Thomas Brouncker

“ Browning’s poem may have been an unconscious development of a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:—“Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.”
The sixth and last verses are interesting. Browning, while in the world “Both lives and likes life’s way,” nor is anxious that his “wings” should be “unfurled” ”

“ His whole life is to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle. Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful; from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for food. ”

“ To be candid," he ends, laughing, "I forgave her a year ago, when I met her at Brainton Station, grown fat, with a red nose, and a tribe of squinting children, who, but for the finger of Providence interposing, might have been mine."
Speaking, he lays his lips upon the blossom of her sweet red mouth; but she, pricked with the sudden smart of recollected treachery, draws away from him.
"Come," she says, with a slight shiver, "let us go home. We shall get into dreadful disgrace as it is; what will Sir Thomas say?" ”

“ It is no greater charity to clothe his body than apparel the nakedness of his soul.”
His distinguished position, as a physician and an author, demands very special and reverential mention in these pages.
Sir Thomas Browne was born in London on the 19th of October, 1605. He died at Norwich on the 19th of October, 1682, having reached exactly the age of seventy-seven. His father [Pg 255] was a wealthy merchant, of a good Cheshire family, but died when his more illustrious son was a boy, and his mother shortly afterwards married Sir Thomas Dutton. ”

“ In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.
It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a fortuitous birth. ”

“ Few writers are so perfectly loved as Sir THOMAS BROWNE is by such 'friends;' as in BACON'S or MONTAIGNE'S essays, his every sentence has its weight of wisdom, and he who should read this volume until every sentence were cut deeply in memory, would never deem the time lost which was thus spent. ”

“ BROWN, THOMAS (1778–1820) , Scottish philosopher, was born at Kirkmabreck, Kirkcudbright, where his father was parish clergyman. He was a boy of a refined nature, a wide reader and an eager student. Educated at several schools in London, he went to Edinburgh University in 1792, where he attended Dugald Stewart’s moral philosophy class. ”

“ It has been said of Browning that he succeeded by a series of failures, which meant, in his case, that his books failed to command instant attention, but were gradually discovered by the thoughtful few who by their appreciation spread the poet's fame among the thoughtless many. It was not in this way that Jonas Lie's failures conduced to his final success. "Thomas Ross," "Adam Schrader," and "Grabow's Cat" have not grown perceptibly in the estimation either of the critics or of the public since their first appearance. ”

“ As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."
"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly; "even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."
"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks, explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance. ”

“ After the Restoration Brouncker took part in the meetings of scientific students in London out of which sprang the Royal Society. The association was incorporated under royal charter, first on 15 July 1662, and again on 15 April 1663. From the date of the society's first incorporation till 30 Nov. 1677, when he resigned, and was succeeded by Sir Joseph Williamson, Brouncker held the office of president, to which he was elected annually. ”

“ The Gerard pew in Felton church is as large as a moderate-sized room, and is furnished with arm-chairs and a fire-place. In winter, Sir Thomas spends fully half the service time in poking the fire noisily and raking out the ashes. There is no fire now, and he misses it. A high red curtain runs round the sacred enclosure, and through it the farmers' wives and daughters strain their eyes to catch a glimpse of Miladi's marabout feathers, and Miss Blessington's big, golden chignon, and little green aerophane bonnet. ”

“ Thomas Branwell, merchant, of Penzance. In 1816 he received the living of Thornton, in Bradford Parish, and there, on April 21, Charlotte Brontë was born. She was the third daughter, Maria and Elizabeth being her elder sisters, and fast on her heels followed Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane and Anne.
"They kept themselves to themselves very close," in the account given by those who remember the family coming to Haworth. From the first, the walks of the children were directed rather towards the heathery moors sloping upwards behind the parsonage than towards the long descending village street. ”

“ Browning's dramatic sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good in a conscious creative power which is outside both, and which deals directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through good and evil ”

“ From Sir Thomas's description one would imagine that the Cancan was habitually danced at the balls he frequents.
The door opens, and Miss Blessington makes her appearance; looking, not vain or conscious, but calmly defiant of any one to make a better—a triumph of lace and tulle and flowers, and milk-white flesh, and grand, cold curves and contours.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cries Essie, clasping her little hands, with the unaffected admiration of one handsome woman for another. "I know it is rude to make personal remarks; but is not she, Lady Gerard?" ”

“ I look up to Browning as one of the very few men known to me by their works who, with most cordial energy and invincible resolution, have lived thoroughly throughout the whole of their being, to the uttermost verge of all their capacities, in his case truly colossal; lived and wrought thoroughly in sense and soul and intellect ”

“ What might not such a poet as Robert Browning have done, could he have emancipated himself from his involved and difficult style, and written in a manly and straightforward way of the world of men and women around him, instead of going off in his exasperating manner into the Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, to tell us of Prince Hohenstiel Tebwangan Saviour of Society. The pity of it is beyond expression, when so great a poet as Browning makes himself so needlessly unintelligible, and loses the vast influence he might exert over the minds of his generation and the minds of posterity. ”

“ We cannot cure Mr. Browning, and we must be content to endure him for the sake of old times. The great, crabbed, formless poet gives the buffoons a rare innings; for his jagged, ramshackle blank verse, with its conjunctions protruding at the ends of lines, its parentheses, its small jokes, its puns, its pedantic display of useless learning, its aimless wanderings, its half-hints, all tend to make the reader feel as if he were taking a little walk with a halting cripple who persisted in digging him in the ribs, and kicking up dust before his eyes. ”

“ Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from nothing which he portrays. ”

“ In his best works, Browning appears as a poet gifted with a large reason and a wide-wandering imagination; but his reason and imagination do not seem to work genially together—are sometimes in each other’s way—and in their operation they sometimes strangle each other. He thinks broadly and deeply, and he shapes finely ”

“ Although Browning was so sublime a metaphysical poet, nothing delighted him more than to listen to an accumulation of trifling (if exact) circumstances which helped to build up the life of a human being. Every man and woman whom he met was to Browning a poem in solution; some chemical condition might at any moment resolve any one of the multitude into a crystal. His optimism, his curiosity, and his clairvoyance occupied his thoughts in a remarkably objective way. ”

“ I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson. Browning is often simple, lovely and universal. And when he speaks out of that emotional imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the delight and love of the centuries to come. By work of this type he will be finally judged and finally endure ”

“ Browning's poetry has created in many minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's imagination, the thought and the thing—the idea and its image—grow up at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other. [86] He sees, therefore, the truths of Nature, as Nature herself gives them ”

“ In that perpetual contemplation of Nature, which with Wordsworth became an [Pg 14] all-absorbent passion, Browning had but little share: his chief interest was in man. But "now and again external nature was for him ... pierced and shot through with spiritual fire."
Three times punctually he would walk round the gardens, and then walk home. Upon these daily strolls he was accompanied by his sister Sarianna: in whose love and companionship he was singularly fortunate. Sarianna Browning had always been the best of sisters to the poet and his wife,—a kindred spirit in every sense of the word ”

“ Browning, on the contrary, is one of the most robust of natures; nothing alive, or that has lived, is indifferent to him; there is no problem of life or death with which he fears to grapple; he has vital affinities with all things; and his genius appears but to grow in geniality, in hearty and manly relish of life, as he grows in age. ”

“ The day Browning climbs Mont Salève, at the beginning of his poem La Saisiaz, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view. What does he see? Himself in Nature? or Nature herself, like a living being? Not at all. He sees what he thinks Nature is there to teach us—not herself, but what is beyond herself. ”

“ To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. Something like metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank verse of Development, the lyrical verse of the Prologue, and the third of the Bad Dreams, with their subtle comments and surmises on the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. But it is life itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in the youngest of Browning's books. ”

“ Browning often treats his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always conceived it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain. ”

“ Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some point to which other minds have reasoned their way. ”

“ Pictor Ignotus (Florence, 15—) is the first of those poems about painting, into which Browning has put so much of his finest art. It is a sort of first faint hint or foreshadowing of Andrea del Sarto, perfectly individual and distinct though it is. Pictor Ignotus expresses the subdued sadness of a too timid or too sensitive nature, an "unknown painter" who has dreamed of painting great pictures and winning great fame, but who shrinks equally from the attempt and the reward: an attempt which he is too self-distrustful to make, a reward which he is too painfully discriminating to enjoy. ”

“ There is a superficial likeness in Browning's theory to the 'Perfectibility' of some eighteenth-century philosophers; the difference is that Browning thinks of perfection as real, so that the imperfect human pilgrim is not a mere wanderer on from one stage to another, nor merely an instrument along with other finite things in building up the fabric of the Universe; he is thought of as one compelled by the Universe to put into his own small being all that the whole world means. ”