Keeping a reserve of scanty water

Meant to save his own life in the desert;

Ready in the desert to deliver

(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened)

Hoard and life together for his mistress.

XII

I shall never, in the years remaining,

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;
So it seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing:

105

ΠΙΟ

115

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!

XIII

Yet a semblance of resource avails us

Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it.
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,

Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,

Makes a strange art of an art familiar,

Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets.

I 20

125

He who blows through bronze, may breathe through silver,

Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess.

He who writes, may write for once as I do.

XIV

Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,

Enter each and all, and use their service,

130

Speak from every mouth,—the speech, a poem,

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:
I am mine and yours-the rest be all men's,
Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty.
Let me speak this once in my true person,
Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea,

135

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence:

Pray you, look on these my men and women,

140

Take and keep my fifty poems finished;

Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!
Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.

XV

Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self!

Here in London, yonder late in Florence,

145

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.

Curving on a sky imbrued with color,

Drifted over Fiesole by twilight,

Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth.

Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato,

150

Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder,
Perfect till the nightingales applauded.
Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished,
Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs,
Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver,
Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish.

155

XVI

What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy?
Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal,

Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy),

All her magic ('t is the old sweet mythos),

160

136. Karshish, etc. These and the names two lines below are characters in his

poems.

148. Fiesole. A town on a hill above Florence.

150. Samminiato. In Florence.

160. Mythos, of the mortal whom Diana loved.

She would turn a new side to her mortal,

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman-
Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,

Blind to Galileo on his turret,

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats-him, even !

165

Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal—

When she turns round, comes again in heaven,
Opens out anew for worse or better !
Proves she like some portent of an iceberg
Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals?
Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire

170

Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain?
Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu

Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,

175

Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire.

Like the bodied heaven in his clearness

Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work,
When they ate and drank and saw God also!

XVII

What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know.

180

Only this is sure—the sight were other,

Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence,

Dying now impoverished here in London.

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!

185

XVIII

This I say of me, but think of you, Love!
This to you-yourself my moon of poets!

163. Zoroaster. Founder of the ancient Persian religion.
164. Galileo (1564-1642). An Italian astronomer.
174. Aaron, Nadab, Abihu. See Exodus vi and xxviii.

Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you—
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.

But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel

190

195

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.

XIX

Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
Wrote one song-and in my brain I sing it,
Drew one angel-borne, see, on my bosom !

200

ALL that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue;

My Star.

Till my friends have said

They would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue !

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled :
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Incident of the French Camp.

You know, we French stormed Ratisbon:

A mile or so away

On a little mound, Napoleon

Stood on our storming-day;

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2. A certain star. The metaphor of this suggestive little poem is thus interpreted by Mrs. Orr, in her "Handbook to Browning's Works":"" My Star may be taken as a tribute to the personal element in love; the bright peculiar light in which the sympathetic soul reveals itself to the object of its sympathy."

1. Ratisbon. Or Regensburg, a town on the Danube, 65 miles north of Munich, not far from the river Isar. The "incident" here described was an actual occurrence.