"Pippa Passes", "The Ring and the Book", "The Inn Album", these are Browning's three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic plays. All are dramas in the exact sense, though the three I have named are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation. Each reader must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the electric quality of the poet's genius: within the ken of his imagination he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling, complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than upon the conventional stage.

The first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions.

I understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of Browning's poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from the vast tableland of "The Ring and the Book"; that thenceforth there was declension. But Browning is not to be measured by common estimates. It is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or steal almost imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons.

But with Browning, as with Shakespeare, as with Victor Hugo, it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment. Like Balzac, like Shakespeare again, he has revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the sun westering athwart distant Andes, the gold of sunrise is already flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of Atlas.

It is certain that "The Ring and the Book" is unique. Even Goethe's masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe's "Faustus", and its ambitious offspring, as in Bailey's "Festus". But is it a work of art? Here is the only vital question which at present concerns us.

It is altogether useless to urge, as so many admirers of Browning do, that "The Ring and the Book" is as full of beauties as the sea is of waves. Undeniably it is, having been written in the poet's maturity. But, to keep to the simile, has this epical poem the unity of ocean? Does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes which wash from Arctic to Antarctic, through zones temperate and equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? If it have not this unity it is still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. And though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of Comparative Literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of Time — not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is not clad in perfection, be it absolute or relative — for relative perfection there is, despite the apparent paradox.

The mere bulk of "The Ring and the Book" is, in point of art, nothing. One day, after the publication of this poem, Carlyle hailed the author with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony: "What a wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of `books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" Here, Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that, notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of hers, "Tour-de-force".

Of the twelve parts — occupying in all about twenty-one thousand lines — the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of the implicated priest, Caponsacchi, with the meditation of the Pope, and with the pathetic utterance of Pompilia. It is not a dramatic poem in the sense that "Pippa Passes" is, for its ten Books (the first and twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues. "The Ring and the Book", in a word, consists, besides the two extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a poetic Koh-i-Noor.

The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by Browning for a `lira' (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865. Therein is set forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido Franceschini; and of that noble's trial, sentence, and doom. It is much the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his predecessors. The story fascinated Browning, who, having in this book and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the part of the individuals more or less directly concerned. The more he considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment, and early in 1866 he began the most ambitious work of his life.

An enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as "one of the most extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature." But poetry is not mental gymnastics. All this insistence upon "extraordinary feats" is to be deprecated: it presents the poet as Hercules, not as Apollo: in a word, it is not criticism. The story is one of vulgar fraud and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in Italy, in the picturesque Rome and Arezzo of two centuries ago. The old bourgeois couple, Pietro and Violante Comparini, manage to wed their thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of Arezzo. They expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and other tangible advantages. He, impoverished as he is, looks for a splendid dowry. No one thinks of the child-wife, Pompilia. She becomes the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties stands revealed. Count Guido has a genius for domestic tyranny. Pompilia suffers. When she is about to become a mother she determines to leave her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes. Since the child is to be the inheritor of her parents' wealth, she will not leave it to the tender mercies of Count Guido. A young priest, a canon of Arezzo, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, helps her to escape. In due course she gives birth to a son. She has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower. Guido, who has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon the child's dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the darkness of night betakes himself to Rome. He and his accomplices enter the house of Pietro Comparini and his wife, and, not content with slaying them, also murders Pompilia. But they are discovered, and Guido is caught red-handed. Pompilia's evidence alone is damnatory, for she was not slain outright, and lingers long enough to tell her story. Franceschini is not foiled yet, however. His plea is that he simply avenged the wrong done to him by his wife's adulterous connection with the priest Caponsacchi. But even in the Rome of that evil day justice was not extinct. Guido's motive is proved to be false; he himself is condemned to death. An appeal to the Pope is futile. Finally, the wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy.

There is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos in the fate of the innocent child-wife Pompilia. It is clear, therefore, that the greatness of "The Ring and the Book" must depend even less upon its subject, its motive, than upon its being "an extraordinary feat" in the gymnastics of verse.

In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels. The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If "The Ring and the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister "getting up" a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to, say, "The Moonstone"; its author would be insignificant beside the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented upon.

As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment. To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. One must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done or refrained from doing.

"The Ring and the Book", as I have said, was not begun in the year of its imagining.* It is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married period of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.

—
* The title is explained as follows: — "The story of the Franceschini case,
as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence
to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed
in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold
prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.
The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file;
it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.
The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged,
and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.
It was too HARD. It was `pure crude fact', secreted from the fluid being
of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state
it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.
He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or — as he also calls it —
of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record
the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed,
first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised,
there broadly stamped with human thought and passion,
he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise
in what he set before them unadulterated human truth." — Mrs. Orr.
—

On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb." The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno: and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.

"Beneath
I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air —
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."

Scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain essential details. The final food for the imagination was found in a pamphlet of which he came into possession of in London, where several important matters were given which had no place in the volume he had picked up in Florence.

Much, far the greater part, of the first "book" is — interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close — the passionate, out-welling lines to "the truest poet I have ever known," the beautiful soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the old Florentine garden of the dead.

"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,
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,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand —
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
— Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"
. . . . .

Thereafter, for close upon five thousand words, the poem descends again to the level of a versified tale. It is saved from ruin by subtlety of intellect, striking dramatic verisimilitude, an extraordinary vigour, and occasional lines of real poetry. Retrospectively, apart from the interest, often strained to the utmost, most readers, I fancy, will recall with lingering pleasure only the opening of "The Other Half Rome", the description of Pompilia, "with the patient brow and lamentable smile," with flower-like body, in white hospital array — a child with eyes of infinite pathos, "whether a flower or weed, ruined: who did it shall account to Christ."

In these three introductory books we have the view of the matter taken by those who side with Count Guido, of those who are all for Pompilia, and of the "superior person", impartial because superciliously indifferent, though sufficiently interested to "opine".

In the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the "Ring", is Pompilia's narrative. Here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual subtlety of Guido's plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature. In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. Once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries —

"No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!
That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) —
That vision of the pale electric sword
Angels go armed with — that was not the last
O' the lady. Come, I see through it, you find,
Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said
I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?
Let me see for myself if it be so!"

Than the poignant pathos and beauty of "Pompilia", there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakespeare's Arthur. It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, "O great, just, good God! miserable me!" — how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife —

"I am just seventeen years and five months old,
And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
'Tis writ so in the church's register,
Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
At length, so many names for one poor child,
— Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini — laughable!"

Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women's own invision of themselves — Robert Browning and George Meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia". The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in "The Ordeal of Richard Feveral", is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.

And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of "Pompilia" —

"Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,
— Better than born, baptised and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
HE WAS TOO YOUNG TO SMILE AND SAVE HIMSELF ——"

or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before —

"So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time, — see my own five saints!"

or these —

"Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
— Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine ——"

once more —

"One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying. . . .
Now it is over, and no danger more . . .
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past ——"

Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's Spring (ll. 1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one —

"A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.
All women are not mothers of a boy. . . .
I never realised God's birth before —
How he grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers."

When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words —

"God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise ——"

who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?

But the two succeeding "books" are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections — the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of "Caponsacchi" and "Pompilia". In the next "book" Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse: —

"For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze ——
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."

Finally comes that throbbing, terrible last "book" where the murderer finds himself brought to bay and knows that all is lost. Who can forget its unparalleled close, when the wolf-like Guido suddenly, in his supreme agony, transcends his lost manhood in one despairing cry —

"Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

Lastly, the Epilogue rounds off the tale. But is this Epilogue necessary?
Surely the close should have come with the words just quoted?

It will not be after a first perusal that the reader will be able to arrive at a definite conviction. No individual or collective estimate of to-day can be accepted as final. Those who come after us, perhaps not the next generation, nor the next again, will see "The Ring and the Book" free of all the manifold and complex considerations which confuse our judgment. Meanwhile, each can only speak for himself. To me it seems that "The Ring and the Book" is, regarded as an artistic whole, the most magnificent failure in our literature. It enshrines poetry which no other than our greatest could have written; it has depths to which many of far inferior power have not descended. Surely the poem must be judged by the balance of its success and failure? It is in no presumptuous spirit, but out of my profound admiration of this long-loved and often-read, this superb poem, that I, for one, wish it comprised but the Prologue, the Plea of Guido, "Caponsacchi", "Pompilia", "The Pope", and Guido's last Defence. I cannot help thinking that this is the form in which it will be read in the years to come. Thus circumscribed, it seems to me to be rounded and complete, a great work of art void of the dross, the mere debris which the true artist discards. But as it is, in all its lordly poetic strength and flagging impulse, is it not, after all, the true climacteric of Browning's genius?

"The Inn Album", a dramatic poem of extraordinary power, has so much more markedly the defects of his qualities that I take it to be, at the utmost, the poise of the first gradual refluence. This analogy of the tidal ebb and flow may be observed with singular aptness in Browning's life-work — the tide that first moved shoreward in the loveliness of "Pauline", and, with "long withdrawing roar," ebbed in slow, just perceptible lapse to the poet's penultimate volume. As for "Asolando", I would rather regard it as the gathering of a new wave — nay, again rather, as the deep sound of ocean which the outward surge has reached.

But for myself I do not accept "The Inn Album" as the first hesitant swing of the tide. I seem to hear the resilient undertone all through the long slow poise of "The Ring and the Book". Where then is the full splendour and rush of the tide, where its culminating reach and power?

I should say in "Men and Women"; and by "Men and Women" I mean not merely the poems comprised in the collection so entitled, but all in the "Dramatic Romances", "Lyrics", and the "Dramatis Personae", all the short pieces of a certain intensity of note and quality of power, to be found in the later volumes, from "Pacchiarotto" to "Asolando".

And this because, in the words of the poet himself when speaking of Shelley, I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high — and, seeing it, to hold by it. Yet I am not oblivious of the mass of Browning's lofty achievement, "to be known enduringly among men," — an achievement, even on its secondary level, so high, that around its imperfect proportions, "the most elaborated productions of ordinary art must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations."

How am I to convey concisely that which it would take a volume to do adequately — an idea of the richest efflorescence of Browning's genius in these unfading blooms which we will agree to include in "Men and Women"? How better — certainly it would be impossible to be more succinct — than by the enumeration of the contents of an imagined volume, to be called, say "Transcripts from Life"?

It would be to some extent, but not rigidly, arranged chronologically.
It would begin with that masterpiece of poetic concision,
where a whole tragedy is burned in upon the brain in fifty-six lines,
"My Last Duchess". Then would follow "In a Gondola",
that haunting lyrical drama `in petto', where the lover is stabbed to death
as his heart is beating against that of his mistress; "Cristina",
with its keen introspection; those delightfully stirring pieces,
the "Cavalier Tunes", "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr",
and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"; "The Flower's Name";
"The Flight of the Duchess"; "The Tomb at St. Praxed's", the poem
which educed Ruskin's enthusiastic praise for its marvellous apprehension
of the spirit of the Middle Ages; "Pictor Ignotus", and "The Lost Leader".
But as there is not space for individual detail, and as many
of the more important are spoken of elsewhere in this volume,
I must take the reader's acquaintance with the poems for granted.
So, following those first mentioned, there would come
"Home Thoughts from Abroad"; "Home Thoughts from the Sea";
"The Confessional"; "The Heretic's Tragedy"; "Earth's Immortalities";
"Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning"; "Saul"; "Karshish";
"A Death in the Desert"; "Rabbi Ben Ezra"; "A Grammarian's Funeral";
"Love Among the Ruins"; Song, "Nay but you"; "A Lover's Quarrel";
"Evelyn Hope"; "A Woman's Last Word"; "Fra Lippo Lippi";
"By the Fireside"; "Any Wife to Any Husband"; "A Serenade at the Villa";
"My Star"; "A Pretty Woman"; "A Light Woman"; "Love in a Life";
"Life in a Love"; "The Last Ride Together"; "A Toccata of Galuppi's";
"Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha"; "Abt Vogler"; "Memorabilia";
"Andrea Del Sarto"; "Before"; "After"; "In Three Days"; "In a Year";
"Old Pictures in Florence"; "De Gustibus"; "Women and Roses";
"The Guardian Angel"; "Cleon"; "Two in the Campagna"; "One Way of Love";
"Another Way of Love"; "Misconceptions"; "May and Death"; "James Lee's Wife";
"Dis Aliter Visum"; "Too Late"; "Confessions"; "Prospice"; "Youth and Art";
"A Face"; "A Likeness"; "Apparent Failure". Epilogue to Part I. —
"O Lyric Voice", etc., from end of First Part of "The Ring and the Book".
Part II. — "Herve Riel"; "Amphibian"; "Epilogue to Fifine";
"Pisgah Sights"; "Natural Magic"; "Magical Nature"; "Bifurcation";
"Numpholeptos"; "Appearances"; "St. Martin's Summer"; "A Forgiveness";
Epilogue to Pacchiarotto volume; Prologue to "La Saisiaz";
Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic"; "Epilogue"; "Pheidippides";
"Halbert and Hob"; "Ivan Ivanovitch"; "Echetlos"; "Muleykeh";
"Pan and Luna"; "Touch him ne'er so lightly"; Prologue to "Jocoseria";
"Cristina and Monaldeschi"; "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli"; "Ixion";
"Never the Time and the Place"; Song, "Round us the wild creatures";
Song, "Wish no word unspoken"; Song, "You groped your way"; Song, "Man I am";
Song, "Once I saw"; "Verse-making"; "Not with my Soul Love";
"Ask not one least word of praise"; "Why from the world";
"The Round of Day" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12 of Gerard de Lairesse);
Prologue to "Asolando"; "Rosny"; "Now"; "Poetics"; "Summum Bonum";
"A Pearl"; "Speculative"; "Inapprehensiveness"; "The Lady and the Painter";
"Beatrice Signorini"; "Imperante Augusto"; "Rephan"; "Reverie";
Epilogue to "Asolando" (in all, 122).

But having drawn up this imaginary anthology, possibly with faults of commission and probably with worse errors of omission, I should like to take the reader into my confidence concerning a certain volume, originally compiled for my own pleasure, though not without thought of one or two dear kinsmen of a scattered Brotherhood — a volume half the size of the projected Transcripts, and rare as that star in the tip of the moon's horn of which Coleridge speaks.

`Flower o' the Vine', so it is called, has for double-motto these two lines from the Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto volume —

"Man's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there ——"

and these words, already quoted, from the Shelley Essay, "I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high."

I. From "Pauline"*1* — 1. "Sun-treader, life and light
be thine for ever!" 2. The Dawn of Beauty; 3. Andromeda; 4. Morning.
II. "Heap Cassia, Sandal-buds," etc. (song from "Paracelsus").
III. "Over the Sea our Galleys went" (song from "Paracelsus").
IV. The Joy of the World ("Paracelsus").*2* V. From "Sordello" —
1. Sunset;*3* 2. The Fugitive Ethiop;*4* 3. Dante.*5*
VI. Ottima and Sebald (Pt. 1, "Pippa Passes"). VII. Jules and Phene
(Pt. 2, "Pippa Passes"). VIII. My Last Duchess. IX. In a Gondola.
X. Home Thoughts from Abroad (1 and 2). XI. Meeting at Night:
Parting at Morning. XII. A Grammarian's Funeral.
XIII. Saul. XIV. Rabbi Ben Ezra. XV. Love among the Ruins.
XVI. Evelyn Hope. XVII. My Star. XVIII. A Toccata of Galuppi's.
XIX. Abt Vogler. XX. Memorabilia. XXI. Andrea del Sarto.
XXII. Two in the Campagna. XXIII. James Lee's Wife. XXIV. Prospice.
XXV. From "The Ring and the Book" — 1. O Lyric Love (The Invocation:
26 lines); 2. Caponsacchi (ll. 2069 to 2103); 3. Pompilia (ll. 181 to 205);
4. Pompilia (ll. 1771 to 1845); 5. The Pope (ll. 2017 to 2228);
6. Count Guido (Book 11, ll. 2407 to 2427). XXVI. Prologue to "La Saisiaz".
XXVII. Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic". XXVIII. Epilogue to
"Two Poets of Croisic". XXIX. Never the Time and Place.
XXX. "Round us the Wild Creatures," etc. (song from "Ferishtah's Fancies").
XXXI. "The Walk" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12, of "Gerard de Lairesse").
XXXII. "One word more" (To E. B. B.).*6*

— *1* The first, from the line quoted, extends through 55 lines — "To see thee for a moment as thou art." No. 2 consists of the 18 lines beginning, "They came to me in my first dawn of life." No. 3, the 11 lines of the Andromeda picture. No. 4, the 59 lines beginning, "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path" (to "delight"). *2* No. IV. comprises the 29 lines beginning, "The centre fire heaves underneath the earth," down to "ancient rapture." *3* No. V. The 6 lines beginning, "That autumn ere has stilled." *4* The 22 lines beginning, "As, shall I say, some Ethiop." *5* The 29 lines beginning, "For he, — for he." *6* To these 32 selections there must now be added "Now", "Summum Bonum", "Reverie", and the "Epilogue", from "Asolando". —

It is here — I will not say in `Flower o' the Vine', nor even venture to restrictively affirm it of that larger and fuller compilation we have agreed, for the moment, to call "Transcripts from Life" — it is here, in the worthiest poems of Browning's most poetic period, that, it seems to me, his highest greatness is to be sought. In these "Men and Women" he is, in modern times, an unparalleled dramatic poet. The influence he exercises through these, and the incalculably cumulative influence which will leaven many generations to come, is not to be looked for in individuals only, but in the whole thought of the age, which he has moulded to new form, animated anew, and to which he has imparted a fresh stimulus. For this a deep debt is due to Robert Browning. But over and above this shaping force, this manipulative power upon character and thought, he has enriched our language, our literature, with a new wealth of poetic diction, has added to it new symbols, has enabled us to inhale a more liberal if an unfamiliar air, has, above all, raised us to a fresh standpoint, a standpoint involving our construction of a new definition.

Here, at least, we are on assured ground: here, at any rate, we realise the scope and quality of his genius. But, let me hasten to add, he, at his highest, not being of those who would make Imagination the handmaid of the Understanding, has given us also a Dorado of pure poetry, of priceless worth. Tried by the severest tests, not merely of substance, but of form, not merely of the melody of high thinking, but of rare and potent verbal music, the larger number of his "Men and Women" poems are as treasurable acquisitions, in kind, to our literature, as the shorter poems of Milton, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Tennyson. But once again, and finally, let me repeat that his primary importance — not greatness, but importance — is in having forced us to take up a novel standpoint, involving our construction of a new definition.