condemns unrimed lyrics and English hexameters; it criticises with just severity Arnold's limited appreciation of the great French poets. Birrell: Res Judicate; Matthew Arnold. For popular reading, a pleasant résumé of Arnold as poet, theologian and critic. I-30. cotes = THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY. sheep-folds. The line in which this word occurs is evidently a reminiscence of Comus, 344: The folded flocks, penned in their wattled cotes. cruse. For cross; recross: infinitives depending upon seen. the story with which this word is commonly associated, see I. Kings xvii. 8-16. Oxford's towers. Though a severe critic of the religious faith which Oxford represents, Mr. Arnold never freed himself 1 6 nor wished to free himself - from the spell which Oxford must exercise over poetic minds. 'Beautiful city!' he writes; SO venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! 'There are our young barbarians, all at play! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?- nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him; — the bondage of was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine?' 31-70. Glanvil. 'There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his 1 Preface to the Essays in Criticism, First Series. carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others; that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.'. Glanvil's Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661. Mr. 71-130. Mr. Arnold's theory of an ethical standard as the best test for poetry receives no help from his practice in these lines. Courthope is quick to see this, and pertinently questions: 16 will Mr. Arnold ever persuade any reader of average sensibility that what ought to be enjoyed in the Scholar-Gipsy is rather the moral of the poem, than the beautiful and affecting images of the Oxfordshire landscape with which the poet has surrounded the story? Never!' Christ-Church (129): the largest college of the University. The chapel of Christ-Church is also the cathedral of the diocese of Oxford. 131-140. yew-tree. The yew is commonly planted in English grave-yards. It grows slowly, lives long, and has thick dark foliage. With this line compare Wordsworth's splendid poem, Yew-Trees, no portion of which can be torn from its context without irreparable loss. thor of Obermann. 141-170. This note of lassitude is struck often- perhaps too often - in Arnold's poems. See the Stanzas in Memory of the AuFor the author's less desponding mood, see his teen (147) = grief, sorrow; from the Old EngLine 165 Which many attempts and many Rugby Chapel. lish 'teóna' injury. failures bring. = 171-180. it, in line 180, refers to spark from heaven in line 171. 181-190. This seems to fit Carlyle as well as any one, but it is probably intended for a type rather than for an individual. In vain he thus attempts her mind to move 1 The Liberal Movement in English Literature, Essay I. Disdainfully she looked, then turning round For the entire episode, see Æneid vi. 450–476. (Dryden's Translation.) 231-250. Notice the force of this elaborate and exquisitely sustained image; how the mind is carried back from these turbid days of sick unrest to the clear dawn of a fresh and healthy civiliza tion. For another example of a poem that closes with a figure not less beautiful and not less ennobling, see Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. THE FORSAKEN MERMAN. The title of this poem inevitably brings to mind Tennyson's two poems, The Merman and The Mermaid. A comparison will show that, in this instance at least, the Oxford poet has touched his subject not less melodiously and with finer and deeper feeling. - Margaret will not listen to her Children's voices wild with pain; dearer to her is the selfish desire to save her own soul than is the light in the eyes of her little Mermaiden, dearer than the love of the king of the sea who yearns for her with sorrow-laden heart. Here is there an infinite tenderness and an infinite tragedy. ---- THE father of Robert Browning was a clerk in the Bank of England whose ear was attuned to other melodies than the chink of gold upon the counter: the companions of his leisure hours were Horace, Anacreon and the Talmud. The poet was born in London in 1812. Shelley and Keats first stirred the singing spirit within him; their influence is easily perceptible in Pauline (1833). In Paracelsus (1835) he found a congenial subject, the History of a Soul: upon this theme he constructed the first in his long series of psychological epics. For Macready he wrote his first play, Strafford (1837), followed in the next eight years by six other plays. The devotees of Browning assure us that on the rare occasions when any of these plays have been acted, they have succeeded. Is it so? Why then so rare ?—In the preface to Sordello, Browning clearly states his poetic belief: 'My stress lay on the incidents the development of a soul: little else is worth study.' Mrs. Carlyle read this poem (?) and declared herself unable to make out whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book; other readers not less intelligent, had even more disastrous experiences. The 21,116 lines (to be exact) in that Realistic Romance of the Police Court, The Ring and The Book, argue an astonishing perseverance in both author and reader, but for the few and evil days allotted man upon this earth, most people will prefer the lyrics in Pippa Passes and the incomparable portraits in Men and Women (1855) and in Dramatis Personae (1864). In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett and from that time until her death (1861) resided principally in Italy. The poems of these fifteen years are full of rich Italian coloring. During the last twentyfive years of his life Browning wrote a large amount of religious and metaphysical verse, but very little poetry, save when he rendered into English the Alkestis of Euripides and the Agamemnon of Eschylus. To compensate him for the decline of his poetic faculty, he enjoyed perfect health, an easy fortune, unbounded faith in God, Immortality and Humanity, and the worship of the appreciative and the undiscriminating banded together in the Browning Society. He died in Venice in 1889 and was duly honored with a grave in Westminster Abbey. BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. The innumerable magazine articles that appeared at Browning's death will be found classified in Poole's Index for 1890. Sharp's Life of Robert Browning (Gt. Wr.) is written by one who knew the poet well: while it has the charm of a story told by an eye-witness and a disciple, free from that hero-worship which makes so much Browning-talk a weariness is yet to the flesh. The Life and Letters of Robert Browning, by Mrs. Southerland Orr, indulges in much personalia, and contains some interesting remarks by Browning on his own works. CRITICISM. - The world of Browning Criticism is so wide that any exploration of it in these Notes would be quite impossible. All that can here be done is to indicate some safe guides for those who would climb its sublimities, descend into its abysses, and skirt around its banalities. F. Mary Wilson: A Primer of Browning. Contains a brief account of the life of the poet, of the characteristics of his poetry, and a series of simple introductions to the poems. W. J. Alexander: Introduction to the Poetry of Browning. Somewhat more advanced in thought and style than the foregoing: contains a statement of the scope of Browning's philosophy, with careful interpretation of a few of the principal poems. G. W. Cooke: A Guide Book to the Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning. Contains, among other things, (1) a carefully selected and (necessarily) short Bibliography of the Best Things said of Browning; (2) mention of the dates, places, and circumstances under which the poems were written; (3) sources of the poems; (4) Browning's own explanations of his poems; (5) explanations of many historical, biographical, and artistic allusions; (6) descriptions of the principal characters in Browning's poems; (7) accounts of the stage presentation of such dramas as have been acted. Edward Berdoe: The Browning Cyclopædia. An exhaustive Dictionary of the sources of the poems and of the historical and literary material and allusions necessary to an understanding of them. Contains also a Bibliography (much inferior to that in Cooke) and a Table of Contents of the publications of the Browning Society. A TRANSCRIPT FROM EURIPIDES. The full title of the poem from which this extract is taken is Balaustion's Adventure, Including a Transcript from Euripides. The scene is laid in the year 413 B.C., when the inhabitants of Rhodes determined to transfer their allegiance from Athens to Sparta. Balaustion (Wild-pomegranate-flower), a maiden of Kameiros in Rhodes, was so loyal to the Athenian tradition, that she persuaded her family to fly with her to Athens. Driven out of their course by a storm, they were chased by a pirate to the entrance of the port of Syracuse. The hostile Syracusans, cherishing bitter memories of the recent Athenian expedition against their city, refused harborage to the vessel carrying Balaustion and her friends; in despair, they were about to turn and face death from the pirate, when the Syracusans demanded if any on board could recite verses from Euripides. Balaustion knew the Alkestis almost by heart: We landed; the whole city, soon astir Just as I saw it; what the actors said, |