Or fondle this the other while malice aches —
Both teach, both learn detestability!

Kiss him the kiss, Iscariot! Pay that back,
That smatch o' the slaver blistering on your lip —
By the better trick, the insult he spared Christ
Lure him the lure o' the letters, Aretine!
Lick him o'er slimy-smooth with jelly-filth
O' the verse-and-prose pollution in love's guise!
The cockatrice is with the basilisk!

There let him grapple, denizens o' the dark,
Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound,
In their one spot out of the ken of God

Or care of man for ever and ever more!"

Browning has distinctly indicated the standard by which he estimates art-work, in the closing paragraph of his Essay On the Poet objective and subjective; on the latter's aim; on Shelley as man and poet.'

"I would rather," he says, "consider Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral point of view, under the mere conditions of art. It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Shelley: there is the unrivalled 'Cenci'; there is the ‘Julian and Maddalo'too; there is the magnificent 'Ode to Naples': why not regard, it may be said, the less organized matter as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect even as those? But I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high,—and, seeing it, I hold by it. There is surely enough of the work 'Shelley' to be known enduringly among men, and, I believe, to be accepted of God, as human work may; and around the imperfect proportions of such, the most elaborated productions of ordinary art must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations."

In the most difficult form of verse, namely, blank verse, Browning has shown himself a great master, and has written some of the very best in the literature. And great as is the extent of his blank verse, the 'Ring and the Book' alone containing 21,116 verses, it never entirely lapses into prose.

One grand merit of blank verse is in the sweep of it; another, in its pause-melody, which can be secured only by a skilful recurrence of an unbroken measure; without this, variety of pause ceases to be variety, and results in a metrical chaos; a third is in its lightsomeness of movement, its go, when well-freighted with thought. All these merits are found united in much of Browning's blank verse, especially in that of 'The Ring and the Book.' As an example of this, take the following passage from the monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi. It gives expression to his vision of Count Guido's spiritual down-sliding; "in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour him, opens wide":

"And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
Aspiring to be immortality,

As the snake, hatched on hill-top by mischance,
Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders down
Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth
Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale:
So I lose Guido in the loneliness,

Silence, and dusk, till at the doleful end,

At the horizontal line, creation's verge,
From what just is to absolute nothingness —
Lo, what is this he meets, strains onward still?
What other man, deep further in the fate,
Who, turning at the prize of a foot-fall
To flatter him and promise fellowship,
Discovers in the act a frightful face

Judas, made monstrous by much solitude!

The two are at one now! Let them love their love
That bites and claws like hate, or hate their hate
That mops and mows and makes as it were love!
There, let them each tear each in devil's-fun,

the

etes

mits

itas.

Star.'

in ex

com

The italics are mine. I would say, but without admitting imperfect art on the part of Browning, for I regard him as one of the greatest of literary artists, that he must be estimated by the standard presented in this passage, by the "presentment," everywhere in his poetry, "of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal."

The same standard is presented in 'Andrea del Sarto,' in 'Old Pictures in Florence,' and in other of his poems.

V.

66

ARGUMENTS OF THE POEMS.1

WANTING IS- WHAT?

OVE, the soul of soul, within the soul," the Christ-spirit, the the Soul

spirit of the "Comer" (¿ ¿pxóuevos, Matt. xi. 3), completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead, and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; Ubi caritas, ibi claritas. See passage from 'Fifine at the Fair,' quoted under 'My Star.'

MY STAR.

The following passage from 'Fifine at the Fair,' § 55, is an expansion of the idea involved in 'My Star,' and is the best commentary which can be given on it :—

What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories

Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own

For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known

The gain of every life.

Death reads the title clear

What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:
Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert,-
And nought i' the world, which, save for soul that sees, inert
Was, is, and would be ever, - stuff for transmuting — null
And void until man's breath evoke the beautiful·

But, touched aright, prompt yields each particle, its tongue
Of elemental flame, no matter whence flame sprung

1 It has not been thought necessary, in these Arguments, to use quotation marks wherever expressions from the poems are incorporated; and especially where they are adapted in construction to the place where they are introduced.