Robert Browning

“ Life would have nothing to boast of, were man formed but to experience an unalloyed joy, to find always and never to seek. Care irks not the crop-full bird, and doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast. But man is disturbed by a divine spark which is his title to a nearer relationship with God who gives than with his creatures that receive.
The rebuffs he meets with should be welcomed. Life’s true success is secured through obstacles, and seeming failures, and unfulfilled aspirations. He is but a brute whose soul is conformed to his flesh, whose spirit works for the play of arms and legs. ”

“ But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last. As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height, So with man—so his power and his beauty forever take flight. No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth o’er the years! Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer’s! Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb—bid arise A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies, Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame would ye know? ”

“ You smile? why, there’s my picture ready made, That’s what we painters call our harmony! A common grayness silvers every thing,— All in a twilight, you and I alike —You, at the point of your first pride in me (That’s gone, you know) —but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. {40} There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, And autumn grows, autumn in every thing. ”

“ Man knows partly but conceives beside, Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, And in this striving, this converting air Into a solid he may grasp and use, Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone, Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. Such progress could no more attend his soul Were all it struggles after found at first And guesses changed to knowledge absolute, Than motion wait his body, were all else Than it the solid earth on every side, Where now through space he moves from rest to rest. ”

“ For all, love greatens and glorifies Till God’s a-glow, to the loving eyes, In what was mere earth before. — St. 2. love greatens and glorifies: see the poem, “Wanting is—what?” 3. Yes, earth—yes, mere ignoble earth! Now do I misstate, mistake? Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth? Expect all harvest, dread no dearth, Seal my sense up for your sake? 4. Oh Love, Love, no, Love! not so, indeed You were just weak earth, I knew: With much in you waste, with many a weed, And plenty of passions run to seed, But a little good grain too. ”

“ The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. 10. All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist, When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ”

“ 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. ”

“ This sense of sense, this spirit consciousness, grew the only life worth calling life, the pleasure-house, watch-tower, and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding flats of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to; a tower that crowns a country. But alas! the soul now climbs it just to perish there, for thence we have discovered that there’s a world of capability for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us; and still the soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more than ere you climbed the tower to look abroad! ”

“ They give no gift that bounds itself, and ends i’ the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds i’ the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give—he also: share the poet’s privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from the old. As though the cup that gave the wine, gave too the god’s prolific giver of the grape, that vine, was wont to find out, fawn around his footstep, springing still to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad. ”

“ First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake, As midway help till he reach fact indeed. The statuary ere he mould a shape Boasts a like gift, the shape’s idea, and next The aspiration to produce the same; So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout, Cries ever, ‘Now I have the thing I see’: Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought, From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself. ”

“ So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. ”

“ 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. ”

“ See this soul of ours! How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled By age and waste, set free at last by death: Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones? What is this flesh we have to penetrate? Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth And power emerge, but also when strange chance Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture, When sickness breaks the body—hunger, watching, Excess, or languor—oftenest death’s approach— Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawl Through life, surrounded with all stirring things, Unmoved—and he goes mad ”

“ Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift, That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the creator,—the end, what began? Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, {270} And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul, Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole? ”

“ To the hazel-trees of England, where their childhood passed, succeeds a rarer sort, till, by green degrees, they at last slope to Italy, and youth,—Italy, the woman-country, loved by earth’s male-lands. She being the trusted guide, they stand at last in the heart of things, the heaped and dim woods all around them, the single and slim thread of water slipping from slab to slab, the ruined chapel perched half-way up in the Alpine gorge, reached by the one-arched bridge where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond, where all day long a bird sings, and a stray sheep drinks at times. ”

“ Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage, Is soul from body still to disengage, As tending to a freedom which rejects Such help, and incorporeally affects The world, producing deeds but not by deeds, Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds, Assigning them the simpler tasks it used To patiently perform till Song produced Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind: divest Mind of e’en Thought, and, lo, God’s unexpressed Will dawns above us! ”

“ Flesh and soul must be mutually subservient; one must not be merely subjected to the other, not even the inferior to the superior. Let us cry, “All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.”
Let, then, youth enter into its heritage, and use and enjoy it; let it then pass into an approved manhood, “for aye removed from the developed brute; a God, though in the germ”; let it pass fearless and unperplexed as to what weapons to select, what armor to indue for the battle which awaits that approved manhood. ”

“ For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,— {245} Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love, How love might be, hath been indeed, and is; And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost Such prize despite the envy of the world, And, having gained truth, keep truth: that is all. {250} But see the double way wherein we are led, How the soul learns diversely from the flesh! With flesh, that hath so little time to stay, And yields mere basement for the soul’s emprise, Expect prompt teaching. ”

“ Never, in the whole range of pictorial art, have the inspired fervor of Christian feeling, the angelic beauty and purity of which the soul is capable, been so gloriously interpreted as in his works. The exquisite atmosphere of an almost supernaturally ideal life surrounds his pictures, irradiates the rosy features of his youthful faces, or greets us, like the peace of God, in the dignified figures of his devout old men. ”

“ O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,— Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 5 And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory—to drop down, 10 To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? ”

“ 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! ”

“ It is by no breath, Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death! As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved! He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. ‘Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be {310} A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! ”

“ But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it. Music is to Browning an inarticulate revelation of the truth of the supersensual world, the ‘earnest of a heaven’. He is no voluptuary in music. Music is simply the means by which the soul wings its way into the azure of spiritual theory and contemplation. Take only ‘Saul’ and ‘Abt Vogler’ in illustration. ‘Saul’ is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by music. ”

“ David has reached an advanced stage in his symbolic song to Saul. He thinks now what next he shall urge “to sustain him where song had restored him?—Song filled to the verge his cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by?” So once more the string of the harp makes response to his spirit, and he sings:—
“In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. ”

“ If we love ease and lethargy, let us turn in good time and fly. The interpretation of literature, like the interpretation of Nature, is no mere record of facts; it is no catalogue of the items which make up a book— such catalogues and analyses of contents encumber our histories of literature with some of their dreariest pages. The interpretation of literature exhibits no series of dead items, but rather the life and power of one mind at play upon another mind duly qualified to receive and manifest these. ”

“ Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause, Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list enrolled:— 7. But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, lo, they are! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught ”

“ A whisper from the west Shoots—“Add this to the rest, Take it and try its worth: here dies another day.” 17. So, still within this life, Though lifted o’er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, “This rage was right i’ the main, That acquiescence vain: The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.” 18. For more is not reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: Here, work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool’s true play. ”