was never meant to be one.” The Hon. Roden Noel, who was in the chair on this occasion, said “he himself had never regarded Childe Roland as having any hidden meaning; nor had cared so to regard it. But words are mystic symbols: they mean more, very often, than the utterer of them, poet or puppet, intended.” When some one asked Mendelssohn what he meant by his Lieder ohne Worte, the musician replied that “they meant what they said.” A poem so consistent as a whole, with a narrative in which every detail follows in a perfectly regular and natural sequence, must inevitably convey to the thinking mind some great and powerful idea, suiting itself to his view of life considered as a journey or pilgrimage. The wanderings of the children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land may be considered simply as a historical event, like the migrations of the Tartars or the Northmen; or they may be viewed as an allegory of the Christian life, like Bunyan’s immortal dream. The historian of the Exodus could never have had in his mind all the interpretations put upon the incidents which he recorded; yet we have the warrant of St. Paul for allegorising the story. Any narrative of a journey through a desert to a definite end held in view throughout the way, is certain to be pounced upon as an allegory; and it is impossible but that Mr. Browning must have had some notion of a “central purpose” in his poem. Indeed, when the Rev. John W. Chadwick visited the poet, and asked him if constancy to an ideal – “He that endureth to the end shall be saved” – was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, he said, “Yes, just about that.” Mr. Kirkman, in the paper already referred to, says, “There are overwhelming reasons for concluding that this poem describes, after the manner of an allegory, the sensations of a sick man very near to death —Rabbi Ben Ezra and Prospice– are the two angels that lead on to Childe Roland.” Mr. Nettleship, in his well-known essay on the poem, says the central idea is this: “Take some great end which men have proposed to themselves in life, which seemed to have truth in it, and power to spread freedom and happiness on others; but as it comes in sight, it falls strangely short of preconceived ideas, and stands up in hideous prosaicness.” Mrs. James L. Bagg, in the Interpretation of Childe Roland, read to the Syracuse (U.S.) Browning Club, gives the following on the lesson of the poem: – “The secrets of the universe are not to be discovered by exercise of reason, nor are they to be reached by flights of fancy, nor are duties loyally done to be recompensed by revealment. A life of becoming, being, and doing, is not loss, nor failure, nor discomfiture, though the dark tower for ever tantalise and for ever withhold.” Some have seen in the poem an allegory of Love, others of the Search after Truth. Others, again, understand the Dark Tower to represent Unfaith, and the obscure land that of Doubt – Doubting Castle and the By-Path Meadow of John Bunyan, in short. For my own part, I see in the allegory – for I can consider it no other – a picture of the Age of Materialistic Science, a “science falsely so called,” which aims at the destruction of all our noblest ideals of religion and faith in the unseen. The pilgrim is a truth-seeker, misdirected by the lying spirit – the hoary cripple, unable to be or do anything good or noble himself; in him I see the cynical, destructive critic, who sits at our universities and colleges, our medical schools and our firesides, to point our youth to the desolate path of Atheistic Science, a science which strews the ghastly landscape with wreck and ruthless ruin, with the blanching bones of animals tortured to death by its “engines and wheels, with rusty teeth of steel” – a science which has invaded the healing art, and is sending students of medicine daily down the road where surgeons become cancer-grafters (as the Paris and Berlin medical scandals have revealed), and where physicians gloat over their animal victims —

“Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage,”

in their passion to reach the dark tower of Knowledge, which to them has neither door nor window. The lost adventurers are the men who, having followed this false path, have failed, and who look eagerly for the next fool who comes to join the band of the lost ones. “In the Paris School of Medicine,” says Mr. Lilly in his Right and Wrong, “it has lately been prophesied that, ‘when the rest of the world has risen to the intellectual level of France, the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality, religion, Divine providence, and so forth, will be swept entirely away, and the dicta of science will remain the sole guide of sane and educated men.’” Had Mr. Browning intended to write for us an allegory in aid of our crusade, a sort of medical Pilgrim’s Progress, he could scarcely have given the world a more faithful picture of the spiritual ruin and desolation which await the student of medicine who sets forth on the fatal course of an experimental torturer. I have good authority for saying that, had Mr. Browning seen this interpretation of his poem, he would have cordially accepted it as at least one legitimate explanation. Most of the commentators agree that when Childe Roland “dauntless set the slug horn to his lips and blew ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,’” he did so as a warning to others that he had failed in his quest, and that the way of the Dark Tower was the way of destruction and death.

Christmas Eve. (Christmas Eve and Easter Day: London, 1850.) Two poems on the same subject from different points of view. The scene is a country chapel, a barnlike structure, from which ornament has been rigorously excluded, not so much on account of want of funds as horror of anything which should detract from “Gospel simplicity.” The night is stormy, and Christmas Day must have fallen on a Monday that year, or surely no worshippers in that building would have troubled themselves about keeping the vigil of such a “Popish feast” as Christmas. It must have been Sunday night as well as Christmas Eve, that year of ’49. The congregation eyed the stranger “much as some wild beast,” for “not many wise” were called to worship in their particular way, and the stranger was evidently not of their faith or class. In came the flock: the fat woman with a wreck of an umbrella; the little old-faced, battered woman with the baby, wringing the ends of her poor shawl soaking with the rain; then a “female something” in dingy satins; next a tall, yellow man, like the Penitent Thief; and from him, as from all, the interloper got the same surprised glance. “What, you, Gallio, here!” it expressed. And so, after a shoemaker’s lad, with a wet apron round his body and a bad cough inside it, had passed in, the interloper followed and took his place, waiting for his portion of New Testament meat, like the rest of them. What with the hot smell of greasy coats and frowsy gowns, combined with the preacher’s stupidity, the visitor soon had enough of it, and he “flung out of the little chapel” in disgust. As he passed out he found there was a lull in the rain and wind. The moon was up, and he walked on, glad to be in the open air, his mind full of the scene he had left. After all, why should he be hard on this case? In many modes the same thing was going on everywhere – the endeavour to make you believe – and with much about the same effect. He had his own church; Nature had early led him to its door; he had found God visibly present in the immensities, and with the power had recognised his love too as the nobler dower. Quite true was it that God stood apart from man – apart, that he might have room to act and use his gifts of brain and heart. Man was not perfect, not a machine, not unaware of his fitness to pray and praise. He looked up to God, recognised how infinitely He surpassed man in power and wisdom, and was convinced He would never in His love bestow less than man requires. In this great way he would seek to press towards God; let men seek Him in a narrow shrine if they would. And as he mused thus, suddenly the rain ceased and the moon shone out, the black clouds falling beneath her feet; a moon rainbow, vast and perfect, rose in its chorded colours. Then from out the world of men the worshipper of God in Nature was called, and at once and with terror he saw Him with His human air, the back of Him – no more. He had been present in the poor chapel – He, with His sweeping garment, vast and white, whose hem could just be recognised by the awed beholder, He who had promised to be where two or three should meet to pray – and He had been present as the friend of these poor folk! He was leaving him who had despised the friends of the Human-Divine. Then he clung to the salvation of His vesture, and told Him how he had thought it best He should be worshipped in spirit and becoming beauty; the uncouth worship he had just left was scarcely fitted for Him. Then the Lord turned His whole face upon him, and he was caught up in the whirl of the vestment, and was up-borne through the darkness and the cold, and held awful converse with his God; and then he came to know who registers the cup of cold water given for His sake, and who disdains not to slake His Divine thirst for love at the poorest love ever offered – came to know it was for this he was permitted to cling to the vesture himself. And so they crossed the world till they stopped at the miraculous dome of God, St. Peter’s Church at Rome, with its colonnade like outstretched arms, as if desiring to embrace all mankind. The whole interior of the vast basilica is alive with worshippers this Christmas Eve. It is the midnight mass of the Feast of the Nativity under Rome’s great dome. The incense rises in clouds; the organ holds its breath and grovels latent, as if hushed by the touch of God’s finger. The silence is broken only by the shrill tinkling of a silver bell. Very man and Very God upon the altar lies, and Christ has entered, and the man whom He brought clinging to His garment’s fold is left outside the door, for He must be within, where so much of love remains, though the man without is to wait till He return:

“He will not bid me enter too,
But rather sit as I now do.”

He muses as he remains in the night air, shut out from the glory and the worship within, and he desires to enter. He thinks he can see the error of the worshippers; but he is sure also that he can see the love, the power of the Crucified One, which swept away the poetry, rhetoric and art of old Rome and Greece, “till filthy saints rebuked the gust” which gave them the glimpse of a naked Aphrodite. Love shut the world’s eyes, and love sufficed. Again he is caught up in the vesture’s fold, and transferred this time to a lecture-hall in a university town in Germany, where a hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned professor, with a hacking cough, is giving a Christmas Eve discourse on the Christ myth. He was just discussing the point whether there ever was a Christ or not, and the Saviour had entered here also; but He would not bid His companion enter “the exhausted air-bell of the critic.” Where Papist with Dissenter struggles the air may become mephitic; but the German left no air to poison at all. He rejects Christ as known to Christians; yet he retains somewhat. Is it His intellect that we must reverence? But Christ taught nothing which other sages had not taught before, and who did not damage their claim by assuming to be one with the Creator. Are we to worship Christ, then, for His goodness? But goodness is due from man to man, still more to God, and does not confer on its possessor the right to rule the race. Besides, the goodness of Christ was either self-gained or inspired by God. On neither ground could it substantiate His claim to put Himself above us. We praise Nature, not Harvey, for the circulation of the blood; so we look from the gift to the Giver – from man’s dust to God’s divinity. What is the point of stress in Christ’s teaching? “Believe in goodness and truth, now understood for the first time”? or “Believe in Me, who lived and died, yet am Lord of Life”? And all the time Christ remains inside this lecture-room. Could it be that there was anything which a Christian could be in accord with there? The professor has pounded the pearl of price to dust and ashes, yet he does not bid his hearers sweep the dust away. No; he actually gives it back to his hearers, and bids them carefully treasure the precious remains, venerate the myth, adore the man as before! And so the listener resolved to value religion for itself, be very careless as to its sects, and thus cultivate a mild indifferentism; when, lo! the storm began afresh, and the black night caught him and whirled him up and flung him prone on the college-step. Christ was gone, and the vesture fast receding. It is borne in upon him then that there must be one best way of worship. This he will strive to find and make other men share, for man is linked with man, and no gain of his must remain unshared by the race. He caught at the vanishing robe, and, once more lapped in its fold, was seated in the little chapel again, as if he had never left it, never seen St. Peter’s successor nor the professor’s laboratory. The poor folk were all there as before – a disagreeable company, and the sermon had just reached its “tenthly and lastly.” The English was ungrammatical; in a word, the water of life was being dispensed with a strong taint of the soil in a poor earthen vessel. This, he thinks, is his place; here, to his mind, is “Gospel simplicity”; he will criticise no more.

Notes. – Sect. ii., “a carer for none of it, a Gallio”: “And Gallio cared for none of these things” (Acts xviii. 17). “A Saint John’s candlestick” (see Rev. i. 20). “Christmas Eve of ’Forty-nine”: Dissenters do not keep Christmas Eve, nor Christmas Day itself; they would not, therefore, have been found at chapel unless Christmas happened to fall on a Sunday. In 1849 Christmas Eve fell on a Monday. Sect. x., the baldachin: the canopy over the high altar of St. Peter’s at Rome is supported by magnificent twisted brazen columns, from designs by Bernini. It is 95 feet in height, and weighs about 93 tons. The high altar stands immediately over the tomb of St. Peter. Sect. xiv., “Göttingen, most likely”: a celebrated university of Germany, which has produced many eminent Biblical critics. Neander and Ewald were natives of Göttingen. Sect. xvi., —

“When A got leave an Ox to be,
No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G.”

The letter Aleph, in Hebrew, was suggested by an ox’s head and horns. Gimel, the Hebrew letter G, means camel. Sect. xviii., “anapæsts in comic-trimeter”: in prosody an anapæst is a foot consisting of three syllables; the first two short, and the third long. A trimeter is a division of verse consisting of three measures of two feet each. “The halt and maimed ‘Iketides’”: The Suppliants, an incomplete play of Æschylus, called “maimed” because we have only a portion of it extant. Sect. xxii., breccia, a kind of marble.

Christopher Smart. (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. 1887.) [The Man.] (1722-1771.) It has only recently been discovered that Smart was anything more than a writer of second-rate eighteenth-century poetry. He was born at Shipbourne, in Kent, in 1722. He was a clever youth, and the Duchess of Cleveland sent him to Cambridge, and allowed him £40 a year till her death in 1742. He did well at college, and became a fellow of Pembroke, gaining the Seaton prize five times. When he came to London he mixed in the literary society adorned by Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Dr. James, and Dr. Burney – all of whom helped him in his constant difficulties. He married a daughter of Mr. Newbery, the publisher. He became a Bohemian man of letters, but the only work by which he will be remembered is the Song to David, the history of which is sufficiently remarkable. It was written while he was in confinement as a person of unsound mind, and was – it is said, though we know not if the fact be precisely as usually stated – written with a nail on the wall of the cell in which he was detained. The poem bears no evidence of the melancholy circumstances under which it was composed: it is powerful and healthy in every line, and is evidently the work of a sincerely religious mind. He was unfortunately a man of dissipated habits, and his insanity was probably largely due to intemperance. He died in 1771 from the effects of poverty and disease. His Song to David was published in 1763, and is quite unlike any other production of the century. The poem in full consists of eighty-six verses, of which Mr. Palgrave, in the Golden Treasury, gives the following: —

“He sang of God – the mighty Source
Of all things, the stupendous force
On which all strength depends;
From Whose right arm, beneath Whose eyes,
All period, power, and enterprise
Commences, reigns, and ends.

“The world, – the clustering spheres, He made,
The glorious light, the soothing shade,
Dale, champaign, grove, and hill:
The multitudinous abyss.
Where Secrecy remains in bliss,
And Wisdom hides her skill.

“Tell them, I AM, Jehovah said
To Moses, while earth heard in dread,
And, smitten to the heart,
At once above, beneath, around,
All Nature, without voice or sound,
Replied, O Lord, Thou art.”

[The Poem.] “How did this happen?” asks Mr. Browning. He imagined that he was exploring a large house, had gone through the decently-furnished rooms, which exhibited in their arrangement good taste without extravagance, till, on pushing open a door, he found himself in a chapel which was

“From floor to roof one evidence
Of how far earth may rival heaven.”

Prisoned glory in every niche, it glowed with colour and gleamed with carving: it was “Art’s response to earth’s despair.” He leaves the chapel big with expectation of what might be in store for him in other rooms in the mansion, but there was nothing but the same dead level of indifferent work everywhere, just as in the rooms which he had passed through on his way to the exquisite chapel: nothing anywhere but calm Common-Place. Browning says this is a diagnosis of Smart’s case: he was sound and sure at starting, then caught up in a fireball. Heaven let earth understand how heaven at need can operate; then the flame fell, and the untransfigured man resumed his wonted sobriety. But what Browning wants to know is, How was it this happened but once? Here was a poet who always could but never did but once! Once he saw Nature naked; once only Truth found vent in words from him. Once the veil was pulled back, then the world darkened into the repository of show and hide.

Clara de Millefleurs. (Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.) The mistress of Miranda, the jeweller of Paris.

Claret. See “Nationality in Drinks” (#litres_trial_promo) (Dramatic Lyrics).

Classification. Mr. Nettleship’s classification of Browning is the best I know. It is no easy matter to table the poet’s works: they do not readily accommodate themselves to classification. Such poems as the great Art and Music works, the Dramas, Love, and Religious poems are to be found in this book under the respective subjects.

Cleon. (Men and Women, 1855.) The speculation of this poem may be compared with a picture in a magic lantern slowly dissolving into another view, and losing itself in that which is succeeding it. We have the latest utterances of the beautiful Greek thought, saddened as they were by the despairing note of the sense of hopelessness which marred the highest effort of man, and which was never so acutely felt as at the period when the Sun of Christianity was rising and about to fill the world with the Spirit of Eternal Hope. The old heathenism is dissolving away, the first faint outlines of the gospel glory are detected by the philosopher who has heard of the fame of Paul, and is not sure he is not the same as the Christ preached by some slaves whose doctrine “could be held by no sane man.” The quotation with which the poem is headed is from Acts of the Apostles, chap. xvii. 28: “As certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’” The quotation is from the Phænomena of Aratus, a poet of Tarsus, in Cilicia, St. Paul’s own city. There is also a very similar passage in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes: “Zeus, thou crown of creation, Hail! – We are thy offspring.” The persons of the poem are not historical, though the thought expressed is highly characteristic of that of the Greek philosophers of the time. As the old national creeds disappeared under the advancing tide of Roman conquest, and as philosophers calmly discussed the truth or falsity of their dying religions, an easy tolerance arose, all religions were permitted because “indifference had eaten the heart out of them.” Four hundred years before our era Eastern philosophy, through the Greek conquests in Asia, had begun to influence European thinkers by its strange and subtle attempts to solve the mystery of existence. A spirit of inquiry, and a restless craving for some undefined faith which should take the place of that which was everywhere dying out, prepared the way for the progress of the simple, love-compelling religion of Christ, and made every one’s heart more or less suitable soil for the good seed. Cleon is a poet from the isles of Greece who has received a letter from his royal patron and many costly gifts, which crowd his court and portico. He writes to thank his king for his munificence, and in his reply says it is true that he has written that epic on the hundred plates of gold; true that he composed the chant which the mariners will learn to sing as they haul their nets; true that the image of the sun-god on the lighthouse is his also; that the Pœcile – the portico at Athens painted with battle pictures by Polygnotus the Thasian, has been adorned, too, with his own works. He knows the plastic anatomy of man and woman and their proportions, not observed before; he has moreover

“Written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.”

He has combined the moods for music, and invented one: —

“In brief, all arts are mine.”

All this is known; it is not so marvellous either, because men’s minds in these latter days are greater than those of olden time because more composite. Life, he finds reason to believe, is intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, not analysed to parts, but each having reference to all: the true judge of man’s life must see the whole, not merely one way of it at once; the artist who designed the chequered pavement did not superimpose the figures, putting the last design over the old and blotting it out, – he made a picture and used every stone, whatever its figure, in the composition of his work. So he conceives that perfect, separate forms which make the portions of mankind were created at first, afterwards these were combined, and so came progress. Mankind is a synthesis – a putting together of all the single men. Zeus had a plan in all, and our souls know this, and cry to him —

“To vindicate his purpose in our life.”

As for himself he is not a poet like Homer, such a musician as Terpander, nor a sculptor like Phidias; point by point he fails to reach their height, but in sympathy he is the equal of them all. So much for the first part of the king’s letter: it is all true which has been reported of him. Next he addresses himself to the questions asked by the king: “has he not attained the very crown and proper end of life?” and having so abundantly succeeded, does he fear death as do lower men? Cleon replies that if his questioner could have been present on the earth before the advent of man, and seen all its tenantry, from worm to bird, he would have seen them perfect. Had Zeus asked him if he should do more for creatures than he had done, he would have replied, “Yes, make each grow conscious in himself”; he chooses then for man, his last premeditated work, that a quality may arise within his soul which may view itself and so be happy. “Let him learn how he lives.” Cleon would, however, tell the king it would have been better had man made no step beyond the better beast. Man is the only creature in whom there is failure; it is called advance that man should climb to a height which overlooks lower forms of creation simply that he may perish there. Our vast capabilities for joy, our craving souls, our struggles, only serve to show us that man is inadequate to joy, as the soul sees joy. “Man can use but a man’s joy while he sees God’s.” He agrees with the king in his profound discouragement: most progress is most failure. As to the next question which the letter asks: “Does he, the poet, artist, musician, fear death as common men? Will it not comfort him to know that his works will live, though he may perish?” Not at all, he protests – he, sleeping in his urn while men sing his songs and tell his praise! “It is so horrible.” And so he sometimes imagines Zeus may intend for us some future state where the capability for joy is as unlimited as is our present desire for joy. But no: “Zeus has not yet revealed it. He would have done so were it possible!” Nothing can more faithfully portray the desolation of the soul “without God,” the sense of loss in man, whose soul, emanating from the Divine, refuses to be satisfied with anything short of God Himself. Art, wealth, learning, honours, serve not to dissipate for a moment the infinite sadness of this soul “without God and without hope in the world.” And, as he wrote, Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, had turned to the Pagan world with the Gospel which the Jews had rejected. To the very island in the Grecian sea whence arose this sad wail of despair the echo of the angel-song of Bethlehem had been borne, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.” Round the coasts of the Ægean Sea, through Philippi, Troas, Mitylene, Chios, and Miletus, “the mere barbarian Jew Paulus” had sown the seeds of a faith which should grow up and shelter under its branches the weary truth-seekers who knew too well what was the utter hopelessness of “art for art’s sake” for satisfying the infinite yearning of the human heart. In the crypt of the church of San Marziano at Syracuse is the primitive church of Sicily, constructed on the spot where St. Paul is said to have preached during his three days’ sojourn on the island. Here is shown the rude stone altar where St. Paul broke the bread of life; and as we stand on this sacred spot and recall the past in this strange city of a hundred memorials of antiquity – the temples of the gods, the amphitheatre, the vast altar, the Greek theatre, the walls of Epipolæ, the aqueducts, the forts, the harbour, the quarries, the Ear of Dionysius, the tombs, the streams and fountains famed in classic story and sung by poets – all fade into insignificance before the hallowed spot whence issued the fertilising influences of the Gospel preached by this same Paulus to a few poor slaves. The time would come, and not so far distant either, when the doctrines of Christ and Paul would be rejected “by no sane man.”

Clive. (Dramatic Idyls, Series II., 1880.) The poem deals with a well-known incident in the life of Lord Clive, who founded the empire of British India and created for it a pure and strong administration. Robert Clive was born in 1725 at Styche, near Market Drayton, Shropshire. The Clives formed one of the oldest families in the county. Young Clive was negligent of his books, and devoted to boyish adventures of the wildest sort. However, he managed to acquire a good education, though probably by means which schoolmasters considered irregular. He was a born leader, and held death as nothing in comparison with loss of honour. He often suffered, even in youth, from fits of depression, and twice attempted his own life. He went out to Madras as a “writer” in the East India Company’s civil service. Always in some trouble or other with his companions, he one day fought the duel which forms the subject of Mr. Browning’s poem. In 1746 he became disgusted with a civilian’s life, and obtained an ensign’s commission. At this time a crisis in Indian affairs opened up to a man of high courage, daring and administrative ability, like Clive, a brilliant path to fortune. Clive seized his opportunity, and won India for us. His bold attack upon the city of Arcot terminated in a complete victory for our arms; and in 1753, when he sailed to England for the recovery of his health, his services were suitably rewarded by the East India Company. He won the battle of Plassey in 1757. Notwithstanding his great services to his country, his conduct in India was severely criticised, and he was impeached in consequence, but was acquitted in 1773. He committed suicide in 1774, his mind having been unhinged by the charges brought against him after the great things he had done for an ungrateful country. He was addicted to the use of opium; this is referred to in the poem in the line “noticed how the furtive fingers went where a drug-box skulked behind the honest liquor.” Lord Macaulay in his Essay on Clive, says he had a “restless and intrepid spirit. His personal courage, of which he had, while still a writer, given signal proof by a desperate duel with a military bully who was the terror of Fort St. David, speedily made him conspicuous even among hundreds of brave men.” The duel took place under the following circumstances. He lost money at cards to an officer who was proved to have cheated. Other losers were so in terror of this cheating bully that they paid. Clive refused to pay, and was challenged. They went out with pistols; no seconds were employed, and Clive missed his opponent, who, coming close up to him, held his pistol to his head and told him he would spare his life if he were asked to do so. Clive complied. He was next required to retract his charge of cheating. This demand being refused, his antagonist threatened to fire. “Fire, and be damned!” replied Clive. “I said you cheated; I say so still, and will never pay you!” The officer was so amazed at his bravery that he threw away his pistol. Chatting, with a friend, a week before he committed suicide, he tells the story of this duel as the one occasion when he felt fear, and that not of death, but lest his adversary should contemptuously permit him to keep his life. Under such circumstances he could have done nothing but use his weapon on himself. This part of the story is, of course, imaginary.

Colombe of Ravenstein. (Colombe’s Birthday.) Duchess of Juliers and Cleves. When in danger of losing her sovereignty by the operation of the Salic Law, she has an offer of marriage from Prince Berthold, who could have dispossessed her. Colombe loves Valence, an advocate, and he loves her. The prince does not even pretend that love has prompted his offer, and so Colombe sacrifices power at the shrine of love.

Comparini, The. (The Ring and the Book.) Violatne and Pietro Comparini were the foster-parents of Pompilia, who, with her, were murdered by Count Guido Franceschini.