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But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,

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Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,

Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,

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Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears

To hear me? Let me go take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance

Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

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A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,

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Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,

Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team

Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,

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And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,

And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
"The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."

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Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch - if I be he that watch'd -

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The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;

Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood 55
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;

Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:

Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

CROSSING THE BAR

SUNSET and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

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Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell

When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place,

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

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ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

Browning was almost an exact contemporary of Tennyson, born three years later and dying three years earlier. Like Tennyson, he was a man of upright character, deep religious earnestness, and cheerful optimism. Like Tennyson, also, he was always frank in facing the intellectual and spiritual problems of the age. Both poets are essentially wholesome in all their writings; both are distinctively modern in thought and poetic method; both were so fortunately situated as to be able to give their undivided attention to their work; and both, for nearly sixty years, labored untiringly and devotedly toward the realization of their art and its mission. But the parallel ends here, and a divergence commences which will explain why Browning, unlike his great contemporary, has never been favored by the many, though he is intensely admired by the few.

The genius of Browning is bold, independent, and vigorous, as his personality is robust, genial, and aggressive. Of smooth and graceful verse he is capable (witness his Saul), and he is capable also of lucidity; but he tends rather to that which is involved in conception and forceful and rugged in utterance. His mission was not to delight or soothe, but to arouse and intellectually to awaken. His aims are strikingly original, and his method no less so. In consequence, he has been condemned by many who simply do not take the trouble to understand him. As a thinker he is rapid and daring, wonderfully subtle and profound. His knowledge was broad, yet singularly recondite, as, for instance, in relation to the music, painting, and sculpture of his beloved Italy. Unfortunately, with characteristic disregard of his reader's limitations, he had the habit of registering his thoughts just as he thought them; of jotting down allusions just as they occurred to him. The obscurity of Browning, moreover, is due not only to subtlety of thought and compression of phrase, but also, in no slight degree, to

his careless style of writing. Hence the demand for Browning societies and Browning cyclopædias, and hence the disfavor in which many hold the poet.

There is little doubt that Browning was ahead of his age, and that the common knowledge and appreciation of his work will gain as time passes. Some of his lyrics are almost perfect of their kind. His dramatic monologues show a power of character analysis equalled by few since Shakespeare. In mental force and directness he reminds one of Dryden at his best. His poems rarely yield their meaning on a single reading, but those who take the pains to study him seldom fail to derive an exhilaration and uplift which few poets are capable of imparting. Much of his poetry hinges on the relation of this life to the next. God, the freedom of the individual soul, and immortality, are the cardinal tenets of his faith. No English poet has coined into art a religious belief more strenuous and optimistic. Already ranked next to Tennyson in the field of nineteenth-century poetry, the day is perhaps not far distant when the consensus of opinion will place him beside Tennyson as one of the leading English poets; always, of course, inferior in technique, but superior in originality of thought, in interpretative and creative power.

1812-1846. - Browning was born in London in May, 1812. His father, a clerk in the Bank of England, was a man of considerable learning, as well as taste in matters of art and literature. The boy's education was received chiefly by private instruction at home, where his father's large library afforded him excellent opportunity for study. He was attracted successively by the works of Byron, Keats, and Shelley; and, at a very early age, commenced the making of verse on his own account. Unlike almost every other English man of letters, he attended neither Oxford nor Cambridge. Browning's first poem, Pauline, was written when he was not yet twenty years of age. The poem, though crude and difficult to understand, is important as the first step toward the fulfilment of the poet's definite determination to make his poetry a study of the life of the soul. Such a study was Paracelsus three years later, and such Sordello in 1840 — both of them characteristic of their author; but the latter, especially, nay unpardonably, obscure and, in many places, even unintelligible to the average or more than average reader. Between 1840 and 1846, many of Browning's best poems were written, among them Pippa Passes, the Dramatic Lyrics, and the Blot i the 'Scutcheon. This series of poems made up some nine or ten small volumes, and were together known as Bells and Pomegranates.

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1846-1861. When Browning was thirty-four years old, he met Elizabeth Barrett, England's greatest poetess, who was then a confirmed

invalid. An attachment sprang up, and, under romantic circumstances, the two were married. They slipped away to Italy and made their home in Florence until the wife's death fifteen years later. Though much of Mrs. Browning's best work was done during this period, Browning himself published but two volumes, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 1850, and Men and Women, 1855. The latter is a collection of dramatic monologues - poems where the speaker is supposed to address an interlocutor, whose presence, however, is only inferred from the speaker's words. In this particular form of composition, Browning stands

supreme.

1861-1871. After his wife's death the poet returned to London, which was henceforth his home, save for occasional periods of residence in Venice. During the first ten years of this life in London he continued to write poems of a quality not inferior to those which he had written in Italy. The Dramatis Personæ, in subject and treatment, reminds the reader of Men and Women. The Ring and the Book, 1869, over twice as long as either Paradise Lost or the Idylls of the King, is thought by many to be his best, as it is certainly his most ambitious, work; but though lighted by golden shafts of poetry the wood is hard at times to see for the trees, so confused, indiscriminate, and repetitious are the details. The Balaustion's Adventure, 1871, is noteworthy as a delightful rendering of a noble Greek tragedy.

1871-1889. The latter portion of Browning's life was even more busily employed than his earlier years. As he grew older, his poems became, unfortunately, more and more abstruse, his style more and more obscure. We could well spare many of his later poems, although the very last, Assolando, written when the poet was over seventy-five years of age, contains some lyrics equal to those of his best days. Browning died at Venice in 1889, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

That much of Browning's poetry is difficult cannot be denied. Still some of the poems are much easier to understand than others; and if they are read in such an order as takes this into account, a comprehension of the peculiarities of their author's style is much more easily acquired. The short poems included in this volume are among the simpler of his productions. At a later period the student may well supplement them by Pippa Passes, The Blot i the 'Scutcheon, Paracelsus, Fra Lippo Lippi, Caliban on Setebos, The Death in the Desert, Saul, Ferishtah's Fancies, and many another.

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