More happy love, more happy, happy love! For ever panting, and for ever young; Who are these coming to the sacrifice ? To what green altar, O mysterious priest. Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 1 Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 6 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 1 Embroidery. 430 435 440 445 450 XIII THE HUMAN SEASONS Four Seasons fill the measure of the year; He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves Is nearest unto heaven : quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings 455 460 He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, 465 ROBERT BROWNING I. LIFE ROBERT BROWNING, born in Camberwell on May 7, 1812, belonged-like most of the great English poets to what their countrymen call the middle class. His father was a clerk in the Bank of England, his mother the daughter of William Wiedemann, a German ship-owner who had settled and married at Dundee. Their house, in the London suburb of Camberwell, was a quiet place, as their life was serene and happy. The poet's father, a man of intelligence and refinement, not only possessed such accomplishments as drawing and painting in water-colours, but was a student, a sensible critic, and a lover of books, pictures, and poetry. At dusk, in his library, he used to walk up and down with the little boy in his arms, singing him to sleep with fragments of Anacreon, the Greek words set to old English tunes. He loved his son greatly. "My dear father," wrote Browning afterwards, "put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements. . . . He secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to realize his expectations of me." Of his mother the poet said "She was a divine woman." To his latest day he could hardly speak of her without tears in his eyes. His boyhood was quiet and happy. He was an energetic boy, fond not only of books, pictures, and 'music, but of living things, which he collected in a small menagerie, speckled frogs, monkeys, owls, hedgehogs. As for books, "the first . . . I ever bought in my life," he tells us, was Ossian; and "the first composition I was ever guilty of, was something in imitation of Ossian." He wrote early and constantly. "I never can recollect not writing rhymes; . . . but I knew they were nonsense even then." Byron's poetry and fame soon captivated him, and inspired a feeling which he said he "always retained . . . in many respects. . . . I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of [Byron's] hair or one of his gloves . . . while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder." Browning's earliest poems the unpublished Incondita, written at the age of twelve were a boy's vision of Byronic romance. Of his days in Mr. Ready's school at Peckham, where he remained till he was fourteen, there is little to say. He was not a schoolboy hero, like Keats. A few facts stand out in this uneventful period. One memorable night, among the elms above Norwood, he saw for the first time the lights of London, and was marvel |