Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  In loving none of those who did possess thee, –

  In minist’ring to no one to an end –

  In no one’s service caring to confess thee,

  But loving still the change of friend for friend,

  And sending the last, plague-wise, to the door!

  And so, or ere thou canst betray and leave me,

  I, a wise lord, dismiss thee, servitor,

  And antedate the wrong thou may’st achieve me

  Against my will, by what my will allows,

  Yet not without some sorrow, gentle house!

  For O, beloved house! what time I render

  My last look back on thee I grow more tender!

  Pleasant possession, hearth for father’s age,

  Dear gift of buried hands, sole heritage!

  My blood is stirred – and love that learnt its play

  From all sweet customs moves mine heart thy way!

  For thou wert all my nurse and helpful creature, –

  For thou wert all my tutor and my teacher –

  In thee through lengthening toils I struggled deep –

  In thee I watched all night without its sleep –

  In thee I worked the wearier daytime out,

  Exalting truth, or trying by a doubt.

  . . . . . . .

  And oh, my father’s roof ! the memory leaves

  Such pangs as break mine heart, beloved eaves,

  But God’s word conquers all! * *

  He is forced to a strange land, reverting with this benediction to the “dearest house:”

  Farewell, farewell, mine own familiar one,

  Estranged for evermore from this day’s sun,

  Fare-thee-well so! Farewell, O second mother,

  O nurse and help, – remains there not another!

  My bringer-up to some sublimer measure

  Of holy childhood and perfected pleasure!

  Now other spirits must thou tend and teach,

  And minister thy quiet unto each,

  For reasoning uses, if they love such use,

  But nevermore to me! God keep thee, house,

  God keep thee, faithful corner, where I drew

  So calm a breath of life! And God keep you,

  Kind neighbours! Though I leave you by His grace,

  Let no grief bring a shadow to your face,

  Because whate’er He willeth to be done

  His will makes easy, makes the distant one,

  And soon brings all embraced before his throne!

  We pass Philip Solitarius, who lived at the close of this eleventh century, even as we have passed one or two besides of his fellow poets: because they, having hidden themselves beyond the reach of our eyes and the endeavour of our hands, and we being careful to speak by knowledge rather than by testimony, nothing remains to us but this same silent passing – this regretful one, as our care to do better must testify – albeit our fancy will not, by any means, account them, with all their advantages of absence, “the best part of the solemnity.”

  Early in the twelfth century we are called to the recognition of Theodore Prodromus, theologian, philosopher, and poet. His poems are unequal, consisting principally of a series of tetrastics – Greek epigrams for lack of point, French epigrams for lack of poetry – upon the Old and New Testaments, and the Life of Chrysostom, – all nearly as bare of the rags of literary merit as might be expected from the design; and three didactic poems upon Love, Providence, and against Bareus the heretic, into which the poet has cast the recollected life of his soul. The soul deports herself as a soul should, with a vivacity and energy which work outward and upward into eloquence. The sentiments are lofty, the expression free; there is an instinct to a middle and an end. Music we miss, even to the elementary melody: the poet thinks his thoughts, and speaks them; not indeed what all poets, so called, do esteem a necessary effort, and indeed what we should thank him for doing; but he sings them in nowise, and they are not of that divine order which are crowned by right of their divinity with an inseparable aureole of sweet sound. His poem upon Love, – φιλια says the Greek word, but friendship does not answer to it, – is a dialogue between the personification and a stranger. It opens thus dramatically, the stranger speaking: –,

  Love! Lady diademed with honour, whence

  And whither goest thou? Thy look presents

  Tears to the lid – thy mien is vext and low –

  Thy locks fall wildly from thy drooping brow –

  Thy blushes are all pale – thy garb is fit

  For mourning in, and shoon and zone are loose!

  So changed thou art to sadness every whit,

  And all that pomp and purple thou didst use,

  That seemly sweet, – that new rose on the mouth, –

  Those fair-smoothed tresses, and that graceful zone,

  Bright sandals, and the rest thou haddest on,

  Are all departed, gone to nought together!

  And now thou walkest mournful in the train

  Of mourning women! – where and whence, again?

  Love. From earth to God my Father.

  Stranger. Dost thou say

  That earth of Love is desolated?

  Love. Yea!

  It so much scorned me.

  Stranger. Scorned!

  Love. And cast me out

  From its door.

  Stranger. From its door?

  Love. As if without

  I had my lot to die!

  Love consents to give her confidence to the wondering stranger; whereupon, as they sit in the shadow of a tall pine, she tells a Platonic story of all the good she had done in heaven before the stars, and the angels, and the throned Triad, and of all her subsequent sufferings on the melancholy and ungrateful earth. The poem, which includes much beauty, ends with a quaint sweetness in the troth-plighting of the stranger and the lady. May’st thou have been faithful to that oath, O Theodore Prodromus! but thou didst “swear too much to be believed . . so much.”

  The poems ‘On Providence’ and ‘Against Bareus’ exceed the ‘Love’ perhaps in power and eloquence to the full measure of the degree in which they fall short of the interest of the latter’s design. Whereupon we dedicate the following selection from the ‘Providence,’to Mr. Carlyle’s “gigmen” and all “respectable persons”: –

  Ah me! what tears mine eyes are welling forth,

  To witness in this synagogue of earth

  Wise men speak wisely while the scoffers sing,

  And rich men folly, for much honoring!

  Melitus trifles, – Socrates decrees

  Our further knowledge! Death to Socrates,

  And long life to Melitus! . . .

  . . . . . . .

  Chiefdom of evil, gold! blind child of clay,

  Gnawing with fixèd tooth earth’s heart away!

  Go! perish from us! objurgation vain

  To soulless nature, powerless to contain

  One ill unthrust upon it! Rather perish

  That turpitude of crowds, by which they cherish

  Bad men for their good fortune, or condemn,

  Because of evil fortune, virtuous men!

  . . . . . . . .

  . . . . . . . .

  Oh, for a trumpet-mouth! an iron tongue

  Sufficient for all speech! foundations hung

  High on Parnassus’ top to bear my feet, –

  So from that watch-tower, words which shall be meet,

  I may out-thunder to the nations near me –

  “Ye worshippers of gold, poor rich men, hear me!

  Where do ye wander? – for what object stand?

  That gold is earth’s ye carry in your hand,

  And floweth earthward! bad men have its curse

  The most profusely! would yourselves be worse

  So to be richer? – better in your purse?

  Your royal purple – ‘twas a dog that found it!

  Your pearl of price – a sickened oyster owned it!

  Your
glittering gems are pebbles dust-astray –

  Your palace pomp was wrought of wood and clay,

  Smoothed rock and moulded plinth! earth’s clay! earth’s wood!

  Earth’s common-hearted stones! Is this your mood,

  To honour earth, to worship earth . . nor blush?” –

  What dost thou murmur, savage mouth? Hush, hush!

  Thy wrath is vainly breathed – The depth to tread

  Of God’s deep judgments, was not Paul’s, he said.

  The “savage mouth” speaks in power, with whatever harshness: and we are tempted to contrast with this vehement utterance another short poem by the same poet, a little quaint withal, but light, soft, almost tuneful, – as written for a ‘Book of Beauty,’ and that not of Euchaita! The subject is ‘LIFE.’

  Oh, take me, thou mortal, . . thy LIFE for thy praiser!

  Thou hast met, found, and seized me, and know’st what my ways are.

  Nor leave me for slackness, nor yield me for pleasure,

  Nor look up too saintly, nor muse beyond measure!

  There’s the veil from my head – see the worst of my mourning!

  There are wheels to my feet – have a dread of their turning!

  There are wings round my waist – I may flatter and flee thee!

  There are yokes on my hands – fear the chains I decree thee!

  Hold me! hold a shadow, the winds as they quiver;

  Hold me! hold a dream, smoke, a track on the river.

  Oh, take me thou mortal, . . thy Life for thy praiser,

  Thou hast met not and seized not – nor know’st what my ways are!

  Nay, frown not, and shrink not – nor call me an aspen;

  There’s the veil from my head! I have dropped from thy clasping!

  A fall back within it, I soon may afford thee;

  There are wheels to my feet – I may roll back toward thee –

  There are wings round my waist – I may flee back and clip thee –

  There are yokes on my hands – I may soon cease to whip thee!

  Take courage! I rather would hearten than hip thee!

  John Tzetzes divides the twelfth century with his name, which is not a great one. In addition to an iambic fragment upon education, he has written indefatigably in the metre politicus, what must be read, if read at all, with a corresponding energy, – thirteen “Chiliads” of “variæ historiæ,” so called after Ælian’s, – Ælian’s without the “honey tongue,” – very various histories indeed, about crocodiles and flies, and Plato’s philosophy and Cleopatra’s nails, and Samson and Phidias, and the resurrection from the dead, and the Calydonian boar, – “everything under the sun” being, in fact, their imperfect epitome. The omission is simply POETRY! there is no apparent consciousness of her entity in the mind of this versifier; no aspiration towards her presence, not so much as a sigh upon her absence. We do not, indeed, become aware, in the whole course of this laborious work, of much unfolding of faculty; take it lower than the poetical; of nothing much beyond an occasional dry, sly, somewhat boorish humour, which being good humour besides, would not be a bad thing were its traces only more extended. But the general level of the work is a dull talkativeness, a prosy adversity, who is no “Daughter of Jove,” and a slumberousness without a dream. We adjudge to our reader the instructive history of the Phœnix.

  A phœnix is a single bird and synchronous with nature,

  The peacock cannot equal him in beauty or in stature!

  In radiance he outshines the gold; the world in wonder yieldeth;

  His nest he fixeth in the trees, and all of spices buildeth.

  And when he dies, a little worm from out his body twining,

  Doth generate him back again whene’er the sun is shining;

  He lives in Ægypt, and he dies in Æthiopia only, as

  Asserts Philostratus, who wrote the Life of Apollonius.

  And as the wise Ægytian scribe, the holy scribe Chœremon,

  Hath entered on these Institutes, all centre their esteem on,

  Seven thousand years and six of age, this phœnix of the story,

  Expireth from the fair Nile side, whereby he had his glory!

  In the early part of the fourteenth century, Manuel Phile, pricked emulously to the heart by the successful labours of Tzetzes, embraced into identity with himself the remaining half of Ælian, and developed in his poetical treatise ‘On the Properties of Animals,’ to which Ioachimus Camerarius provided a conclusion – the Natural History of that industrious and amusing Greek-Roman. The Natural History is translated into verse, but by no means glorified; and yet the poet of animals, Phile, has carried away far more of the Ælian honey clinging to the edges of his patera, than the poet of the Chiliads did ever wot of. What we find in him is not beauty, what we hear in him is not music, but there is an open feeling for the beautiful which stirs at a word, and we have a scarcely confessed contentment in hearkening to those twice-told stories of birds and beasts, and fishes, measured out to us in the low monotony of his chaunting voice. Our selections shall say nothing of the live grasshopper, called, with the first breath of these papers, an emblem of the vital Greek tongue; because the space left to us closes within our sight, and the science of the age does not thirst to receive, through our hands, the history of grasshoppers, according to Ælian or Phile either. Everybody knows what Phile tells us here, that grasshoppers live upon morning dew, and cannot sing when it is dry. Everybody knows that the lady grasshopper sings not at all. And if the moral, drawn by Phile from this latter fact, of the advantage of silence in the female sex generally, be true and important, it is also too obvious to exact our enforcement of it. Therefore we pass by the grasshopper, and the nightingale too, for all her fantastic song, – and hasten to introduce to European naturalists a Philhellenic species of heron, which has escaped the researches of Cuvier, and the peculiarities of which may account to the philosophic reader for that instinct of the “wisdom of our forefathers,” which established an English university in approximation with the fens. It is earnestly to be hoped that the nice ear in question for the Attic dialect, may still be preserved among the herons of Cambridgeshire: –

  A Grecian island nourisheth to bless

  A race of herons in all nobleness.

  If some barbarian bark approach the shore,

  They hate, they flee, – no eagle can outsoar!

  But if by chance an Attic voice be wist,

  They grow softhearted straight, philhellenist;

  Press on in earnest flocks along the strand,

  And stretch their wings out to the comer’s hand.

  Perhaps he nears them with a gentle mind, –

  They love his love, though foreign to their kind!

  For so the island giveth wingèd teachers

  In true love lessons, to all wingless creatures.

  He has written, besides, ‘A Dialogue between Mind and Phile,’ and other poems; and we cannot part without taking from him a more solemn tone, which may sound as an “Amen!” to the good we have said of him. The following address to the Holy Spirit is concentrated in expression:–

  O living Spirit, O falling of God-dew,

  O Grace which dost console us and renew;

  O vital light, O breath of angelhood,

  O generous ministration of things good –

  Creator of the visible, and best

  Upholder of the great unmanifest!

  Power infinitely wise, new boon sublime,

  Of science and of art, constraining might;

  In whom I breathe, live, speak, rejoice, and write,

  Be with us in all places, for all time!

  “And now,” saith the patientest reader of all, “you have done. Now we have watched out the whole night of the world with you, by no better light than these poetical rushlights, and the wicks fail, and the clock of the universal hour is near upon the stroke of the seventeenth century, and you have surely done!” Surely not, we answer; for we see a hand which the reader sees n
ot, which beckons us over to Crete, and clasps within its shadowy fingers a roll of hymns anacreontical, written by Maximus Margunius! and not for the last of our readers would we lose this last of the Greeks, owing him salutation. Yet the hymns have, for the true anacreontic fragrance, a musty odour, and we have scant praise for them in our nostrils. Their inspiration is from Gregory Nazianzen, whose “Soul and body” are renewed in them by a double species of transmigration; and although we kiss the feet of Gregory’s high excellencies, we cannot admit any one of them to be a safe conductor of poetical inspiration. And in union with Margunius’s plagiaristic tendencies, there is a wearisome lengthiness, harder to bear. He will knit you to the whole length of an “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” till you fall asleep to the humming of the stitches, what time you should be reading the “moral.” We ourselves once dropped into a “distraction,” as the French say, – for nothing could be more different from what the English say, than our serene state of self-abnegation – at the beginning of a house-building by this Maximus Margunius: when, reading on some hundred lines with our bare bodily eyes, and our soul starting up on a sudden to demand a measure of the progress, behold, he was building it still, with a trowel in the same hand: it was not forwarder by a brick. The swallows had time to hatch two nestfulls in a chimney while he finished the chimney-pot! Nevertheless he has moments of earnestness, and they leave beauties in their trance. Let us listen to this extract from his fifth hymn: –

  Take me as an hermit lone,

  With a desert life and moan;

  Only Thou anear to mete

  Slow or quick my pulse’s beat;

  Only Thou, the night to chase,

  With the sunlight in Thy face!

  Pleasure to the eyes may come

  From a glory seen afar,

  But if life concentre gloom

  Scattered by no little star,

  Then, how feeble, God, we are!

  Nay, whatever bird there be

  (Æther by his flying stirred,)

  He, in this thing, must be free –

  And I, Saviour, am thy bird,

  Pricking with an open beak

  At the words that thou dost speak!

  Leave a breath upon my wings,