 Chapter 1 of Days with Great Poets. Days with Great Poets. About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665, when the sun was not yet shining upon his windows facing the artillery fields, and the autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves. John Milton awoke with his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstentious mode of life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose and proceeded to dress with the help of his man-servant green. However, although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partially crippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright and blue, as they had always been to outward seeming, were both stone-blind. Milton still retained much of that personal comeliness which had won him at Cambridge, the nickname of Lady of Christ College. His original red and white had now become a uniform pallor. His thick, light-brown hair parted at the top, and curling richly on his shoulders, no close-cropped roundhead this, was beginning to fade towards grey. But his features were noble and symmetrical. He was well-built and well-proportioned. He was justified in priding himself upon a personal appearance which he had never neglected or despised. In his own words he was neither large nor small, at no time had he been considered ugly, and in his youth with a sword by his side he had never feared the bravest. Such was the man who now, neatly dressed in black, was led into his study upon the same floor as his bedroom. A small chamber hung with rusty green, and there seated in a large old elbow chair, received the morning salutations of his three daughters. One after another they entered the room, and each bestowed a characteristic greeting upon her father. Anne, the eldest, a handsome girl of twenty, was lame, and had a slight impediment in her speech. She bade him good morning with a stammering carelessness, inquired casually as to his night's rest, and stared out of window, palpably bored at the commencement of another monotonous, irksome day. Mary, the second, dark, impetuous, and impatient, was in a state of small during rebellion. She addressed him in a tone of almost insolent moxivility. He must needs have been deaf as well as blind, not to detect the unfealial dislike in her words. Ten-year-old Deborah, the most affectionate of the three, ventured to kiss her father, even to stroke the long, beautiful hair, and to retie the tassels of his collar. Mary will read to me this morning, said Milton, gravely inclining his head in acknowledgment of Deborah's attentions. The dark girl, with a mutiny strug of her shoulders, sat down and began to read aloud, in a hard, uninterested voice, out of the great, leather-bound Hebrew Old Testament, which lay upon the table. And not one single sentence did she understand, not one word of what she was reading. John Milton's theories of education, which he had expounded at length in pamphlets, were a curious blend of the practical and the ideal. Justly in advance of his time, in his demand for a practical training, he had evolved that fine definition, which has never been improved upon. I call it complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both private and public, of peace and war. But he made no allowances for slowness or stupidity. All his schemes were based upon the existence of scholars equally gifted with himself, and he entirely left out of all calculations, much as a Mohammedan might, that complex organism, the female mind. He wished it when must conjecture, to remain a blank. So his daughters had received no systematic schooling, only some sort of home instruction from a governess. And he had himself trained them to read aloud in five or six languages, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and even Syriac, in total ignorance of the meaning. One tongue, observed Milton brusquely, almost brutally, is enough for any woman. Mary read on, steadily, stallingly, sullenly, for a full hour. The others had left the room and were busy upon household tasks. At the conclusion of two hours, leave me, commanded Milton. I would be alone now for contemplation. And Mary willingly escaped to breakfast. The great poet reclined in his chair, wrapped in such solemn and melancholy meditation, as might have served as the model for his own pinciroso. A severe composure suffused his fine features. A serious sadness looked out of his unclouded eyes. His entire expression was that of English intrepidity, mixed with unutterable sorrow, for Milton was a bitterly disappointed man. It was not merely his comparative poverty, because the restoration, besides depriving him of his post as Latin or foreign secretary to the Commonwealth Council of State, had reduced his means from various sources almost to vanishing point. Nor was his melancholy mainly the result of his affliction, that he had deliberately incurred, and was as deliberately enduring. Constant headaches, late study, and perpetual recourse to one nostrum after another, had eventuated in the certainty of total blindness if he persisted in his mode of work. The choice lay before me between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight, and I therefore concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I had to enjoy in doing this the greatest service to the common wheel that it was in my power to render. No, it was not a personal matter which could sadden John Milton to the very roots of his stern, ambitious, courageous soul. It was the contravention of all that he held dear in life, the frustration as he conceived it, of that liberty which was his very heart's blood by the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. He had resolved, in his own words, to transfer into the struggle for liberty, all my genius and all the strength of my industry. It appeared that he had flung away both in vain. The Stuart monarchy to him lay monstrously black, overshadowing all the land, like his own conception of Satan. The restoration was not merely the political defeat of his party, it was the total defeat of the principles, of the religious and social ideals with which Milton's life was bound up. He had always stood aloof from the other salient men of the time. Of Cromwell he had practically no personal knowledge, with the bulk of the Presbyterians he was openly at enmity. Shut away behind a barrier of his own ideas, he did not care to associate with men of less lofty intellectual standing, but now he was even more isolated. Since the downfall of the Puritan regime, he of necessity stood alone and became the party himself. And he presented in his Samson agonisties the intensest utterance of the most intensive English poets, the agonized cry of the beaten party, condensed into the expression of one unflinching and heroic soul. Upon the mysterious and inscrutable decrees of Providence, which had laid in the dust what seemed to him the very cause of God, Milton sat and pondered, in a despondency so profound, a disappointment so poignant, that his own great lines had sought in vain to voice it. I feel my genial spirit's droop, my hopes all flat, nature within me seems in all her functions weary of herself, my race of glory run and my race of shame, and I shall shortly be with them that rest, Samson agonisties. Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair, and an outlet was now open to him at last which for eighteen years he had forgotten, the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared explore Saint Dante, and with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was measuring himself, man to man. He was able above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting troubles to weigh his spread wings at leisure to behold far off the ephemeral heaven, extended wide in circuit, undetermined square or round, with opal towers and battlements adorned of living sapphire, once his native seat. Paradise lost. That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, first to his preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had thrown the whole weight of his mind. And secondly, to the effect of his own firm resolve that the great epic which he had always secretly intended should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers. The apathesis of all that was worthiest in him, the full fruit of his strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never surpassed in its terceness and truth, that true poetry must be simple, sensuous, impassioned, words which might serve as the text and touchstone of art. And long it was not after when he was confirmed in this opinion that he who would not be frustrated of his hopes to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem. For poetry to John Milton was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal, in his hand the thing became a trumpet, apt to seraphic usages and the rallying of celestial cohorts. Therefore when he ceased to touch the tender stops of various quills that trembled into silence and licitice, it was not as one discomfited of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfillment. The woodnotes wild of Comus, the exquisitely stipled genre painting of Allegro and Pinciroso, were mere childish attempts compared with that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the fruition of his genius. And now having become a man through mental and physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon and had at last undertaken the one subject most congenial to his taste and most suitable to his style and diction. Paradise Lost was the triumphant offspring of his brain. It had sprung like light from chaos, out of the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat. A rose the poem which was to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus. You make many inquiries as to what I am about. He wrote in bygone years to his old school fellow Charles Diodati. What I am thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality? Forgive the word. I only whisper it in your ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight. Nor was this the idle boasting of an egotist, the empty imagination of a dreamer. Consumed by the desire of honor and repute and universal fame seated, as he put it, in the breast of every true scholar, Milton, sedulously and assiduously, had prepared himself for the achievement of his aims. That he should strictly meditate the thankless muse required a certain self-control. To scorn delights and live laborious days is not the customary delight of a handsome young scholar, expert in swordsmanship as in languages. To equip himself for his self-chosen task, still a misty, undefined prospect in the remotest future required strenuous and disciplined study and necessitated his foregoing too frequently the scenes of rustic happiness, which he had pictured so charmingly in the legro. Absenting himself from the groves and ruins and the beloved village elms where I too, among rural scenes and remotest forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity. And this, though Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a born nature-lover, was in itself a sufficient deprivation and sacrifice. For beauty appealed to him with the most earnest insistence, and the purer and the more abstract form it took, the more urgent was that appeal. God hasn't stilled into me at all events, he declared, of the hemmed love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor as Cersei said to have sought Persephone, as I am want day and night, to search for the idea of the beautiful through all forms and faces of things, and to follow it, leading me on with certain assured traces. Yet not alone among forms and faces was he predestined to discover that absolute beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound worlds as well as sight worlds, was faded to remain with him an incalculable consolation when forms and faces could be no more seen, and into the vocabulary of Paradise Lost, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal effects, and the magic of great names that reverberate through open vowels. Into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound. As the wakeful bird sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid, tunes her nocturnal note. Paradise Lost remains, as has been observed, the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry, the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great, and the wise of all past time, equally magnificent in verbiage whether describing man, or God, or the arch enemy visiting this pendant world, when thither full fraught with mischievous revenge accursed, and in accursed hour he lives. At seven o'clock the body-servant Green re-entered, followed by Mrs. Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher their maid-servant, bringing in his breakfast, a light slight-re-past. Mrs. Milton, nay, Elizabeth, mensual of Natwitch, was a comely, attractive, capable woman of a peaceful and agreeable humor so far at least as her husband was concerned, for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not hitting it off with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and calm common sense were in striking contrast alike with the dark beauty and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of Catherine Woodstock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man and wife, he forgot only she forgot in him, which it has been said condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and to her maker. She managed very adroitly to convey an impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord, and at least she was entirely adequate as a housewife. Had Milton ever encountered that not impossible she, whom he portrayed in his ideal Eve, or was this latter a mere visionary abstract of great qualities to show us how divine a thing a woman may be made. Neither of his three wives, nor yet that very handsome and witty gentle woman, Miss Davis, to whom he had at one time paid his addresses, conformed to this description. One cannot even conjecture that it was a pisticio of their respective fine attributes. Mrs. Milton, third of that name, as she bustled and busied herself about the study, was by no means a new Eve. She regarded her husband's ambitions and achievements with that good nature tolerance so characteristic of the materially minded. Only genius can appreciate genius, and the man who shut himself away from his confrers in scholarship and literature was not likely to unbosom himself to his housewifely, provincial wife. The man's servant Green, breakfast being concluded, read aloud, or wrote to his master's dictation for some hours. This had formally been the girl's daily office, but they were revolting more and more. The whole position was becoming untenable, for they resented the presence of their stepmother as much as they disliked the duties which fettered them to their father's side and forced them to parrot-like feudal drudgery in unknown tongues. Today, however, Green was relieved of the task for which he was manifestly but ill-fitted by the entrance of Milton's two favorite visitors. No celebrity ever had fewer friends. From all who might have called themselves such, he was separated by hostility of party, rancor of sect, or by that almost repellent isolation of character to which reference has already been made. When, at the highest point of his political fame, he had almost boasted of this splendid isolation, I have very little acquaintance with those in power in as much as I keep very much to my own house and prefer to do so. At heart a Republican beyond the conception of any roundhead, cherishing a form of religion so recondite that it could be classed under no heading since he ignored both public worship and family prayer, having given offence to all and sundry by his outspoken theories upon divorce and divine right, Milton presented to most men a dangerous personality. And most of all now when the wits of the Restoration Ruse could be sharpened upon him and when the heathen, as he considered them, roistered and ruffled it through the city that had returned to her wallowing in the mire. Yet those who had sat at his feet as pupils retained a singular affection for their former master. For all such young folk as adopted the disciples attitude, the stern self-contained man had a very soft spot in his heart. With such he was not only instructive but genial, almost cheerful, and they alone could move him to the only utterances which were neither solemn, serious or sad. Chief among his former pupils were those who now made entrance, Henry Lawrence and Syriac Skinner. It may be guessed, therefore, with that pleasure the blind poet received these loyal and affectionate men. His pensive face became transformed with interest and animation. As with gentle courtesy and unfaigned delight, he turned his sightless eyes from one speaker to another. Upon every subject he had a ready flow of easy colloquial conversation seasoned with shrewd satire. His deep and musical voice ran up and down the whole gamut of worthy topics. Sometimes he fell into the stately, almost stilt addiction of his great prose pamphlets. Sometimes he spoke in racy English vernacular. Sometimes warming to his subject he assumed an almost fiery eloquence. But when, at twelve o'clock, he was escorted downstairs to dinner in the parlor, the metamorphosis was complete. He was no longer the brooding introspective man of the early morning, but of one extreme pleasant in his conversation, almost merry in society so congenial, the life of the party, abstinent but not acetic, having a healthy human enjoyment of the dishes set before him. These are the victual's most my liking, he observed as he ate. Being sensible and with all of no great cost, for that which is of great rarity or richness, and must be procured with care or toil hath no temptation for me. I always do my best, Mr. Milton, replied his wife, that you shall be well satisfied and me thinks today I have hit your taste right fairly. God her mercy, Betty! said Milton, regarding her with an air of kindly tolerance. I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit while I live, and when I die thou knowest I have left thee all. Here Anne, Mary, and Deborah sat up very straight, it looks a fury and astonishment towards their stepmother. Talk not a dying in God's name, man! responded the embarrassed Betty. We have enough to do to make shift to live nowadays, and hastily pressed her good but simple fare, homely Cheshire dishes well prepared upon the two guests. Such a many alone foreign folk have visited our poor home these latter days. Time hath failed me for my cheesecakes, and of the haather cakes I made two days ago. Why not a crumb is left, but eat my masters, eat and drink? Though these be but country victuals none of your court kickshaws, I warrant you there are fresh and savoury. I would commend you now to this rabbit pie. Peace, Betty, peace! The woman prats her pies like a pie, magpie herself. What sayeth the apostle? I suffer not a woman to speak in the presence of the man's authority. Had done, good Betty, with thy harping on kitchen matters, let thy savoury messes be companioned with a sauce of silence. Temporary eclipses of Mrs. Milton, obvious in malevolent satisfaction of Anne and Mary, desperately suppressed inclination to giggle on the part of little Deborah, and a desire to cover up the situation with talk as regards kindly Lawrence and courtly Skinner. The foreign folk were no new thing. Milton's fame indeed was European. As a prose writer and pamphleteer, be it understood not, as a poet, had he not refuted and put to shame the most erudite scholars of the day. Foreign savants of note, therefore, who might be visiting London, were desirous to acquaint themselves with so powerful a personality. And the little house in the artillery walk was the rendezvous for many distinguished persons. They found their host no such recluse as town talk might have led them to imagine, but one ready and willing to converse with them, and English gentleman to the backbone, a scholar and artist to the fingertips. His continental tours and Italian sojourns had made him less insular than most of his compatriots, and his vast range of reading had imparted a certain cosmopolitanism to his exceedingly individual lines of thought. The visitors found him moreover employed upon a work so important and of a theme so lofty as might well give them pause considering the circumstances under which it was being accomplished. And whatever their particular religious tenets might be, they could not fail to admire the magnitude of his aim in composing Paradise Lost. To justify the ways of God. To men. Dinner dispatched, the master of the house led by his devoted friends, went out into the garden. A garden was the desideratum of his existence, and he had never been without one. For in 17th century London, every house was fitly furnished in this respect. Here Milton was in the habit of taking that steady exercise, which was a sinquanon to a sedentary and gouty man. He made a point of walking up and down out of doors in cold weather for three or four hours at a time, sometimes composing his majestic lines, sometimes merely meditating. When weary with walking he would come in and either dictate what he had conceived or would take further exercise in a swing. In really warm weather he received his visitors sitting outside his house door, wrapped in a coarse grey overcoat, gazing out upon the fields of the artillery ground with those unblemished eyes that belied their own clear beauty. The only point, as he said, in which I am against my will a hypocrite. Today being cool and cloudy allowed but intermittent periods in the open air. Milton Lawrence and Skinner paced slowly to and fro deep and enthralling intercourse until three o'clock when the rain and Thomas Elwood arrived simultaneously, and the other two men departed to the respective avocations. Thomas Elwood was a young Quaker of twenty-three, who was acting in some degree as honorary secretary to Milton. Himself of a defective education and having been expelled from his father's house on account of his religious opinions, he was only too glad to take lodging in the neighbourhood, and by reading aloud to Milton every afternoon, acquire an amount of information and a variety of learning which by no other means could have been obtained. And there was also a tacit sympathy between them in so much as Milton was more and more as life went on inclining towards the Quaker tenants. In those days, being in tendu, veered with horror and detestation by the majority of men. Having re-entered the house, we will not read as yet, Tom. Milton said, I desire greatly to comfort myself with sweet sounds, bring me into the withdrawing room and place me at the organ. A little bellows blowing will not hurt thee, Tom, and let my wife attend me that she may have song with all. She had the good voice, though a poor ear. Seated at his beloved instrument, the blind man steeped himself in the principal pleasure that was left him. Milton's father, a stout Puritan, though he might be, was an accomplished musician and had taught his son to play in early youth. The austerities of a narrow dogma had not been able to crush out the inveterate artistry of either father or son, and now the devotee of divinest melancholy was able to solace himself with such lovely concords, such anthems clear, as may with sweetness through my ear dissolve me into ecstasies and bring all heaven before my eyes. Sometimes he sang as he played, sometimes Mrs. Milton with her clear and emotional notes sang to his accompaniment. Presently, that Elwood should not be wearied in his blowing, he quitted the organ for the bass file, on which he was no mean performer. At the conclusion of his playing he sat with a wrapped, transfigured face, such as might have well called forth the Italians in Commium thirty years before, if thy piety were equal to thy understanding, figure, eloquence, beauty, and manners, verily thou wouldst not be an angle but an angel. And now, good Tom, quote Milton to the young man, let us to work. The day moves on apace, and they went upstairs to study. Before we read I have some forty lines to set down, continue the poet. All day they have been knocking for admission, and with that last music they made entrance. Needs must I house them now in ink and paper. I am instant at thy bidding friend, and Elwood seated himself with dutiful alacrity at the table. Milton, placing himself obliquely a thwart as elbow chair, with one leg thrown across the arm, dictated forty lines almost in a breath. They burst from him, as it would seem, in a stream no longer to be restrained. Gently, gently good sir, exclaimed Elwood, slow witted and slow fingered I may be, but I cannot keep pace with thee. A grim smile hovered over Milton's lips. Out of practice, Tom, he replied indulgently, It is a long while since I require this service at thy hands, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox as I have told thee my muse lies dumb, and silent as the moon, when she deserts the night, hid in her vacant interlunal cave. But now the winter is over past, the singing of birds is heard in our land, and she too awakes and sings. With the vernal equinox my thoughts now flow free as helicon. Then with slow and deliberate diction, he repeated the lines once more, and having had them read aloud to him he compressed, condensed, concentrated every thought and phrase, and reduced them to twenty. There is more to come, queried Elwood, his quill poised ready to write. No more, not one word more at present, replied Milton sighing as though somewhat exhausted. No more, not one word more at present, replied Milton sighing as though somewhat exhausted. His inspiration was entirely intermittent, and sometimes he would lie awake at night, trying but without success to complete one single line to his liking. They pleased me not wholly these lines, he continued, much remains to be done before I set them down to be changed no more. Not every man would say so, replied Elwood, the learning and the erudition whereof these few lines alone give witness would supply many with just cause for boasting throughout a lifetime. Milton shook his head. Pomp, an ostentation of reading, he remarks, is admired among the vulgar. But in matters of religion he is learnedadest, who is plainest. Yet Mr. Milton these hath the reputation of such scope and range of wisdom as the greatest scholar in Europe might fitly envy. To me I confess in my poor, unlettered ignorance. It is not conceivable in what manner have they acquired so great and witty powers. I gathered them not of my own strength, said Milton. But they were mine for the asking and endeavor, and any man may obtain them in the like fashion. I ceased not, nor will cease, in devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added select reading, and steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs. And now, good Tom, to reading. Elwood took up the Latin author which he was at present engaged upon, and proceeded with it. Whenever the preternaturally acute ear of Milton detected, by Elwood's intonation, that he did not quite understand a sentence. He would stop him, examine him, and elucidate the difficult passage. By and by you will find saying very similar to that, he observed, in Virgil his fourth echelon, fetched the book down, and let us hear what the mantu and hath written therein. Elwood searched along the bookshelves but to no avail. Friend, said he, Virgil is no longer here. Yesterday I handled it myself. Today it is vanished. So is the Lucretius. A frown contracted Milton's splendid brow. These women kind, he muttered like a rambling thunder. They are verily the root of all evil. Bid me hither my wife and daughters and Mary Fisher the maid moreover. The first and the last being summoned, arrived in all haste, and disavowed any knowledge of the missing books. Anne and Mary Milton it appeared, were gone out marketing, but little Dabra being strictly cross-examined, confessed that she had seen sister Anne carrying books away from the study last night when her father had retired. The wherewithal for marketing was easily obtained in this way. Milton groaned in his ineptitude. How have I deserved this treacherous dealing at their hands? Lord, how long shall I be dark and light exposed to daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong within doors and without, still as a fool in power of others never in my own? Samson agonisties. Here, and by a happy coincidence, there was a sturdy hammering heard at the front door, and Andrew Marvel was ushered in. I am out of my due time, said he, for it is not yet gone six. Six to eight p.m. being Milton's best time for receiving visitors. Yet to so old an offender as myself, John, I thought thou wilt make an exception. Marvel was the one friend of his own type in standing, the one constant and inalienable comrade upon whose fidelity the blind man could rely. He had formally been Milton's colleague under the Cromwellian government, and was his kindred spirit so far as anyone could claim such relationship with the frozen heights of the poet's intellect. With him, during the next two hours, the learned physician Paget joining them and Elwood listening in respectful silence to the converse of the mighty men, Milton forgot the vexations of his ill-assorted household. He assured his friends that he was truly far happier now in poverty, infirmity and neglect, occupied solely upon his long-projected masterpiece, than during the eighteen years of his manly prime, when his mind and pen were solely employed upon the controversies which he now professed to hate. Never again, he declared, shall earthly ambitions interrupt and thwart me. Never now shall I endure to leave a calm and pleasing solitaryness fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes. Cast out of my fool's paradise of fame not worth the finding, shall not I and the hope whereon too I am wedded explore some fair and fragrant track of outer Eden? Even as I have set forth the banishment of our first parents, some natural tears they dropped but wiped them soon. The world was as before them where to choose their place of rest and providence their guide. They, hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. Paradise lost. The four men now, at eight o'clock, went down to supper. A very spare and frugal meal so far as Milton was concerned, for all he consumed was a very light wine, a piece of bread, and a few olives. His flow of speech was still unwirried, his spirit as near vivacity as he could approach it when his friends rose to take leave. The night is yet young, said Paget, but I know that nowadays you seek rest early. That is so, Milton assented. Since I am no longer able to study a night and sense the best of secretaries, he smiled towards Elwood. Must needs grow weary of a blind man's whims. I were as well in bed as Outfit, moreover I can compose my lines in better advantage lying down. One thing at least you were spared, Marvel told him, darkness cannot discmode your doings, nor doth your eye-weariness of the midnight student afflict you with grevious brow-akes in the morning as of old. Milton answered, my darkness hitherto by the singular kindness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear than the deathly one. What should prevent me from resting in the belief that I site lies not in eyes alone, but enough for all purposes in God's leading and providence, and to you now I bid farewell with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were lincious himself or keenness of sight? In a short space of time he was at rest in his darkened room, not as yet drowsy, but revolving great phrases and deriving a greater joy from these lonely silences of the night watches than could ever accrue to him by day. Gradually the aisles and bowers of the paradise, which his mental eye enjoyed, took upon them more and more the lovely similitude of rural England, the greennesses and sweetnesses of his childhood's home, the Buckinghamshire village, were fused into the eternal spring of the primeval garden, and from the glassy, cool, translucent wave of the river that ran through Eden, by the rushy, fringed bank, where grows the Willow and the Ossier bank, a rose Sabrina attended by water-nymphs as once he saw her rise in comas and sang the stightless bard to sleep with the plashing of water music. End of Chapter 1 Recording by Capricia Page A Day With Colourage In a beautiful part of beautiful Somerset, where the soft orchard and cottage scenery is dimpled between blue hill slopes, where meadows and woods and translucent streams compete with each other in charm, in the lovely region of the Quantuck Hills lies the quiet little market village of Nether Stoey. About sunrise on a May morning of 1790 a young man awoke in a little wayside cottage there, and resolutely thrusting back his natural inclination to indolence, rose and dressed, and set himself to the performance of such humble duties as devolve upon a very poor householder with a wife and child. Samuel Taylor Colourage was in his 26th year. Pale, stoutish, black-haired, not an immediately attractive man, his face, according to himself, bore evidence of great sloth and great, indeed almost idiotic, good nature, a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby, and expressive, chiefly of inexpressions, with a wide, thick-lipped, always-open mouth and small feeble nose, yet it was capable of being roused on occasion to something akin to nobility and beauty, and redeemed by the animation of his full grey eyes. It was a face, in short, to match his general appearance, which he dismissed as that of indolence capable of energies, and Carlisle characterized as weakness under possibility of strength, for this was a man who was consistent in his faults as in his virtues, always conscious of power, but also conscious of want of will to use his power. And it was therefore with redoubled vigor, this particular morning, that he put on a spurt and threw unusual force into his chopping of firewood, his somewhat clumsy attempts to clean up the cottage with its poor accommodation and few utensils, and his valiant if ineffectual endeavours to have the fire lighted and the modest meal enroute, whilst his wife, up the ladder stairs, attended to herself and the baby. Between whiles he cast admiring glances of the most ardent delight at his garden of an acre and a half, and its glowing mass of apple-bloom, and at all the luscious greeneries of the May World without. These glimpses into the opening paradise went far to compensate him for his determination to keep no servant, but to be made of all work and nurse if need be himself. They ministered to that spirit of contemplation which was the ruling spirit of his life. They were the very texture of dreams. Soon Sarah Coleridge descended and took her share in the domestic life. She found fault after a quick vivacious fashion with her husband's futile efforts and perplexities. She was the typical incompatible wife for a poet, not only socially speaking his inferior but naturally incapable of sharing his dreams or sympathising with his studies. Yet she was an honest and good-hearted woman, and perhaps now and then she felt a certain lack of human warmth in the warmest of human friendships, for there was a tepid quality about Coleridge's affections and his expression of them. Fire and fervour were utterly unknown to his pensive, tender, gentle methods. He had no intensity or passion either in love or friendship. His feelings were steadfast and of an unblemished purity, yet the very fact that they knew neither ebb nor flow, but were always maintained at a calm level, might jar upon the inscrutable mind of a woman. One might almost imagine, as Sarah bustled to and fro and scolded her husband with the volubility of a squirrel, that she was anxious to urge him, if for but one moment, out of his invariable laissez-faire of amiability. But no, he remained as placid, as good-tempered, as cheerful as ever. Presently another member of the household appeared. Coleridge's pupil and paying guest, worth a precious seventy pounds a year to the lean ex-checker, one Charles Lloyd. He was a young bank clerk, who had poetry on the brain and found himself ill-attuned to the drudgery of keeping his father's ledgers. He was also subject to epileptic fits, which did not conduce either to poetizing or banking with success. But he expected to learn from Coleridge, it is hard to say. Certainly his curriculum included a good many hardships, makeshifts and contra-tents, to which he had never looked forward. His instructor, however, had not deceived him as to the hybrid nature of his present occupation. Coleridge had deliberately set himself down at Nether Stoey to be his friend Tom Poole and to support himself by a mixture of literature and husbandry. He proposed to make some sixty pounds per annum by reviewing and magazine work. He had an offer from Cottle, the Bristol publisher, for as much verse as he chose to write, at terms working out somewhere near four pence a line. And for the rest I would rather, he declared, be an expert self-maintaining gardener Milton, for I could not unite both. I mean to raise the vegetables for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature. And what, inquired Charles Lamb after hearing of this desperate undertaking, what does your worship know about farming? But Coleridge was not to be discouraged. He allowed his natural unfitness for the task. I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and I have read almost everything. I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times or of the puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the historic writers, but I do not like history. Metaphysics and poetry and facts of the mind, that is, accounts of all the strange fantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers, from Toth the Egyptian to Taylor the English Pagan, are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge I am a so-so chemist and I love chemistry, all else is blank. But I will be, please God, a horticulturist and farmer. What is to be done against such impregnable obstinacy? Coleridge's friends let him gang his aingate, and when Moway could dare threatened to drive him to despair, they came to the rescue with timely checks. Meanwhile, Tom Poole strove hard to educate him in potato culture, and Charles Lloyd paid down his twenty-five shillings a week. But today Charles Lloyd was looking ill at ease and sulky. He threw out hints about the general discomfort of things, vague allusions to other people being made much of and, himself, contempt. He was in a disagreeable mood and evidently dying to pick a quarrel. Half through breakfast he took ombridge at some inoffensive jest and flung himself out of the room. What can ale the lad? asked Coleridge in amazement. I suppose he has another fit coming on, observed the practical Sarah. I don't like sour looks and bitter words in our peaceful home, said the poet, rumbling his heavy black locks with a distracted air. God forbid that he should take it into his head to go away, said Sarah, and she got up with a very grave face and proceeded to clear the breakfast table. Coleridge betook himself to the garden and called over the back hedge to the neighbour for whose companionship he had taken this inefficient little cottage. Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well educated, and a devout student of literature. He discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, the magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects, which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind, which even endears him who is impossible from a worldly standpoint to those of saner and robuster calibre. Coleridge could never be without a friend, without a listener, and a listener was a desideratum to him. This noticeable man with large grey eyes undoubtedly attracted to himself all that was best in other people. His culture allured them, his eloquence held them spellbound, and his voice, that wonderful voice which was to hazlet, a stream of rich, distilled perfumes sank into every fibre of their being. So you cannot be surprised that the faithful, kindly Thomas Poole, already busy in his tanyard, hearing Coleridge calling at the hedge, instantly forsook his proper tasks and hurried to salute his comrade. When he heard of Charles Lloyd's tendency towards mutiny, oh, says Poole, with a great laugh, don't let that discompose you. The young man is consumed by a very common malady, jealousy. And indeed I think he has some cause. Jealousy, repeated Coleridge, rolling his fine eyes wildly, it was a word which had little or no meaning for him. Jealousy of whom? About whom? I do not understand you in the least. Why your fine friends the words worths, of course, Poole told him. Here have you been gadding about with them the whole of this last twelve month, traipsing the hills night and day, and leaving your pupil for sooth to sit at home with madam and master baby, a twiddling his thumbs and scribbling schoolboy verse. You have taken precious little notice of him. And as for your friends, they think him but a poor thing, not worth mention. I say he is a lad of spirit to kick up his heels at last. True, true, I may have neglected him to some extent, murmured Coleridge, with a pained air. But indeed, my good Poole, if you knew what the words worth had been to me, manna in the desert, water in the wilderness, happiness like the alighting of a paradise bird. Quite so, my dear fellow, interrupted the unemotional Poole, but you are not now in the pulpit. Bring yourself down to earth for a moment, for I have but little time to spare this morning, and let us see what are the most crying needs of today in your garden. There is enough to do in a May garden to occupy the most diligent, and as Coleridge raked and hod and thinned out and weeded his vegetable beds, with blistered hands and a back that longed for a hinge in it, he was inclined to wish that Lloyd had come as an agricultural rather than a poetical pupil. From time to time he rested on his tool and assimilated with rapt eye the innumerable surrounding touches of simple beauty. He was a man who, like Wordsworth, interested himself in every little trifle. The delicate details of sight and sound were very dear to him. They had enabled him to become one with nature in an almost literal sense, as he observed with a calm but intense enjoyment such side issues as the one red leaf, the last of its clan that dances as often as dance it can, hanging so light and hanging so high on the topmost twig that looks up at the sky, or the unripe flax went through its half transparent stalks at Eve the level sunshine glitters with green light, or the hornet moon with one bright star within the nether tip, and indeed Coleridge was aware himself of the extraordinary power which was exercised upon him by external and visible things, especially by the magic of scenery. He wrote, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn. A wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me. The further I ascend from animated nature the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death? And he determinately developed in his theory of poetry his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe a few short months before that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, whether the summer clothed the general earth with greenness, or the red breast sit and sing betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, whether the eave drops fall heard only in the traces of the blast, or if the secret ministry of frost shall hang them up in silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon. And he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth on what he termed the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. He had no greater pleasure possible than to steep himself in the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure, he proclaimed, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solitude, we have eyes, yet sea-knot, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. And when his imagination craved some wilder and more romantic outlook than the peaceful village where, beside one friend, beneath the impervious covert of one oak, I've raised a lowly shed and know the names of husband and of father, that imagination could at will supply its wants. His eyes could make pictures when they are shot, and could carry him momentarily, as on some magic carpet, to a dreamland beyond the limitations of mortal experience. The same exquisite and meticulous perception which enabled Coleridge to realize and remember the double sound of rain, the quiet sounds from hidden rills among the heather, the slanting shower of blossoms on the faint gale of departing May, revealed to him how, in Zanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through Cavern's measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round, and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree, and here were forests ancient as the hills and folding sunny spots of greenery. But, oh, that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill thwart a seeden cover, a savage place, as holy and enchanted as air beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover. Five miles meandering with amazing motion, through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the Cavern's measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war. Such, in fact, was the dual capacity of Kolarage's mind such its ability to commingle the actual and the imaginary that whilst he could at one moment paint the gentle English landscape in which he dwelt. Low was our pretty cot, our tallest rose peeped at the chamber window. We could hear at silent noon and eve and early morn the sea's faint murmur. In the open air our myrtles blossomed, and across the porch, thick jasmine's twined, the little landscape round, was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call the valley of seclusion. He was enabled to describe with the verisimilitude of perfect memory the dim sea reaches where now there came both mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold, and ice, mast high, came floating by as green as emerald, and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen, nor shapes of men, nor beasts we can. The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around, it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound. At length did cross an albatross, through the fog it came, as if it had been a Christian soul we hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it near had eat, and round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit, the helmsman steered us through. But now, while the sun poured down hotter and still hotter rays upon the unaccustomed back of Coleridge, he heard the hearty voice of Tom Poole summoning him to the bark-built arbor under the big elm trees. A jug of egg-flip and a delightful chat were awaiting him. The bees were humming round in the lime-tree-bower of the garden, and the deep vibrating voice of the poet, roused to unwonted exhilaration, was presently moved to declaim one of his own magnificent imitations of Schiller, the Visit of the Gods, his recitation rose like a chant in its music and sonority. Never, believe me, appear the immortals, never alone. Scarce had I welcomed the sorrow-beguiler Ayakus, but in came Boy Cupid the Smiler. Lo, Phoebus the Glorious descends from his throne, they advance, they float in, the Olympians all. With divinities fills my terrestrial hall. How shall I yield you due entertainment, celestial choir? Me, rather, bright guests, with your wings of up-boyance, bear aloft to your homes, to your banquets of joyance, that the roofs of Olympus may echo my lyre. Ah, we mount! On their pinions they waft up my soul. Oh, give me the nectar! Oh, fill me the bowl! Indeed one might easily forget all mundane matters upon a day like this, mused the poet, as he became rested and refreshed. It is not a day for doing, Poole, for digging and forking and stooping. It was meant for dreaming, for endless reveries of eternal beauty. That is not likely ever to be my lot, said the matter of fact, Poole, too much to see after. It might be mine, perhaps, did I choose, observed Coleridge, with the abstracted air of one talking in his sleep. Have I ever told you, Poole, of the offer I have had from the Wedgwood Brothers? The China man's son, Poole queried? The same, said Coleridge. They have offered me an annuity for life, of a hundred and forty pounds a year, to prevent my being obliged to abandon poetry and philosophy, as I must do if I take up preaching professionally. It is a vastly fine offer, exclaimed the astonished Poole. On the other hand, continued his friend, the Unitarian Chapel people at Shrewsbury will pay me one hundred and twenty pounds a year to become their preacher, and that means that I give up literary work. I cannot combine both, hitherto, as you know, I have refused to accept any remuneration for my sermons. To be a hireling is against my principles. When I go to Totten or Bridgewater I do it freely. But here are these two proposals, and I know not which to accept. I freely confess to you, Poole, what you probably know already, that I am very seriously worried over money matters, and that I perceive I can never support my family by manual labour. My play, Osorio, which Sheridan requested me to write for Drury Lane, has been rejected. I have no talent, I fear, for the drama. I am too scared after work in an evening to do any reviewing or writing, and now I am threatened by the prospect of Lloyd leaving us. That means the loss of our main income. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed, every mode of life which promised me bread and cheese has been torn away from me. But God remains. This long speech was not without effect upon the kind hearted Poole. Pocketing certain twinges of what in Charles Lloyd he had defined as jealousy, he asked, and what does your friend Mr. Wordsworth say? You are constantly in his company that I should suppose he would be a very fit judge of the best course for you to take. Oh, Wordsworth, well need you ask. Of course he urges me to accept the Wedgewood's generosity and devote myself to poetical work alone. But my mind misgives me. Lest in doing that I should be turning my back upon the service of God. Am I not more efficacious for good as a preacher than as a versifier? Well, I don't know, muttered Poole. We can all read your poems, you see, but we can't all follow you about the West Country to listen to you. We can't track you to chapels at Taunton or Bridgewater or Shrewsbury, however eloquent you may be. Not but what, he added, with a sly twinkle. You do a pretty fairish deal of preaching in private. That's what Lamb said, remarked Coleridge. I asked him if he had ever heard me preach and he said, My dear fellow, I never heard you do anything else. A trifle flippant at times is our good Lamb, but who's this? And he sprang from his seat with unwanted energy. Oh, it's your friends from El Fawxton, said Poole. And with the resigned expression of one relegated to a back seat he picked up the empty flip jug and glasses and returned to his own domain. Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden. A gaunt and Don Quixote-like man in striped pantaloons and a brown, fustian jacket and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth, names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of El Fawxton Manor House, about a mile away among the hills. For nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration, to their example and society he owed as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius, for although the magic and melody of his verse were all his own, that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable altogether beyond price, and that melody, such a soft, floating, witchery of sound as twilight elfens make, when they at eve voyage on gentle gales from fairyland, where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers footless and wild, like birds of paradise, nor paws nor push, hovering on untamed wing, the Eolian harp. Yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to find himself, and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. Three people but one soul, Coleridge had called this ideally united trio of himself and his friends, and as three people with one soul they walked on Seaward Quantuck's heathy hills and had every thought in common. We are off for a long walk this lovely noon, explained Dorothy, and taking our lunch with us. Will you come, Mr. Coleridge? A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sarah, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away he could postpone for the months every work-a-day question which troubled him, and deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire. He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned in collaboration with Wordsworth a great book of man and nature and society to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea, much on the lines of his own strophe from the German. Unperishing youth, thou leapest from forth the cell of thy hidden nativity, never mortal saw the cradle of the strong one, never mortal heard the gathering of his voices, the deep murmured charm of the sun of the rock, that is lisped ever more at his slumberless fountain, there's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil at the shrine of his ceaseless renewing, it embusoms the roses of dawn, it entangles the shafts of the noon, and into the bed of its stillness the moonshine sinks down as in slumber, that the sun of the rock, that the nursing of heaven, may be born in a holy twilight. He had begun the ancient mariner upon a previous walking tour, also as joint composition with another poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising. Nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste. He had undertaken a translation of Violin's Oberon, which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friend's criticism on his newest fragment, Christabel. The bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best. Coleridge's mind was that extremely rara avis intera, which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament, two inherently opposed qualities, his acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, color, and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy, logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature. And where the philosopher, the metaphysician, and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this Anous Mirabilis, of his sojourn in Nether Stoë, he was still allured to the marvelous, the strange, and the supernatural. He sought to disguise his surrender to these fantasies by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural. And the excellence arrived at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real, in this sense, they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. A cold and unproductive soil this, one would suppose, in which to grow the glowing flowers of Christabel, where night itself, peopled with occult alarms, cannot minimize the mingled horror and splendor of Geraldine's first appearance. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high. It covers, but not hides the sky. The moon is behind and at the full. And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray. It is a month before the month of May. And the spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, whom her father loves so well. What makes her in the wood so late? A furlong from the castle gate. She had dreams all yesterday night of her own betrothed night. And she in the midnight wood would pray for the wheel of her lover that's far away. She stole along. She nothing spoke. The size she heaved were soft and low, and not was green upon the oak, but moss and rarest mistletoe. She kneels beneath the huge oak tree and in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, the lovely lady, Christabel. It moaned as near as near can be, but what it is she cannot tell. On the other side it seems to be of the huge broad-breasted old oak tree. There she sees a damsel bright, dressed in a silken robe of white, that shadowy in the moonlight shone, the neck that made the white robe won. Her stately neck and arms were bare, her blue veined feet unsandled were, and wildly glittered here and there the gems entangled in her hair. I guess it was frightful there to see a lady so richly clad as she, beautiful, exceedingly. And a chilly basis these solemnly propounded theories for the gorgeous fabric of the ancient mariner. Originally founded as regards its main outlines upon a dream which occurred to crookshank, a dream of a skeleton ship with figures in it, who could have anticipated such results as that unforgettable scene where the ancient mariner beholdeth a sign in the element far off. The western wave was all aflame, the day was well nigh done, almost upon the western wave rested the broad bright sun, when that strange shape drove suddenly betwixt us and the sun, and straight the sun was flecked with bars, Heaven's mother send us grace, as if through a dungeon great he peered with broad and burning face. Alas! thought I, and my heart beat loud, how fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the sun like restless gossip ears? Are those her ribs through which the sun did peer, as through a great? And is that woman all her crew? Is that a death? And are there two? Is death that woman's mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, her locks were yellow as gold, her skin was as white as leprosy, the nightmare life in death was she, who thicks man's blood with cold, the naked hulk alongside came and the twain were casting dice. The game is done! I've won! I've won! Quoth she and whistles thrice! The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, at one stride comes the dark, with far heard whisper o'er the sea, off shot the spectre bark. We listened and looked sideways up, fear at my heart as at a cop my life blood seemed to sip, the stars were dim and thick the night, the steersman's face by lamp gleamed white, from the sails the dew did drip, till clam above the eastern bar, the hornet moon with one bright star within the nether tip. Or who could have supposed that Wordsworth's subsequent suggestion for the plot of the poem, suppose you represent the Mariner as having killed an albatross on entering the South Sea, and that the holy spirits of these regions take upon themselves to avenge the crime should develop into that magnificent defense of the animal right to live, which in Coleridge's opinion, obtruded a moral sentiment too openly in a work of such pure imagination, the curse of remorse throughout the whole story hangs as heavy on the seamen's soul as does the dead weight of the albatross around his neck, until that mystical moment when he blesses the beauty of the happy living things in the water, God's creatures of the great calm, the moving moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide, softly she was going up and a star or two beside. Her beams be mocked the sultry mane like April whorefrost spread, but where the ship's huge shadow lay the charmant water burnt all way a still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water snakes, they moved in tracks of shining white, and when they reared the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire. Blue, glossy green and velvet black they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. Oh happy living things! No tongue their beauty might declare. A spring of love gushed from my heart and I blessed them unaware. Sure my kind saint took pity on me and I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray. And from my neck so free the albatross fell off and sank like lead into the sea. Side by side the three friends wandered over the May sweet hillsides, dipping into wooded combs, musical with the sound of streams, climbing the heathery slopes, resting here and there upon some glorious crest to drink in all the joy and color of the landscape and to reflect in Coleridge's own words how flowers are lovely, love is flower-like, friendship is a sheltering tree. Each of them young, each of them passionate lovers of nature, each brimming with hopes and equipped with commanding intellect. They formed the three-fold cord with its tonic, dominant, and mediant, of which is born all music. It was nearly eight o'clock when Coleridge parted from the Wordsworths at the gate of Al-Foxton. They were happily tired after some nine hours rambling and a serene joy lit up their faces as of those who have passed through some enchanting experience, who have touched at some oasis of sheer delight. Coleridge tried to frame his thoughts into words as he strode homeward with his loose shambling gate, continually shifting from one side of the path to the other after his notorious corkscrew habit. The notes of the nightingale poignantly sweet echoed to him out of the woods, and he would gladly have lingered to listen, but instead he thought, Farewell, O Warbler, till to-morrow eve, and you, my friends, farewell, a short farewell, we have been loitering long and pleasantly, and now for our dear homes. That strain again, full feign it would delay me. My dear babe, who, capable of no articulate sound, marrs all things with his imitative lisp. How he would place his hand beside his ear, his little hand, the small forefinger up, and bid us listen. And I deem it wise to make him nature's playmate. He knows well the evening star, and once, when he awoke in most distressful mood some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream, I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once, suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, while his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moon-beam. Well, it is a father's tale, but if that heaven should give me life, his childhood shall grow up familiar with these songs, that with the night he may associate joy. Once more farewell, sweet knight and gale. Once more, my friends. Farewell. Sarah met him in the road with a despondent air. Lloyd has gone, said she. Gone? What, actually gone? Do you mean to say he has left us? Exclaimed colleridge horror struck. He packed up his things and took leave of me, she replied. It seems he hired a conveyance from Bristol to fetch him home. Good heavens, cried her husband, and all the tranquil joy died out of his face. Nothing but weariness, flabbiness and dejection remained. Did he give no reason? Oh, he said things about the wordsworths, replied Sarah, he thinks you have neglected him shamefully. So do I, and she shut her mouth with a snap. Though so prolific a conversationalist, and so prone to speech, knew when there was a time to be silent. He attempted no defence or excuse. He simply went indoors and, sitting distastefully to an unprepossessing supper, let Sarah say her say upon the subject of Lloyd. It was an extensive and a justifiable recrimination. Then, still in the same abstracted and monosyllabic state, he helped to wash up, attended better late than never, to the pigs and fowls, and sat before the fire with a notebook in his hands and baby-clothes pinned to warm upon his knees while Sarah put the child to bed. He was working out with patient care those apparently unprimeditated effects which go to make up the haunting melody of Christabel, for skillful and accomplished metrists as he was. It was only by dint of repeated experiments and intense mental effort that he achieved those results in which his art appears most artless. However, he was in no fit state, overtired and distressed as he felt, for laborious efforts of this kind, and presently nature took vengeance upon him in the form of intolerable toothache. A little while he bore it. Then, moving tiptoe lest he should be heard in the upper room where Sarah was soothing the little one to sleep, he stole to a corner cupboard and took out a bottle of laudanum. In this false friend and insidious comforter he had already found relief and repose from mental, as from physical troubles, more and more frequently he had recourse to it. He knew its fatal tendency to undermine the will and debilitate the Constitution, yet he could not deny himself an artificial peace which he described as a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and trees in the very heart of a waste of sand, and immediately he began to view things gler de rose. The sharp tongue and angry face of Sarah became transmogrified into the gentle semblance of her anagram, the imaginary asra of his poems. To be beloved is all I need, and whom I love I love indeed. O ever, ever be thou blessed, for dearly Azra love I thee. This brooding warmth across my breast, this depth of tranquil bliss. Ah me, fount, tree, and shed are gone, I know not wither, but in one quiet room we three are still together. The shadows dance upon the wall, by the still dancing fire flames made, and now they slumber moveless all, and now they melt to one deep shade, but not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee, I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel thee. The visions born of opium floated in vague, rich phantasmagoria across his slumberous brain, and so his senses gradually wrapped in a half-sleep he dreams of better worlds, sitting in the failing firelight. With a great effort he roused himself to creep up the stair ladder and to lay his drugged limbs upon the hard straw bed. The child and Sarah were already dreaming. He gazed at them with serene affection. Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, whose gentle breathings heard in this deep calm fill up the interspersed vacancies and momentary pauses of the thought. My Babe, so beautiful, it thrills my heart with tender gladness thus to look at thee. And lastly, with all the mental power yet left him, he committed himself to the God of whom he was so weak, so well-intentioned a worshipper. Air on my bed my limbs I lay. It hath not been my use to pray with moving lips or bended knees, but silently by slow degrees my spirit eye to love compose. In humble trust mine eyelids close with reverential resignation, no wish conceived, no thought expressed. Only a sense of supplication, a sense or all my soul impressed that I am weak, yet not unblessed, since in me, round me, everywhere, eternal strength and wisdom are. But now the stealthy narcotic utterly clouded him. He sank away as through unfathomable gulfs of somnolence. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had closed another day. A Day with Keats About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hempstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only. In the first, John Keats established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited by a Mrs. Braun and her family. They are wooden houses with festooning draperies of foliage, and the clean, contrived air of Hempstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. He gazes around him, with his weak, dark eyes upon the sky, the flowers, the various of nature which means so much to him, and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. For in his own words he loves the principle of beauty in all things, and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the flowers into which he has crystallized for all time sensations similar to those of the present. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and asleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow are we breathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth, spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and or darkened ways made for our searching, yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pawl from our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, trees old and young, sprouting a shady boom for simple sheep, and such our daffodils with the green world they live in, and clear rills that for themselves a cooling covert make against the hot season, the mid-forest break, rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms, and such, too, is the grandeur of the dunes we have imagined for the mighty dead, all lovely tales that we have heard or read, an endless fountain of immortal drink pouring unto us from the heaven's brink, nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour. No, even as the trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, the passion-poesy, glories infinite haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls, and bound to us so fast that whether there be shine or gloom or cast, they all way must be with us, or we die. And dimmium. Yet John Keats is, in some respects, out of keeping with the magnificent phraseology of which he is the self-peace. Little Keats, as his fellow medical students termed him, is a small, undersized man, not over five feet high, the shoulders too broad, the legs too spare, death in his hand, as Coleridge said, the slack, moist hand of the incipient consumptive. The only thing of beauty about him is his face. It is a face, to quote his friend Lee Hunt, in which energy and sensibility, that is, sensitiveness, are remarkably mixed up, an eager power wrecked and made impatient by ill health, every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive. There is that femininity in the cast of his features which Coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius, his beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture, eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight, which have, as Hayden said, an inward look perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions. And he is seeing visions all the while. Some chance sight or sound has wrapped him away from the young greenness of the May morning, and plunged him deep into the opulent color of September. His prophetic eye sees all the apple buds as golden orbs of fruit, and the swallows that now build beneath the eaves, making ready for their departure. And these future splendors shape themselves into lines as richly colored. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun, conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatcheeves run, to bend with apples the most cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core, to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel, and pump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel, to set budding more and still more later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease. For summer has orbrimmed their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind. Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook spares the next swath, and all its twined flowers. And sometimes like a gleener thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook, or by a cider-press with patient look thou watchest the last oozing's, hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them! Thou hast thy music, too, while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue, then in a waleful choir the small gnats mourn among the river-salos, borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies, and full-grown lambs loud bleed from hilly borne, hedge-crickets sing, and now, with treble soft, the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, and gathering swallows, twitter in the skies. Autumn The voice of Charles Brown at the open window, hailing him cheerily, breaks the spell. Keats goes in, and they sit down together to a simple breakfast-table, and Brown quizzes Keats, as the current phrase goes, on his inveterate abstractedness. The young man, with his sweet and merry laugh, defends himself by producing the result of his last night's meditations in praise of the self-same, wandering fancy. Ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home, at a touch sweet pleasure melteth, like to bubbles when rain pelteth. Then let winged fancy wander through the thought still spread beyond her. Open wide the mind's cage door, she'll dart forth, and cloudward soar. Oh, sweet fancy, let her loose, summer's joys are spoiled by use, and the growing of the spring fades as does its blossoming. Autumn's red-lipped frutage, too, blushing through the mist and dew, cloys with tasting. What do then? Sit thee by the angle, when the seer-faggot blazes bright, spirit of a winter's night. When the soundless earth is muffled, and the caked snow is shuffled from the plow-boy's heavy tune. Fancy, high-commissioned, send her, she has vassals to attend her. She will bring, in spite of frost, beauties that the earth hath lost. She will bring thee altogether, all delights of summer weather, all the buds and bells of May, from dewy suard or thorny spray, all the tepid Autumn's wealth, with a still mysterious stealth. She will mix these pleasures up, like three fit wines in a cup, and thou shalt quaff it. Fancy. Breakfast over, the business of the day begins, and that, with Keats, is poetry, and all that can foster poetic stimulus. He takes no real heed of anything else. A devoted son and brother, one ready to sacrifice himself and his slender resources to the uttermost farthing for his mother, brothers, sister and friends, yet he has no vital interest in other folks's affairs, nor in current events, nor in ordinary social topics. Other people's poetry does not appeal to him except that of Shakespeare, and of Homer, whom he does not know in the original, but who, through the poor medium of translation, has filled his soul with Grecian fantasies. Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen. Round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Offed of one wide expanse had I been told that deep-browed Homer ruled as his demean. Yet did I never breathe its pure serene, till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken, or like Stout Cortez, when his eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wide surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Sonnet This is what he wrote after sitting up one night till daybreak with his friend Cowden Clark, shouting with delight over the vistas newly revealed to him, and from that time on he has luxuriated in dreams classic beauty, warmed to new life by the sorcery of romance. Immortal shapes arise upon him from the infinite azure of the past, and he sees how deep in the shady sadness of a veil, far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, far from the fiery noon and Eve's one star, sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, still as the silence round about his lair. Forest on forest hung about his head, like cloud on cloud, no stir of air was there. Not so much life as on a summer's day robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, but where the dead leaf fell. There did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more by reason of his fallen divinity, spreading a shade. The niad mid her reeds pressed her cold finger closer to her lips. Hyperion. He is studying French, Latin, and especially Italian, all with the view of furthering his poetic ability. Though no great reader, he has soaked himself in the atmosphere of old Italian tales, and the very spirit of medieval Florence breathes from the story borrowed from Boccaccio, an echo in the north wind sung, which narrates how the hapless Isabelle bit away the head of her murdered lover. Then in a silken scarf, sweet with the dews of precious flowers plucked in Araby, and divine liquids come with odorous ooze through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully, she wrapped it up, and for its tomb did lose a garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, and covered it with mold, and o'er it set sweet basil which her tears kept ever wet, and she forgot the stars, the moon and sun, and she forgot the blue above the trees, and she forgot the dels where waters run, and she forgot the chilly autumn breeze. She had no knowledge when the day was done, and the new moon she saw not. But in peace hung over her sweet basil ever more, and moistened it with tears unto the core. Isabella. Keats has brought himself with difficulty, however, to the perusal of modern poets, his boyish enthusiasm for Lee Hunt's work has long since evaporated, and after reading Shelley's revolt of Islam, all he has found to say is, poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good qualities, but for the rest he is not attracted to any kind of knowledge which cannot be made applicable and subservient to the purposes of poetry, his own poetry, for his one desire is to win an immortal name, and he has begun life full of hopes, fiery, impetuous and ungovernable, expecting the world to fall at once beneath his pen. Poor fellow. Hayden's diary. But men of genius, Keats himself has said, are as great as certain ethereal chemicals operating in a mass of created matter, but they have not any determined character, that indefiniteness of literary aim that want of willpower, without which genius is a curse, which have hampered the young man all along, are now still further emphasized by the restlessness of a passionate lover. John Keats cannot stay indoors this fine May morning, fitting himself for verses fit to live, when the girl who is to him the incarnation of all poetry is visible in the next door garden. He throws down his pen and hurries out to find her. Contemporary portraits of Fanny Braun have not succeeded in representing her as beautiful, and at first sight Keats has complained that although she manages to make her hair look well, she wants sentiment in every feature. Propinquity, however, has achieved the usual result, and now the young poet believes his enamorata to be the very apotheosis of loveliness. He is never weary of adoring her sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone, bright eyes, accomplished shape. If the truth be told, Fanny Braun is a fairly good-looking young woman, blue-eyed and long-nosed. Her hair arranged with curls and ribbons over her brow. She has a curious but striking resemblance to the draped figure of Titian's sacred and profane love, and for the rest she is by no means poetic or sentimental, but of a luminous reader, whose strong point is an extraordinary knowledge of the history of costume. She accepts the homage of Keats much as she accepts the fact of their visit betrothal, and the fact that her mother disapproves of it, without taking it too seriously in any sense, and now, though not particularly keen on open-air enjoyment, she accepts his daily suggestion of a walk with her, and they go out into the beautiful meadows which were part of Hempstead a hundred years ago. Keats is in his glory in the fields. Always the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, have seemed to make his nature tremble. Then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, his mouth quivered, peculiarly sensitive as he is to external influences, his chiefty light is to think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy. The man who is so soon to feel the days he's growing over him, takes one of his intensest pleasures in watching the growth of flowers, and now, as in exquisite music, notes that pierce and pierce, descends through the young green oak leaves, the poet seizes this golden moment of the May World and transmutes it into song. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past and lethy words had sunk. It is not with envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thine happiness, that thou, light-winged dried of the trees in some melodious plot of beach and green and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease. Oh, for a draught of vintage, that hath been cooled a long age in the deep delvid earth, tasting of flora and the country green, dance and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth. Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south, full of the true, the blushful hypocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth, that I might drink and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim, fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known. The weariness, the fever, and the fret here, where men sit and hear each other groan, where palsy shakes a few sad, last gray hairs, where youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies, where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs, where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow. Thou wasst not born for death immortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down. The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown. Perhaps the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn, that same, at often times hath charmed magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairy-lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hillside, and now, it is buried deep in the next valley-glades. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep? Ode to a nightingale. The poet is recalled from these rapturous flights to the fugitive sweetness of the present. He is wandering in may meadows, young and impetuous, on fire with hopes, and his heart's beloved beside him. It is almost too good to be true. I have never known any unalloyed happiness for many days together, he tells Fanny, the death or sickness of someone has always spoiled my home. I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days, three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. He talks to her honestly of his dreams, his aspirations, his ambitions, and then the sordid facts of everyday life begin to cast a blighting shadow over his effulgent hopes. What has he, indeed, to offer worth her taking? A young man of twenty-three, ex-dresser at a hospital who has abandoned his surgical career without adopting any other, with slender resources and no occupation beyond that of producing verses which are held up to absolute derision by the great reviews. I would willingly have recourse to other means, he tells her again, as he has told his friend Dilkey. I cannot. I am fit for nothing else but literature. He talks of taking up journalism, but in his heart he feels unfit for any regular action, by reason both of physical weakness and a certain lack of system in mental work. The future becomes blackly, blankly overcast. The rays of Gosta Dome descend like a curtain between the sublimity of Keats and the calm common sense of fanny. They turn homewards in silence, the poet revolving melancholy musings. But when the melancholy fit shall fall, sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, that fosters the droop-headed flowers all, and hides the green hill in an April shroud, then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, or on the wealth of globed peonies, or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, imprison her soft hand and let rave, and feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die, and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu, and aching pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the B mouth sips, I in the very temple of delight, veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine. Though scene of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine, his soul shall taste the sadness of her might, and be among her cloudy trophies hung. Ode to melancholy. Fanny Braun enters her mother's house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. Oh, he says, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers, then I might hope. But despair is forced upon me as a habit. And he is only too well aware that although he is naturally the very soul of courage and manliness, this habit of despair is growing upon him, and eating his energy away. A wintry chill settles down upon the maytime, and his misery finds vent in lovely lines. In a drear nighted December, too happy, happy tree, thy branches nare remember their green felicity, the north cannot undo them, with a sleety whistle through them, nor frozen thawings glue them from budding at the prime. In a drear nighted December, too happy, happy brook, thy bubblings nare remember Apollo's summer look. But with a sweet forgetting, they stay their crystal fretting never, never petting about the frozen time. Ah, would twirl so with many a gentle girl and boy! But were there ever any writhe knot at passage joy to know the change and feel it, when there is none to heal it, nor nom'd sense to steal it, was never said in rhyme. Yet Keats is young, and youth means buoyancy. With an effort increasingly difficult he is able to shake off this somber fit for a while, and he makes use of the simplest means to that end. Whenever I feel vaporish he has said, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact adonize, as if I were going out. Then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. These very prosaic methods adopted, he abandons himself to the full flood of inspiration, and lets his mind suffuse itself in antique glory. As dimion he receives the divine commands of the passionately bright moon lady, as she stoops at last to bless him, and as she spake into her face there came light, as reflected from a silver flame, her long black hair swelled ample in display full golden. In her eyes a brighter day dawned blue and full of love. And dimion. Or as Lyceus he succumbs to the serpentine grace of Lamia, or as Porfiro, hidden in the silence, watches Madeleine at prayer. A casement high and triple-arched there was, all garlanded with carven imageries of fruits and flowers, and punches of knot-grass, and diamond-ed with panes of quaint device, innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, as are the tiger moths' deep-damessed wings. And in the midst mung thousand heraldries, and twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, a shielded scutian blushed with blood of queens and kings. Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, and threw warm ghouls on Madeleine's fair breast, as down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon, rose bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, and on her silver cross, soft amethyst, and on her hair a glory like a saint. She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, save wings for heaven, Porfiro grew faint. She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Eve of St. Agnes But the inspiration does not well up to-day. Its flow is frustrated, in view of the mountainous difficulties which hedge him in. Ill health, stinted means, hopeless love, and continual lack of success. These are calculated to give the bravest pause. And presently Keats, snatching a few hurried mouthfuls of lunch, is off to the studio of his friend, the painter Hayden, the one man among all his acquaintance, who is capable of really understanding him. He sits down morbid and silent in the painting room. For a while nothing will evoke a word from him, good or bad. But his keen interest in matters of art, and the entry of various friends one by one, Wentworth Dilkey, Hamilton Reynolds, Bailey and Lee Hunt, soon arouse him to animated conversation. Keats is shy and ill at ease in women's society, but a delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry distinguishes his intercourse with men. He says fine things finally, jokes with ready humor, and at the mention of any oppression or wrong rises into grave manliness at once, seeming like a tall man. No wonder that his society is much sought after, and himself greatly beloved by these genial spirits. No wonder that here at least he meets with that appreciation of which elsewhere his genius has been starved. In this young fellow of twenty-three, who unites winning affectionate ways and habitual gentleness of manner with the loftiest and most nobly worded ideals, few would discover that imaginary Johnny Keats, the apothecary's assistant, upon whom the Blackwood reviewer had lavished such vials of vituperation. He is here openly acknowledged as one of the bards of passion and of mirth, and his poems are each accepted as not a senseless tranced thing, but divine melodies of truth, philosophic numbers smooth, tales and golden histories of heaven and its mysteries. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. Matthew Arnold. But only these few friends of his are able to recognize that perfection. Outside their charmed circle lies an obstinately unappreciative world. The afternoon wears on, and the friends disperse. Keats returning to Wentworth Place, flushed with hectic exhilaration, finds a veritable douche of cold water awaiting him, in the shape of a letter from his publishers. They refer to his unlucky first volume of poems brought out in 1817. By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us, they say, have found fault with it in such plain terms that we have in many cases offered to take the book back, rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. In fact it was only on Sunday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman who told us that he considered it no better than a take-in. For a few minutes the pendulum swings back to despair. A man whose whole business and life is the creation of the work, who never wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought, who believes that after his death he will be among the English poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered. That such a one should be merely the butt and laughing stock of his readers? It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. Praise or blame, he says, has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. In Andimion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But what will Fanny think of such a letter? He falls to miserable meditation over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the constant erection of new obstacles in the course of his luckless love. And of Fanny's love he always has had a smoldering doubt. Yet he remains her vassal from the first, as he has told her, irrevocably her slave. He conceives himself an outcast on the wintry hillside, exiled from all his heart's desires. Ah, what can ale thee wretched white, alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Ah, what can ale thee wretched white, so haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full, and the harvest's done. I see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever due, and on thy cheek a fading rose, fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads. Full beautiful, a fairy's child. Her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild. I set her on my pacing steed, and nothing else saw all day long. And sideways would she lean and sing a fairy's song. I made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone. She looked at me, and she did love, and made sweet moan. She found me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manad you. And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true. She took me to her elfin grot, and there she gazed and sighed deep. And there I shut her wild, sad eyes, so kissed to sleep. And there we slumbered on the moss, and there I dreamed, a woe betide, the latest dream I ever dreamed on the cold hillside. I saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death pale where they all, who cried, la belle dame sang merci, hath thee enthrall. I saw their starved lips in the gloam, with horrid warning gaped wide, and I awoke, and found me here on the cold hillside. And this is why I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. La belle dame sang merci. And now he hears the voice of his belle dame ringing light across the garden. While he sits here, a prey to every distress, she is gaily gossiping with her next door neighbor, Brown. At once the unhappy Keats is tormented by a thousand jealous fears. Fanny is transferring her affection to Brown. Of that he is quite certain. He rushes out, his black looks banish the much amused Brown, and very nearly produce an immediate rupture between Fanny and himself. But after a few bitter words he permits himself to be reassured, or is it cajoled, and tells her, I must confess that I love you the more, in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. The poor boy, from the worldly point of view, has nothing else to offer. The lover's quarrel is over for the nonce. Visitors begin to drop in for the evening. There is music and singing in Brown's little drawing-room. Keats is very fond of music, and can himself, though possessing hardly any voice, produce a pleasing musical effect. He will sit and listen for hours to a sympathetic performer. But his ear, like all his faculties, is abnormally sensitive, and a wrong note will drive him into a frenzy. As the room grows fuller he becomes restive. The poetical character he has observed is not itself, it has no character. When I am in a room with people the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a little time annihilated. In the light chit-chat of small talk and body-nage he has no part. It bewilders and annoys him. Those about him, especially the women, seem to show up in their worst colors. Fanny herself appears, as he has described her at their first meeting, an absolute minx. And presently he contrives to slip stealthily away, and seats himself in some quiet chamber, alone with the darkness and the may-sense of leaf and blossom. I hope I shall never marry, he groans once more. The roaring wind is my wife, and the stars through the window-panes are my children. The mighty abstract idea of beauty I have in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, then shapes of epic greatness are stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's bodyguard. The young man now lights his candles, and takes up a familiar and favorite occupation, the writing of a long letter to his brother George in America. This epistle is, as one might expect, almost entirely concerned with the art of poetry, what else has Keats to write about, whether from the side of technique or inspiration. He dwells on the adroit management of open and closed vowels. He shows how the poetry of earth is never dead. He discusses the need of constant application to work, and how the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man, and meanwhile, as fitful strains of song reach him from the distance, and his roving gaze rivets itself upon a wedgewood copy of a Grecian vase, one of Brown's chief treasures. The fleeting wafts of sound, and the lovely symmetry of shape, and the golden chain of figures blend themselves into one harmonious whole of word music. Thou still unraveished bride of quietness. Thou foster child of silence and slow time. Sylvan historian, who canst thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme. What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape of deities or mortals, or of both, in Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loathe? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Herd melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore ye soft pipes play on, not to the sensual ear, but more endeared pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare. Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal, yet do not grieve? She cannot fade, though hast not thou thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair. Ah, happy, happy boughs, that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu. And happy melodist, unwirried, for ever piping songs for ever new. More happy love, more happy, happy love, for ever warm and still to be enjoyed, for ever panting and for ever young. All breathing human passion far above, that leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed, a burning forehead and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, old mysterious priest, leads to thou that heifer lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? What little town by river or sea shore, or mountain built with peaceful citadel, is emptied of its folk this pious morn? And little town, thy streets for ever more will silent be. And not a soul to tell why thou art desolate can ere return. O Attic shape, fair attitude, with breed of marble men and maidens overwrought, with forest branches and trodden weed, thou silent form dust, tease us out of thought as doth eternity. Cold pastoral, when old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest, beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Ode to a Grecian urn, the shapes of epic greatness throng closer and mightier around him, the storm and stress of the day's thoughts have utterly drained his small reserve of strength. Outworn by the vehemence of his own conflicting emotions, John Keats lays his aching eyes and dark brown head upon his arm as it rests along the table, and sinks into a dreamless slumber of exhaustion, while a happy melodist, unwirried, forever singing songs forever new, the nightingale chants on outside. 1 February afternoon in the year 1822 about two o'clock, for this is the hour at which his day begins, the most notorious personality of his century arouses himself in the Palatialan Franci in Pisa. George Gordon Knowle, Lord Byron, languidly arises in dresses with the assistance of his devoted valet, Fletcher. Invariably he awakens in very low spirits. In actual despair and despondency he has termed it. This is in part constitutional, and partly no doubt a reaction after the feverish brainwork of the previous night. It is at any rate an unutterable melancholy end on we that he surveys in the mirror that slight and graceful form which had been idolized by London drawing rooms, and the pale, scornful, beautiful face, like a spirit, good or evil, which the enthusiastic Walter Scott has termed a thing to dream of. He notes the gray streaks already visible among the brown locks and murders his own lines miserably to himself. Through life's dull roads so dim and dirty I have dragged to three and thirty. What have these years left to me? Nothing except thirty three. An innumerable motley crowd of reminiscences, most of them bitter, sorrowful, or contemptuous, throng across his mind, shaping themselves into poignant verse. There's not a joy the world can give, like that it takes away, when glow of earthly thought declines in feeling still decay. It is not on youth's smooth cheek that blush alone which fades so fast, but the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past. O could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been, or weep as I could have wept, or many have vanished seen, as springs and desert fountains seem sweet, all brackish though they be. So midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me. A meager breakfast of claret and soda with a few mouthfuls of some Italian dish somewhat restores his natural vivacity, and he listens with cynical amusement to Fletcher's blood-curdling stories of phantoms who have made the night hideous. For the famous old feudal palazzo with its dungeons and secret chambers has been immemorably infested with ghosts and harassed by inexplicable noises. Fletcher has already begged Leeds to change his room and then refuse to occupy his new room because, as his master reports, there are more ghosts in there than the other. There is one place where people were evidently walled up. I am bothered about these specters, as they say the last occupants were too. However, he is laughing as he descends the magnificent staircase, the reputed work of Michelangelo, laughing until the shrill quarrelous cries of peevish children make him stop and frown. He has allowed the Lee Hunts, with their large and fractious family, to occupy for the present the ground floor of the palazzo, and the children are his patch of whorents. I abominate the sight of them so much, he has already told more, that I have always had the greatest respect for the character of Herod. No child figures in any of his poems. His own paternal feeling towards Ada, sole daughter of my house and home, is merely a fluctuating sentiment. He shrugs his shoulders and enters his great sammel, again moody and with a downcast air, and throws himself upon a couch in gloomy reverie. Snatches of poetry wander through his thoughts. Poetry intrinsically autobiographical, for the inequalities of his style are those of his career, and his imaginary heroes are endless reproductions of himself, the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind. He has drawn his own picture more effectively in Laura than any strange hand could do. In him, inexplicably mixed, appeared much to be loved and hated, sought and feared. Opinion, varying or his hidden lot, in praise or railing, near his name forgot. There was in him a vital scorn of all, as if the worst had fallen which could befall. He stood a stranger in this breathing world, an erring spirit from another hurled. His early dreams of good outstripped the truth, and troubled manhood followed baffled youth. His men in short, as has been observed, are made after his own image, and his women after his own heart. Yet the inveterate family likeness of these heroes is not shown by the heroines of his romantic stances, for Byron has an eclectic taste in beauty. One can hardly imagine a wider dissimilarity than between the bride of Abidos, the gentle Zuleika, with her nameless charms unmarked by her alone, the light of love, the purity of grace, the mind, the music breathing from her face, the heart who softnessed harmonized the whole, and oh, that I was in itself a soul. And Circassia's daughter, the stately Leila of the Gior, whose black and flowing hair swept the marble where her feet gleamed wider than the mountain's sleet, or if the reader seek her for the choice, there is Medora, beloved of the Corsair, Medora of the deep blue eye and long, fair hair, or the nameless eastern maiden of the Hebrew melodies. She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climbs and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Thus melods that tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less, had half impaired the nameless grace which waves in every raven truss, where softly lightens or her face, where thoughts serenely sweet express how pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and or that brow, so soft, so calm yet eloquent, the smiles that win, the tints that glow, but tale of days and goodness spent, a mind at peace with all below, a heart whose love is innocent. Yet all these heroines are alike in one respect, the potentiality of passionate emotion, since Byron's passions and his powers, according to his intense admirer Shelley, are incomparably greater than those of other men, and he has used the last almost recklessly in portrayal of the first. As the poet reclines in sombre meditation, his reverie is broken by the not unwelcome entrance of his friends, who may be better termed his intimate acquaintances. For to that brooding, introspective spirit, constitutionally shy and morbidly conscious of the fact, friendship is a propensity he has declared, to which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel anything that deserves the name. All my others are men of the world friendships. Be that as it may, it is with a warmly cordial expression, and with that peculiarly sweet smile of his that Byron welcomes his usual visitors, Captain Williams, Captain Medwin, Teff, the Irishman, and Percy Bish Shelley, the most companionable person under thirty he has avowed, that ever I knew. When they have discussed the latest little pizan on D and the progress of Shelley's boat building, the conversation trends more and more toward literary topics, personal topics, be it understood, for Byron is not an omnivorous reader like Shelley. Williams and Medwin themselves dabblers in verse and prose, listen with respectful admiration to the dicta of the great poet's exchange in views. The low, clear, harmonious voice of Byron is a sort of intoxication. Men are held by it as under a spell. He makes no secret of his open contempt for the professional writing fraternity. Who will write if he had anything better to do? he scornfully inquires. I think the mighty stir about scribbling and scribes by themselves and others, a sign of a feminacy, a degeneracy, and weakness. Shelley, whose assiduous studies in literature have led him quite to other conclusions, defends his craft with order, but Byron's chief successes have been too lightly won. He who wrote the Corsair in ten days, the Bride of Abidos in four, and Laura, whilst undressing after balls and masquerades, cannot be expected to take a very serious view of poetry as the one business of a lifetime. I by no means rank poetry or poet, says he, high in the scale of imagination. Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake. If I live ten years longer, he adds prophetically, you will see that all is not over with me. I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing, and it may seem odd enough to say, I don't think it's my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other. This conteminar of poetry, however, is soon persuaded, without much difficulty, to read aloud some excerpts from his new poems in the process of completion, and very well he reads them. The listeners are moved to smiles by the bitter humor of the visitation of judgment. They are left half breathless by the impetuous vigor of heaven and earth, but a murmur of unfeigned applause punctuates the second canto of Don Juan with its exquisite presentment of youth, love, and ecstasy in the persons of Juan and Aidae. It was the cooling hour, just when the rounded red sun sinks down behind the azure hill, which then seems as if the whole earth bounded it, circling all nature, hushed and dim and still, with the far mountain crescent half surrounded, on one side, and the deep sea calm and chill upon the other, and the rosy sky, with one star sparkling through it like an eye. And thus they wandered forth, and hands in hands, over the shining pebbles and the shells, glided along the smooth and hardened sand. They looked up to the sky, whose floating glow spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright. They gazed upon the glittering sea below, once the broad moon rose circling into sight. They heard the waves splash, and the wind so low, and saw each other's dark eyes darting light into each other, and beholding this, their lips drew near and clung into a kiss. Dunwan. Byron's restless spirit, perpetually eager to express itself in action, now makes him anxious to dismiss intellectual discussions, and he hastily proposes a game of billiards. As he moves around the billiard table, his lameness is distinctly noticeable. Not all the ingenuity of his tailor, nor his own efforts to walk naturally, can conceal it. Yet, as has been said of him in other matters, he redeems all his defects by his graces. And his companions note with surprise the remarkable change for the better which has taken place in him since. A few months before, he arrived at this old palace on the Arno with a troop of servants, carriages, horses, vows, dogs, and monkeys. The selfish and sensual Byron of Venetian days is entirely a thing of the past. He is improved in every respect, says Shelley to Williams, in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness. And although keeping up a certain splendor upon an income of four thousand pounds a year, he devotes one thousand pounds of that income entirely to purposes of charity. His unpersonal needs are of the simplest. The game concluded, Byron's carriage is announced. His friends and he proceed in it as far as the town gates of Pisa by this means to avoid the stairs of the streets. Horses are in readiness at the gates. The company, with one or two servant men, mounts and ride into the pine forest that reaches towards the sea. Byron is as excellent and graceful a rider as a swimmer with remarkable powers of endurance. He can cover seventy or eighty miles a day, fast going, and swim five miles at a stretch. He is indeed in many respects the typical open-air Englishman. But today he rides slowly and immersed in thought. As his wife years since assured him, he is at heart the most melancholy of mankind, often when apparently the gayest. His abnormally long sight takes in every detail of the scenery, storing it up unconsciously for future reference. It has been said that Byron is nothing without his descriptions. And in these he has achieved some of his finest work, notably in some of the immortal stanzas of Child Harold, with a dazzling panoramic succession of vivid scenes, where they're depicting how I stood in Venice on the bridge of size, a palace and a prison on each hand. I saw from out the way her structures rise as from the stroke of the enchanter's wands. Or on the eve of Waterloo, there was a sound of revelry by night and Belgium's capital had gathered then, her beauty and her chivalry and bright the lamp shone, or fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily, and when music arose with its full up to a swell, soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, and all went merry as a marriage-bell. But hush, hark! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell. Were there again in the veil of vintage? The castled crag of Druckenfell's frowns or the wide and winding Rhine, whose breast of water's broadly swells between the banks which bear the vine and hills all rich with blossom trees, and peasant girls with deep blue eyes and hands which offer early flowers walk smiling o'er this paradise, or looking backwards through a score of centuries. I see before me the gladiator lie. He leans upon his hands, his manly brow consents to death, but conquers agony, and his dropped head sinks gradually low, and through his side the last drops ebbing slow, and the red gash fall heavy, one by one. Like the first of a thunder shower, and now the arena swims round him, he is gone. Air ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. Byron is emphatically a citizen of the world, who has not only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene which he visualizes, and that is this magic power of conveying the authentic impression of an actual occurrence, which renders his most recondite situation so thrilling, which breathes a western vigor into the scented air of the Orient, and thrills with poignant pathos through the horrors of the prisoner of Chillon. A light broke in upon my brain. It was the carol of a bird. It ceased, and then it came again, the sweetest song I ever heard, and mine was thankful till my eyes ran over with a glad surprise, and they that moment could not see. I was the mate of misery. But then by dull degrees came back my senses to their wanted track. I saw the dungeon walls and floor closed slowly round me as before. I saw the glimmer of the sun creeping as it before had done. But through the crevice where it came, that bird was perched as fond and tame, and tamer than upon the tree. A lovely bird with azure wings. A song that said a thousand things, and seemed to say them all for me. I never saw it like before. I now shall see its likeness more. It seemed to me to want a mate, but was not half so desolate. And it was come to love me when none lived to love me so again. And cheering for my dungeon's brink had brought me back to feel and think. I know not if it late were free or broke its cage to perch on mine. But knowing so well captivity, sweet bird, I could not wish for thine. Or if it were a winged guise, a visitant from Paradise, for heaven forgive that thought, the while which made me both weep and smile. I sometimes deemed that it might be my brother's soul come down to me. But then at last away it flew, and then to his mortal well I knew, for he would never thus have flown, and left me twice so doubly lone. Lone is the course within its shroud, lone as a solitary cloud, a single cloud on a sunny day, while all the rest of heaven is clear, afrown upon the atmosphere, that half no business to appear when skies are blue and earth is gay. The prisoner of Chillon. Unhappily all these shifting scenes of imagination or experience, so the poet has made mournful confession, have little power to wean him from himself, neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrents, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, and for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, above, around, and beneath me. And although it will be noticed, he exempts the sea, and although the blood of old sea-kings running fiercely in his veins, still kindles him to imperishable rapture in its presence, and I have loved the ocean, and my joy of youthful sports was on thy breast to be, born, like thy bubbles onward, from a boy, I wantoned on thy breakers, they to me were a delight, and if the freshening sea made them a terror, it was a pleasing fear, for I was, as it were, a child of thee, and trusted to thy billows far and near, and laid my hands upon thy mane, as I do hear. Child herald, yet there is sorrow on the sea itself, the unplumbed salt, a strangeing sea, which separates him from his mother country. Cosmopolitan, as he is, self-managed exile, quick with Greek and Italian sympathies, Byron never for one moment forgets that he is the head of one of England's proudest families. Despite his scathing scorn towards his fair-weather London friends, towards the unreasoning outbursts of malignity which drove him out of his England, with all her faults, he loves her still. He vaguely hopes and hankers after a return to those long-lost shores, and endeavors to believe that the future will in some way make atonement for all the calamities of the past. But now, Shelley, Williams, Medwin, and Tafe are dismounting in the pine forest, and the men's servants setting up the target. Pistol practice is Byron's forte. When he hits a half-crown at twelve yards, he is as delighted as a boy, and quite glum and disconcerted if he should happen to miss. This very rarely happens, as he is a crack shot, easily distancing the other competitors. His hand trembles violently, but he calculates on this vibration, and depending entirely on his eye, hardly ever fails. After about an hour shooting, the light begins to wane towards sunset, and the friends ride back to the city. Byron an exuberant good humor with himself and everyone else. Arrived at the Palate Lanfranci, he finds two guests awaiting him, Count Pietro Gamba, brother of the lovely Contessa Giugcioli, and Trelawney, that handsome, picturesque, pyratical-looking younger son who has not yet published to an astonished world his remarkable and almost incredible adventures. Trelawney is at presence in command of Byron's yacht, the Boulevard, lying in the harbor of Genoa. The poet welcomes these new additions to his company, for since his arrival in Pisa he has began to entertain men at dinner parties, for the first time since leaving England. At very cheerful companies that stand with him to dinner, their host displays himself to great advantage. Being at once, to quote Shelley, polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humor, never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening. Byron, according to his own declaration, has never passed two hours in mixed society without wishing himself out of it again. Nobody, however, could guess at this fact from his bright, frank and spontaneous gaiety. Always an upstreamious eater. I have fed at times, for over two months together, he assures his friends, on sheer biscuit and water. Very little food defices him, and besides, byron tendu, he is anxious to retain that happy slenderness on which he prides himself. The slenderness, which is a characteristic of his family, in which he has recently endangered by a lazy life in Venice. The guests sit fascinated by his enthralling personality. They recognize that he wears a natural greatness which his errors can only half obscure, and they rivet their gazes upon that pale and splendid face, the only one, as Scott says, that ever came up to an artist's notion of what the lineaments of a poet should be. He looks around him upon the ethereal and feminine countenance of Shelley, the visionary, the kind, pleasant, honest English faces of Medwin and Williams, the good-looking Italian gamba, the quaint little Irishman tafe, last, not least, the dark moustachios and wildly flashing Celtic eyes of the Cornish adventurer Trelawney. This latter might well have served for a model of Conrad the Corsair, and so he is assured by his companions. Sun burnt his cheeks, his forehead high in pale, the sable curls in wild profusion veil his features deepening lines and varying hue, at times attracted yet perplexed the view, but where they ask shall the original of Gulnar be found? Gulnar, who stains her hand with the blood of her lord the Pasha, to save the Corsair from a dreadful death, Byron refuses to reveal his source of inspiration, but Shelley quotes with sincere approval the lines which most emphatically delineate the lovely desperate woman. Embarked, the sail unfurled, the light breeze blew, how much had Conrad's memory to review? He thought on her afar his lovely bride. He turned and saw Gulnar the homicide. She watched his features till she could not bear their freezing aspect and averted air, and that strange fierceness foreign to her eye fell quenched in tears too late to shed or dry. But for that deed of darkness where worth thou? Reproach me, but not yet. Oh, spare me now. I am not what I seem this fearful night, my brain bewildered, do not madden quite. If I had never loved, though less my guilt, though hath not lived to hate me if thou wilt, extreme in love or hate, in good or ill, the worst of crimes had left her woman still. Does Conrad marked and felt, ah, could he less? Hate of that deed, but grief for her distress. And what she had done, no tears could wash away, and heaven must punish on its angry day. But it was done, he knew, whatever her guilt, for him that punyard smote, that blood was spilt, and he was free, and she for him had given her all on earth, and more than all in heaven. The Corsair But Heaven's Shelley cries the host. What infinite nonsense are you quoting, and he hastily turns the current of conversation towards more impersonal subjects? The evening wears on, the guests depart. The clear spring moonlight streams upon the winding Arno. Byron stands dreaming at the open window. The bridges and buildings of Pisa lie still and silverlit before him. A subtle influence of quietudes steals down upon him from the stars. What nothings we are, he murmurs, before the least of these stars. One in particular, is it serious? And trances his attention with its cold revolutions of pure light. His thoughts involuntarily shape themselves in rhythm and rhyme. Son of the sleepless, melancholy star, whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, that show us the dark thou canst not dispel, how like thou art to joy remembered well, so gleams the past the light of other days which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays. A night beam sorrow watches to behold, distinct but distant, clear, but oh how cold. It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with the glowing phantasmagoria of ideas that cry a lad for visible expression. He forgets, under the stress of creative impulse, the sources and causes of his inherent melancholy, the miserable days of his childhood, with a fury for a mother, the wounds never to be healed of his unrequited love for Mary Chaworth, the inimical wife from whom he is eternally alienated, the little daughter that he may never hold in his arms, the beloved sister separate from his side, the ancestral home of his forefathers now pass him to a stranger's hold, the meteoric glory and total eclipse of his unparalleled popularity in England, the follies and worsen follies which have made him what he is, consisting in nothing but his passion and his pride. These memories, like poisonous exhalations, are banished from his mind and leave a clear horizon for a while, a fertile landscape peopled with great words and images, something akin to inspiration ceases upon him, and he throws himself to work with all the zest and nerve of his impulsive nature. This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, with rapidity and rarely with pains, when I once take a pen in hand I must say what comes uppermost or fling it away, not for him that careful polishing of sentences which other writers meticulously bestow. I have always written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in the proofs. I can never recast anything. I am like a tiger, if I miss the first spring I go grumbling back to my jungle. And to this impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness, some critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrical writer, yet a Promethean fire stolen from heaven burns immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek it is said, there are one thousand six hundred and thirty-two ways of expressing simple facts I love you, yet who has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in made of Athens? Made of Athens, ere we part, give oh give me back my heart, or since that it has left my breast keep it now and take the rest. Hear my vow before I go, zdo emu sas agapol, my life I love you. By those tresses unconfined, wooed by each a gee in wind, by those lids whose jetty fringe kiss thy soft cheeks blooming tinge, by those wild eyes like the row, zdo emu sas agapol. By that lip I longed to taste, by that zone encircled waste, by all the token flowers that tell what words can never speak so well, by love's alternate joy and woe, zdo emu sas agapol. Made of Athens, I am gone, think of me sweet when alone, though I fly to Istanbul. Athens holds my heart and soul. Can I cease to love thee? No. Zdo emu sas agapol. Rapidly as his pen flies over the paper, the taunt of throbbing thought flows faster still, far on into the night when ghostly noises echo through the sleeping palace, that ever gushing and perennial fonts of natural waters, as Scott has described the genius of Byron, pours forth in reckless perfusion. Until at last, outspent with energy, he draws a deep breath of exhaustion and realizes that he is weariness itself. The moon has sunk in Arno. The stars are halfway across the sky. The cold glimmer of dawn is palpitating along the east as Byron, again, to that accustomed couch must creep, where joy subsides and sorrow sighs to sleep. After a day's fitful fever, he sleeps well and rest, a few short hours of it, is due to that perturbed spirit which now, or labored with his being's strife, shrinks to that sweet forgetfulness of life, that sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least. Laura. End of Section 4 Chapter 5 OF DAYS WITH GREAT POETS This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bob Gonzalez. DAYS WITH GREAT POETS by May Clarissa Gillington Byron. Chapter 5 A Day with Walt Whitman About six o'clock on a mid-summer morning in 1877, a tall old man awoke and was out of bed next moment, but he moved with a certain slow leisureliness. As one who will not be hurried, the reason of this deliberate movement was obvious. He had to drag a paralyzed leg, which was only gradually recovering its ability and would always be slightly lame. Seen more closely, he was not, by any means, so old as at first sight one might imagine. His snow-white hair and almost white gray beard indicated some 80 years, but he was vigorous, erect and rosy. His clear gray blue eyes were bright with a wild hawk look. His face was firm and without a line. An air of splendid vital force, despite his infirmity, was diffused from his whole person and defied the fact of his actual age, which was two years short of sixty. Dressing with the same large leisurely gestures as characterized him in everything, Walt Whitman was presently attired in his invariable suit of gray, and by the time the clock touched half past seven, he was seated in the veranda comfortably inhaling the sweet, fresh morning air and quite ready for his simple breakfast. In this old farmhouse in the New Jersey hamlet of Whitehorse, Walt Whitman had been long an inmate. He was recovering by almost imperceptible degrees from the breakdown induced by over strain, mental and physical, which had culminated in intermittent paralytic seizures for the last eight years and had left his robust physique a mere wreck of its former magnificence. Here, in the absolute peace and seclusion of the little wooden house with its few fields and fruit trees, he lived in a lovable companionship with the farmer folk, man, wife, and sons, and here the level, faintly undulated country, neither attractive nor unattractive, supplied all the needs of his strenuous nature and healed him with its calm, curative influences. He steeped himself month by month, season after season, in primitive solitudes, winding stream, recluse and woody banks, sweet-feeding springs and all the charms that birds, grass, wildflowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, et cetera, can bring. Simple fare these charms might seem to a townsman. To the good gray poet, they were not only sufficient, but inexhaustible. Dearly as he loved the swarming and tumultuous life of cities, the tops of Broadway omnibuses, the Brooklyn ferryboats, the eternal panorama of the multitude, his true delight was in the vast expanses, the illimitable spaces, the very earth from which, anteus-like, he drew his vital strength. Out here in the country solitudes, alone could he observe how, in a way undreamed of by the street-dweller, ever upon this stage is acted God's calm, annual drama, gorgeous processions, songs of birds, sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most of the soul, the heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical strong waves, the woods, the stalwart trees, the slender tapering trees, the lily-put countless armies of the grass, the return of the heroes. It may be doubted whether any other poet who has been inspired by outdoor nature has approximated so closely as Whitman to the shows of all variety which nature presents, from the infinite gradations of microscopic detail to the enormous range and sweep of dim vastitudes. His poetry has a huge elemental quality, akin to that of winds and clouds and seas. To speak with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees and the woods and grass by the roadside, this was the standard he had set himself. And in pursuance of this ideal he had given his first and most typically unconventional volume the title Leaves of Grass. No name could better convey and sum up his meaning in art. The mixture of the minute and the universal, the simple and the inexplicable, the particular and the all-pervading, the common place which is also the miracle, for to Whitman leaves of grass were this and more. To me he declared, as I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. The grass blades no less so than the gentle, soft-born, measureless light and avowedly, from these external expressions of nature he derived all power of song. I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven, O suns, O grass of graves, O perpetual transfers and promotions. If you do not say anything, how can I say anything? Thus he had arrived at declaring with august arrogance let others finish specimens I never finish specimens. I shower them by exhaustless laws as nature does, fresh and modern continually. Nor are you to suppose that this was a late development of nature worship in a man suddenly confronted with teeming glories and wonderments. All through his life he had been soaking himself in the mysterious loveliness of the world around. Even as a boy, he wrote, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a poem about the seashore. That suggesting dividing-line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid, that curious lurking something has doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit, which means far more than its mere first sight. Grand as that is! I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid mystic theme. Afterward it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt the seashore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me in my composition. Even as a child, upon the desolate beaches of Long Island he had, leaving his bed, wandered alone, bare-headed, barefoot, over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, and explored the secret sources of tragedy that are hidden at the roots of love. Once, Palmanoc, when the snows had melted, when the lilac scent was in the air and fifth month grass was growing, up this seashore, in some briars, two guests from Alabama, two together, and their nest and four light-green eggs spotted with brown, and every day the he-bird, two and fro, near at hand, and every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, and every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. To love, to love, to love, translating. To love a sudden, maybe killed, unknown to her mate, one forenoon the she-bird crouched, not on the nest, nor returned that afternoon, nor the next, nor ever appeared again, and thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea, and at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather. Yes, when the stars glistened, all night long on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake, down almost amid the slapping waves, sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears. I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair, listened long and long, out of the cradle, endlessly rocking. But now the Stafford family were assembled at breakfast, and Walt limped in to join them. Courteously and simply he greeted the various members of the household, the dark, silent, diligent Methodist father, the spiritually-minded yet busy-handed mother, the two young fellows, the married daughter and her little ones. He was the most domesticated, the least troublesome of inmates, and his large, sweet presence imparted something to the homely breakfast table, something of benignity and tranquility, which it had lacked before his entrance. The best man I ever knew, Mrs. Stafford called him, her sons adored him, and her grandchildren were almost like his own, in the love and confidence with which they curled themselves upon his great grey knee when the meal was over. For his affection for children, his sense of fatherhood, was a predominant trait of Whitman's character. Lonely since his mother's death, he had lived as regards the closer human relationships, lonely. In this sense he was doomed to remain. A veil of secrecy hung over his past life, which none had ever ventured to lift. Rumors of a lost mate, as in the song of the Alabama bird upon the shore, of children whom he never could claim, hints of harsh fates and imperious destinies, occasionally penetrated that close woven curtain of silence which covered his most intimate self. But only in his poems had he voiced his loneliness. And that with the tenderest poignancy of yearning for better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade. That woman who passionately clung to me. Again we wander, we love, we separate again. Again she holds me by the hand. I must not go. I see her close beside me with silent lips, sad, and tremulous. Be not impatient. A little space. Know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land, every day at sundown, for your dear sake, my love. And this was the man who had been blamed for his utter lack of the romantic attitude towards women. But Whitman was no light singer of casual empty love lyrics. He was of sterner stuff than that. No dainty dulce à fait du also I, bearded, sunburnt, grey-necked, forbidding. I have arrived. As breakfast passed he spoke but little to his companions. His ordinary mood of quiet yet cheerful serenity lay gently on him, and he was content to sit almost silent, emanating that radiant power, that affluence and inclusiveness as of the sun, which none could fail to note in him. When addressed he only replied with the brief monosyllable I, I, which he pronounced oy, oy, and which slightly inflected to answer various purposes, served him for all response. The meal was not yet over for most of the family, when Whitman, rising abruptly with that startling brusquery which occasionally offended his friends, observed ta-ta to everybody in general and departed, as if he didn't care if he never saw us again, remarked one of the young men. He left the house and strolled down the green lane to a wide wooded hollow, where the stream called Timber Creek went winding among its lily leaves beneath the trees. Here Whitman had found a year before a particularly secluded little dell off one side of my creek, filled with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a struggling bank, and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here he retreated every hot day, specimen days, and here, while the summer sun drew sweet aromatic odours from the tangled water-mints and cresses, he proceeded slowly now, carrying a portable chair and with his pockets filled with notebooks, for as he truly avowed, wherever I go winter or summer sit he or country, alone at home or travelling, I must take notes. He was about to make sure of a morning's unmitigated delight, in the spot where he sought every day seclusion, every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners. And each step of the way was a pure joy to him. What a day, he murmured, what an hour just passing, the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul. So rhapsodizing inwardly and drinking in the beauty of sight and sound, he proceeded, still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows, musical as soft clinking glasses, pouring a sizable stream, pure and clear, out from its vent, where the bank arches over like a great brown, shaggy eyebrow or mouthroof, gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly, meaning, saying something, of course, if one could only translate it. Spassman days. Here he sat down a while and reveled in sheer joy of summer opulence. He enumerated, to himself, laying a store of lovely recollections for future reference in darker days, the fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air, the white and pink pond blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves, the glassy waters of the creek, the banks with dense bushery and the picturesque beaches and shade and turf, the tremendous reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence, the prevailing, delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils, and overall, and circling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue. Spassman days. And from old habit penciled down from time to time almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints, and outlines on the spot. Minutes like these were the seed-time of his art, if that can be called art which was almost one with nature, for Walt Whitman had, from the very outset, striven to obtain that fusion of identity with Natura Benignia, which, if only momentary, bequeeds a lasting impression on the mind. He had always felt, with regard to his productions, that there is a humiliating lesson one learns in serene hours of a fine day or night. Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and art as something almost impertinent. If I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if but only once, but enough, that we have really absorbed each other and understood each other, it suffices him. Nothing less did. For he recognized that after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on, have found that none of these finally satisfy or permanently wear, what remains? Nature remains. To bring out, from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, changes of seasons, the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. And while confessing, I cannot divest my appetite of literature, yet I find myself eventually trying it all by nature. First premises, many call it, but really the crowning results of all laws, tallies, and proof. I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied soul giving its verdict. Specimen days. He was so afraid, as he phrased it, of dropping what smack of outdoors or sun or starlight might cling to the lines. I dared not try to meddle with or smooth them. To be made one with nature, in a deeper sense than ever any man yet had known, was, in short, his ideal, and one may say his achievement. For the verdict of the average person, vacant of his glorious gains, he did not care. Regardless of ridicule, calamity, contumely, he had pursued his own way to his own goal. Till he was able, at last, to realize his dream of me, impoturb, standing at ease in nature, master of all, or mistress of all, a plum in the midst of irrational things. And now he was an old man, to look upon. Yet a man surcharged with electric vigor and daily renewing his physical strength from the fountains of eternal youth. He was just as full of elan of enterprise, of the glorious hunger for adventure, as when he had first proclaimed, a foot and light-hearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose. I long to that which is endless, as it was beginningless, to undergo much tramps of days, rests of nights, to merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to, again to merge them in the start of superior journeys. To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it. To look up or down no road, but it stretches and waits for you, however long, but it stretches and waits for you. To see no being, not gods or any, but you also go wither. Song of the Open Road The big gray man expanded almost visibly into the sun-steeped air, as he absorbed the exquisite minutiae of the green dell into his mind, and assimilated the music of the wind and stream. Sound of any sort had a powerfully emotional effect upon him. It was not mere fancy on Whitland's part that he and Wagner made one music. With music on the most colossal scale his poems are fraught from end to end, and while their technical form may be less finished, less perfected than those of other authors. While they have less melody, they have the multitudinous harmony, the superb architectonics, the choral and symphonic movement of the noblest masters. Such poems as The Mystic Trompeter, Out of the Cradle, Passage to India, Have the Genesis and Exodus of great musical compositions, and to many auditors the vast elemental sympathy of this unique personality can only be compared to that of Beethoven, whom he said he had discovered as a new meaning in music. Beethoven, by whom he allowed, he had been carried out of himself seeing, hearing wonders. Beethoven, who like himself, sought inspiration continuously in the magic and mystery of nature. And thus all Whitman's finest poems have a processional air, like the evolution of some great symphony, a pageantry of sound, so to speak, which whorls one forward like a leaf upon a resistless stream. Sometimes he is superbly triumphant, as in his inaugural song of myself. With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play great marches for conquered and slain persons. Sometimes he translates the sonorities of the air into immortal effluences of meaning. Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night. Blow, trumpeter, free and clear, I follow thee. While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene, the fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day withdraw. Or he blends all sorts of conditions of beautiful resonance into surely the strangest yet loveliest love-song ever yet set down. I heard you, solemn sweet pipes of the organ, as last Sunday morn I passed the church, winds of autumn, as I walked the woods at dusk, I heard your long-stretched sighs up above so mournful. I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera. I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing. Heart of my love, you too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head. Heard the pulse of you, when all was still, ringing little bells last night under my ear. But now the precious hour had arrived, which to Whitman spelt revivification and rejuvenessence above all others, the time when, stripped of all externals, he became the very child of Mother Earth, in his own description of the process. A light southwest wind was blowing through the treetops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath. So hanging clobes on a rail nearby, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook, taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses, slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun. Somehow I seemed to get identity with each and everything around me in its condition. Perhaps the inner, never-lost rapport we hold with the earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body. Specimen days. Power and joy and exhilaration infused his whole frame. Here, he murmured, I realized the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to nature, never before did she come so close to me. And a miracle of transient transformation had been wrought upon him. His youth was renewed like the eagles, his lameness hardly perceptible, as he reluctantly emerged from the sweet water, and having dried himself in the sun-glow, still more reluctantly dressed again. This was no longer the battered, wrecked old man, the veteran of lifelong battles with the world, but one who could realize with keenest perception every sensation of stalwart strength. He might have been, at this moment, one of his own lumbermen in the winter camp, enjoying daybreak in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping, the glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work, the blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the bare skin, song of the broad ax, or a scion of the youthful sinewy races whom he had chanted in pioneers. Come, my tan-faced children, follow well in order, get your weapons ready. Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes? Pioneers, oh pioneers! All the past we leave behind. We debouch upon the newer, mightier world, varied world, fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labour and the march. Pioneers, oh pioneers! Here at last was the true Walt Whitman, superabundant in splendid vitality and conscious of mental and physical power through every fibre of his being. One last longing, loving look he cast upon the creek, before returning homewards. The magnificent mid-noon lay full tide over all, brimming the uttermost shores of beauty. It was the very apotheosis of summer, the tangible realization of Whitman's prophetic vision. All, all for immortality. Love, like the light silently wrapping all, nature's amelioration blessing all. The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain, forms, objects, groats, humanities, to spiritual images ripening. Give me, oh God, to sing that thought. Give me, give him or her, I love this quenchless faith in thy ensemble. Whatever else withheld, withhold not from us, belief in plan of thee, enclosed in time and space. Peace, salvation universal. Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream. And failing it, life's lore and wealth the dream. And all the world a dream. Now he passed back up the lane to the little farmstead and entering in found the midday meal was served. Mr. Stafford was already seated and about to say grace. Whitman stopped as he passed behind the farmer's chair and glasping Stafford's head in his large, well-formed hands became an actual part, as it were, in the benediction. Then he took his seat in silence. But that irrepressible joyousness, which sometimes after working on a manuscript seemed to shine from his face and pervade his whole body, that singular brightness and delight as though he had partaken of some divine elixir, was visible now upon his noble features. He talked a little, in simple homely phrases, giving little idea of the voluminous reserve force within him, telling little incidents of the war of secession and anecdotes of his hospital experiences. He had been a volunteer nurse of exquisite patience and admirable efficiency throughout those terrible years 1862 to 64. His passionate tenderness and sympathy then found vent, and he gave his best and uttermost, believing that in his own words, these libations, ecstatic life-pourings, as it were, of precious wine or rose-water on vast desert sands or great polluted rivers taking chances of no return. What are they but the theory and practice of Christ or of all divine personality? For in the human, however defaced, he still could discern the divine and immortal. The worth of every individual soul was the pivot of all his arts and beliefs. Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul. Usually to his sensitive mind, able as it was to realize with the keenest sympathy every phase of human suffering, the memories of carnage were repulsive. By day he could shut them off, but by night he said, in clouds descending, in midnight sleep of many a face in battle, of the look at first of the mortally wounded, of that indescribable look of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide. I dream, I dream, I dream, old war dreams. But he had faith in the future of his country. Vast hopes in the purification wrought out by those sorrowful years, and his poem, To the Man of Warbird, was but one of many allegories in which he saw his beloved America rising transfigured from the ashes of the past. Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions, burst the wild storm, above it thou ascendest, and rested on the sky thy slave that cradled thee. Thou born to match the gale, thou art all wings, to cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane. Thou ship of air that never furlts'd thy sails, days even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating, at dusk that looks'd on Senegal, at morn America, that sports'd amid the lightning flash and thundercloud, in them, in thy experiences, hathst thou my soul. What joys, what joys are thine? And out of the smoke and din of conflict, he believed should spring the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, knit in sublime unity of brotherhood. Dinner over, Whitman retired a while to his own apartment, that fearful chaos of pel-mel untightiness which was the delight of its occupant and the despair of Mrs. Stafford, an indescribable confusion it was of letters, newspapers, and books, an ink-bottle on one chair, a glass of lemonade on another, a pile of manuscripts on a third, a hat on the floor, imperturbably composed, the poet surveyed his best-loved books, Scott, Carlisle, Tennyson, Emerson, translations of Homer, Dante, Hafiz, Sadi, renderings of Virgil, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, versions of Spanish and German poets, most well-worn of all Shakespeare and the Bible, finally out of the heterogeneous collection he selected George Sands Consuelo and seated himself at the window with it. On another afternoon he would have returned to the creek, but today he was expecting a friend, and friends with him did not mean mere acquaintances, still less those visitors who were brought by vulgar curiosity. Although the best of comrades and one who found companionship most exhilarating, he had a bedrock of deep reserve and to such as he did not like he became as a precipice. But to those with whom he was truly on rapport, whether by letter or in the flesh, he was spendrift of his personality. His English literary friends, Tennyson, Rosetti, Buchanan, Browning, and others, had supplied the financial aid which enabled him to recuperate at Timber Creek, compatriots such as Emerson, John Burroughs, and a host of old-time friends were welcome visitors. But nothing in his life or in his literary fortunes, he declared, had brought him more comfort and support, nothing had more spiritually soothed him than the warm appreciation and friendship of that true full-grown woman Ann Gilchrist, the sweet English widow who was now staying with her children in Philadelphia to be within easy reach of Whitman. Among the perfect women I have known, and it has been very unspeakable good fortune to have had the very best for mother, sisters, and friends, I have known none more perfect, wrote the poet than my dear, dear friend, Ann Gilchrist. It was this warm-hearted, courageous English woman alive with humor and vivacity, whose musical voice was shortly heard outside inquiring for Walt. He hastened down to receive her. Ann Gilchrist's opinion of Whitman was even more enthusiastic than his appreciation of her. She admired and revered his courage, with which he expounded his theories of life, no less than the expression of them in words which, as she put it, ceased to be words and became electric streams. What more can you ask of the words of a man's mouth, she exclaimed, than that they should absorb into you as food and air, to reappear again in your strength, gait, face, that they should be fiber and filter to your blood, joy and gladness to your whole nature. She alone of all women, and almost alone among men, had stood forth to defend him for the fearless and comprehensive dealing with reality which had alienated the conventional and offended the prudish, and she alone was the recipient now of his most intimate thoughts and aspirations. They sat together in the shady piazza, and he unfolded to her, while her children played around, the hopes and wishes of his heart, not only for America, but for all humanity. He said, My original idea was that if I could bring men together by putting before them the heart of man, with all its joys and sorrows and experiences and surroundings, it would be a great thing. I have endeavored from the first to get free as much as possible from all literary attitudinism, to strip off integuments, coverings, bridges, and to speak straight from and to the heart, to discard all conventional poetic phrases, and every touch of or reference to ancient or medieval images, metaphors, subjects, styles, etc., and to write de novo with words and phrases appropriate to our own days. He took her hand as he spoke, as was his won't with a sympathetic listener, and gazed with eagerness into her serious yet easily lighted face. His terrible blaze of personality was subdued, for the nonce, into the childlike simplicity, that womanlike tenderness which constituted some of his chief charms. They discussed the work of contemporary poets, English and American, Whitman, however much he differed from these in theory and method, gave generous homage to their varied genius. He loved to declaim the Ulysses and kindred majestically rolling passages of Tennyson in a clear, strong, rugged tone, devoid of all elocutionary tricks or affectation. He never spoke a line of his own verse, but to recite from Shakespeare was a great pleasure to him, and he compared the Shakespearean plays to large, rich, splendid tapestry like Raphael's historical cartoons, where everything is broad and colossal. For Scott, whose work he said breathed more of the open air than the workshop, he had unfaigned admiration, dramatic work and music in all its forms he discussed with knowledge and fervor. As for the poets of America, he poured encomium upon them ungrudgingly. I can't imagine any better luck befalling these states for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant and Whittier. Specimen Days. The afternoon shadows stretched themselves out, and at sunset Mrs. Gilchrist and her children departed. It had been for her a memorable afternoon, and Whitman had been thoroughly in his element as comrade of so genial a soul. Now, as the twilight deepened, he devoted himself to the consideration of the deepest notes in the whole diapason of human existence. Never was a man of more exuberant a joy in life, never one who gazed more courageously into the dim veiled face of death, the sower of all enigmas, the comforter of all pain. Whispers of heavenly death murmured I hear, labial gossip of night, sibilant corals, footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes, wafted soft and low. Do you think life was so well provided for, and death, the purport of all life, is not well provided for? I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere, at any time, is provided for in the inherences of things. I do not think life provides for all, and for time and space, but I believe heavenly death provides for all. Whispers of heavenly death, and his heart once more as in the matchless trinity for Lincoln, when lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, uttered its song of summons and of welcome. Come, lovely and soothing death, undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, in the day, in the night, to all, to each, sooner or later, delicate death. Dark mother, always gliding near, with soft feet, have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome, then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all. The skies deepened into purple, and the march of the stars began. It was the sacredest hour of the day to Whitman, a period consecrated and set apart above all. I am convinced, thought he, that there are hours of nature, especially of the atmosphere, mornings and evenings, addressed to the soul. Night transcends, for that purpose, what the proudest day can do. Specimen days. And a new buoyancy quickened in his soul. The indomitable spirit of enterprise revived within him. Now, at eleven at night, he was more exhilarated in mind than his body had been in the blue July morning. And casting one comprehensive glance upon the burning arcana of the heavens, that he might carry into his sleep a memory of that glory, he desired a better country, with longing and deep solicitude. Bathe me, O God, in thee, mounting to thee, I and my soul, to range, in range of thee. Passage to more than India, O secret of the earth and sky, of you O waters of the sea, O winding creeks and rivers, of you O woods and fields, of you strong mountains of my land, of you O prairies, of you gray rocks, O morning red, O clouds, O rain and snows, O day and night, passage to you, O sun and moon and all you stars, Sirius and Jupiter, passage to you, O my brave soul, O father, father sail, O daring joy but safe, are they not all the seas of God, O father, father, father sail. Passage to India. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of Days with Great Poets. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marie Hoffman. Days with Great Poets by Mae Clarissa Gillington Byron. Chapter 6. A Day with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The year is 1858, the month, June, the scene, Florence. Overhead, the pure illimitable space and pause of sky, intense as angels' garments, less blue than radiant. Below the wakening city, cathedral, tower, and palace, piazza in street, the river trailing like a silver cord through all. And where the romantic old palace of Casa Guidi holds the corner of a narrow street, there is a stirring of sound and life within its majestic medieval rooms. A child's tones are audible here and a man's deep notes there. And a shrill, sweet tenuity of voice bespeaks the presence of the house's mistress. That infinitely small, infinitely remarkable personality, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, has begun another blue day, and a short time sees her seated at breakfast in the great room of the palazzo, her husband and boy beside her. The woman of women, as Harriet Martino has termed her, is a most slender, fragile, ethereal specimen of her sex. The smallest possible amount of substance encloses her soul, declared Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife, I was never so conscious of so little perishable dust in any human being. Long, dark curls, drooping heavily over her pale, small face, almost conceal the large, dark eyes through which her passionate soul looks out. Those eyes of extraordinary expressiveness and luster, the rich bright coloring which was her conspicuous charm in youth, is wholly vanished under the touch of prolonged ill health, so that, it seemed no sun had shown on me. So many seasons I had forgot my spring, my cheeks had pined and perished from their orbs, and all the youth blood in them had grown white as dew on autumn cyclimens. Above, my eyes and forehead answered for my face. Open parentheses aurora lee, close parentheses. What now remains to the woman of middle age is less the beauty of feature than the loftier beauty of expression, which renders her so singularly attractive to all who know her. Her form, inconceivably slight and attenuated, appears still more so by reason of her habitual black silk dress. Altogether, what with her tiny exquisite hands and feet, high sweet voice and fairy-like figure, she has a touch of the unearthly about her. It would be hard to find another human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. Yet this delicate little creature is she who, flinging aside all fetters of physical weakness and social convention, slipped out of her father's house to join her secretly wedded husband, and to take flight with him by land and sea on that memorable day when in her own words, nobody backed me except the north wind which blew us vehemently out of England. But the erstwhile hopeless invalid, the lonely poetess shut up in one shaded silent room for years is now a devoted wife, a happy mother, her woman's destiny fulfilled and all the simple joys of life within her grasp. For she and her husband are ideally mated, a happier home, and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy to imagine, and this completeness arises not only from the rare qualities which each possesses, but from their adaptation to each other. Moreover, their happiness is crowned in the possession of a darling child, Penini as his pet name goes, who in his mother's words is like a rose possessed by a fairy. Penini, now nine years old, slim and graceful as a sprite, is the very embodiment of grace and charm, a modern Ariel, Trixie, and Delightful. In Casa Guidi, six beautiful rooms and a kitchen, three of them quite palace rooms, according to Mrs. Browning, this contented family are living for nothing or next to nothing, we scarcely spend three hundred pounds, she has told her friend Miss Smithford, and I have every luxury I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up at need. And Robert wouldn't sleep, I think, if an unpaid bill dragged itself by chance into another week. Nor does the palazzo itself suggest poverty in any form, rather a refined and eclectic abundance of beautiful, if not costly things. The great drawing room in which they are sitting, and which Mrs. Browning inhabits all day long, is so lofty and spacious as to provide almost too massive a setting for her dainty, tiny little person. The walls, when pictures of saints look down out of ancient carved black frames, are hung with many colored tapestries. From solemn bookcases filled with learned books, small tables piled with modern volumes, past heavy antique furniture, quaint old mirrors, curiously wrought chairs, by busts, casts, portraits, paintings of every date, the eye turns through dark shadows and subdued lights, to the flower-decked balcony without, and the tall grey church of San Felice opposite. Quite unlike anything to be found in England, and yet not wholly Florentine, for people of such strong individuality as the Brownings must perforce imbue their surroundings with a certain aura of distinction, a sense of something unwanted and unusually alluring. Breakfast over, Robert Browning, alert and handsome, leaves the room with his light quick step to seclude himself a while in his favorite retreat, the long room crowded with plaster casts and studies, where he is assiduously laboring to profit by the tuition of his friend the sculptor's story, for he is not writing much at present only very fitfully. Robert is peculiar in his ways of work as a poet, his wife has observed. I have struggled a little with him on this point, for I don't think him right, that is to say it would not be right for me. Robert waits for an inclination, works by fits and starts, he can't do otherwise he says. One may conjecture that the reception or non-reception of his poems in England is hardly conducive to a steady output of work, his wife allows as much. The treatment in England affects him materially, I don't complain for myself of an unappreciating public, I have no reason. But the blindness, deafness and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing, nevertheless she heaves a little sigh as he vanishes out of sight, for she is a firm believer in what Balzac called la péchéance angélique du génie in working steadily, not awaiting the desultery descent of the divine if ladies. On the opposite page there is a poem entitled The Love Boats, it's taken from a romance of the Ganges. The maidens lean them over the water side by side and shun each other's deepening eyes and gaze down the tide. For each within a little boat, a little lamp hath put, and heaped for freight some lily's weight or scarlet rose half shut. The river floweth on. Open parentheses a romance of the Ganges, close parentheses. She has toiled with unremitting industry of brain and intensity of feeling, since the time when as a young girl she threw herself with whole sold pathos into her portrayal of those impassioned watches on the Ganges bank where the maidens lean them over the water side by side and shun each other's deepening eyes and gaze down the tide. For each within a little boat, a little lamp hath put, and heaped for freight some lily's weight or scarlet rose half shut. The river floweth on. Of a shell of cocoa-carven each little boat is made, each carries a lamp and carries a flower and carries a hope, unsaid. And when the boat has carried the lamp unquenched till out of sight, the maidens are sure that love will endure, but love will fail with light. The river floweth on. Open parentheses a romance of the Ganges, close parentheses. If I fail ultimately, she has avowed. It will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labour where labour could do anything. I have worked at poetry. It has not been with me reverie, but art. Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing. There has been no playing at skittles for me in either. A woman who in her 20s was publishing translations from Aeschylus might justly claim the credit of industry, and not only has Elizabeth Barrett Browning laboured with a high motive and indefatigable resolve, but she has undergone to a full extent that process of pang and travail by which poets are shaped to their ends. She has been taught to know bitter pain of mind and body, paralyzing bereavement, anguish of hopes deferred before she could realise in their entirety the sublime uses of poverty and the solemn responsibility of the poet, and has told the tale in her own way thus. What was he doing the great god Pan down in the reeds by the river, spreading ruin and scattering ban, splashing and paddling with hooves of a goat, and breaking the golden lilies afloat with the dragonfly on the river? He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, from the deep cool bed of the river. The limpid water turbidly ran and the broken lilies a dying lay, and the dragonfly had fled away, ere he brought it out of the river. High on the shore sat the great god Pan while turbidly flowed the river, and hacked and hewed as a great god can, with his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed to prove it fresh from the river. He cut it short, did the great god Pan. Open parentheses, how tall it stood in the river, close parentheses, then drew the pith like the heart of a man steadily from the outside ring and notched the poor dry empty thing in holes as he sat by the river. This is the way laughed the great god Pan. Open parentheses, laughed while he sat by the river, close parentheses. The only way since gods began to make sweet music they could succeed. Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, he blew in power by the river. Sweet sweet sweet oh Pan, piercing sweet by the river, blinding sweet oh great god Pan. The sun on the hill forgot to die, and the lilies revived, and the dragonfly came back to dream on the river. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, to laugh as he sits by the river, making a poet out of a man, the true gods sigh for the cost and pain, for the reed which grows never more again as a reed with the reeds in the river. Open parentheses, a musical instrument, close parentheses. But now Panini, climbing upon his mother's couch and ensconcing himself cosily beside her, preludes his lesson time with a shower of kisses, just as she has described in Aurora Lee how, I with shut eyes, smile and motion for the dewy kiss that's very sure to come from mouth and cheeks, the whole child's face at once dissolved on mine, as if a nosegay burst its string with the weight of roses overblown and dropped upon me. And after a few celestial moments of such endearments as are only known between mother and child, she sets to work upon the instruction of that restless little spirit, for poet's children must do their lessons the same as other folk. And although Panini is a born linguist and intelligent beyond his years, he is quite as apt to fidget and wriggle and kick his heels as any little boy that ever crept like snail unwillingly to school. His mother devotes an hour and a half daily to this necessary labour of love, and it is quite as much as her slender strength permits, but she is not one to begrudge herself in anything to the duty of the moment. Ever ready to accord sympathy to all, taking an earnest interest in the most insightful and humble, thoughtful in the smallest things for others, she gives little thought to herself. Panini dances away to the great square anti-room with its large pictures and piano forte, and there takes his seat to tinkle softly up and down the keys which he dignifies by the name of practice. Mrs. Browning left to herself as a new claimant on her attention, for her faithful spaniel flush, making the most of opportunity curls up beside her on the sofa, and indulges in all the outward ebullitions of canine affection. Flush, a gift from Miss Mitford, has a most absurd resemblance to his present mistress in his large brown eyes, long silky curls, and spiritual cast of countenance. Flush loves me to the height and depth of the capacity of his own nature, Mrs. Browning has declared. If I did not love him, I could love nothing. He is as innocent as the first dog when Eve padded him. If he sees a ghost at all, it is of a little mouse which he killed once by accident. But this emaciated invalid, his mistress, has nothing of the hypochondriac in her nature. She can dare to touch the tremendous issues of the drama of exile to raise the unanswerable questions of confessions. She, this puny, feeble creature, can describe with the spirit and vigor of personal experience that final and tremendous tragedy in which the Duchess May justifies her life and love, while her enemies burst through the breaking doors and her husband reigns his steed on the Great East Tower. Back he reigned his steed back thrown on the slippery coping stone, toll slowly. Back the iron hooves he did grind on the battlement behind once a hundred feet went down, and his heel did press and goad on the quivering flank bestowed, toll slowly. Friends and brothers save my wife, pardon sweet in change for life, but I ride alone to God. Straight as if the holy name had upbreathed her like a flame, toll slowly. She up sprang, she rose upright. In his cell she sat in sight, by her love she overcame. And her head was on his breast, where she smiled as one at rest, toll slowly. Ring, she cried, a whisper bell in the beechwood's old chapel, but the passing bell rings best. They have caught out at the rain, which surged through loose in vain, toll slowly, for the horse in stark despair with his front hooves poised in the air on the last verge rears a mane. Now he hangs, he rocks between, and his nostrils curdle in, toll slowly. And he shivers, head and hoof, and the flakes of foam fall off, and his face grows fierce and thin. And a look of human woe from his staring eyes did go toll slowly. And a sharp cry uttered he in a foretold agony of the headlong death below, on the opposite page is the poem Duchess May's ride from rhyme of the Duchess May. She up sprang, she rose upright in his cell, she sat in sight, by her love she overcame. And her head was on his breast, where she smiled as one at rest, toll slowly. Ring, she cried, a whisper bell in the beechwood's old chapel, but the passing bell rings best. Open parentheses, rhyme of the Duchess May, close parentheses. And ring, ring thou passing bell, still she cried, I the old chapel, toll slowly. Then back toppling, crashing back, a dead weight flung out to rack, horse and riders over fell. And with equal art she can convey the subsequent effect of dead calm, the lethargy of reaction after that culminating stroke on which the tempestuous story ends. Then oh spirits did I say, ye who rode so fast that day, toll slowly. Did star wheels and angel wings with their holy winter wings keep beside you all the way? Though in passion ye would dash with a blind and heavy crash, toll slowly. Up against the thick bost shield of God's judgment in the field, though your heart and brain were rash, now your will is all unwilled, now your pulses are all stilled, toll slowly. Now ye lie as meek and mild. Open parentheses, where so laid, close parentheses, as mod the child, whose small grave today was filled. Beating heart and burning brow, ye are very patient now, toll slowly. And the children might be bold to pluck the king cups from your mold, ere a month had let them grow. And you let the goldfinch sing in the altar near in spring, toll slowly. Let her build her nest and sit all the three weeks out on it, murmuring not at anything. In your patience ye are strong, cold in heat, ye take not wrong, toll slowly. When the trumpet of the angel blows eternities, evangelical, time will seem to you not long. Oh, the little birds sang east and the little birds sang west, toll slowly. And I said in under breath, all our life is mixed with death, and who knoweth which is best? Oh, the little birds sang east and the little birds sang west, toll slowly. And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness, round our restlessness, his rest. It is this intimate and subtle understanding, this instinctive knowledge minus experience, which is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Browning's poetry, which has enabled it to lay hold so strongly upon the hearts of that very British public, which her husband has challenged as ye who like me not. The cry of the children with its poignant human sympathy is already bearing a definite result in the reformation of evil conditions. These simple verses are more potent perhaps than the most eloquent oratory or the most appalling statistics. Do ye hear the children weeping oh my brothers? Air the sorrow comes with years. They are leaning their young heads against their mothers and that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleeding in the meadows, the young birds are chirping in the nest, the young fawns are playing with the shadows, the young flowers are blowing toward the west. But the young, young children oh my brothers, they are weeping bitterly. They are weeping in the playtime of the others, in the country of the free. For oh, say the children, we are weary and we cannot run or leap. If we cared for any meadows, it were merely to drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping. We fall upon our faces, trying to go. And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, the reddest flower would look as pale as snow. For all day, we drag our burden tiring through the cold dark underground. Or all day, we drive the wheels of iron in the factories, round and round. For all day, the wheels are droning, turning, their wind comes in our faces, till our hearts turn, our head with pulses burning, and the walls turn in their places. Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling, turns the long light that drops down the wall. Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, all are turning all the day, and we, with all. And all day, the iron wheels are droning, and sometimes we could pray, oh ye wheels. Open parentheses, breaking out in a mad moaning. Close parentheses, stop. Be silent for today. Open parentheses, the cry of the children. Close parentheses. The woman who can write this is no idle singer of an empty day, but one to whose passionate mother heart one touch of nature makes the whole world kin. The matchless earnestness which has been adduced as the prominent trait of her conversation and her character find its chief outlet in her work. While my poems are full of faults, she allows, they have my heart and life in them. And her firm conviction that every poem should have an object and a significance is occasionally apt to mar the artistic effect of the whole. The desire to tag on a moral, to append a didactic dissertation, or to evoke a serious symbolism from a mere featherweight of fancy, does not always make for beauty. But when she reaches her topmost pinnacle, when the loveliness of thought is twinned by the loveliness of language, and both are pilgrims to some lofty shrine of meaning, then assuredly she achieves some golden orb of perfect song. Such are those consummate utterances of love in all its phases, sonnets from the Portuguese in which the whole strong clamoring of a vehement soul doth utter itself distinct, earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. These sonnets may be taken to represent the deepest current of her thought, the loftiest altitude of her imagination, always on a higher plain than that of most writers, for with her everything is religion, and surely she has insisted it should be the gladness and the gratitude of such as our poets among us, that in turning towards the beautiful, they may behold a true face of God. In sonnets from the Portuguese, the exquisite gradations of human love resolve themselves, as it were into a mirror wherein the true face of God is always reflected, and only in him is the mortal joy complete. The shadowy figure of death, whose wings brood vaguely dusk over these noble sonnets, becomes transformed and irradiate with celestial light, and the lightest word or look of love appears suffused with new significance, such as only the initiated can fully fathom, yet told with a tender simplicity of language that knocks at every heart. First time he kissed me, he but only kissed the fingers of this hand wherewith I write, and ever since it grew more clean and white, slow to world greetings, quick with its o-list when the angels speak. A ring of amethyst I could not wear here, plainer to my sight than that first kiss. The second passed in height the first, and sought my forehead, and half missed, half falling on the hair, oh beyond mead. That was the chrysm of love, which love's own crown with sanctifying sweetness did proceed. The third upon my lips was folded down in perfect purple state, since when indeed I have been proud and said, my love, my own. Meanwhile, the stress of Tuscan noon is invading even this cool and shadowed room. Florence, outside the window, seems to seethe in this median boil pot of the sun, and all the patient hills are bubbling round, as if a prick would leave them flat. And the fiery thread-paper of a woman, who was pouring out her sensitive heart in lines which she feels to her very fingertips, is growing exhausted by her mourning's effort. Not the less so, that the political poems upon which she is engaged, by the very fervor which they evoke, tacks her vitality to the uttermost. It is almost impossible for any stranger to comprehend Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ardent love for Italy. She has become more Italian than the Italians themselves, and all her patriots, rather than her compatriots, find a welcome and a rendezvous at Casa Guidi. The fervency of her feelings is redoubled by the unusual setting of her life, its former solitude and present comparative isolation. All her feelings on political subjects are intensified. Not only by her woman's impetuosity it has been said, but by the circumstances of her secluded life. Her judgments, both for good and bad, seem often times like those of a dweller in some city convent. She is at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument concerning things of which, open parentheses, even with the intuition of genius, close parentheses, she can know little. No aid of books or friends can supply that daily contact which active life alone can give. She is without any more practical knowledge of actual life than a nun might be when after long years she emerged from her cloister and her shroud. So various friends have described her and the truth of their description deepens daily, for the famous poetess is practically almost as much of a recluse, a wife and mother in Casa Guidi, as in the old sepulchral London days. No longer is she able for visits to Vellambrosso, being conveyed in a grape basket without wheels drawn by oxen, or losing herself in distant forests and scrambling on muleback up the sources of extinct volcanoes. Her precarious hold on life is relaxing, slowly but surely, year by year, and her own impetuosity burns her away from within. Chiefly, as has been hinted, her hopes and fears for Italy are absolutely wearing her out, and she has pinned her faith to a broken reed, did she know it, the Emperor Napoleon III. For him, as the potential savior of Italy, as the deus ex machina, who shall free the land from shore to shore, for that inscrutable and untrustworthy man, Elizabeth Barrett Browning cherishes the most astounding admiration. Nothing can weaken it, nothing cast a doubt upon his bona fides, the sane sound reasoning of her husband does not in this case weigh a jot against her desperate belief. And now she is commemorating his deeds in lines unintelligible to ordinary English thought, inhaling him as a hero, because she says, he might have had the world with him, but choose to side with suffering men, and had the world against him when he came to deliver Italy, Emperor evermore. Open parentheses, Napoleon III in Italy, close parentheses, spent with the emphasis of her own ardor. The poetist drops her pen and rests her silky head upon a spirit small hand, her great eyes still glowing with the thoughts that have fired them. At that moment, she fulfills to the last detail her husband's description of his lyric love, half angel and half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire. And so he thinks as gently entering and stooping over her. He calls her by her pet name, Ba, and begs her to desist a while from work. Montaigne says somewhere, she replies with quaint humor, that to stop gracefully is sure sign of high race in a horse. That is just what I have done, and she covers up her manuscripts, for they are never obtrusively in evidence while not in use. Lunch is presently awaiting them, and afterwards through the fierce heat of the afternoon, Mrs. Browning rests herself, more or less reluctantly. After four o'clock she is open to receive visitors, though indeed she sometimes postpones being visible to strangers until eight p.m. And the visitors who are expected, duly arrive, rather important ones, being Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife. Oddly enough, Mrs. Browning's popularity in America is greater than in England, and the English folk who call at Casa Guidi are few and far between, compared with the constant stream of American poet worshipers. The Hawthorne's very much impressed with everything they see, from vestibule to drawing room, are seated at the long, narrow table placed before the hostess's inveterate sofa. Nathaniel Hawthorne, that dark, silent man of spiritual nature, but more like a gnome than a self, becomes lost in admiration of Penini, who clad in a buff silk tunic embroidered with white. Open parentheses. For, although nine years old, he is still according to early Victorian custom in frocks and socks, close parentheses, flits about, graceful as Ganymede, and hands round cake and strawberries. Other visitors soon arrive, and Robert Browning, who seems to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment, is revealed as a host, par excellence, cultured, cordial, full of robust common sense combined with lofty ideals. Penini sometimes adds his childish trouble to the talk, sometimes sits down and apparently enjoys his own meditations. No conversation in Casa Guidi can ever languish for a want of material, still less can it proceed for very long, without inevitably trending towards the subject which Mrs. Browning takes so terribly to heart as one of her friends has said. Next to the thought of Italy, her whole interest is at present focused on and absorbed in spiritualism, to which from its first introduction she has lent an ear as credulous as her trust was sincere and her heart high-minded. And she endorses to the full in practice the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Life as we call it is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes on soundings. In this view I don't see anything so fit to talk about or half so interesting as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our fellow creatures, the dead living, who are hundreds of thousands to one of the live living, and to whom we all potentially belong. Though we have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrin, albumin, and phosphates that keep us on the minority side of the house, to a woman who confesses that most of my events and nearly all of my intense pleasures have passed in thoughts, this subject is one of extraordinary fascination, and her husband's profound disbelief is a trouble to her. Truth to tell, he makes no secret of it, and the author of Mr. Sludge, the medium, needs say little more to demonstrate his opinions. However, through sheer force of habit, he joins with energy in the general discussion, taking a directly opposite view to his wife. And when the argument, which both seem to enjoy, has left off exactly at the point where it began, the guests adroitly turn the conversation upon those poems of their hostess, which are founded upon a supernatural motif, notably the lay of the brown rosary. To her it may be, there is but little difference between the human and the superhuman, between dreams and realities. So abnormally thin is the thread of mortality which binds her to terrestrial facts. As she has expressed it, poetry is essentially truthfulness, and the very incoherences of poetic dreaming are but the struggle and the strife to reach the true, the unknown. Therefore, the story of the brown rosary may be considered that of a dream, yet, if you please to call it a dream, the author is quotes Cowley, I shall not take it ill, because the father of poets tells us even dreams too are from God. The plot is one of the most remarkable in the English language, that of a compact between a living, loving maiden, agonizing to retain her life and love, and an unholy elemental of the darkness. Evil spirit. Who told thee thou was called to death? A Nora in sleep, I sate all night beside thee. The gray owl on the ruined wall shut both his eyes to hide thee, and ever he flapped his heavy wing all brokenly and weak, and the long grass waved against the sky around his gasping beak. I sate beside thee all the night, while the moonlight lay forlorn, strewn round us like a dead world's shroud in ghastly fragments torn. And through the night, and through the hush, and over the flapping wing, we heard beside the heavenly gate the angels murmuring. We heard them say, put day to day, and count the days to seven. On the opposite page is the poem and Nora in the spirit of the sun. I sate all night beside thee. The gray owl on the ruined wall shut both his eyes to hide thee. I vowed to thee on rosary. Open parentheses, dead father, look not so. Close parentheses. I would not thank God in my wheel, nor seek God in my woe. Open parentheses, lay of the brown rosary. Close parentheses. And God will draw Nora up the golden stairs of heaven, and yet the evil ones have leave that purpose to defer. For if she has no need of him, he has no need of her. Evil spirit, speak out to me, speak bold and free. A Nora in sleep. And then I heard thee say, I count upon my rosary brown, the hours thou hast to stay, yet God permits us evil ones to put by that decree. Since if thou hast no need of him, he has no need of thee. And if thou wilt forego the sight of angels verily, thy true love gazing on thy face shall guess what angels be. I vowed upon thy rosary brown, this string of antique beads, by charnal lichens overgrown and dank among the weeds. This rosary brown, which is thine own, lost soul of buried none, who lost by vow, wouldst render now all souls unlike undone. I vowed upon thy rosary brown, until such vow should break, a pledge always of living days to us hung around my neck. I vowed to thee on rosary. Open parentheses. Dead father, look not so. Close parentheses. I would not thank God in my wheel, nor seek God in my woe. Open parentheses. The lay of the brown rosary. Close parentheses. In this, as in almost all her poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has worked out her invariable theory of life, that humanity is purified and made perfect by suffering, by suffering only that knowledge by suffering entereth, and life is perfected by death. This is the text of all she has ever written, from the exquisite tenderness of cowper's grave to the hard one joy in which Aurora Lee looks heavenward with her blind lover. Evening closes in, the guests are gone, the small black-robed figure stands upon the flower-breathing balcony, leaning on her husband's arm and watching the dusk droop downward over Florence, as she has watched at so many happy nights. Often she has noted, with delicate details of perception, how the heavens were making room to hold the night, the seven-fold heavens unfolding all their gates to let the stars out slowly, the purple and transparent shadows slow, had filled up the whole valley to the brim, and flooded all the city, which you saw as some drowned city and some enchanted sea. Then a kiss, as long and silent as the ecstatic night, and deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond whatever could be told by word or kiss, eye-fane would write it down here like the rest, to keep it in my eyes as in my ears, the heart's sweet scripture to be read at night when weary, or at morning when afraid, and lean my heaviest oath on when I swear that when all's done, all tried, all counted here, all great arts, and all good philosophies, this love just puts its hand out in a dream and straight out stretches all things. Open parentheses, Aurora Lee, close parentheses, and the last and sweetest treasure for that hand of love to grasp is now awaiting her, the sight of her sleeping child. She makes her way to his bedside and bends above her darling son, she has already drawn his likeness as he lies there, warm and moist with life to the bottom of his dimples, to the ends of the lovely tumbled curls about his face. He saw his mother's face, accepting it in change for heaven itself with such a smile as might have well been learned there, never moved, but smiled on in a drows of ecstasy. So happy, open parentheses, half with her and half with heaven, close parentheses, he could not have the trouble to be stirred, but smiled and lay there, like a rose I said, as red and still indeed as any rose that blows in all the silence of its leaves, content and blowing to fulfill its life. She leaned above him, open parentheses, drinking him as wine, close parentheses, in that extremity of love twill pass for agony or rapture, open parentheses, Aurora Lee, close parentheses, and thus, compassed by a sense of perpetual benediction of strength made perfect in weakness, of life as a continual sacrament to man, since Christ break the daily bread of it in his hands, Elizabeth Barrett Browning ends her day. More softly than the dew is shed, or cord is floated overhead, he giveth his beloved sleep, and while the midsummer stars of Italy blaze above the Arno, and the long, warm twilight turns northward towards the dawn, those who have been privileged to speak with her are musing in her own phrases. You have shown me truths, O June Day friend, that help me now at night when June is over, truths not yours indeed, but set within my reach by means of you. Open parentheses, Aurora Lee, close parentheses. End of Chapter 6, Recording by Marie Hoffman Chapter 7 of Days with Great Poets This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Days with Great Poets by May Clarissa Gillington Byron Chapter 7, A Day with Rosetti A hot July day of 1871, the Chelsea streets refracted the scorching sunlight with that peculiar sultriness common to low-lying districts. The river flowed with a metallic glitter, and no cool breath was wafted from its long, sleek ripples to temper or invigorate the sweltering air. The leaves of the London plain trees, dulled with dust, endured the heat with a perceptible effort, for it was now between 10 and 11 a.m., and the sun stood high in heaven. But in that solid, roomy, old-fashioned dwelling, Number 16, Chaney Walk, with its look of equal nobility and shabbiness, known as Tudor House, from the tradition that it had been a nursery house for Henry VIII's children, there was no suggestion of the solstice. Its beautiful lime trees, yellow with honey blossom, threw depths of shade across the grassy garden. Its windows were dark with midsummer foliage. It was as deeply secluded as the heart of a wood from the torrid splendor of the heat, and not unreminiscent of some strange and tropic wood in the number and variety of its outdoor inhabitants. A gorgeous peacock trailed his tail along the path, a deer's antlers jutted between the lower boughs of the trees, an armandillo here and a kangaroo there, a wombat, a wallaby, a chameleon, owls of every sort and size, parakeets, jackdaws, and a raven, disported themselves in this paradise of the grotesque, and as for rabbits, hedgehogs, dormice, squirrels, and other ordinary British animals, only to mention a few, they were so numerous as to defy description. Never did a more heterogeneous collection of fauna exist outside the zoological gardens than the extraordinary menage which inhabited the spacious garden grounds of sixteen Cheney Walk. Meanwhile, the master of these furred and feathered folk was languidly rising and dressing. The whole aspect of his apartment was dark, almost forbidding. Thick, dark velvet curtains covered the windows, heavy hangings were round the bed and on the walls. An enormous mantelpiece of carved dark oak took up nearly one side of the room from floor to ceiling. Old black picture panels enhanced the general effect. One would hardly have believed in the blaze of sunshine without or in the magnificent color sense of the man who deliberately surrounded himself with such a funereal weight of shadow. Yet Rosetti, at this period of his life, was at his best of health, of prosperity, and with what went with him for happiness. He was free to follow his bent in all respects, to indulge any whim whether within or without the house. If Caprice kept him up at night until three o'clock and later, if insomnia or indolence prevented him rising till towards noon as now, if he chose to fill the house with rare china and the garden with rampant animals, there was none to say him nay. Autocratic by nature and habit, he was at present autocratic by dint of circumstance and in every respect his own master and a law unto himself. Dante Gabriel Rosetti was now a man of forty-three, rather short, distinctly stout, good-looking in a sense, but not impressively so. His large gray eyes, his dark brown hair, his dark auburn beard and mustache conveyed but little intimation of his Italian origin. Still less did his badly molded mouth indicate the typical artist. He wore spectacles for his failing sight, which were not conducive to a picturesque appearance. He could hardly be called well-dressed, though his attire was in no sense conspicuous. His movements were chiefly slow and heavy, those of a lounger, like a seal on a sandbank, as a two-canded friend had put it. In short, there was nothing to bear witness outwardly of the immense reserve fund of fiery vigor, prodigious personality, and dominant intellect, which dwelt within this many-sided genius. It would never have occurred to a casual observer that this thick-set, heavy, sluggish-looking man was naturally master of every company in which he found himself. A genial despot, a king by right, a born ruler over minds in other respects on a level with his own. Hidden forces of sovereignty and of creative power, smoldering deeply in Rosetti's breast, could turn him at times into a volcano of enthusiasm and energy. Two other men inhabited Tudor House as subtenants, Rosetti's brother William Michael and Algernon Charles Swinburne, while George Meredith also lived there for a time. None, however, was what may be termed a fixture. Swinburne and Meredith had each his own separate sitting room and W. M. Rosetti a bedroom only. Theoretically, the party met at dinner, but Swinburne was the only one who was fairly punctual to this arrangement. As for Rosetti himself, he acted in all things according to the dictates of the moment's impulse. And took his meals at any time he chose. His household arrangements, though far from parsimonious, were thus hardly calculated to promote anything beyond comfort of a more or less offhand kind. Today, having completed his careless toilet, he passed out into the adjoining room which he called the breakfast room. Green leaves brushed the windowpane and sunlight filtered through them. A large-colored porcelain chandelier, which had once been David Garrix, somewhat lightened up the general effect. And from the lovely avenue of lime trees in the garden, delicious scents stole in. Rosetti, languidly eating a lukewarm meal, appeared to acquire a gradual accession of energy. He looked through his morning's letters, gave the most casual of glances at the newspaper, for current events scarcely had the slightest interest for him, went down into his large studio, and presently strolled into the garden to play with the animals. The mulberries were ripening upon Queen Elizabeth's mulberry tree, the neglected garden intermingled flowers and weeds in rank luxuriance of leaf and blossom, the uncut grass lay long and withering under July rays, and the fierce flood of noontide glory beat down between the lime branches. The man of southern ancestry gazed around him with his ill sighted eyes, hungrily drinking in every detail of luscious color. The pure, light, warm green, which of all colors he loved the best, was tangible and consummate in the lime leaves, and the deep gold color and certain tints of gray, secondarily dear to him, were conspicuous in the dappled play of light and shadow. Those other hues which he had defined as shadowy or steel blue and brown with a crimson tinge, were present to his regard among the crowd of tangled flowers in their rich abandon of growth. Last and most magnificent, the scarlet in which his soul rejoiced, flamed at him in the splendor of great poppies here and there, half wild and holy magnificent. Other colors he had announced are only lovable according to the relation in which they are placed, and if he needed them here they were in all the multitudes of mid-summer. Almost he could imagine in the great green boughs some dried vision beckoning him with slim white arms, almost he could succumb to an illusion of some lovely lady poised among the leaves, as in his own picture, the daydream. Within the branching shade of reverie, dreams even may spring till autumn, yet none be like woman's budding daydream spirit fanned. Low toward deep skies, not deeper than her look, she dreams, till now on her forgotten book drops the forgotten blossom from her hand. The creatures, wild and tame, who flew or crept or burrowed or strutted or wriggled in this strangest of all London gardens, were furtively edging nearer and nearer on all sides to the man whom they recognized as a friend. Rosetti took up the wombat and fondled it. He patted the unprepossessing wallaby. He fed the ungracious raccoon. He dandled and teased the fat, irresponsible woodchuck. Occasionally he tossed a little notice to his Pomeranian puppy, Punch, or his great Irish deerhound, Wolf. Now and then he whistled to the birds, or paid a brief attention to the kangaroo in its enclosure, but of all his beasts he loved the wombat best. Yet time was passing all too rapidly, and Rosetti had, of late, made a definite attempt to work systematically and with a certain amount of daily output, whether in painting or poetry. He retraced his steps to the house and tried to settle himself to his labor. Everything appeared to be in a conspiracy to attract or to deflect his attention. At all points of the room, some object, quaint or curious or unusual, or perhaps with no claim to notice beyond its evident antiquity, some object called aloud to him, so to speak, and drew him aside. He had recently developed the collector's mania in its most unbridled form, with plenty of money flowing in and no particular necessity involved in the spending of it. He had suddenly evinced a passion for acquiring old oak, old furniture, old convex mirrors, old titles, and above all, blue china. He was one of the first men in England to start a collection of Japanese and Chinese blue china, and a very fine one his wads, as might reasonably be expected from the time and cash which he expended on it, although he sometimes paid in the form of a picture. This desire for possession of the antique, the bizarre, the odd, the not necessarily beautiful, was perhaps one of the most remarkable anomalies in Rosetti's paradoxical nature. It was, at most, a transitory phase just now at its full swing, and yet there seemed a certain incongruity in the fact that the man who combined at their highest points of perfection the crafts of the painter and the poet, the man who in England was the prime force of the poetic and artistic movement of the latter 19th century, should be ransacking dealer's shops for what Hanley characterized as flemy little bits of blue, and rummaging old curiosity stores after dusty, oaken relics. Yet we know that extremes meet, and meet with such frequency in the artistic temperament that, after all, one need hardly be surprised to see Rosetti very much of the earth earthy, gloating one moment over some grotesquely hideous Chinese curio, or rising another moment to superb altitudes of thought and diction wither few, if any, had preceded him. And as he sauntered round his spacious studio, or his wide sunny drawing room, and noted the various precious objects with which every nook was crammed, a flash of second sight lit up his mind. May not this ancient room, thou sittest in, dwell in separate living souls for joy or pain? Nay, all its corners may be painted plain, where heaven shows pictures of some life spent well, and may be stamped a memory all in vain upon the sight of lidless eyes in hell, inclusiveness. And the never-silent, ever-haunting memory returned to him, which only by distractions deliberately invoked could be shut out a while, the memory of his dead wife, and of all that he had lost in her, and of all the negligences and omissions with which, rightly or wrongly, he reproached himself, looking back upon their brief married life. Of her, prophetically, and of himself, left desolate, he had written twenty years before in what was to prove one of his greatest poems, when he told how the blessed Damazel leaned out from the gold bar of heaven. Her blue-grave eyes were deeper much than a deep water even. She had three lilies in her hand, and the stars in her hair were seven. Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, no wrought flowers did adorn. But a white rose of Mary's gift on the neck meately worn, and her hair, lying down her back, was yellow like ripe corn. Her seemed, she scarce had been a day, one of God's choristers. The wonder was not yet quite gone from that still look of hers. Albeit to them she left, her day had counted as ten years. To one it is ten years of years. Yet now, here in this place, surely she leaned or me, her hair fell all about my face. Nothing, the autumn fall of leaves, the whole year sets a pace. It was the terrace of God's house that she was standing on, by God built over the sheer depth in which space is begun. So high, that looking downward dense, she could scarce see the sun. It lies from heaven, across the flood of ether, as a bridge, beneath the tides of day and night, with flame and blackness, ridged the void, as low as where this earth spins, like a fretful midge. Heard hardly, some of her new friends, playing at holy games, spake, gentle mouthed, among themselves their virginal chaste names, and the souls, mounting up to God, went by her like thin flames. And still she bowed herself, and stooped into the vast waste calm, till her bosom's pressure must have made the bar she leaned on warm, and the lilies lay as if asleep along her bended arm. From the fixed lull of heaven she saw time, like a pulse, shake fierce through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove in that steep gulf to pierce the swarm, and then she spake as when the stars sang in their spheres. The blessed Damazel. And of her, and of himself, again he had written prophetically in the mystic and mysterious tale of hand and soul, for she, whether as maid or wife, whether living or dead, had given him inspiration and aspiration, even such as the veiled woman who was his very soul brought to Chiaro Del Armo the painter. A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a green and gray raiment, fashioned to that time. It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams. Though her hands were joined, her face was not lifted, but set forward, and though the gaze was austere, yet her mouth was supreme in gentleness. She did not move closer towards him, but he felt her to be as much with him as his breath. He was like one who, scaling a great steepness, hears his own voice echoed in some place much higher than he can see, and the name of which is not known to him. As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro, not as it were from her mouth or in his ears, but distinctly between them. I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. See me and know me as I am. Thou sayest that fame has failed thee, and faith failed thee. But because at least thou hast not laid thy life under riches, therefore, though thus late, I am suffered to come unto thy knowledge. Fame sufficed not for that thou didst seek fame. Seek thine own conscience, not thy mind's conscience, but thine heart's, and all shall approve and suffice. While he heard, Chiaro went slowly on his knees. It was not to her that spoke, for the speech seemed within him and his own. The air brooded in sunshine, and though the turmoil was great outside, the air within was at peace. But when he looked in her eyes, he wept, hand and soul. And now Rosetti filled his eyes with gazing on his own picture of Beata Beatrix, whose face was that of his wife, the noblest accomplishment of his genius in which he had rendered into form and color the words of Dante's Balata. Because mine eyes can never have their fill of looking at my lady's lovely face, I will so fix my gaze that I may become blessed, beholding her. Of this he had declared that no picture ever cost him so much pain in painting. It was the first time since her death that he had permitted himself to recall that lovely countenance, and that with no picture had he ever felt so conscious of his supreme mastery in art. It is not, he said, intended at all to represent death, but to render it under the semblance of a trance in which she is suddenly wrapped from earth to heaven. In this glorious achievement he had entirely broken away from the style of his early medieval work, more or less intentionally modeled upon the archaisms of a certain period. He had foregone the meticulous detail of the pre-Raphaelites, the stiff gestures of Tuscan art, the precision of crowded detail. He had forsaken the quaint chambers in quaint places where angels creep in through sliding panel doors and stand behind rows of flowers drumming on golden bells with wings crimson and green. He had shaken off some of the trammels of a conscious pose and was now using his palette and his pen coincidentally to express the best that was in him. Again and again he had declared that if any man has any poetry in him he should paint, for it has all been said and written and they have scarcely begun to paint it. Moreover, he frequently found himself able to demonstrate his meaning more clearly through pigment than through ink because of that all permeating color sense of his to which we have already alluded. Great colorists, like great poets, are born not made. Color and emotion are practically identical. And if poetry be, according to Wordsworth's dictum, emotion remembered in tranquility, the desire of Rosetti to express himself through such a medium can only be regarded as an inevitable outcome of his remarkable poetic temperament. I believe color, he had written, to be a quite indispensable quality in the highest art. Color is the physiognomy of a picture and cannot be perfectly beautiful without proving goodness and greatness. It is another incongruity of the versatile genius of Rosetti that one of his most successful pictures should be almost colorless in comparison with the rest. His annunciation, or Eche and Chila Domini, as he named it, is a study of purity almost unique in its dignity and restraint. The white dob was his own name for this masterpiece, which for very, very many years found no purchaser and drew down such a nice derangement of epitaphs from the principal art critics as might have fatally discouraged a less indomitable man at the very outset of his career. Here again, picture and poetry were at one in his thoughts, for he had loved to dwell in Ave and in Mary's girlhood upon this neglected or forgotten subject the obscure days of the Virgin before Gabriel's salutation sounded in her ears. This is that blessed Mary pre-elect God's Virgin. Gone is a great while and she dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee until God's will she brought devout respect, profound simplicity of intellect and supreme patience from her mother's knee, faithful and hopeful, wise in charity, strong in grave peace, in pity circumspect. So held she through her girlhood as it were an angel-watered lily that near God grows and is quiet. Till one dawn at home she woke in her white bed and had no fear at all, yet wept till sunshine and felt odd because the fullness of the time was come. Mary's girlhood. Some special, subtle charm of chastity and sanctity drew Rosetti to the contemplation of this exquisite, maidenly figure in its gracious reticence. By the very force of contrast she appealed to him as compared with the passionate and impassioned woman of his normal ideal, the richly glowing, deeply loving, long-throated, dense-haired, full-lipped lady of so many poems and so many paintings. Such a one was Helen of Troy Town, such Lilith of Eden Bower, such burning with unquenchable love and hate, the desperate heroine of Sister Helen. Why did you melt your waxen man, Sister Helen? Today is the third since you began. The time was long, yet the time ran, little brother. Oh mother, Mary mother, three days today between hell and heaven. But if you have done your work all right, Sister Helen, you'll let me play, for you said I might. Be very still in your play tonight, little brother. Oh mother, Mary mother, third night to night between hell and heaven. Oh, the waxen nave was plump today, Sister Helen, how like dead folk he has dropped away. Nay now, of the dead, what can you say, little brother? Oh mother, Mary mother, what of the dead between hell and heaven? See, see, the sunken pile of wood, Sister Helen, shines through the thinned wax, red as blood. Nay now, when looked you yet on blood, little brother? Oh mother, Mary mother, how pale she is between hell and heaven. See, see, the wax has dropped from its place, Sister Helen, and the flames are winning up a pace. Yet here they burn but for a space, little brother. Oh mother, Mary mother, hear for a space between hell and heaven. Ah, what white thing at the door has crossed, Sister Helen, ah, what is this that sighs in the frost? A soul that's lost as mine is lost, little brother? Oh mother, Mary mother, lost, lost, all lost between hell and heaven. It was almost afternoon when Rosetti sat down to write in hard earnest. I shall never, I suppose, he had remarked, get over the weakness of making a thing as good as I can manage. And this man of indolent physical habits was most sedulous and fastidious in mental ones. He spared himself no trouble in perfecting, in revising, in remodeling. Anything slurred or scamped or slipshod was abhorrent to him. His poems were the growth of that fundamental brainwork which he had stipulated as the only real origin of great poetry. But these growths were tilled and tended, pruned and watered by him, with scrupulous and unremitting care. He had his own strongly defined views on the composition of a poem. It was no haphazard affair with him of casual inspiration. Poetry, said he, should seem to the hearer to have been always present to his thought, but never before heard. It was, therefore, largely from the prospective hearer's point of view that the poems were executed. His Italian blood and Italian instincts prevented him ever looking at things from a thoroughly English point of view. His mind was withdrawn from all that ordinarily occupied the mental processes of the ordinary man, restricted within definite and, in some sense, narrow limits. In politics, metaphysics, science, theology, history, whether of nations or individuals, he had no interest, and thus the whole strength of an acute and penetrating intellect was devoted to art and poetry, powerfully concentrated in a two-fold effort. For about an hour he remained fixed in body and spirit. Sometimes he hummed softly and deeply, soto voce, sometimes he rocked himself to and fro. Sometimes, with restless, fidgety movement, he crossed one foot over the other and shook it rapidly. Now and then he clicked his thumb and first fingernails together, in a manner that would have irritated any companion. But for the most part he was curiously quiet, setting down carefully and with assiduous attention, in his bold, clear, sweeping hand writing, the outcome of many previous meditations. Rarely has there been such a conjunction of the artist and the craftsman, as in his younger days Rosetti had frequented the British Museum to find out what he classed as stunning words for poetry, reverberant, stately, medieval words, instinct with sound and color. So now he used his words as a painter, his paints, selecting them from an astoundingly rich vocabulary, and not seldom using them in a new sense or putting them to a new service such as they had not hitherto known in customary English usage, that his lines should be perfectly lucid, unimpaired by any intricacy or cloudiness of expression was his first care, and hence the limpid clarity and dignity of his best work, the clothes of the staff and script, for instance, which falls upon the ear like a passage of Sebastian Bach. Stand up to-day, still armed with her, good night, before his brow, who then, as now, was here and there, who had in mind thy vow then, even as now. The lists are set in heaven today, the bright pavilions shine, fair hangs thy shield, and none gain say, the trumpets sound in sign that she is thine, not tithed with days and years decease, he pays thy wage he owed, but with imperishable peace here in his own abode, thy jealous god, the staff and script, or again in the sonorous majesty of a superscription. Look in my face, my name is might have been, I am also called no more, too late, farewell. Unto thine ear I hold the dead seashell, cast up thy life's foam-fretted feet between. Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen, which had life's form and loves, but by my spell is now a shaken shadow intolerable. Of ultimate things unuttered, the frail scream, hark me, how still I am, but should there dart one moment through thy soul, the soft surprise of that winged peace, which lulls the breath of sighs, then shout thou see me smile, and turn apart thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart, sleepless with cold, commemorative eyes. In like manner, as Rosetti seems to have served no apprenticeship in literature, but to have come suddenly and swiftly into the possession of his full inheritance, many of his first poems having been written from his eighteenth to his twenty-third year, so also he was not beholden to experience, to books, or to anything beyond the promptings of a vivid intuition amounting almost to clairvoyance for the subject matter of his poems. They are nearly all the expression of some poignant passion in which violent emotions are, so to speak, the dramatis personae and external nature the mere background. It has been well said that no nineteenth-century English poet had so little of the instinctive love of nature as Rosetti. He was essentially an indoors poet. Not only was he a throwback, a reversion to medieval thought in his views and cognizance of life, intrinsically a man of the Middle Ages, and thus by no means a votary of wild nature, but he did not care for the outdoor world at all. He objected to traveling, it was too disturbing and perturbing, he disliked walking, it was too much trouble, and although he observed and mentally noted a hundred intimate details of nature and of scenery, it was the painter's eye rather than the poet's heart which was attracted by them. Living as he did, shut up mainly within his own four walls, rising late and accessible to but few visitors, a curious prestige of mystery and seclusion surrounding him, which rendered him an unknown quantity to the world at large. Rosetti had but a small store of experiences to draw upon when compared with other English poets of his age, nor did his double-sided art provide him with more, for the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood had kept themselves to themselves, presenting to the bewilderment or amusement of the world at large a front of jealously guarded privacy. It therefore renders his work more marvelous in its result that it should have been practically the outcome of instinct and insight only, a rich and obscure glow of insight to quote Coventry Patmore into depth too profound and too sacred for clear speech, even if they could be spoken. And the most remarkable point of all is the fact that Rosetti's friends and contemporaries regarded his poems and his paintings as only a faint expression of an inner force. Thus his art, which has been defined as the climax of personality, was held by all who knew him to be so much inferior to the possibilities of that personality that it afforded but the vaguest suggestion of what he might do if he should choose to exert his full powers. The medium in which he worked, whether words or colors, was a hindrance rather than a help to him. Rosetti laid down his pen at last and involuntarily turned as though to read his completed poem aloud to some sympathetic listener. Then, with a gesture of despair, he brushed away this vain delusion and recognized that he was very much alone. By no means a man of naturally morbid nature, he was so encompassed by vivid and melancholy memories that, when unsuckered by the society of friends, a certain somberness of gloom invested him. Again, in recollection, his lips were touching the lovely lips of his wife that should never smile upon him more. Again, he meditated in the very terms of Dante's sorrow, which he had pictured and translated so touchingly. Then my heart, that was so full of love, said unto me, It is true that our Lady Lyeth dead, and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding place, and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my Lady in death, whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil, and who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, I have attained to look on the beginning of peace, vita nuova of Dante Allagieri. And his mind, always prone to the supernatural, if not to the superstitious, pondered with renewed longing whether it might not yet be possible to hold intercourse with the world beyond the grave. Over and over again he had made the sanguine attempt by means of spiritualistic phenomena, over and over again he had been disappointed. Yet still he cherished a futile, fatalistic hope of some clearer and nearer communion with the dead. He was not, in the ordinary sense of the words, a religious man, or rather his religion was medieval in its main characteristics. A deep and sincere reverence for the person of Christ, a boundless admiration for the book of Ecclesiastes, an acquaintance with the more humanly emotional chapters of the Gospels, these were the chief essentials of his faith. Yet, though his beliefs were of this heterogeneous character, a fortuitous concourse of atoms, Rosetti was capable of being most indignant at any hint that he was irreligious or un-Christian. Do not my works testify to my Christianity, he had vehemently inquired, it was a question impossible to answer. But this spasm of heartache and longing which had momentarily oppressed him was largely the result of mental exhaustion. Writing poetry took it out of Rosetti to quite an abnormal extent. He described himself as the wracked and tortured medium never permitted an instance surcease of agony until the thing on hand is finished. And now, to banish painful thoughts and find a restorative, the artist took up a book and immersed himself a while in its pages. Rosetti was not a great or omnivorous reader, he was a leisurely and fastidious one. The library contained about a thousand volumes, some being rare and curious books. Above all English imaginative writers he worshipped Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Shelley. Among novelists his chief admiration was Dumas. Boswells Johnson was his favorite reading at night when he lay sleepless. But probably the book which had more influenced his own work than any other was the immortal Mortarther of Mallory. He was very sensitive towards fine poetry, it affected him even to tears. But certain writers he had hardly even patience to hear mentioned. Upon this index expurgatorious figured the names of Thackery, Balzac, and George Elliott. It will therefore be seen that Rosetti's tastes in literature were, like all his other tastes, of a most resolutely personal order. The afternoon was rapidly drawing to a close, not much had been accomplished. Sloth, alas, said Rosetti to himself, has but too much to answer for with me. I had better stick to knowing how to mix Vermillion and Ultramarine for a flesh gray and how to manage their equivalents in verse. He quoted under his breath with melancholy meaning, his own tremendous lines, lost days. The lost days of my life until today, what were they? Could I see them in the street, lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat sown once for food, but trodden into clay, or golden coin squandered and still to pay, or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet, or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat the undying throats of hell, a thirst away? I do not see them here, but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see, each one a murdered self with low last breath. I am thyself, what hast thou done to me? And I, and I, thyself, low each one saith, and thou thyself to all eternity. And as he betook himself to his easel, with a valiant determination to toil till daylight failed him, voices and footsteps broke cheerfully upon his ear, and some of his chosen intimates appeared in the doorway. Swinburne, Walter Pater, Edward Byrne Jones, one by one came dropping in. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Edmund Goss, Philip Burke Marston, the young blind poet, were numbered amongst Rosetti's most loyal admirers. So were William Morris, William Bell Scott, and last, not least, Ford Maddox Brown, his quantum master and consistently faithful friend. Rosetti received his friends with that bluff, hearty, free, and easy genealogy, which was one of his chief attributes, and the studio soon resounded with laughter. For this paradoxical poet was a man of infinite jest. His rich voice rang out a thousand changes of intonation, from the most despotic assertions, the most autocratic layings down of the law, to the sparkle and scintillation of a spontaneous mirth and humor in which few could rival him. And with all this, he executed a tremendous influence, apparently unknown to himself, over everyone with whom he came in contact. Absolutely careless and indifferent as to the effect he produced, unimpressive in appearance, entirely unaffected in manner, without a trace of pose or pedestal, he ruled with a complete and enthralling dominance over whatever circle surrounded him. The extraordinary homage which his admirers rendered him, in no wise, went to his head. He was too commanding a personality to be dazzled or dizzyed by applause. Meanwhile, he painted busily as long as light was available. He never relaxed work until darkness drove him to surrender. Then, whatever hour it might be, with his usual disregard of times and seasons, he ordained to dine, and lounged into the little green dining room where Swinburne and Meredith might or might not join him for, truth to tell, the poet's happy-go-lucky methods of life were not always conducive to comfort, that he was inconsiderate on minor points, however affectionate and generous on greater matters no one could contradict. The twilight was already deepening into dusk and the garden a mere well of shadows when Rosetti sauntered out again and heard how his animals of nocturnal habits scuttered and grunted and snuffled in the tangled grasses. A faint sweetness of lilies blended with the celestial odor of the lime blossom and warm aromatic scents of herbage lingered through the darkness. In such a night, among the nebulous half-lights and fragrance, his astarty siriaca might have taken concrete form, moving in sea-green robes through the grave green of midsummer, while the low wind in the treetops made a sound like a distant sea. Mystery, low betwixt the sun and moon, astarty of the sirians, Venus queen, air, Aphrodite was. In silver sheen her two-fold girdle clasps the infinite boon of bliss, whereof the heaven and earth commune, and from her necks inclining flower-stam lean love-frated lips and absolute eyes that wean the pulse of hearts to the sphere's dominant tune. Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel all thrones of light beyond the sky and sea, the witnesses of beauty's face to be. That face, of love's all penetrative spell, amulet, talisman, and oracle, betwixt the sun and moon a mystery, astarty siriaca. Rosetti debated with himself whether to take one of his accustomed walks, which were only pursued at night. He could not decide whether it were not too late to go as far as Albany Street to visit his mother, that intellectual and noble woman whom he loved was so tender a devotion. He went out to the front of the house and stood looking down upon the river. In those days the foreshore boasted no embankment, but was be strewn with boats and the various litter and debris of the waterside. The river gleamed seductively beneath the rising moon, but the night was saltier than ever. To cover miles of oven-like streets was a most repugnant idea. Rosetti shrugged his shoulders and turned back. A sudden insufferable weariness and languor descended upon him, and the weariness, as usual, was companioned by the remembrance of a woman's face, a face of unworldly simplicity and purity of aspect, with blue-green eyes, brilliant complexion, and a heavy crown of copper-golden hair, a face in short of extraordinary beauty, not to be equaled, not to be forgotten. A long, long while he sat in his lonely studio, summoning this exquisite countenance from the vistas of the past, striving with vain, strenuous endeavor to materialize it before his eyes. But this consummation continuously evaded him. Nothing short of the eternal futurity could restore his wife into his arms again. Even so, where heaven holds breath and hears the beating heart of love's own breast, where, round the secret of all spheres, all angels lay their wings to rest, how shall my soul stand wrapped and awed, when, by the new birth born abroad, throughout the music of the suns, it enters in her soul at once, and knows the silence there, for God. Here, with her face, doth memory sit meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, till other eyes shall look from it, eyes of the spirit's Palestine, even than the old gaze tenderer, while hopes and aims, long lost with her, stand round her image side by side, like tombs of pilgrims that have died about the holy sepulchre, the portrait. It was far into the small hours of the morning, the twilight had shifted round northward, and was merging itself into the dawn of a new day, when Dante Gabriel Rosetti dragged himself upstairs to that heavily darkened room where sleep could rarely be induced to enter. For four years he had suffered from insomnia, the one enemy of all others with which he was least fitted to cope. Impatient, impetuous, self-willed, he had seized the nearest weapon to hand, the most powerful, superific, then available, which at that time was so little known that its possible ill results were only a remote contingency. Chloral afforded him an unconsciousness which would hardly be termed repose. He lighted a candle which would burn for the rest of the night, put a book upon the couch to which he would transfer himself when weary of tossing on a restless bed, swallowed his customary dose, and lay down to await what peace the night might bring him. Peace so long a stranger to his troubled spirit and feverishly laborious brain, and while his eyes at last closed as under a leaden weight beneath the benumbing influence of the narcotic, his thoughts ran slowly and in broken phrasing upon the lines which he believed his best and highest achievement, and in which his ultimate longings were voiced as by a muffled music. When vain desire at last and vain regret go hand in hand to death and all is vain, what shall assuage the unforgotten pain and teach the unforgetful to forget? Shall peace be still a sunk stream, long unmet, or may the soul at once in a green plain stoop through the spray of some sweet life fountain and cull the doodrenched flowering amulet? Ah, when the one soul in that golden air between the scriptured petals softly blown, pierced breathless for the gift of grace unknown, Ah, let none other alien spell so air, but only the one hope's one name be there, not less nor more, but even that word alone. The One Hope End of Chapter 7 A Day with Rosetti Recording by Lucretia B Chapter 8 of Days with Great Poets This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Days with Great Poets by Mae Clarissa Gillington Byron Chapter 8 A Day with William Morris O June, O June, that we desired so, Will thou not make us happy on this day? Across the river thy soft breezes blow, Sweet with the scent of bean fields far away, The earthly paradise. His own lines are running in the head of William Morris, as at sunrise, that is to say, about three o'clock, on a mid-summer morning of 1879, he thrusts his rough dark head out of the open window, and sees the river shimmering past between the branches of great elms in fullest leaf. The very breath of June is in the air, full of atoms of summer, and the fertile earth is aglow with warm loveliness. From all the length and breadth of green English shires to Morris in his house by London River, the voice of beauty calls, and he responds to it. O me, O me, how I love the earth, he murmurs, and the seasons and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, the earth and the growth of it, and the life of it. If I could but say or show how I love it. His vagrant thoughts go homing to their dearest goal, that lovely old-world Kelmscott village in Oxfordshire, after which his present abode is named, beside its far-off, lovely mother of the Thames. He loves to think that this same gray, sunlit water, which sparkles at his feet, has come down to him past the gables and the gardens of Kelmscott, 130 miles away. He dreams a moment of those far-green meadows, pure and perfect, yet as very Eden. He sees them as he saw the fields in summer dawn. Pray but one prayer for me, twix thy closed lips. Think but one thought of me, up in the stars. The summer night waineth, the morning light slips. Faint and gray, twix the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars, that are patiently waiting there for the dawn. Patient and colorless, though heaven's gold waits to float through them along with the sun. Far out in the meadows, above the young corn, the heavy elms wait, and restless and cold, the uneasy wind rises. The roses are done. Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn, round the lone house in the midst of the corn. Speak but one word to me over the corn, over the tender, bowed locks of the corn. But William Morris is not alone a dreamer of dreams, born out of due time, any more than he is the idle singer of an empty day. Essentially, ineradicably, first and foremost, he is a man of action. He has just aroused himself from that sleep of dreamless profundity which he can take, as he puts it, in solid bars, and from which he passes into a waking life of immediate and strenuous energy. He never does anything by haves. In ten minutes he has dressed and started work. His dressing, as may be inferred, is a rough and ready matter. It is indeed affected without the aid of a mirror, for he hates mirrors and will not have any in the house. His rough blue surge is that of a workman, not a literature. And his general appearance it must be confessed is that of a slovenly and unkempt magnificence. His extraordinary and abundant hair with its thick, strong curl, like wrought metal, his massive head with its vague, in expressive eyes and beautifully molded mouth, his fine build and height, dimly indicative of almost superhuman strength, his clumsy-looking but exquisitely adroit hands, all these traits have combined to produce that rum and indescribable deportment which is at once the delight and despair of his friends. He has resolutely turned away from the window, switching off, so to speak, that romantic element which makes one side of his life one long dream, and has taken up the other side of his life, that steady, assiduous, unremitting, almost stolid, laboriousness which has made him the man he is. I do not hope to be great at all in anything, he wrote in earlier days, but perhaps I may reasonably hope to be happy in my work, and sometimes when I am idle and doing nothing, pleasant visions go past me of the things that may be. Nowadays it may be said he is never idle, mind or hands or both are always busy. Work has become his ideal, his solace, his panacea for all ills. I tried to think, he has declared, what would happen to me if I am forbidden my ordinary daily work, and I knew that I should die of despair and weariness. And indeed it is not easy to see how this strong and passionate man, possessed of superabundant vitality and tremendously powerful physique, could find an outlet for his exuberant energy except by actual manual labor. His loom is set up in his bedroom, he is already weaving there, now in the first soft light, busyed upon the lovely warp and woof of his cabbage and vine tapestry. Sometimes he will stay at this for eight or nine hours, sometimes as today other labors claim his attention, and he toils all the more resolutely for knowing that his time at the loom must be short. In the making and dying of textile fabrics, William Morris has found a means of expression particularly apt to his peculiar modes of thought. To him the medieval method is so much the best that it is the only one. And not content with reviving medieval romance in his prose and verse, he continues to compose as it were in more tangible materials, but always with the same underlying idea. Simplicity of utterance, romance of plot, gorgeous pageantry of color, these are characteristic of his work both in words and in things. To make the common as though it were not common, an ideal which has been already expounded in the art of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is a fair definition of the unusual quality which suffuses all the achievements of William Morris. And even as in the earthly paradise, the lambent rosy light, the misty lunar atmosphere, shot with faint auroral colors, the low and magical music, the ever-varying panorama of poetical description and passion and thought have struck an entirely new note in English poetry. So the same words very nearly may be used with reference to the material effect wrought out by William Morris in the field of decorative and textile art. You cannot think of him as a poet without considering him as the master craftsman, the designer, the architect, the weaver, the dire, the artisan artist in excelsis. He is able to express in one art it would appear that which the technique of another denies him. He can create a new atmosphere in his poems, but in textiles he can, it is said, create new colors, amethyst with tender flushings of red and gold which take on the tincture of a sunset sky, and blues so cunningly intermingled with green that no existing color name may define them. This poignant joy in color has always been his. It is conspicuous in his earlier poems where splashes of splendid primary hues are almost the raison d'etre of certain lyrics. The drawing and the painting are misalasque in their quaint and realistic detail, in such poems as The Sailing of the Sword. Across the empty garden beds, when the sword went out to sea, I scarcely saw my sister's heads bowed each beside a tree. I could not see the castle leds when the sword went out to sea. Alicia wore a scarlet gown when the sword went out to sea, but Ursula's was russet brown. For the mist we could not see the scarlet roofs of the good town when the sword went out to sea. Green holly in Alicia's hand when the sword went out to sea, with seer oak leaves did Ursula stand. Oh, yet alas for me, I did but bear a peeled white wand when the sword went out to sea. Oh, russet brown and scarlet bright when the sword went out to sea, my sister's wore, I wore but white. Red, brown and white, all three. Three damazelles each had a night when the sword went out to sea. Or in that very harmless and spirited ditty which had once the knack of simply infuriating the grave and precise, two red roses across the moon, the color notes predominate. There was a lady lived in a hall, large in the eyes and slim and tall, and ever she sung from noon to noon two red roses across the moon. There was a night came riding by in early spring when the roads were dry, and he heard that lady sing at the noon, two red roses across the moon. Yet none the more he stopped at all, but he rode a gallop past the hall and left that lady singing at noon, two red roses across the moon. Because forsooth the battle was set and the scarlet and blue had got to be met, he rode on the spur till the next warm noon, two red roses across the moon. You scarce could see for the scarlet and blue a golden helm or a golden shoe, so he cried as the fight grew thick at the noon, two red roses across the moon. Verily then the gold bore through the huddled spears of the scarlet and blue, and they cried as they cut them down at the noon, two red roses across the moon. Under the may she stooped to the crown, all was gold, there was nothing of brown, and the horns blew up in the hall at noon, two red roses across the moon. The big dark weaver's lips moved silently and his filmed inscrutable eyes shined faintly with a lambent light. He is thoroughly enjoying himself. No work which cannot be done with pleasure is worth doing. That is one of his cardinal maxims. Time was when anybody that made anything made a work of art beside a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it. Whatever I doubt I have no doubt of that. One of Morris's main objects in life is to bring this simple, long-forgotten truth home to the hearts of his fellow workmen and how hard a task he finds it. For in modern days, as once in the origins of language, work and pain are synonymous, and pleasure is divorced from labor by reason of the tertium quid, which we know as money. But in the manual arts, as in literature, Morris perpetually endeavors to take up and continue the dropped threads of the medieval tradition when honest labor wore a lovely face, and he denies the superiority of verbal or literary construction over any other. All are equal in his eyes. That talk of inspiration says he is sheer nonsense. There is no such thing. It's a mere matter of craftsmanship. If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he'd better shut up. He'll never do any good at all. So now you behold him carrying out his own principle and framing noble phrases in his mind while his deft fingers manipulate the threads of the web. Having concluded the appointed hours at the loom, Morris, who even during his work has frequently paced to and fro, restlessly patting round the room or oscillating between his weft and the window, goes down to his study on the ground floor, a room of severe simplicity. No carpet is there, no curtains. Shelves of plain, unpolished oak, heavy laden with books cover most of the wall space. A square table of the same plain oak carries his writing tackle. A few austere chairs are placed about. The books, like the room, afford little clue to their owner's pensions. They are a most haphazard collection, mainly yellow-backed novels picked up on railway journeys. Morris, the jealous hoarder of invaluable medieval volumes, is careless in the extreme as regards his modern authors, and losing books is almost a habit with him. His tastes, moreover, are by no means eclectic. He is a rapid but not a great reader. A chosen few in the world of literature are dear to him, and all the others but so much empty letterpress. Milton he abominates. Wordsworth he detests. In Shakespeare he has no great interest. For Browning and Tennyson, twin idols of the period, he has cared very little since his youth. But Keats, Keats for whom I have such boundless admiration and whom I venture to call one of my masters, and to whom he closely approximates in the tone and quality of his work, sits enthroned in his heart. And among prose writers of the day he accords first place to Carlisle and Ruskin. The latter he reveres as a truly great and wise master, not only in matters of art, but throughout the whole sphere of human life. Fiction does not greatly appeal to Morris, yet with that queer twist of the anomalous so often discoverable in men of great genius, he has three favorite writers who are about the last people one could have guessed. He is devoted to George Barrow, he is soaked and steeped in dickens, and above all he is an enthusiast regarding the adventures of Mr. Jorak's. This last is an inexplicable matter. Morris is no horseman, he knows little and cares less about any sport save angling. How be it he has for many years, in the moods when he was not dreaming of himself as Tristram or Sigurd, identified himself with Joe Gargery, Great Expectations or Mr. Boffin, our mutual friend, to such an extent that his favorite salutations are quotations from these worthies. And he insists on ramming Jorak's down the throats of his friends in season and out of season, to their bewilderment and, beyond entendue, not infrequently to their boredom. Morris, standing carelessly over his table, sets down a few score lines, the result of his morning's meditations. He can write anyhow, anywhere, under any interruption. The leisurely seclusion of the professional author has no charms for him. His exquisitely beautiful calligraphy, originally a slovenly and illegible scrawl, is the result of years of work spent on illuminating and on the study of painted books of the 13th and 14th centuries. It is now analogous to that delicate and marvelous detail, that skill in the embroiderers and the goldsmith's art, which are so evident in the intricately wrought, yet broadly designed effects of his verse. The happiness of epithet and of local coloring, which obtain in Jason, and still more, in the earthly paradise, the picturesque detail and the appropriate phrase which give life and individuality to his pictures, are for the most part known only by their effects, and only fully appreciated in the retrospect. Morris's greater poems are mainly unquotable, because you must take them as a whole. To detach a few lines from their context is equivalent to cutting away a piece of cornice to proffer as an example of a sublime cathedral. For this reason, he will never achieve the enormous popularity of such poets as Tennyson or Longfellow, because, to the average man or woman, great architecture is less alluring than a small, well-furnished house. An impression of vastness overhangs and overaws the mind, but little domesticities can insinuate themselves into its closest corners. Of William Morris's earlier poems, the defense of Guinevere, the haystack in the floods, and the rest of that noble company, it has been said that they seem to be lifted out of poetry to have, besides poetry, a substance of visible beauty of one particular kind, to be partly without any notion of being poetry, or effect, or aim at it. Yet, caviar to the general, though the earlier poems may be, who can shut his ears against the sensuous loveliness of such lyrics as that sweet song not sung yet to any man, fragrant as a flower, the water nymphs lullaby in Jason. I know a little garden clothes set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wander if I might from Dewey Dawn to Dewey Night and have one with me wandering. And though within it no birds sing, and though no pillared house is there, and though the apple-bows are bearer of fruit and blossom, wood to God, her feet upon the green grass trod, and I beheld them as before. There comes a murmur from the shore, and in the place two fair streams are, drawn from the purple hills afar, drawn down unto the restless sea. The hills whose flowers nare fed the bee, the shore no ship has ever seen, still beaten by the billows green, whose murmur comes unceasingly unto the place for which I cry, for which I cry both day and night, for which I let slip all delight, that maketh me both deaf and blind, careless to win, unskilled to find, and quick to lose what all men seek. Yet, tottering as I am, and weak, still have I left a little breath to seek within the jaws of death an entrance to that happy place, to seek the unforgotten face once seen, once kissed, once reft from me, a nigh the murmuring of the sea. And, though no new poet be a prophet in his own country, and though all great revivalists or reconstructors of an art must be prepared for initial doubtings and denials, have not Morris's mystical heroines, nameless miracles of beauty out of fairy lands for Lorne, a more subtle charm, a more enduring sway, than the everyday damsels of court or cottage, who are celebrated by less imaginative makers, to consider the earthly paradise, that consummation of the vague and the mystical, in form, color, and sound, set forth in words of the most childlike simplicity, is to hear and behold an endless procession, a moving pomp, like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream, gorgeous with blazonry of color, and resonant with strange, exhilarating music. It is to listen once more with the wonder of a child, to the old half-forgotten tales, classical and medieval, brought down into one's touch and sight. It is the infusing of quick and throbbing vitality into the dry bones of dead romances, and the opening out of new strange vistas into dreamlands, that we supposed were irretrievable. With the king, having no name and needing none, we sit breathless at the watching of the falcon. Till, with a start, he looked at last about him, and all dreams were passed. For now, though it was past twilight without, within all grew as bright as when the noon sun smote the wall, though no lamp shone within the hall. Then rose the king upon his feet, and well nigh heard his own heart beat, and grew all pale for hope and fear, as sound of footsteps caught his ear but soft, and as some fair lady, going as gently as might be, stopped now and then a while, distraught by pleasant wanderings of sweet thought. Nigher the sound came, and more nigh, until the king unwittingly trembled, and felt his hair arise, but on the door still kept his eyes. That opened soon, and in the light there stepped alone a lady bright, and made straight toward him up the hall. In golden garments was she clad, and round her waist a belt she had of emerald's fair, and from her feet she held the raiment daintily, and on her golden head had she a rose wreath round a pearl-wrought crown. Softly she walked with eyes cast down, nor looked she any other than an earthly lady, though no man has seen so fair a thing as she. We go roaming down with rodipy to the iridescent ripples of the June sea, and await some dim, indefinable joy, as when she stood to watch the thin waves mount her feet before she tried the deep. Then toward the wide, sun-litened space she turned, and began to meet the freshness of the water-cool, and sighed for pleasure as the little rippling tide lapped her about, and slow she wandered on till many a foot from shore she now had won, the story of rodipy. Or we cower with Lawrence trembling in the shadows, while the glimmering procession of the dead gods passes terribly from sea to land, daring at all risks to recover the ring given to Venus. But William Morris does not take himself at any exorbitant valuation. Whatsoever his hand finds to do, he does with all his might, and leaves it at that. First in one art, then in another, he strives to find expression. Neither praise nor blame can cloud his vision of the ultimate end which he has set before him. Perhaps you think, he told his mother once, that people will laugh at me and call me purposeless and changeable. I have no doubt they will, but I in my turn will try to shame them, God being my helper, by steadiness and hard work. And thus it is with no sense of instability or restlessness that he puts down his pen and proceeds to adopt another mode of expression. It is simply a change in the material, but not in the ideal of his art. He runs upstairs and takes a glimpse of the river, now fully ablaze with summer sunshine, from the five windows of his great beautiful drawing room which runs the whole length of the house. This room is hung round with tapestry of his own weaving. It boasts a great painted settle and other articles of furniture, such as give it a unique touch of character and individuality among the conventions of the latter seventies. It is one mass of subdued, yet glowing color, yet its chief perfection is missing in the shape of that stately and beautiful woman Jane Morris, who is just now with her children away at Kelmscott Manor. The human element is consciously lacking in this glorious apartment and Morris realizes that, for although he prefers men's to women's society, and although his most intimate friend has declared that, he doesn't want anybody, he lives absolutely without the need of man or woman. Yet, Mrs. Morris is the very embodiment of her husband's most gracious imaginings, and without her superb presence, the house is but a tinkling symbol. Morris, who ignores the existence of society, who has never belonged to a club, who, with the true artist's impatience in small matters, never knows how much or how little he has in hand, is dependent upon the presence of his beautiful wife far more than he allows or is aware of. Now he is downstairs again, and out of doors, a chorus of sweet garden odors greeting him. A long rambling garden runs behind the house with lawn and orchard and kitchen garden. Hammersmith is still but a suburban village, quaint, Georgian, unspoiled, from all the flower beds of its little red-tiled houses, delightful mid-summer fragrances float by. The very barges, as they pass along the river, wear a holiday air and spread their great red spritzels, like one who expands his breast, to meet pure breeze. Morris betakes himself to his coach house and stables, which he has turned into a large weaving room for carpet looms. During the previous winter, he has been carrying on the weaving of figured silks upon a jacquard loom, pile carpets upon this loom in the coach house, and aris tapestry upon the one in his bedroom, simultaneously and in addition to his works at Queen's Square, where he dyes embroideries and silken fabrics. He is also engaged in the initiation of, or the execution of, designs and fabrications in such works as painted glass, tiles, furniture, furniture velvets, wallpapers, chintzes, printed cottons, and upholstery of all sorts. Not to mention a hundred projects of social reform begun or in progress, an immense amount of reading in Icelandic literature, and a quantity of minor affairs connected with all the above, such as few men could master or even attempt. He is demonstrating, op de le letre, the significance of that celebrated rule which he avows will fit the case of everybody. Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. A good hearty breakfast, including a tremendous quantity of tea, is Morris' next business in hand, and he gives it the same thorough attention as everything else that he undertakes. He has been likened to Dr. Johnson for his inveterate love of tea drinking, but he does everything on a big and expansive scale, and at other times of the day he drinks other liquors with equal relish, and smokes with supreme enjoyment. The strength and vitality and strenuousness of the man are apparent through all the smallest details of his life. He takes a robust delight in matters which to other men of feebler physique are incomprehensible. He does not affect any lean and hungry aestheticism, nor despise the pleasures of the table. He is himself a good cook and an authority on cooking, which he ranks among the fine arts whose fullness has been denied to women. When out upon those angling excursions which constitute his brief respites from work, he always will insist on cooking the fish he has caught, and his tastes are typically English. I always bless God, says he, for making anything so strong as an onion. It may be indeed that Morris' wholehearted absorption in mundane matters as they pass beneath his notice, his spacious, huge delight in all things beautiful or desirable, are, after some abstruse fashion, resultant from his haunting dread of death, that passionate revulsion from and revolt against the thought of inevitable mortality, which runs like a cold, subterranean stream with perpetual shuddering undercurrent below his most opulent palaces of dream. Ah, what begateth all this storm of bliss, but death himself, who, crying solemnly, e'en from the heart of sweet forgetfulness, bids us, rejoice, lest pleasureless ye die, within a little time must ye go by, stretch forth your open hands, and while ye live, take all the gifts that death and life may give, the earthly paradise. He has himself observed that perhaps change and death are necessary, or there would be no good stories, but this was a momentary outburst of philosophy far removed from his authentic feeling. Change and decay and death are altogether repugnant to him, all that creates misery and poverty and hatred between man and man he loathes. And while resolutely avowing himself a London bird, its soot has been rubbed into me, and yet, doing his utmost to provide things beautiful in a common place and beauty careless age, all the while this heavy, boisterous, overpowerful man is dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. My work, he has confessed, is the embodiment of dreams, to bring before people's eyes the image of the thing my heart is filled with. What is this image? An earthly paradise, neither more nor less, a haven of peace and unfading loveliness, a land of heart's desire, immune from time and death. The hollow land, that prose romance, which nobody having once read can ever forget, closes upon this one great keynote of all his dreams, where lover and beloved enter the hollow city. Through the golden streets under the purple shadows of the houses we went, and the slow fanning backward and forward of the many-colored banners cooled us, we too alone. At last we came to a fair palace, cloistered off in the old time, before the city grew golden, cloistered off from the eager leanings and brotherhood of the golden dwellings. Unchanged, unchangeable were its marble walls, whatever else changed about it. We stopped before the gates and trembled and clasped each other closer, for there among the marble leafage and tendrils that were round and under and over the archway that held the golden valve were wrought two figures of a man and woman, winged and garlanded, whose raiment flashed with stars, and their faces were like faces we had seen or have seen in some dream long and long and long ago, so that we trembled with awe and delight. And I turned and seeing Margaret saw that her face was that face seen or have seen long and long and long ago, and in the shining of her eyes I saw that other face, seen in that way and no other, long and long and long ago, my face. And then we walked together toward the golden gates and opened them, and no man gain-set us, and before us lay a great space of flowers. Such is the true ideal, however impossible of attainment it may be, perhaps it is all the dearer for that of this strange mass of contradictions, William Morris, this combination of the ultra-imaginative and the ultra-practical. Constitutionally fierce and violent of temper, he is constitutionally desirous of an ultimate and unending calm. Filled with the wild vigor and delight of battle, he expresses himself in the most deliberately unemotional words. You cannot guess whether he is putting a mighty constraint upon himself, or fulfilling, in the medium of sound and form, his own conceivment of perfection. You can only echo his mysterious music. Christ keep the hollow land all the summer tide, still we cannot understand where the waters glide, only dimly seeing them coldly slipping through many green-lipped cavern mouths where the hills are blue. It is this blend of anomalies, no doubt, which makes the mind of William Morris such a curious, terra incognita to all those who have to do with him. He presents to them so strange a union of aspects inherently antagonistic to each other that men regard him more as an elemental force dominating and inspiring them by dint of a powerful personality than one to be reckoned with as a human being. The allurement of magnetic charm so often bestowed upon feebler intellects is in a measure denied to him. He stands for an abstract influence rather than a lovable individuality. That tremendous influence destined to permeate and revolutionize English and even European ideas of decorative art is only beginning as yet to make itself felt. But Morris' friends are vaguely aware of the urgent energy which drives him towards some goal unseen of them. Even as those filmy, expressionless eyes of his are possessed of preternaturally quick sight, far exceeding that of the average men, so his abnormally acute mind with the prescience of true genius darts on ahead into regions Caesar never knew, and his most faithful admirers often have a sense of being dragged at his heels, perplexed and out of breath. They cannot hope to follow such sweeping, swooping flight. He is really a sort of Viking, says one of them, set down here in making art because there is nothing else to do. The trivialities and conventionalities of middle Victorian London have absolutely no meaning for this master craftsman. He belongs to some other sphere. The morning is spent by Morris at the carpet loom, directing, superintending, or working with his own hands. He allows himself a few minutes recreation at bowls in the garden, but finds the sun too hot. After lunch he is off to Queen's Square to visit his dying works there, and to look in upon his friends the Faulkners. Not a day passes, but he visits them. Matters of business must also of necessity be discussed. Always a tedious and impatient affair to Morris, who himself, the very soul of honor, truthfulness, and justice detests any details of trafficking. Here you encounter more of his contradictory traits. For human want and woe in the abstract he has the most passionate sympathy. Toward human needs in the concrete he is absolutely close-fisted. Do you know, to quote Rosetti's remark, that topsy has never yet been known to give a single penny to a beggar? Upon all the exigencies and expenses of work, he is ready to be lavish on occasion. He will employ the almost unemployable without hesitation, even as, the while, he expends himself and his own labor without stint. But, penury, apart from the prospect of relieving it in mass, finds no responding benevolence in him. And of that reckless, spin-thrift habit so incident to men of great genius, which finds a vent in careless, extravagant charity, he has not the slightest touch. Had today been Wednesday, Morris, by invincible habit, would have dined with Byrne Jones. But, it being only Tuesday, he betakes himself back home to Hammersmith as the evening draws on. A remarkable figure he presents, among the fashionable frequenters of the West End, as he strides steadily along the crowded streets in his soft-felt hat and rough, blue-surge suit. Topsy, according to his intimates dictum, has an unlimited capacity for producing and amassing dirt, and his appearance is unquestionably grubby. He looks, in consequence, something between a working engineer and a sailor, with a strong dash of the latter, for whom he is occasionally mistaken. And the unkempt, picturesque, slatternliness of the man is in keeping with either of these occupations, so that there is really nothing utra about him. It is only when, very rarely, he has condescended to assume the orthodox silk hat and frock coat that Morris has candidly appeared ridiculous. Anything more bizarre than this conjunction can hardly be imagined. He crosses the upper hall and regards with satisfaction his ugly Georgian house. Ugly as it may show without, he knows it is a treasury of beauty within. A certain sense of emptiness strikes across his mind. He remembers that the beautiful woman who rules these glowing rooms will not be there to receive him, she whose portrait he has painted, not on canvas as Rosetti did, but in lines of power and pathos. Praise of my lady. My lady seems of ivory forehead, straight nose, and cheeks that be hollowed a little mournfully, Beata mea domina. Her forehead overshadowed much by bows of hair, as a wave such as God was good to make for me, Beata mea domina. Nor greatly long my lady's hair, nor yet with yellow color fair, but thick and crisped wonderfully, Beata mea domina. Heavy to make the pale face sad and dark, but dead as though it had been forged by God most wonderfully, Beata mea domina, of some strange metal, thread by thread, to stand out from my lady's head, not moving much to tangle me, Beata mea domina. Beneath her brows the lids fall slow, the lashes a clear shadow show where I would wish my lips to be, Beata mea domina. He paces round the gardens, noting with expert eye the growth and condition of their contents, for he knows all the ways and capabilities of flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees, which he studies with the four-fold interest of decorator, poet, earth-lover, and culinary connoisseur. Finally, while dusk is drawing a veil over the river, he enters his study and takes up with interest the manuscript he left unfinished at early morning. He is absolutely free from vanity regarding his own productions in any kind. Eulogy is lost upon him. A task completed is un fait accompli, and must be judged on its own merits, which are not the authors. So, he now observes of his poem, That's Jolly, with entire simplicity and detachment. He determines to continue his work upon it after dinner. It is nearly midnight when Morris leans out once more from his bedroom window as he leaned at morning and drinks in deep breaths of the fragrant air. The wind sighs to and fro in the elm leaves, minutely planted, with a murmur of old, unhappy, far-off things, the only hint of sadness in all that overbrimming joy of summer. To Morris, the wind has always held this sorrowful undertone, this wandering quest of something obscurely unattainable, as when it companions the night in his blossom burial of the beloved. I kissed her hard by the ear, and she kissed me on the brow, and then lay down on the grass where the mark on the moss is now, and spread her arms out wide while I went down below. Wind, wind, thou art sad, art thou kind, wind, wind, unhappy, thou art blind, yet still thou wanderest the lily seed to find. And then I walked for a space to and fro on the side of the hill, till I gathered and held in my arms great sheaves of the daffodil, and when I came again my Margaret lay there still. I piled them high and high above her heaving breast, how they were caught and held in her loose, ungirded vest. But one beneath her arm died, happy to be so pressed. Again I turned my back and went away for an hour. She said no word when I came again, so, flower by flower, I counted the daffodils over, and cast them languidly lower. My dry hands shook and shook as the green gown showed again, cleared from the yellow flowers, and I grew hollow with pain, and on to us both there fell from the sun-shower drops of rain. Alas, alas, there was blood on the very quiet breast, blood lay in the many folds of the loose, ungirded vest, blood lay upon her arm where the flower had been pressed. Wind, wind, thou art sad, art thou kind, wind, wind unhappy, thou art blind, yet still thou wanderest the lily seed to find, the wind. But tonight the wind is claimant with subdued strange voices, music out of other times, such as that medieval minstrelsy which touches Morris as no modern music may. He stares with utter satisfaction into the opaque, midsummer night. The whole world is spread out before his thought. Visible, odorous, suffused with secret warmth and color, mapped out in exquisite uniformity of intricate form. Above him the stars throb rhythmically. All is changed and altered. The night is lovelier than the day. It is as though the old earth and heavens are gone, says he to himself, and there are new heavens and earth. What goes on there? Who shall say of us who only know rest and peace by toil and strife, and what shall be our share in it? Well, sometimes we must needs think that we shall live again. Yet, if that were not, would it not be enough to think that we helped to make this unnameable glory and lived not altogether deedless? And not altogether deedless of a verity William Morris lies down and is immediately sound asleep. End of Chapter 8 A Day with William Morris Recording by Lucretia B. Section 9 of Days with Great Poets. It was early on a bright June morning of the year 1599. The household of Christopher Montjoy, the wigmaker at the corner of Silver Street in Cripplegate, was already up and to stir. Montjoy, his wife and daughter, and his apprentice, Stephen Bellott, were each refreshing themselves with a hasty mouthful. One could not term it breakfast, before beginning their day's work. For town wigmakers were busy folk, then as now. Every fashionable dame wore transformations, and some noble ladies, like the late Queen of Scots and, read it low, the great Elizabeth herself, changed the colour of their tresses every day. Breakfast in 1599 was a rite more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Most people, having stopped with exceeding hardiness the previous night, ignored breakfast altogether, especially as dinner would occur sometime between 10 and 12 a.m. Those who could not go long without food had no idea of a regular sit-down meal during that precious morning hour which has a piece of gold in its mouth. They contented themselves with beaten-up eggs in muscadelle wine, as now the Montjoy family, who, being of French origin, boggled somewhat at the only alternative, a very English one, sail ale and bread and butter. To these good folk, standing up and swallowing their morning draught, entered their well-to-do lodger, Mr. William Shakespeare, up the times like them, for he was a very busy person, and shared their jug of eggs in muscadelle. Mr. Shakespeare was thirty-five years of age, a handsome, well-shaped man, in the words of his friend Aubrey. His eyes light hazel, his hair and beard Auburn. He still retained in some degree the complexion which accompanies Auburn hair, and this imparted a tinge of delicacy to his sensitive and mobile face. He was already slightly inclined to en bon poing, for the seventeenth-century people aged soon, and thirty-five was much more like forty-five nowadays. In all company, with all people, Shakespeare was charmingly pleasant-spoken. He had long since shed any provincial gochery, and was of exquisite courtesy, of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit, again, to quote his intimates, a good-natured man, of a great sweetness in his bearing, and a most agreeable company. Moreover, that indefinable ease of bearing, which accrues with success, was evident in the gracious bonomie of his name, for after many years of stress and struggle, many hard bouts with fortune, innumerable humiliations, and adverse events. He was now prosperous, popular, possessed of this world's goods, although a self-made man, in every sense of the word, although still a member of that despised theatrical profession against which the pulpit thundered, at which the decent citizen looked a scance. He was a distinctly marked personality, not to be ignored. He was part proprietor of the Globe Theater, the Black Friars, and the Rose, and he had house property in Southwark and Black Friars, lands and houses at Stratford-upon-Avon. He had obtained a coat of arms for his family from the College of Haralds, thus constituting himself legally a gentleman. He was the brilliant author of immensely popular plays, and he was reputed to earn at the rate of six thousand pounds per annum, which would now be worth nearly eighty times as much. Such was the man who presently sauntered out into the summer sunlight this June morning, and went leisurely westward towards Holburn. He strolled along, thoughtfully ruminating the day's work before him but but courteously alert to every greeting from passing acquaintances in the streets. He encountered as he went, warm and invigorating scents, which floated round each corner, and rose for the nonce above the malodours of the open gutter. Pleasant midsummer perfumes which were exhaled in the clear and smokeless air of those days, from a multiplicity of blossoming London gardens. For every house had its ornaments of potters, ware, or metal. The floors were still strewn with leaves and grasses, and the doorways often decked with boughs. Cherries and strawberries were ripening in the ancient monastery gardens, among the majestic precincts of ruined priories, blackbirds were singing in the trees. If the actual dewy freshness of the warwickshire water meadows were not present in the London air, if the wild roses of the Avan side did not bloom in Holburn, yet Shakespeare had only to close his eyes one moment to project himself back into his boyhood scenes. For London was emphatically a garden city, and circled by forests and fields and farms and wooded hills, and the ecstatic sweetness of an English June was wafted over its cobbled thoroughfares. Of all seasons this was the most enjoyable to Shakespeare because of his passion for flowers. He delighted to make long, luscious lists of flowers. The very names were a pleasure to him, each fraught with its own special significance. He loved to write of daffodils, that came before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty, violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juneau's eyes, or Sopheria's breath, pale primroses, the crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, the flowers loose being one. To collect, in imagination, roses, their sharp spines being gone, not royal in their sense alone, but in their hue, maiden pinks of odor faint, deity smellless yet most quaint, and sweet time true. Carnations and streaked ghillie flowers, and the lovely company of the garden were a joy to him, and equally so the wild flowers in the woodlands where, the wild time grows, and oxlips and the knotting violet blows, over which the south wind breathes softly, stealing and giving odor. Beneath the tangled woodbinds and musk roses the poet could linger in fantasy, if not in fact, in dream, if not indeed. A passionate enjoyment of wild nature distinguished him preeminently above all his town-bred compiers. Trees and birds and forest brooks, but flowers especially, claimed an equal place with music in his affections. Beauty of sight and sound appealed, with magic power, to the man on whom the robust joys failed to make any permanent mark. For towards all the salient characteristics of the Elizabethan age, volcanic vigor, the incandescent longing for adventure, the magnificent daredevilry of seamanship, the fierce and splendid valor inciting men to desperate deeds, William Shakespeare was strangely impassive and unimpressionable. The wave of Elizabethan ardor surged past, and left him not even sprinkled by its spray. He was quite content to go on clothing with new flesh, glowing and jogony-like, the antique bones of old romances, to infuse new life into forgotten medieval episodes, crudely treated by his predecessors, the men who supplied stock plays for traveling companies. He preferred some ardent love scene in the rich, dim gardens of Verona, to all the opulent possibilities of the New World, some pageantry in Venice or in Athens, to any present splendor of the Elizabethan court. He secretly reveled with consciousness and justifiable pride in pouring forth imperial passages of words reverberant with rolling sound, but frequently, for the sheer pleasure of musical effect as it would seem, he introduced those exquisite lyrics, bird-like in their careless spontaneity, flower-like in their grace and daintiness, which float like flakes of thistle down above his plays. These songs say all that need to be said. They condense into a few swift words the essential spirit of the whole drama. So in Othello, my mother had a maid called Barbara, says Desdemona, standing unwittingly upon the threshold of death. She had a song of Willow, an old thing twas, but it expressed the future, and she died singing it. That song tonight will not go from my head. The most apparently casual and irrelevant ditties of Shakespeare's dramas in like manner expressed the future of the story. Come unto these yellow sands, and there take hands, so eventually Ferdinand and Miranda avow their mutual love beside the lapping of the long blue waves. Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me, might be the very life motif of as you like it. Sino more, ladies, ladies, Sino more. Men were deceivers ever, one foot in sea, and one on shore, to one thing constant never. Here you have the treachery of Don John, and the vacillating mistrust of Claudio succinctly summed up. Journeys end in lover's meeting, every wise man's son doth know. Thus the clown in twelfth night becomes mouthpiece of the Daniel Small, which was never long in doubt. To every man his metier, and that of William Shakespeare was not to be the mouthpiece of those spacious times tingling with sensation, with excitement, with huge enterprise, exhibiting throughout the curious patient persistence of the essential midlander, he had worked his way right up from the bottom rung of the ladder. The ill-mated young man of twenty-three who had left Stratford with a travelling company of players in fifteen eighty-seven, who had, whether conscious or unconscious of his genius, plotted industrially onwards as a literary hack of drama, tinkering, adapting, reshaping, and rewriting the stale old-stock plays, until they suffered a change into something rich and strange, whose colossal greatness its contemporaries were not great enough to appreciate. That same man was now arriving, like so many other midlanders, at a point where criticism could not touch him. He had gained no giddy pinnacle of success but a safe and solid summit of assured position, that he should attain it in his own way and after his own methods, that, after all, was his business. There were plenty of other poets to utter Armao Wirumquecano. William Shakespeare preferred to link himself with thoughts of Italy and fairy folk, and the sea coast of Bohemia, with youth and palaces and forests, and fortunate or frustrate love. His range and scope were enormous, if he cared, his output astonishing if he chose. Meanwhile, it was mid-summer, and there were roses. Moving meditatively along Holborn, he presently encountered his old friend Gerard the Botomist, who was herbal, had been published two years before, who stood at the head of his profession for knowledge and achievement. He lived in Holborn, where he had not only a fine garden ground, but a fruit ground in Fetter Lane, which he superintended for the surgical society of which he was a member. Well met, Will, said the grave and reverend herbalist. No other man in London would I more gladly welcome, for that thou hast the most worthy apprehension of the seamliness of plants and herbs. Country blood, country blood, good sir. Come now into my poor enclosure and let me regale thee with new and marvellous things. What? It is but eight o'clock. The poultry playhouse shall not claim thee yet a while. We are all euripides in his dramas, in comparison with that which, wherewith, I shall rejoice thine eyes. And seizing the poet hand, Gerard drew him through a side door into his beloved garden. Behold, he exclaimed, the apple of love, pomum areium. And with ineffable pride he pointed out some slowly ripening tomatoes. These grow in Spain, Italy, and such hot countries, from whence myself have received seeds from my garden, where, as thou seeest, they do grow and prosper. Albeit there be other golden apples, which the poets do fabled growing in the gardens of the daughters of Hesperus. These, he added regretfully, I have not. Master Gerard, there shall no golden apples ever come to England worthy to compare with yours, remarked the dramatist, luxuriously inhaling the warm June scents shut closely within the sun-baked walls, and gazing down the coloured vistas and aisles of bloom. Here's flowers for you, he murmured to himself. Here's a plenty of sweet herbs, hot lavender, mince, savoury, marjoram, the marigold that goes to bed with a sun, and with him rises weeping. These are flowers of middle summer, and I think they are given to men of middle age. So thee here again, continued Gerard, well launched upon his favourite topic. This plant, which is called a sum syrix of Peru, is generally called to us potatus or potatoes, and he waged his hand towards a bed of sweet potatoes. Of these roots may be made conserves, toothsome, holy and dainty, and many comfortable and restorative sweet-meats. Other potatoes there be, which some do use with salt, but of these I have no presence apprehension. Shakespeare was not paying attention to the potatoes. On his knees beside a strawberry bed he looked up with a laughing face. He thinks I would rather fresh fruit than conserves, he said, filling his mouth with much satisfaction. Then of the Italian pot herb, tobacco, the bottom is preceded, give me joy that I have had good fortune in three kinds thereof, the henbane of Peru, the Trinidadda tobacco, and the pygmy or dwarfish sort. The juice, boiled with sugar into a syrup, is a sovereign cure for many maladies. I pray you, good master Shakespeare, said he, earnestly seizing the other's arm and punctuating his words with a gentle seesaw movement, believe me, that any other herb of hot temperature will suffice for pipe smoking, rosemary, thyme, winter savoury, sweet marjoram, and such like. Faith, I am no great smoker, replied Shakespeare, as with a dexterous jerk he alluded his friends and dived down an alley of damask roses. Here, said he, I shall play the robber. He gathered a rose and set it behind his ear in the most approved court fashion. I would feign linger all day among these manifold sweetnesses, he added. But a lack, I have need to hasten now. I pray you, therefore, give me leave to depart. The herbalist, talking volubly, accompanied him to the door. The playwright turned down towards black friars. On his way he entered an apothecary shop, and heedless of Master Gerard's warnings, purchased a rich smoke at six pence of pipeful, equivalent perhaps, to four shillings of our money. This was no cheap and adulterated mixture, such as the groundlings used, but the very best procurable, and to emphasize its rechache quality. It was kept in a lily-pot, minced on a maple-block, served out with silver tongs, and lighted from a little fire of juniper shavings. Shakespeare, having thus filled his long clay pipe, proceeded to the black fryer's shore, where he took a ferry-boat across the bank-side in Southwark, and entered the Globe Theatre, of which he was part proprietor. It may here be explained that every theatre having recently been banished from the city, as the very quintessence of disreputability, and the root of all evil, the exiled players had taken refuge south of the river in bank-side, which, being a quarter singularly ill-famed, was considered by all reputable citizens a most appropriate situation for them. The Globe, like other public playhouses of the period, was ruthless, three stories high, with boxes all round in tears, and the grand tear paled with open boards and fenced with strong iron pikes. The stage, which had a shadow or cover over it, was some forty feet wide, and extended to the middle of the yard or pit. At the back of the stage there was a balcony, over the entrance, from the tiring-house or dressing-rooms. It was lighted, if necessary, by branched candlesticks, while crescents, tarred rope-sends and cages, were set in front of the boxes. The Globe Company was of about ten actors. Burbage, Hemming, Condell, Fields, and the rest were entering by ones and twos, with the boys who played the women's part. Last of all, the orchestra of ten performers, the largest in London, dawdled in, and took up their instruments, chiefly drums and trumpets. The rehearsal commenced, the play of Hamlet, with Burbage in the title role. Shakespeare, though necessarily present, paid but little attention to the business in hand, in studied and self-conscious acting he had no interest whatsoever. His theory was the same as Ben Johnson's, that a man should act freely, carelessly, and capriciously, as if one's veins ran with quicksilver, and not utter a phrase, but shall come forth from the very brine of conceit and sparkle like salt and fire. But this was too high a criterion to impose upon his company. He therefore left them chiefly to their own devices under the capable management of Burbage, and remained himself in the tiring room, employed upon his usual morning's application, revising and revivifying old stock plays, and considering fresh M.S.S., which had arrived in vast numbers, and accepting as much as he could. For he was incapable of jealousy, and he did his greatness easily, and was the kindest of friends, the most indulgent of critics, to the would-be dramatic authors. His acquaintance with Ben Johnson had originated in a remarkable piece of humanity and good nature. Johnson, unknown and unaccredited, had offered a play to the theatre, but the person into whose hand it was put, after turning it carelessly and superficially over, were just upon returning it to him with an ill-natured answer, that it would be of no service to their company, when Shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to encourage him to read it through, and afterwards to recommend Ben Johnson and his writings to the public, row. Similar experiences befell many a budding stage writer. Shakespeare's singular sweetness of disposition led him to be lavish of praise as of money. He was always willing to touch up this man's play or write an act for that one, and of no other man did he utter a cruel or injurious word. A kinder gentleman treads not the earth, his intimates might have said of him, as he of Antonio. Yet it might almost be a word that William Shakespeare found himself a dramatist by accident. He accepted from the first the conditions of a life despised and condemned. The life of an actor clasped with rogues and vagabonds, banished with contumely into ignominious neighbourhoods. He looked upon the half-art of acting, with disdain and disgust. He saw his worst plays performed much more frequently than his best. By nature, a poet pure sample of a delicate, fastidious, bookish temperament, one who continually corrected his best verses and critical scrupulosity. He had been thrown into the rowdy pot-house company of second-rate actors, and was accused by jealous rivals of being an upstart crow, swelled out with an ordinate vanity, or jied at, by those he professed themselves as friends, and a slovenly and careless writer, or openly condemned by the very lackeys and menials, should he receive a call to court. And this was only one of the darker sides to the life of this gentle-natured, cheerful, seemingly successful man. The others, as we shall presently perceive, were in some sense infinitely more tragic. The rehearsal over, and the hungry actors pouring forth to obtain their dinner at the nearest taverns or cook-shops, Shakespeare, who had, as we know, already broken fast, recrossed the river and paced quietly up toward St. Paul's churchyard to visit the bookseller-shops. The signs of white-gray hounds, the angel, the spread eagle, the green dragon, the flower de luce, and so on were the recognized rendezvous for men of letters, and Shakespeare's own earlier works, such as Venus and Adonis, Lucrisi, Henry VI, Henry IV, and Richard II, were issued at several of these shops. Here he could foregather with learned and literary friends. Here he could sit and study the latest books. Here, in short, he was no longer the actor, but the author. And it may be noted in passing that Shakespeare's literary confrers respected him, not as the permanent dramatist of the globe, the transmitter of old lead into gold of Orpheer, but as a lyrical poet, an authentic maker of the beautiful verse. The muses would speak Shakespeare's fine-filled phrase if they could speak English, so ran the encomium of his admirers. His sun-guard sonnets, they declared, were of surpassing excellence and charm. His facetious pleasant grace in writing, as they turned it, which approves, approves, his art, was that of the sonneteer, not of the playwright. That state and majesty, that knowledge of human nature which distinguished his dramatic work, seemed to his contemporaries, quite foreign to the man they knew, the witty, gracious, graceful poet. After a short look-in at his favorite bookshops, Shakespeare proceeded to another popular rendezvous, the Middle Isle of St. Paul's. This was no sequestered haunt of studious folks, but a busy promenade, where all sorts and conditions of men met freely, by appointment or otherwise. Here one might encounter the down-at-heels adventurer, or the masterless man or penniless companion, side by side, with a Rubicon citizen, the opulent merchant, and the country gentleman whose talk was of hawks and hounds. Every condition of character, every variety of type, was here for Shakespeare's sharp eye to scan. Every fragment of conversation that fell upon his keen ears was noted down, almost automatically. Friends and acquaintances many were here to be encountered. The popular writer received salutations on every hand, and those who might benefit by his well-known laxity of purse were not slow to avail themselves of it. Money frequently changed hands before Shakespeare passed out of the cathedral. He had the customary, careless generosity of stage folk, and the fact that he was reputed to spend as much as he earned was doubtless largely due to his lavish free-handedness. Nobody could look into that kindly face and expect a no to any asking. But now it was striking twelve on every clock in the city, and he turned into the cheap side, to the mermaid, which stood between Friday Street and Bread Street. In those days, few except the upper classes dined at home, the restaurant habit of the twentieth century prevailed among middle-class town folk, especially those who were only lodgers or visitors in London. And the cookshops, ordinaries, and taverns laid themselves out to provide such hearty dinners as were necessary to people who had only two meals a day. Upon the table to which Shakespeare sat down, there was a stewed rabbit, a roast capon, a salmon stuck with cloves, and a piece of boiled beef, a jug of ale, a flagon of white wine, sack or canary, and a quart of claret. Honey was poured over the meat, and the wine cups were half full of sugar, for the Elizabethans loved sugar and spice and all things nice. Every dish was highly seasoned, highly sweetened, and spiced to what we should call a nauseating point. Cooked vegetables were but little used. These strong meat-eaters disdained them. Potatoes were not yet indispensable articles of diet. Herbs, fruits, and roots, in fact, played a very secondary part in town fare, though poor folk in country places must needs make shift with these. The plates were of bread, the dishes of wood, and the wine was poured into small, green clay pots. Shakespeare did not linger over his dinner. Naturally, no great eater, and by the robust, full-blooded Elizabethans, considered a very poor drinker. He was lost in thought. That customary flow of scintillating wit, which made him the life and center of a crowd, that nervous, excitable, impatient brilliance which often characterized him in company, seemed a while to have forsaken him. To the irrelevant ups and downs of the artistic temperament, he was singularly subject. Various familiar friends passed in and out with loud and jolly greetings. Mr. Will Shakespeare was Hale fellow well met with all men, from carters to courtiers. But today, Mr. Will Shakespeare only smiled at them with a humorous pensive air, and yet retired further into himself. What was saddening and silencing him? Had a sudden distaste for his occupation seized upon his sensitive mind? Had some slight been put upon him by careless young nobles, such as my Lord's Pembroke or Southampton, who take up a man one day and drop him the next? Had he received ill news from Stratford, as when the tidings arrived three years ago of the death of his only little son? What was he simply cogitating one of his sugared sonnets? Thus the quidnunks of the mermaid questioned among themselves, and there was much surmising and putting of heads together, and wagering upon the thoughts of Master Shakespeare's melancholy. For of a surety he had lost his wanted flow of spirits. But only one or two men guessed truly at the secret troubles that sat heavy on his cheerful, mercurial minds. Seventeen years ago, at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare had made a hasty and ill-assorted marriage. Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, his inferior in position, was no fit mate for the impetuous, ambitious youth. A father at nineteen, with neither employment nor source of income, he had chased and fretted for five years against the consequences of his own rash folly. At twenty-three he found the position intolerable. He quitted Stratford, and had never returned, save a brief and flying visit. Nor had he ever brought up his wife and children to London. He was maintaining them in comfort. He was purchasing a fine house in Stratford, whether he would eventually retire and play the parts of husbands and father. But blame him or not as you will. There are limits beyond which human nature cannot be forced. And the ill-tempered, ill-tempered, incompatible Anne Hathaway was the skeleton in Shakespeare's cupboard, not to be explained away, the thought of whom left a bitter taste at the bottom of every pleasure. So far things were bad enough, but there was even worse to follow. The lad whose calf love had flung him into ill-considered matrimony was now a mature man. And two years ago he discovered, for the first time, what the love of mature manhood can be like. With equal folly, equal recklessness to his first affair, he had conceded a desperate and hopeless affection for a woman who exactly reversed the previous conditions, where she was very much younger than himself, better educated, and of much superior rank. The dark lady of Shakespeare's sonnets upon whom he lavished all his golden wealth of praise, laying open the most intimate secrets of human love and scorn and anguish, was in all probability Mary Fitton, a girl of nineteen, made of honour to the Queen, proud, high-spirited, vivacious, unquestionably beautiful, although in the old age black was not counted fair. Aristocratic, grand dawn to the fingertips, in every respect, the antipasys of contrived, shrewish, repellent Anne Hathaway, yet the dark lady was inherently wanton, false and faithless. Shakespeare recognized this, but it made no difference to the strength and intensity of his passion. So true a fool is love, that in your will, though you do anything, he thinks no will. In sonnet after sonnet he expressed his despair, his patience of contempt or injury. No such sounding of the whole deapassion of love, no such revealing of a tortured human heart, has ever been put before the world. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme. And he depicted various features of this woman, in various roles, in play after play. He could not shut her out, whether he pilloried her dark beauty as Cressida or Cleopatra, whether he masked her wit and spirit under the name of Beatrice or Rosalind, whether he alternately implored or invade against her in sonnets. He was enthralled by so magnetic a fascination that it influenced his art at all points. Shakespeare the man, Shakespeare the artist, was obsessed by, bound fast in, a hopeless infatuation for a woman who he knew to be unworthy. Indeed, here was sufficient matter from using. But the poet's unhappy reveries were cut short by the appearance of a young man, his brother Edmund, who had recently arrived in London, and obtained a small acting part at the Blackfriars Theatre. He addressed the older man with a mixture of respect and boyish naivety. Goodwill, lend me a groat or so ere I perish of sheer hunger. Six long hours have I laboured at their plaguey rehearsal, and I have not a penny in my pocket. In faith I never starved like this at Stratford. I swear I will repay thee two days hence. The elder brother, with his easy tolerant air, waved the lad to his seat, and shouted for the drawer, or waiter, a non, a non, sir, and the functionary hastened up. The mermaid was emptying now, and the attendants were less hurried and flurried. Shakespeare ordered a second dinner, for at little though he had eaten, the food was cold, and patting his brother affectionately on the shoulder, slipped a handful of money into his hands. I, Mary, thou hast a good war, char hunger, and thirst, Ned, said he. Let it not cry out upon thee in vain. For me I am away to the globe. They play Hamlet there to-day, and needs must I be present. He did not wait for thanks, but with his peculiarly pleasant smiles slipped out of the mermaid, and made haste towards his theatre. The globe was already crowded when he arrived. Although the play did not begin till three, there were no evening performances in those days except in noblemen's private theatres. Burbage, the favourite tragedian, as Hamlet drew a great following, but the humble part played by the author himself as Rosencrantz, was a succéd esteem rather than a genuine one. For Mr. William Shakespeare was no very wonderful actor. A fellowship in a cry of players had little glamour for him. The man who could imagine, with every vivid circumstance of detail, the sinister and verboding atmosphere of Elsinor, had little admiration for the strutting and bellowing of the players who interpreted his visions. On either side of the stage sat the young noblemen, the polar-tasters, the shorthand writers who worked for private publishers. In the boxes, priced up to half a crown, about one pound of our present money, were various aristocratic and wealthy patrons of the play. The groundlings obtained standing room in the pit for a penny, say, six shillings, and were vociferous in their applause of the sanguinary scenes, of the grave-diggers, and of the grosser jests. Everyone who could afford it smoked. The classes, rich authentic tobacco, and the masses, men and women alike, an adulterated mixture of coltsfoot and other hot herbs. As for the middle class, the merchantfolk, tradesmen, and the bourgeoisie in general, they were chiefly conspicuous by their absence, strongly pervaded by a growing flavour of puritanism and having a wholesome decent horror of play-acting, as something undoubtedly congruous with all dissolute ways and ill-living, the middle classes avoided bank-side like the pestilence. Had they been present, there would have been sorely put to it to understand what in the world Mr. Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, was jibing at. Was he decrying actors? Was he condemning audiences? Was he scorching with bitter disdain all who wrote for or acted in or crowded into playhouses? The young galants, uncomfortable and uncertain, were glad when the placing was over, and one arrived at more familiar matters of battle, murder, and sudden death. Too much metaphysics about this Hamlet fellow, so they held. A dramatist should stick to his last, and not drag his heroes into deep waters of conjecture, where a man might well flounder for ever. The play was over. Some few adventurous spirits from the audience approached the tire-room door. Hemming held it warily ajar. I would speak with your author. Where is he? I would have a word with Mr. Shakespeare. Is he within? Not this way, I assure you, sir. We are not so efficiently befriended by him as to have his presence in the tiring-house. To prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tire-man, rail the music out of time, and sweat for every venial trespass we commit. Was it not Mr. Shakespeare, then, that played the part of Rosencrantz, inquired the bewildered ones? Close the door, thundered Burbitch from within, followed a sound of bolts and bars. Meanwhile, Mr. Shakespeare had disappeared from the melodorous precincts of the globe, for the adjacent bear gardens were notorious for evil of Livia, had crossed the river, and was making his way to the mermaid, where he arrived about six. A plentiful supper was already being partaken of. The rooms were full of steam and savory smells. Here was a smaller meal than dinner, but in no way stinted. Lettuces and radishes were usually served first, and afterward a variety of highly flavored dishes. Pigeons stuffed with green gooseberries, fiercely seasoned herring pies, roast pork with green sorrel sauce, mustard, horseradish, ginger, and honey-ad lib, and sweet dishes innumerable. Shakespeare did justice to his food, and took copious drafts of light sweet wine. The morning's melancholy had passed away, and was exceeded by an almost feverish gaiety. The artificial stimulus of the theatre had produced a temporary excitement in him. He was flushed, brilliant, loquacious. As his repartees flashed rapier-like across the room, Ben Johnson smiled grimly, seated at the head of the table, and the score of kindred souls who surrounded it relished the verb and sparkle of their favorite comrade. Johnson was a man of great size, of immense strength and personal courage, masterful, domineering, jealous. He recognized and allowed the extraordinary genius of Shakespeare, but always with many detractions, insinuating his incorrectness or a careless manner of writing, and a want of judgment. That the stratford shopkeeper's son, utterly unequipped in scholarship or training, should stand so high in popular estimation above himself, the university graduate of great learning, was acutely annoying to Johnson. It may be, too, that with the littleness of certain minds, he had never forgiven Shakespeare for doing him a good turn in the matter of his comedies. At any rate, he resented the works of man's unparalleled quickness, brightness, and flexibility of tongue, and every evening he inaugurated a duel of words which almost invariably resulted in a draw, and which was the delight of those privileged to be present. At the mermaid, says Fuller, one of these favorite auditors, many were the wit combats between Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, which, too, I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war. Master Johnson, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performance. Shakespeare, like the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all sides, tack about, and take advantage of wins by the quickness of his wit and invention. And thus it befell that the frequenters of the mermaids, such notabilities as Raleigh, Fletcher, Marlowe, Beaumont, Green, were accustomed to hear these two great poets disputing and to join in the tournament in words, as Beaumont put it. So nimble and so full of subtle flame, as that if everyone from whence they came had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, and had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life. Hours passed swiftly away in this congenial manner. The amazing fluency and readiness of Shakespeare showed no sign of flagging. The whimsical, delightful, happy-go-lucky humor which he has put into the mouths of so many merry folk, was still at its most laughter-provoking stage, when suddenly, by one of his customary revolutions of feeling, he was seized by a great distaste for the heated apartment, the flaring light, the stale odours of wine and ale. Like Cassius, he had poor, unhappy brains for drinking, and the endless potations due at a city tavern were singularly unsuited to his taste. He felt that he would give a thousand bursts of mermaid applause for an acre of baring grounds, long heath, brown furs, anything that was out in the clean, pure air. Though he was a thorough townsman outwardly, the ineradicable instincts of a countryman tore at his heart. He hankered after rural doings and the rough deep speech of the shires. He did not pause to explain the cause of this sudden yearning to men who could hardly be expected to understand it. He simply followed his own immediate inclination. Making a hasty and inadequate excuse, he escaped into the street, and setting off northward and alone, he struck up across the fields. The delicate scent of hay was wafted warmly round him. Every hedgerow was a blaze of blossom, roses, honeysuckle, elder. Every brook was fringed with meadowsweet and loose strife. Among these exquisitely calm surroundings, what worth had this sordid and squalid manners of the stage, with its petty ambitions, its puny failures or successes? The boisterous conviviality of the mermaid, the dazzling interchange of thrust and perry, his own reputation as a fellow of infinite jest, and a nobly endowed poet all sank away into nothing, as the midsummer twilight, a glimmering gray translucent, slowly replaced the splendors of the day. Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits, sighed Shakespeare, like his own Rosalind, as, flinging himself beneath the broad and leafy boughs, he became submerged in the infinite maternal peace of nature. Shortly as darkness deepened, he would return to his lonely room in Silver Street, challenged by the watch and replying in some gay jest. Shortly he would toss upon a sleepless bed, consumed by violence and varied emotions, until the cooler wind that comes with dawn should soothe him into rest. But now he lay like a three wanderers in Arden, against the bowl of a huge oak, watching the glowworms gleaming round, and the stars stealing forth above him, until the floor of heaven was all orlaid with patins of bright gold, and the day, by that celestial sign, was ended. End of Section 9. CHAPTER X. OF DAYS WITH GREAT POETS. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. DAYS WITH GREAT POETS. By May Clarissa Gillington Byron. CHAPTER X. A DAY WITH TENNESON. Tennyson was no recluse. He shunned society in the ordinary London sense, but he welcomed kindred spirits to his beautiful home with large-hearted cordiality. To be acquainted with Feringford was in itself a liberal education. Feringford was an ideal home for a great poet. To begin with, it was somewhat secluded and remote from the world's ways, especially in the early fifties when the Isle of Wight was much more of a terra incognita than traffic now permits. One had to travel down some hundred miles from town, cross from the quaint little new forest port of Lamington to the still quainter little old world-yarmouth, a medieval Venice, the poet called it, and then drive some miles to fresh water before one attains the stately loveliness of Feringford embowered in trees, where, far from noise and smoke of town, I watched the twilight falling brown all around a careless-ordered garden, close to the ridge of a noble down. Groves of pine on either hand to break the blast of winter stand, and further on the hoary channel tumbles a billow on chalk and sand. Lines to the Reverend F. D. Morris. The interior of the house, a very ancient one, was no less ideal than its outward aspect. It was like a charmed palace, with green walks without and speaking walls within. And its occupants crowned all, the ethereally lovely mistress with her tender spiritual face, and the master, tall, broad-shouldered, and massive, dark-eyed and dark-browed, his face full of deep organ tones and delicate inflections, his mind shaped to all fine issues. The wisest man, said Thackeray, that ever I knew. Subject of slight inevitable variations, a certain method and routine governed the days of Tennyson. He had definite working times, indoors and out, and accustomed habits of family life. The morning brought him letters from all parts of England. There was hardly any great man who did not desire to exchange salutations and discuss world subjects with a thinker so far above the rest. The poet, with a prophetic soul of genius, had always been well in advance of his times. For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argost seas of magic sails, pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales. Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and the rain aghastly dew from the nation's airy navies grappling in the central blue. Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm, with the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunderstorm, till the war drum throb no longer, and the battle flags were furled in the parliament of man, the federation of the world. Not in vain the distance beacons, forward, forward, let us range, let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into younger days, better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Loxley Hall. The daily papers are somewhat late in reaching the Isle of Wight, but the poet could find inspiration even in a source so apparently prosaic as a Times column. He noted down some of those valiant and soul-stirring episodes which go unrecorded saved by a passing paragraph, and the poem which perhaps has held the public fancy longest, the Charge of the Light Brigade, was written a few minutes after reading the Times' description of the battle containing the phrase Someone Had Blundered. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death rode the 600. Forward the Light Brigade, charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of death rode the 600. Forward the Light Brigade, was there a man dismayed? Not, though the soldier knew Someone Had Blundered. There is not to make reply. There is not to reason why. There is but to do and die. Into the valley of death rode the 600. Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them, followed and thundered. Dorm dead with a shot and shell, boldly they rose and well. Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell rode the 600. Flashed all their sabers bare, flashed as they turned in air, sabering the gunners there, charging an army, while all the world wondered. Plunged in the battery smoke, right through the line they broke, Cossack and Russian reels from the sabers stroke, shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not, not the 600. Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon behind them, followed and thundered. Storm dead with a shot and shell, while horse and hero fell, they that had fought so well came through the jaws of death. Back through the mouth of hell, all that was left of them, left of the 600. When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made, all the world wondered. Honor the charge they made, honor the Lypergade, noble 600. The Charge of the Lypergade. A little while after breakfast, Tennyson would retire to his den on the top story for that sacred half hour devoted to poetical composition and assisted by his beloved pipe during which nobody dared disturb him. This den, or study, formed a setting worthy of its inmate. Every inch of wall was covered with portrait, sketches, drawings. Almost every distinguished name in the 19th century was in some manner represented here. The poet literally worked surrounded by his friends, and in this congenial atmosphere he devoted himself to that lifelong pursuit of his, as he has imagined it in the Gleam, which flying onward, wed to the melody, sang through the world. Whatever respective values a future generation may set upon Tennyson's work, there can be little doubt that he himself considered the idols of the king with its interspiritual meanings as his greatest work. There is no single factor incident in the idols, he said, which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever, hence their appeal to the least mystical reader through sheer beauty of language and superb pictorial effect. But at the same time he let it be known that his whole story was inherently one of pure symbolism starting from the suggestion that Arthur represented conscience. This idea is predominant without undue insistence upon it in Guinevere. Queen Guinevere had fled the court and sat there in the Holy House in Almsbury, weeping. None with her saved a little maid, a novice. One low light betwixt them burned, blurred by the creeping mist, for all abroad beneath the moon unseen, albeit at full, the white mist, like a face clothed to the face, clung to the dead earth, and the land was still. There rode an armed warrior to the doors, a murmuring whisper through the nunnery ran, and then a sudden cry, The King! She sat, stiff stricken, listening. But when armed feet through the long gallery from the outer doors rang, coming, prone from off her seat, she fell and grumbled with her face against the floor. There, with her milk-white arms and shadowy hair, she made her face a darkness from the King. And in the darkness heard his armed feet paused by her. Then came a silence. Then a voice, monotonous and hollow like a ghost, denouncing judgment, but though changed, the King's. Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes. I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere. I, whose vast pity almost makes me die to see thee lying there thy golden head, my pride and happier summers at my feet. Let no man dream, but that I love thee still per chance, and so thou purify thy soul, and so thou lean on our fair Father Christ. Hereafter in that world where all are pure, we too may meet before high God, and thou wilt spring to me and claim me thine, and know I am thy husband. Not a smaller soul, nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence, but hither shall I never come again, never lie by thy side, see thee no more. Farewell. And while she grumbled at his feet, she felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck, and in the darkness o'er her fallen head perceived the waving of his hands that blessed. Then, listening till those armed steps were gone, rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found the casement, parrot-aventure, so she thought, if I might see his face and not be seen. And lo! he sat on horseback at the door, and near him the sad nuns with each alight stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen to guard and foster her for evermore. Idols of the King In the course of the day the poet would devote considerable time and energy to his favorite exercise of garden work. To plant trees and shrubs, to roll the lawn, to dig the kitchen garden, and lovingly to tend the simple flowers which he had set was his constant delight as long as his strength sufficed. He had a passionate love, and an extraordinary knowledge of nature. He rejoiced in watching the birds in his great cedar, ilux, and fir trees, and his mind was thoroughly attuned to the sweet influences of color and foliage. Few else could have written that insurpassable lyric, Come into the Garden Mod. Come into the Garden Mod? For the black bat night has flown. Come into the Garden Mod? I am here at the gate alone, and the wood-bind spices are wafted abroad, and the musk of the rose is blown, for a breeze of morning moves, and the planet of love is on high. Beginning to faint in the light that she loves on a bed of daffodil sky, to faint in the light of the sun she loves, to faint in his light, and to die. And the soul of the rose went into my blood, as the music clashed in the hall, and long by the garden lake I stood, for I heard your rivulet fall, from the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, our wood that is dearer than all. From the meadow your walks have left so sweet that when air on March wind sighs, he sets the jewel print of your feet in violets blew as your eyes, to the woody hollows in which we meet, and the valleys of paradise. The slender archesia would not shake one long milk bloom on the tree. The white late blossom fell into the lake, as a pimpinil dozed on the lee. But the rose was awake all night for your sake, knowing your promise to me. The lilies and roses were all awake, they sighed for the dawn and thee. Queen Rose of the Rosebud Garden of Girls, come hither! The dances are done. In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen Lily and Rose in one. Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls to the flowers, and be their sun. There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear. She is coming, my life, my fate. The red rose cries. She is near, she is near. And the white rose weeps. She is late. The lockspur listens. I hear, I hear. And the lily whispers. I wait. The same love of nature made his eye alert for every obscured beauty, when he put aside his gardening tools and started, as was his want, for a stroll with some friends along the glorious cliffs of fresh water. Those were favored folk who, like Mrs. Thackeray Richie, walked with Tennyson a long high down, treading the turf, listening to his talk while the gulls came sideways, flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliff, and the poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind. This cloak and the poet were practically synonymous. It figures, a first edition of it, in all the early sketches of him by Spenning, Fitzgerald, etc., 1830-40, and to the last, one can hardly imagine him apart from it. During these quiet rambles, he was want to discuss with enthusiasm the religious and social problems of the day. They weighed heavily upon his thoughtful mind. His philosophy was a hopeful one, rooted in Christian belief, yet constantly overshadowed by fugitive misgivings and by a sense of the impermanence of human existence. And while voicing these misgivings in lines which might give pause to weaker minds, he never lost his firm faith in right, in duty, and in ultimate rectification of all apparent wrong. Oh, yet we trust that somehow good will be the final goal of ill, to pangs of nature, sins of will, defects of doubt, and taints of blood, that nothing walks with aimless feet, that not one life shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void, when God has made the pile complete, that not a worm is cloven in vain, that not a moth with vain desire is shriveled in a fruitless fire, or but subserves another's gain. Behold, we know not anything. I can but trust that good shall fall at last, far off, at last, to all, and every winter change to spring. So runs my dream, but what am I, an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry? Are God in nature then at strife, that nature lends such evil dreams, so careful of the type she seems, so careless of the single life, that I, considering everywhere her secret meaning in her deeds, and finding that of fifty seeds she often brings but one to bear, I falter where I firmly trod, and falling with my weight of cares upon the great world's altar stairs that slope through darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith and grope, and gather dust and chaff, and call to what I feel is Lord of all, and faintly trust the larger hope. In Memoriam But these mysteries of life and death will not bear too persistent a contemplation, and presently Tennyson, discarding them in favor of less-summer subjects, would regale his hearers with marvelous recitations. The role of his great voice acted sometimes almost like an incantation. The old world classical legends had always founded him a noble exponent, and nowhere was his peculiar felicity of diction and delicate sense of sound better exemplified than in Enone. O mother Ida, many fountain Ida, dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Hear me, O earth, hear me, O hills, O caves that house the cold crowned snake, O mountain brooks, I am the daughter of a river god. Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all my sorrow with my song, as yonder walls rose slowly to a music softly breathed, a cloud that gathered shape, for it may be that, while I speak of it, a little while my heart may wander from its deeper woe. O mother Ida, many fountain Ida, dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, aloft the mountain lawn was dewy dark, and dewy dark aloft the mountain pine. Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, leading a jet-black goat white horned, white hooved, came up from Ridesomenolus all alone. Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold that smelt ambrosially, and while I looked and listened, the full-flowing river of speech came down upon my heart. My own Anone, beautiful browed, Anone, my own soul, behold this fruit whose gleaming rind and graven, for the most fair, would seem to award it thine, as lovelier than whatever oared hot, the knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace of movement, and the charm of married brows. Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He pressed the blossom of his lips to mine, and added, this was cast upon the board, when all the full-faced presence of the gods ranged in the hills of Pellius, whereupon rose feud, with question unto whom to adieu. But Lightfoot Iris brought it yester eve, delivering that to me, by common voice elected umpire, ere comes today, palas enough radaiti, claiming each this mead of ferris. Thou, within the cave behind, yawned whispering tuft of oldest pine, mayest well behold them, unbeheld, unheard, hear all, and see thy parish judge of gods. Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. It was the deep mid-noon, one silvery cloud had lost his way between the piney sides of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, naked they came to that smooth-sworded bower, and at their feet the crocus break like fire. Violet, Amoracus, and Asphodel, Lotus, and Willys, and a wind arose, and overhead the wandering ivy and vine, this way and that, in many a wild festoon ran riot, garlanding the gnarled vows with bunch, and berry, and flower, through and through. Old mother Ida, many fountant Ida, dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Idalian afrodite, beautiful, fresh as the foam, new bathed in pathean wells, with rosy slender fingers backward drew from her warm brows and bosom her deep hair, ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat and shoulder. From the violets her light feet shone rosy white, and o'er her rounded form between the shadows of the vine bunches floated the glowing sunlight as she moved. Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. She with a subtle smile in her old mild eyes, the herald of her triumph, drawing nigh half whispered in his ear, I promise thee the fairest and most loving wife in Greece. She spoke and laughed. I shut my sight for fear, but when I looked, Paris had raised his arm, and I beheld great Heres angry eyes as she withdrew into the golden cloud. And I was left alone within the bower, and from that time to this I am alone, and I shall be alone until I die. Enone. The afternoon was spent, sometimes in furler gardening pursuits, sometimes in a drive round the beautiful island lanes and thatched-browed villages. Frequently there were visitors to be met at Yarmouth, where the Tennyson's carriage might often be seen in the quaint cobbled streets. The soft and lovely coloring of the solent was one to attract the poets fancy, and it was after coming freshly one day into sight of the familiar waters of the estuary and a tide that moving seems too full for sound or foam, lapping the likened seawalls of Yarmouth that he composed in his eighty-first year, the verses that he devised to be placed at the end of his whole collected poems, crossing the bar. The mystic simplicity of these lines strikes the very keynote of his character. Tea was served in the drawing room, its orial window full of green and golden lights of the sounds of birds in the distant sea. The air of extreme and unstudied simplicity which dominated the whole of Farringford household was just as noticeable here. Tea was a happy gathering of the family and friends and livened with talk on current topics. The laureate's sympathies were wide reaching, and his conversation, forcible and often racy, was characterized by the strongest common sense. He held firmly defined views on all social subjects and had declared himself on the question of woman's rights, then comparably fresh, at considerable length in The Princess. The woman's cause is man's. They rise or sink together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free. For woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse. Could we make her as the man sweet love were slain? His dearest bond is this, not like to like, but like indiverance, yet in the long years like her must they grow. The man be more of woman, she of man. He gain in sweetness and in moral height, nor lose the wrestling thues that throw the world. She, mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, nor lose the childlike in the larger mind. Till at last she set herself to man like perfect music upon noble words. And so these twain, upon the skirts of time, sit side by side, full summoned in all their powers. Let this proud watchword rest of equal, seeing either sex alone is half itself, and in the marriage ties, nor equal, nor unequal. Each fulfills defect in each, and always thought and thought, purpose and purpose, will in will they grow. The single pure and perfect animal, the two-celled heart beating with one full stroke, life. The Princess The poet's ideal of woman was set very high. He held her to be far above man, morally and spiritually, and an ideal as perfect as may well be conceived was daily before his eyes in the person of his beautiful wife, with her pure and saintly face, who was yet no angel, but a dearer being, all dipped in angel instincts, breathing paradise, interpreter between the gods and men who looked all native to her place, and yet on tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce wade to her from their orbits as they moved, and girdled her with music. The Princess Later on in the evening came, perhaps, the sweetest hour of the day, when, playing and robbing with its little ones, the tall and stately man became a very child for a while. The peculiar tenderness towards children was a distinctive feature at Tennyson, and whether helping his own boys build stone castles on the cliff, or frolicking with any village school children whom he might meet, he was intent upon giving that joy and laughter to the new generation, which had been denied to his own childhood. Make the lives of children as beautiful and as happy as possible was a favorite saying with him. The children's hour, which Longfellow had sung, was a radiant hour for him, and most of all, he was enchanted by the sight of little drowsy heads, asleep and caught, or cradle. They inspired some of his loveliest lyrics, such as sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea, low, low, breathe and blow, wind of the western sea, over the rolling waters go, come from the dying moon and blow, blow him again to me, while my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, father will come to thee soon. Rest, rest on mother's breast, father will come to thee soon. Father will come to his babe in the nest, sober sails all out of the west, under the silver moon. Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. And the loss of his firstborn infant had touched him with that infinite poignancy of pathos, which breathes in other lines. As through the land at Eve we went and plucked the ripened ears, we fell out, my wife and I. We fell out, I know not why, and kissed again with tears. And blessings on the falling out that all the more endears when we fall out with those we love and kiss again with tears. For when we came where lies the child we lost in other years, there above the little grave, oh there above the little grave, we kissed again with tears. The dinner table was enlivened by Tennyson's boundless store of anecdote and keen sense of humor. It was a feast of intellect, to quote Mrs. Cameron, hour after hour of the most brilliant conversation. The supernatural loomed largely. The poet had a penchant for well authenticated ghost stories, a deep interest in psychical phenomena, and an open mind towards the unknowable. And very strange tales of dreams, clairvoyance, and occult happenings were to be heard at Feringford. A master of the romantic pervaded black supernatural elements, he had long since drawn with deaf touches the mysterious confines of fairylands forlorn, steeped in the very atmosphere of dream. Willows whitened, aspen's quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver through the ways that run forever by the island and the river flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls and four gray towers overlook a space of flowers. And the silent isle embowers the lady of Chalot. Only reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley hear a song that echoes cheerly from the river winding clearly down to towered Camelot. And by the moon the reaper weary, biling sheaves at upland's airy listening, whispers, tis the fairy lady of Chalot. There she weaves by night and day a magic web with colors gay. She has heard a whisper say a curse is on her if she stay to look down on Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, and so she weaves steadily, and little other care has she the lady of Chalot. And moving through a mirror clear that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear. There she sees the highway near winding down to Camelot. There the river eddy whirls and there the surly village churls and the red cloaks of market girls pass onward from Chalot. A bow shot from her bower eaves he rode between the barley sheaves. The sun came dazzling through the leaves and flamed upon the brisen jeaves of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-crossed night forever kneeled to a lady in his shield that sparkled on the yellow field beside remote Chalot. All in the blue and clouded weather, thick jewels shone the saddle leather, the helmet, and the helmet feather as he rode down to Camelot. As often through the purple night, below the starry clusters bright, some bearded meteor trailing light moves over still Chalot. His broad clear brow and sunlight glowed on burnished hooves his warhorse trod. From underneath his helmet flowed his coal-black curls as on he rode, as he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river he flashed into the crystal mirror. Tira Lira by the river sang Sir Lancelot. She left the web. She left the loom. She made three paces through the room. She saw the water lily bloom. She saw the helmet and the plume. She looked down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide. The mirror cracked from side to side. The curses come upon me cried the Lady of Chalot. The Lady of Chalot. Sitting in his old oak armchair in the drawing room after dinner, the laureate talked of all that was in his heart, or read some poems aloud, with the landscape lying before us like a beautiful picture framed by the dark arched bow window. His moods, said Mrs. Bradley, were so variable. His conversation so earnest, his knowledge of all things, so wide and minute. Wide and minute above all, perhaps, was his acquaintance with nature. The long quiet years in Lincolnshire had endowed him with an almost unrivaled power of detail, and as the old fairing for shepherd say in dying, master was a wonderful man for nature and life. No one quotation could do justice to his powers, but the lesser music of the countryside tingles and ripples audibly through the brook, and all the exquisite details of its landscape. I come from haunts of Coot and Hearn. I make a sudden sally and sparkle out among the fern to bicker down a valley. I chatter over stony ways in little sharps and trebles. I bubble into eddying bays, I bubble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret, by many a field and fellow, and many a fairy foreland set with willow-weed and mellow. I wind about, and in and out, with many a blossom sailing, and here and there a lusty trout, and here and there a grayling. And here and there a foamy flake upon me as I travel, with many a silvery water break above the golden gravel. I steal by lawns and grassy plots. I slide by hazel covers. I move the sweet-forgetting knots that grow over happy lovers. I slide, I slide, I gloom. I glance among my skimming swallows. I make the netted sunbeam dance against my sandy shallows. I murmur under moon and stars in brambly wildernesses. I linger by my shingly bars. I loiter round my crests. And out again I curve and flow to join the brimming river. For men may come, and men may go, but I go on forever. The brook. In the course of the evening, the poet would retire to the den for a second sacred half-hour of unbroken silence into which we need not follow him. Lastly, when slumber filled the house, and night hung black above the trees, he ascended to a platform on the leads of the housetop to observe the margin majesty of the stars. Farringford, it has been said, seemed so remote and still, and as though the jar of the outside world had never entered it. But in the throbbing starlight, the sea purring in the distance, the seer on the roof communing with the mysterious skies above him, it was more than ever a house of dreams, a house whose roof touched heaven. Here and thus were thrilling nocturnes imagined. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white. Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk, nor winks the gold fin in the proffery font, the firefly wakens. Waken thou with me? Now lies the earth, all dainé to the stars, and all thy heart lies open unto me. Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves the shining furrow as thy thoughts in me. Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, and slips into the bosom of the lake. So fold thyself, my dearest thou, and slip into my bosom and be lost in me. The princess And so we leave Alpha Tennyson at the end of his day, gazing forward to the starry trek glimmering up height beyond, alone with the creator. He lifts me to the golden doors, the flashes come and go. All heaven bursts her starry floors, and strews her lights below. While the discords of earth are hushed beneath the magic of this feral harmony, and the gleam hovers upward into heaven. End of Chapter 10 A Day with Tennyson Recording by Todd Chapter 11 Of Days with Great Poets This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Days with Great Poets by May Clarissa Gillington-Bryan Section 11 A Day with the Poet Browning From his bedroom window in the Plato Gustiano Reconti, every morning in 1885, Robert Browning watched the sunrise. My window commands a perfect view, he wrote. The still-gray lagoon, the few seagulls flying, the Islet of San Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple wreck, from behind which sort of spirit of rose burns up, till presently all the rims are on fire with gold. So my day begins. The Plato, in which a suite of rooms had been placed by Mrs. Bronson at the disposal of the poet and his sister, was a place of historical association and 15th-century traditions. And no more appropriate abiding place than Venice could have been selected for a man of Browning's temperament. The Venetian coloring was a perpetual feast to his eye. His medieval glories were a source of continual inspiration, and if much of his heart still remained with his native land, so that the London Daily paper was not in vain, the London Daily papers were a necessity of existence, and a certain sense of exile occasionally intruded itself, we must need to be grateful to the fact for its result in certain immortal lines. Oh, to be in England, now that April's there, and whoever wakes in England sees, some morning unaware, that the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the Elmwood bowl are in tiny leaf, while the chaffage sings on the orchard bough in England, now. And after April, when May follows, and the white-throat builds and all the swallows, hark, where my blossomed parotry in the hedge leans to the field and scatters on the clover blossoms and dew drops, at the bent spray's edge. That's the wise thrush. He sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine, careless rapture. And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, all will be gay when noontime wakes adieu, the buttercups, the little children's dower, far brighter than this gaudy, melon flower. But there had always been a frankly cosmopolitan spirit in Browning, no touch of parochialism or insularity. In the magnificent gallery of portrait studies, no two alike, which his poems present to us, the nations are legion, yet Italian scenes predominate, for Browning could gade with the unerring instinct of genius all the subtleties of the Italian temperament. So we come at every turn across some ardent vision of the south, here, Warring sailing out of Trieste under the furrowed Latine sail, and there, for a little lippy tracking lute strings, laughs, and whiffs of song down the darkling streets of Florence, the patriot riding into Brescia, roses roses all the way, and the Duke of Ferrara, that typical representative of a whole phase of civilization, discussing my last duchess and her foolishness. That's my last duchess, painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. I call that piece a wonder now. Fraupendoff's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will please you sit and look at her, I said? Fraupendoff, by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance. The depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned, since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I. And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there. So, not the first, are you deterred and ask thus? Sir, it was not her husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek. Perhaps Fraupendoff chanced to say, her mental lapse or my lady's risk too much, or, paint must never hope to reproduce the fate half-flush that dyes along her throat. Such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. She had a heart, how shall I say, too soon made glad, too easily impressed. She liked what air she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, it was all one, my favorite at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherry some officious fool broken the orchard for her, the white mule she rode round the terrace. All and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush at least. She thanked men, good, but thanked somehow. I know not how, as if she ranked my gift of a nine hundred years old name with anybody's gift. My last duchess. After a light and early breakfast, the poet went abroad, lived almost entirely on milk, fruit, etc., of juring animal food. Browning would follow his invariable custom, a stroll along the Riva to the public gardens. He never failed to leave the house at the same hour of the day. He was a man of singularly methodical habits in many ways. Good sense, it has been said, was as foible, if not his habit. And an orderly method of life was one of the strongest proofs of this fact. Another evidence, laying his care to avoid being labeled. The disorderly locks and careless appearance of the typical poet were quite alien to this well-groomed, clean-looking Englishman, with his sweet, gray face, silvery hair, and smooth, healthy skin. Singularly wholesome in body as well as in mind, until past 70 he could take the longest walks without fatigue. The splendid eyesight of his clear gray eyes remained untarnished to the last. These keen gray eyes of his never failed to notice anything worth seeing in his walks. An extraordinary minuteness of observation is perceptible in all his poems dealing with outdoor life. Little touches of detail, such as few men, are masters of. And the leaf buds on the vine are woolly. I noticed that today. One day more verse them open fully. You know the red turns gray. The lost mistress. And again, those lines of poignant, passionate reserve which sum up may and death. I wish that when you died last May, Charles, there had died along with you three parts of spring's delightful things. I, and for me the fourth part too. A foolish thought. And worse perhaps. There must be many a pair of friends who, arm in arm, deserve the warm moonbirths, and the long evening ends. So, for their sake, be May, still May. Let their new time, as mine of old, do all it did for me. I bid sweet sights and sound strong manifold. Only one little sight, one plant woods have in May, that starts up green, save a soul's streak which, so to speak, is spring's blood, spilt its leaves between. That they might spare. A certain wood might miss the plant. Their loss were small, but I. When air the leaf grows there, its drop comes from my heart. That's all. Arrived at the public gardens, Browning was careful to visit his friends there, and to feed them, the elephant, baboon, kangaroo, ostrich, pelican, and mama sets. He had that particular camaraderie with wild animals which is almost akin to a hypnotic influence over them. And, when in the country, he would whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which boarded the roads to try his old power of attracting them. Flowers he enjoyed as a color feast for the eye, scenery he reveled in. In that perpetual contemplation of nature, which with wardsworth became an 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 flame. Three times punctually he would walk round the gardens, and then walk home. Upon these daily strolls, he was accompanied by his sister, Saryana, in whose love and companionship he was singularly fortunate. Saryana Browning had always been the best of sisters to the poet and his wife, a kindred spirit in every sense of the word, and she was now intent to supply, so far as in her lay, the place of that soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Of the dead wife, who had been all in all to him, Browning seldom spoken words, but his burning need of her in hope of reunion with her, gleamed continually through his writings. Oh, there Raphael of the dear Madonna's, Oh, there Dante of the dread inferno, wrote one song, And in my brain I sing it, grew one angel, born, see, on my bosom. And in all his poems, which dealt with the love of man and woman, he regarded the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life. He thought of love as a supreme possession in itself, and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it, as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit. Hence, even where the shadow of death broods over a poem, as we see in a gondola, that shadow glows with color like the shadows of a Venetian painter. Love, to the very last, is infinitely stronger than death. He sings, I send my heart up to thee, all my heart in this my singing, for the stars help me, and the sea bears part, this very night is clinging. Closer to Venice's street to leave one space above me, whence thy face may light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling place. She speaks, say after me, and try to say my very words, as if each word came from you of your own accord, in your own voice, in your own way. This woman's heart and soul and brain are mine as much as this gold chain she bids me wear, which, say again, I choose to make by cherishing a precious thing, or choose to fling or the boat side, ring by ring. And yet once more say, no word more, since words are only words, give or, unless you call me all the same, familiarly by my pet name, which, if the three could hear you call, and me reply to, would proclaim, at once, our secret to them all. She speaks, there's Zanzi's vigilant taper, say for we, only one minute more to night with me, resume your past self of a month ago, be you the bashful gallant, I will be the lady with the cooler breast than snow. Now bow you, as becomes, nor touch my hand more than I touch yours when I step to land, and say, all thanks, senor, heart to heart, and lips to lips. Yet once more every part clasp me, and make me thine as mine thou art. He is surprised and stabbed. It was ordained to be so sweet, and best comes now beneath thine eyes and on thy breast, still kiss me, care not for the cowards, care only to put aside that beauteous hair, my blood will hurt. The three I do not scorn to death because they never lived, but I have lived indeed, and so yet one more kiss can die. In a gondola. The latter hours of the morning were devoted by the poet to work, proof sheets, and correspondence. He would complain bitterly of the quantity of ephemeral correspondence would took up so much of his time. Yet, with the rarest exceptions, he answered every letter he received. He counted that day lost in which he had not written at least a little. In earlier life he had worked fast and copiously, but now he was satisfied with twenty or thirty lines as a result of a morning's work. And upon these lines he expended infinite trouble, for, despite all supposition to the contrary, he finished his work with great care. People accuse me of not taking pains, he grumbled. I take nothing but pains. His subject manner fell naturally into three groups of poems, those interpreting love in his various phases, those occupied with art and artists, those treating of religious ideas and emotions, and these again may be subdivided into poems of failure and attainment. It is hard to say which are which, for Browning was a singer of heroic failures, and they, to him, were spiritual triumphs. He held that, we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. No such moral tonic has ever been proffered to the weary and dispirited as the invulnerable optimism of Browning. He regarded this present life as a state of probation and preparation, therefore his faith in the unseen order of things created a hope which persists through all apparent failure. The miltonic ideal, and what is else not to be overcome, is the core and center of Browning's teaching. Sometimes it refers to hopeless love, as in the last ride together. I said, then dearest, since it is so, since now at length my fate I know, since nothing of my love avails, since all my life seems meant for fails, since this was written and needs must be, my whole heart rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness. Take back the hope you gave, I claim only a memory of the same, and this beside, if you will not blame your leave for one more last ride with me. My mistress bent that brow of hers, those deep dark eyes were pried to mures when pity would be softening through. Fixed me a breathing while or two, with life or death in the balance, right, the blood replenished me again. My last thought was at least not vain, I and my mistress side by side shall be together, breathe and ride. So one day more am I deified, who knows but the world may end tonight. Sometimes death to all seeming has shut the doors of hope forever. Beautiful Evelyn, hope is dead, sit and watch by her side an hour. That is her book-shell, this her bed. She plucked that piece of geranium flower, beginning to die too in the glass. Little has yet been changed, I think. The shutters are shut. No light may pass. Save too long rays through the hinges' chink. Is it too late then, Evelyn, hope? What? Your soul was pure and true. The good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire and dew, and, just because I was thrice as old, and our paths in the world diverged so wide, each was not to each, must I be told? We were fellow mortals, not beside. No, indeed, for God above is great to grant, as mighty to make, and creates the love to reward the love. I claim you still, for my own love's sake, delayed it may be for more lives yet. Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few. Much is to learn, and much to forget, ere the time become for taking you. But the time will come, and at last it will, when, Evelyn hope, what meant, I shall say, in the lower earth, and the years long still that body and soul so pure and gay. Why, your hair was amber, I shall divine, and your mouth of your own geraniums red, and what you would do with me in fine, in the new life comes, in the old one's dead. I loved you, Evelyn, all the while. My heart seemed full as it could hold. There was place and despair for the frank young smile, and the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. So hush! I will give you this leaf to keep. See? I shot it inside the sweet cold hand. There, that is our secret. Go to sleep, you awake, and remember, and understand. Or again the tragedy of ingratitude and crumbled aspirations ends, as world might say, upon the scaffold. It was roses, roses all the way, with myrtle mixed in my path like mad. The house roofs seemed to heave and sway, the church spires flamed, such flags they had, a year ago, on this very day. There's nobody on the housetops now, just a palsy few at the windows set. For the best of the sight is, all allow, at the shambles gate. Or better yet, by the very scaffold's foot, I trow. I go in the rain, and more than needs, a rope cuts both my wrists behind, and I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, for they fling, whoever has a mind, stones at me for my year's misdeeds. Thus I enter Brescia, and thus I go. In triumphs, people have dropped down dead, thou, paid by the world, what thus thou owe me, God might question, but now instead, till God shall requite, I am safer so. In all of these, as in Childe Roland, that forlorn romance of dreary and depressed heroism, the trumpet note of the soul's victory rings through the darkness of terrestrial defeat. Not here? When noise was everywhere? It told increasingly like a bell, named in my ears of all the lost adventurers, my peers. How such a one was strong, and such was bold, and such was fortunate! Yet each of old lost, lost. One moment knell of the woe of years, there they stood, ranged along the hillside, meant to view the last of me, a living frame, for one more picture. In a sheet of flame I saw them, and I knew them all. And yet, dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set and blew, Childe Roland to the dark tower came. At noon, Brownie would make a second and more substantial breakfast on Italian dishes. And at three o'clock, regularly, a friend's gondola, which was always a hand to convey him, came and carried him, usually, to the Lido, his favorite spot. I walk, even in wind or rain, he wrote, for a couple of hours on Lido, and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand, as much as Shelley did in those old days. Go there, if only to be blown about by the sea wind. The sea wind, indeed, was the very utterance of his own robust and vigorous nature, his keen alertness of sense, and his impetuous, impulsive spirit. In the course of the afternoon, he would explore Venice in all directions, studying her multitudinous points of interest and beauty. The daughter of his hostess, Mrs. Brunson, sometimes companion him on these excursions, guiding him through the narrow by-streets, or examining with him the monuments, sculptures, and frescoes of the churches. Art, in its various manifestations, had been a lifelong study with Browning. He took great delight in modeling in clay, and had for some while studied sculpture under story. He possessed the artistic temperament, fiery, nervous, susceptible in its sanest form, and not only was he able to express all an artist's aims, ambitions, and aspires, but to arrive in all his poems, at one point or another, at a superb pictorial moment. Some of his lines are penetrated from end to end by this remarkable pictorial quality. Perhaps the most notable example is Love Among the Ruins, with its triple contrast, the infinite calm of the pasturelands prolonging themselves into the sunset, the noise and vital movement which had filled the now-vanor city, and the lover endeavoring to curb his impatience for the one beloved face by dwelling on those outward things. Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles miles and miles on the solitary pastures where our sheep half asleep tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop as they crop, was the sight once of a city great and gay, so they say, of our country's very capital, its prince, ages since, held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far peace or war. And I know, while thus the quiet-colored eve smiles to leave, to their folding, all our mini-tinkling fleece in such peace, and the slopes and reels in undistinguished gray melt away. That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair waits me there in the turret once the charioteers caught soul for the goal. When the king looked where she looks now, breathless, dumb, till I come. But he looked upon the city every side far and wide, all the mountains topped with temples, all the glades, colonnades, all the causies, bridges, aqueducts, and then all the men. When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, either hand, on my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace of my face, ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech, each on each. Oh heart, oh blood that freezes, blood that burns, earth returns, for whole centuries of folly, noise and sin, shut them in. With their triumphs and their glories and the rest, love is best. Another characteristic of Browning was his consummate comprehension of artistic ideals, those of temperaments so opposite as Fráil Lippolibi, Pictor Ignossus, and that two perfect painter Andrea Del Sato, his poem on the last name was written and forwarded to a friend who had begged him to procure a copy of the PD portrait of Del Sato and his wife. It tells far more than any portrait could, and expresses the writer's doctrine that in art, as in life, the aspiration towards the higher is greater than the achievement of the lower. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for? According to Browning's belief, a soul's probation, its growth, its ultimate value, lie mainly if not wholly in this choice between the high and the less high. Love. We are in God's hand. How strange now looks the life he makes us lead. So free we seem, so fettered fast we are. I feel he laid the fetter. Let it lie. This chamber, for example, turn your head. All that's behind us. You don't understand nor care to understand above my art, but you can hear at least when people speak, and that cartoon, the second from the door, it is the thing, love. So such things should be. Behold Madonna, I am bold to say. I can do with my pencil what I know, what I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for. If I ever wish so deep, do easily too. When I say perfectly, I do not boast perhaps. Yourself, our judge, who listened to the Legates talk last week, and just as much they used to say in France, at any rate, tis easy, all of it. No sketches first, no studies. That's long past. I do what many dream of all their lives. Dream, strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing. I could count twenty such on twice your fingers, and not leave this town, who strive. You don't know how the others strive, to paint a little thing like that you smeared, carelessly passing with your robes afloat. Yet do much less, so much less, someone says. I know his name, no matter, so much less. Well, less is more Lucretia. I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, in their vexed, beating, stuffed, and stopped up brain, heart, or whatever else, that goes on to prompt this low-pulsed, forthright craftsman hand of mine. Their works drop groundward. But themselves, I know, reach many a time a heaven that shut to me, enter and take their place there sure enough. Though they come back and cannot tell the world. My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. Andrea Del Sarto Social intercourse occupied a large portion of the day. Browning identified himself with the daily life of Venice, and besides this, English and American acquaintances were frequently in Venice. The poet, his reputation now firmly established and extending, was sought after by innumerable admirers. He was a man of great social charm, a brilliant talker full of amusing anecdotes. His memory for historical incident was only paralleled by his immense literary knowledge, upon which he drew for apt illustration. Yet he was naturally a reticent man, of painfully nervous excitability. Nervous is such a degree, as he said of himself, that I might fancy I could not enter a drawing room that I not know from my experience that I could do it. This very nervousness, however, often induced an almost abnormal vivacity of speech, and Browning was warmly welcomed amongst the notable and even royal folk whose names were included in Mrs. Bronson's circle. They recognized in him, as Frederick Tennyson had done, a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and moreover a sterling heart that reveals no hollowness. To women he was especially attracted, and vice versa, that golden-hearted Robert, as his wife had termed him, had an intimate understanding of the woman's mind, but towards children he was, so to speak, almost numb. Devoted though he was to his only son, the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him, and the fervor of parental instinct finds practically no expression in his poems. In the course of the day, the poet would lose no opportunity of hearing any important concert. An accomplished musician himself is loved for the tone art amounted to a passion, and in many of his greatest poems he had voiced the most secret meanings of music and the yearning aspirations of a composer. We sit alone in the loft with the organist, Master Hughes of Saxgotha, and his huge house of the sounds, to listen and wonder while his fugue broadens and thickens, gradens and deepens and lengthens, and the intricacy of constructive technique forms, as someone has said, an interposing web spun by the brain between art and things divine. Or we stand with Aptavogler in his palace of music as it falls to pieces, and the magic of inspiration overrides the mastery of construction. The void of the silence is filled with a substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, and faith is born of the composer's very impotence to realize the height of his own ambition. Yet one more rendering of that triumphant failure of which Browning was a prophet. 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, our music sent up to God by the lover and the bard. Enough that he heard it once. We shall hear it by and by, and what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized? Why else was the pause prolonged for the singing might issue thence? Why rush the discords in but that harmony should be prized? Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the wheel and woe, but God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear. The rest may reason and welcome, tis we musicians know. Optibogla. And as a final contrast, drawn out of that shoalous sea of contrast which music can reveal, we have a Tokata of Galapies, suffused with the melancholy of mundane pleasure steeped in the ephemeral voluptuousness of 18th century Venice. In these lines it has been pointed out, Browning's self-restraint is admirable. The poet will not say a word more than the musician has said in his Tokata. Oh, Galupie. Baldasaro. This is very sad to find. I can hardly misconceive you. It would prove me deaf and blind. But although I take your meaning, tis with such a heavy mind. Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What? They lived thus at Venice, where the merchants were kings, where St. Mark's is where the doges used to wed the sea with rings. Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May? Balls and masks began at midnight, burning ever too midday, when they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? Well, and it was graceful of them. They'd break talk off and afford. She'd to bite her mask black velvet, he'd to finger on his sword, while you sat and played Tokatas, stately at the clavichord. What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixth diminished, sigh on sigh, told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions, must we die? Those commiserating sevenths, life might last. We can but try. Were you happy? Yes. And are you still as happy? Yes, and you? Then, more kisses. Did I stop them? When a million seemed so few? Hark! The dominance persistence, till it must be answered too. So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I daresay. Brave Gallupi! That was music, good alike, at grave and gay. I can always leave off talking, when I hear a master play. Then they left you for your pleasure. Till in due time, one by one, some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, death came tacitly and took them, where they never see the sun. A Tokata of Gallupis. The afternoon wore by quickly, and it was soon time to dress for dinner, for Brownie was precise in adhering to the customs of civilized life, and he liked to see his sisters seated opposite him, clad in beautiful gowns of somber richness and wearing quaint old jewelry. Brownie accepted his meals with frank pleasure, he was no ascetic, and his optimism and his belief in direct providence led him to make a direct virtue of happiness, and to welcome it in his simplest form. Any guest who might be present was privileged to enjoy that sparkling and many faceted eloquence to which reference has been made already, but the host was always careful to avoid deep or solemn topics, doubtless because he felt them far too keenly to use them as mere texts for dinner table discussion. If such were broached in his presence, he dismissed them with one strong convincing sentence and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel. Later on he would probably visit the Gouldani Theatre, where he had a large box, or if remaining at home, he was often prevailed upon to read aloud. His delivery was forceful and dramatic. He would strongly emphasize all the light and shade of a poem and the touches of character in the dialogue, especially was this the case when reading his own compositions, but often he would say with a smile, no R.B. tonight, let us have some real poetry, and we take down a volume of Shelley, Keats, or Cooleridge. At last, another of the divine sunsets which Brownie adored had faded over the Lido, the quiet colored end of the evening had darkened into dusk and stars, even that alert and indefatigable frame grew weary with the day's long doings and a natural desire for rest descended upon the brain which too much thought expands. The vision of Garicino's picture, fraught with apathos so magnificent, returned upon him from that sultry day in which he had beheld the guardian angel at Fano, my angel with me too, and he longed for the touch of those divinely healing hands. Dear and great angel, wouldst thou only leave that child when thou hast done with him, for me? Let me sit all the day here, that when Eve shall find perform thy special ministry and time come for departure, thou suspending thy flight may it see another child pretending, another still, do quiet and retrieve, then I shall feel thee step one step, no more, from where thou standest now, to where I gaze, and suddenly my head is covered o'er with those wings white above the child who prays, now on that tomb, and I shall feel thee guarding me out of all the world, for me, discarding yon heaven, thy home, that waits and hopes its door, I would not look up thither past thy head, because the door hopes, like that child, I know, for I should have thy gracious face instead. Thou bird of God, and wilt thou bend me low like him and lay, like his, my hands together, and lift them up to pray, and gently tether me as thy lamb there with thy garment's bread, how soon all worldly wrong would be repaired. I think how I should view the earth and skies and sea, when once again my brow was bared after thy healing with such different eyes. O world, as God has made it, all was beauty, and knowing this is love, and love is duty, what further may be sought for, or declared. Yet it was not to a celestial visitant that Browning's thought turned most, now or at any other time, it was towards the one love of his life, towards that reunion, that restoration, that infrangible joy of retrieval, which was the goal of his whole desire. And, characteristically of the man who was ever a fighter, he did not expect to reach his haven by a common prosperous passage. It had to be fought for, struggled for, from strength to strength, attained through incessant and arduous combat, for those do not mount and that hardly to eternal life who remain content upon terrestrial planes. Surely they see not God, I know, nor all that chivalry of his, the soldier saints who, row on row, burn upwards each to his point of bliss, since the end of life being manifest, he had cut his way through the world to this. Therefore, as sleep, death's twin brother, came slowly through the darkness, the fighter faced his last hour in imagination and made haste to greet the future with a cheer. For Prosperous is an act of the faith which comes through love. No lonely adventurer is here to reward the victor or death. The transcendent joy is human love, recovered. Fear depth? To feel the frog in my throat, the mist in my face when the snows begin and the blasting note I am nearing the place? The power of the night, the press of the storm, the post of the foe. Where he stands, the arched fear in a visible form, yet the strong man must go. For the journey is done and the summit attained and the barriers fall. Though a battle is to fight, yet a girdon be gained, the reward of it all. I was ever a fighter, so one fight more, the best and the last. I would hate that death banished my eyes and forebore and bade me creep past. No. Let me taste the hull of it. Fair like my peers, the heroes of old. Fair the brunt, in a minute, pay glad life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold. For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, the black minutes at end, and the elements rage, the fiend voices that rave shall dwindle, shall blend, shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light, then thy rest. O thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, and with God be at rest. Prosperous. End of Section 11, Recording by Todd. End of Days with Great Poets by May, Clarissa, Gillington, Byron.