Читать книгу: «Robert Browning», страница 12

Another anxiety gave Browning an opportunity which he turned to account in a way that renders honour and gratitude his due from all lovers of English letters. At a great old age Landor, who resided with his family at Fiesole, still retained his violent and intractable temper; in his home there was much to excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong. Three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back. When for a fourth time—like a feeble yet majestic Lear—one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to Casa Guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.⁷³ Browning had often said, as his wife tells her sister-in-law, that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any other contemporary.⁷⁴ He resolved to set things right, if possible; and if not, to make the best of a case that could not be entirely amended. A visit to the villa assured him that reconciliation was out of the question. He provided for Landor's immediate wants; communicated with Landor's brothers in England, who were prompt in arranging for a regular allowance to be administered by Browning; became the old man's guide and guardian; soothed his wounded spirit, although, according to Mrs Browning, not often happy when he attempted compliments, with generous words and ready quotations from Landor's own writings; and finally settled him in Florence under the care of Mrs Browning's faithful maid Wilson, who watched over him during the remainder of his life.⁷⁵ To his incredulous wife Browning spoke of Landor's sweetness and gentleness, nor was he wrong in ascribing these qualities to the old lion. She admitted that he had generous impulses, but feared that her husband would before long become, like other friends of Landor, the object of some enraged suspicion. "Nothing coheres in him," she writes, "either in his opinions, or, I fear, affections." But Landor, whose courtesy and refinement she acknowledges, had also a heart that was capable of loyal love and gratitude. After the first burst of rage against the Fiesole household had spent itself, he beguiled the time in perpetuating his indignations in an innocent and classical form—that of Latin alcaics directed against one private and one public foe—his wife and the Emperor Louis Napoleon.⁷⁶

Lander's affairs threatened to detain the Brownings in Florence longer than they desired, now that peace had come and it was not indispensable to run out of doors twice a day in order to inspect the bulletins. But after three weeks of very exhausting illness, Mrs Browning needed change of air. As soon as her strength allowed, she was lifted into a carriage and they journeyed, as in the year 1850, to the neighbourhood of Siena. She reached the villa which had been engaged by Story's aid, with the sense of "a peculiar frailty of being." Though confined to the house, the fresher air by day and the night winds gradually revived her strength and spirits. The silence and repose were "heavenly things" to her: the "pretty dimpled ground covered by low vineyards" rested her eyes and her mind; and for excitements, instead of reports of battle-fields there were slow-fading scarlet sunsets over purple hills. A kind Prussian physician, Gresonowsky, who had attended Mrs Browning in Florence, and who entered sympathetically into her political feelings, followed her uninvited to Siena and gave her the benefit of his care, declining all recompense. The good friends from America, the Storys, were not far off, and Landor, after a visit to Story, was placed in occupation of rooms not a stone's-cast from their villa. With Pen it was a time of rejoicing, for his father had bought the boy a Sardinian pony of the colour of his curls, and he was to be seen galloping through the lanes "like Puck," to use Browning's comparison, on a dragon-fly's back.⁷⁷

The gipsy instinct, the desire of wandering, had greatly declined with both husband and wife since the earlier days in Italy. Yet when they returned to Casa Guidi it was only for six weeks. Even at the close of the visit to Siena Mrs Browning had recovered but a slender modicum of strength; she did not dare to enter the cathedral, for there were steps to climb. At Florence she felt her old vitality return and her spirits rose. But the climate of Rome was considered by Dr Gresonowsky more suitable for winter, and towards the close of November they took their departure, flying from the Florentine tramontana. The carriage was furnished with novels of Balzac, and Pen's pony was of the party. The rooms taken in the Via del Tritone were bright and sunny; but a rash visit to the jeweller Castellani, to see and touch the swords presented by Roman citizens to Napoleon III. and Victor Emmanuel, threw back Mrs Browning into all her former troubles of a delicate chest and left her "as weak as a rag." Tidings of the death of Lady Elgin seemed to tell only of a peaceful release from a period of imprisonment in the body, but the loss of Mrs Jameson was a painful blow. Rome at a time of grave political apprehensions was almost empty of foreigners; but among the few Americans who had courage to stay were the sculptor Gibson and Theodore Parker—now near the close of his life—whose tête-à-têtes were eloquent of beliefs and disbeliefs. As the spring advanced the authoress of "The Mill on the Floss" was reported to be now and again visible in Rome, "with her elective affinity," as Mrs Browning puts it, "on the Corso walking, or in the Vatican musing. Always together." A grand-daughter of Lord Byron—"very quiet and very intense"—was among the visitors at the Via del Tritone, and Lady Marion Alford, "very eager about literature and art and Robert," for all which eagernesses Mrs Browning felt bound to care for her. The artists Burne-Jones and Prinsep had made Browning's acquaintance at Siena; Prinsep now introduced him to some of the by-ways of popular life in Rome. Together they witnessed the rivalry of two improvisatori poetic gamecocks, whose efforts were stimulated by the announcement that a great poet from England was present; together they listened to the forbidden Hymn to Garibaldi played in Gigi's osteria, witnessed the dignified blindness of the Papal gendarmes to the offence, while Gigi liberally plied them with drink; and together, to relieve the host of all fear of more revolutionary airs, they took carriages with their musicians and drove to see the Coliseum by moonlight.⁷⁸

The project of a joint volume of poems on the Italian question by Browning and his wife, which had made considerable progress towards realisation, had been dropped after Villafranca, when Browning destroyed his poem; but Mrs Browning had advanced alone and was now revising proofs of her slender contribution to the poetry of politics, Poems before Congress. She wrote them, she says, simply to deliver her soul—"to get the relief to my conscience and heart, which comes from a pent-up word spoken or a tear shed." She can hardly have anticipated that they would be popular in England; but she was not prepared for one poem which denounced American slavery being misinterpreted into a curse pronounced upon England. "Robert was furious" against the offending Review, she says; "I never saw him so enraged about a criticism;" but by-and-by he "didn't care a straw." His wife, on the other hand, was more deeply pained by the blindness and deafness of the British public towards her husband's genius; nobody "except a small knot of pre-Rafaelite men" did him justice; his publisher's returns were a proof of this not to be gainsaid—not one copy of his poems had for six months been sold, while in America he was already a power. For the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation. When Savoy was surrendered to France Mrs Browning suffered some pain lest her Emperor's generosity might seem compromised. Browning admitted that the liberation of Italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, "But he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity." During the winter he wrote much. "Robert deserves no reproaches," his wife tells her friend Miss Haworth in May, "for he has been writing a good deal this winter—working at a long poem, which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, and may declare worthy of him." Mr F.G. Kenyon conjectures that the long poem is not unlikely to have been Mr Sludge the Medium, for Home's performances, as he says, were at this time rampant.⁷⁹ As hitherto, both husband and wife showed their poems each to the other only when the poems were complete; thus like a pair of hardy friends they maintained their independence. Even when they read, there was no reading aloud; Mrs Browning was indefatigable in her passion for books; her husband, with muscular energy impatient for action, found it impossible to read for long at a single sitting.

On June 4th 1860 they left Rome, travelling by vettura through Orvieto and Chiusi to their home in Florence.⁸⁰ The journey fatigued Mrs Browning, but on arriving they had the happiness of finding Landor well; he looked not less than magnificent, displaying "the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard … all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty." Wilson had the old man under happy control; only once had he thrown his dinner out of the window; that he should be at odds with all the world was inevitable, and that all the world should be in the wrong was exhilarating and restorative. The plans for the summer were identical with those of the preceding year; the same "great lonely villa" near Siena was occupied again; the same "deep soothing silence" lapped to rest Mrs Browning's spirits; Landor, her "adopted son"—a son of eighty-six years old—was hard by as he had been last summer. The neighbourhood of Miss Blagden was this year an added pleasure. "The little eager lady," as Henry James describes her, "with gentle, gay black eyes," had seen much, read much, written already a little (with more to follow), but better than all else were her generous heart and her helpful hand. The season was one of unusual coolness for Italy. Pen's pony, as before, flashed through the lanes and along the roads. Browning had returned from Rome in robust health, and looking stouter in person than six months previously. Now, while a tenant of the Villa Alberti, he spent his energies in long rides, sometimes rides of three or four continuous hours. On returning from such careers on horseback little inclination, although he had his solitary room in which to work, remained for the pursuit of poetry.

The departure for Rome was early—about September; in the Via Felice rooms were found. A new and great sorrow had fallen upon Mrs Browning—her sister Henrietta, Mrs Surtees Cook, was dead, leaving behind her three young children. Mrs Browning could not shed tears nor speak of her grief: she felt tired and beaten by the pain; and tried to persuade herself that for one who believed the invisible world to be so near, such pain was but a weakness. Her husband was able to do little, but he shared in his degree in the sense of loss, and protected her from the intrusion of untimely visitors. Sir John Bowring was admitted because he presented a letter of introduction and had intimate relations with the French Emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in England, with its cry of "Riflemen, form!" was grateful to Mrs Browning's political feelings. French troops were now in Rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but Pen had fraternised with the officers on the Pincio, had learnedly discussed Chopin and Stephen Heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the Holy Father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma—an invitation which they were too discreet to accept. Mrs Browning's excitement about public affairs had somewhat abated; yet she watched with deep interest the earlier stages of the great struggle in America; and she did not falter in her hopes for Italy; by intrigues and smuggling the newspapers which she wished to see were obtained through the courteous French generals. But her spirits were languid; "I gather myself up by fits and starts," she confesses, "and then fall back."

Apart from his anxieties for his wife's health and the unfailing pleasure in his boy, whom a French or Italian abbé now instructed, Browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest. He had long been an accomplished musician; in Paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor Story. His previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment. He ceased even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says Mrs Browning smilingly, "poor lost soul." The union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved. His wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation. Of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible. And some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience—"beating his dear head," as Mrs Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant—"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years—Browning was now nearly forty-nine—the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time. "The women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in Story's studio, where the songs of the birds, and the bleat of a goat coming through the little door to the left, were heard.⁸¹

While hoping and planning for the future, his wife was not unaware of her own decline. "For the first time," she writes about December, "I have had pain in looking into Penini's face lately—which you will understand." And a little earlier: "I wish to live just as long as, and no longer than to grow in the soul." The winter was mild, though snow had fallen once; a spell of colder weather was reserved for the month of May. They thought of meeting Browning's father and sister in some picturesque part of the forest of Fontainebleau, or, if that should prove unsuitable, perhaps at Trouville. Mrs Browning, who had formerly enjoyed the stir of life in Paris, now shrank from its noise and bustle. Her wish would be to creep into a cave for the whole year. At eight o'clock each evening she left her sitting-room and sofa, and was in bed. Yet she trusted that when she could venture again into the open air she would be more capable of enduring the friction of the world. In May she felt stronger, and saw visitors, among whom was Hans Andersen, "very earnest, very simple, very childlike."⁸² A little later she was cast down by the death of Cavour—"that great soul which meditated and made Italy"; she could hardly trust herself to utter his name. It was evident to Browning that the journey to France could not be undertaken without serious risk. They had reached Casa Guidi, and there for the present she must take her rest.

The end came swiftly, gently. A bronchial attack, attended with no more than the usual discomfort, found her with diminished power of resistance. Browning had forebodings of evil, though there seemed to be no special cause to warrant his apprehension. On the last evening—June 28, 1861—she herself had no anticipation of what was at hand, and talked of their summer plans. When she slept, her slumber was heavy and disturbed. At four in the morning her husband was alarmed and sent to summon the doctor; but she assured him that his fears were exaggerated. Then inestimable words were spoken which lived forever in his heart. And so "smilingly, happily, with a face like a girl's," resting her head upon her husband's cheek, she passed away.⁸³

Chapter XI
London: Dramatis Personae

The grief of the desolate man was an uncontrollable passion; his heart was strong and all its strength entered into its sorrow. Miss Blagden, "perfect in all kindness," took motherly possession of the boy, and persuaded his father to accompany Penini to her villa at Bellosguardo. When all that was needful at Casa Guidi had been done, Browning's first thought was to abandon Italy for many a year, and hasten to London, there to have speech for a day or two at least with Mrs Browning's sister Arabel. "The cycle is complete," he said, looking round the sitting-room of Casa Guidi. "I want my new life," he wrote, "to resemble the last fifteen years as little as possible." Yet while he stayed in the accustomed rooms he held himself together; "when I was moved," he says, "I began to go to pieces."⁸⁴ Yet something remained to sustain him.

To one who has habitually given as well as received much not the least of the pangs of separation arises from the incapacity to render any further direct service. It fortified Browning's heart to know that much could be done, and in ways which his wife would have approved and desired, for her child. And as he himself had been also her care, it was his business now to see that his life fulfilled itself aright. Yet he breaks out in July: "No more 'house-keeping' for me, even with my family. I shall grow still, I hope—but my root is taken, and remains." From the outward paraphernalia of death Browning, as Mrs Orr notices, shrank with aversion; it was partly the instinct by which a man seeks to preserve what is most sacred and most strong in his own feelings from the poor materialisms and the poor sentimentalisms of the grave; partly a belief that any advance of the heart towards what has been lost may be rather hindered than helped by the external circumstance surrounding the forsaken body. Browning took measures that his wife's grave should be duly cared for, given more than common distinction; but Florence became a place from which even for his own sake and the sake of her whose spirit lived within him he must henceforth keep aloof.

The first immediate claim upon Browning was that of duty to his father. On August 1st he left Florence for Paris, accompanied by Isa Blagden, who still watched over him and the boy. Two months were spent with his sister and the old man, still hale and strong of heart, at a place "singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's content"—so Browning describes it—St Enogat, near St Malo. The solitary sea, the sands, the rocks, the green country gave him at least a breathing-space. Then he proceeded to London, not without an outbreak of his characteristic energy in over-coming the difficulties—which involved two hours of "weary battling"—of securing a horse-box for Pen's pony. At Amiens Tennyson, with his wife and children, was on the platform. Browning pulled his hat over his face and was unrecognised.⁸⁵ In "grim London," as he had called it, though with a quick remorse at recollection of the kindness awaiting him, he had the comfort of daily intercourse with Miss Arabel Barrett.

It was decided that an English education, but not that of a public school, would be best for the boy; the critical time for taking "the English stamp" must not be lost; his father's instruction, aided by that of a tutor, would suffice to prepare him for the University, and he would have the advantage of the motherly care of his mother's favourite sister. Browning distrusted, he says to Story, "ambiguous natures and nationalities." Thus he bound himself to England and to London, while at times he sighed for the beauty of Italian hills and skies. He shrank from society, although before long old friends, and especially Procter, infirm and deaf, were not neglected. He found, or made, business for himself; had "never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it." The discomfort of London lodgings was before long exchanged for the more congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in Warwick Crescent, which he occupied until 1887, two years before his death. The furniture and tapestries of Casa Guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose. "It was London," writes Mrs Ritchie, referring to her visits of a later date, "but London touched by some indefinite romance; the canal used to look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the Crescent.... The house was an ordinary London house, but the carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs. In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and fluttering." In 1866 an owl—for Browning still indulged a fantasy of his own in the choice of pets—was "the light of our house," as a letter describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways." The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one said "Poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a sympathetic air of depression.⁸⁶ Miss Barrett lived hard by, in Delamere Terrace. With her on Sundays Browning listened at Bedford Chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, Thomas Jones, to some of which when published in 1884, he prefixed an introduction. "The Welsh poet-preacher" was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural gift of eloquence, which, with his "liberal humanity," drew Browning to become a hearer of his discourses.

He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. Mrs Browning had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion. An invitation to accept the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation declined. He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. In 1862 he issued with a dedication "to grateful Florence" her Last Poems; in 1863, her Greek Christian Poets; in 1865 he prepared a volume of Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. The efforts of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the "paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" God knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath. Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were characteristic of Browning, and were sometimes followed by regret for his own distemperature. In 1862 a gratifying task was laid on him—that of superintending the three volume edition of his Poetical Works which was published in the following year. At the same time his old friend Forster, with help from Procter, was engaged in preparing the first—and the best—of the several Selections from Browning's poems; it was at once an indication of the growing interest in his writings and an effective means towards extending their influence. He set himself steadily to work out what was in him; he waited no longer upon his casual moods, but girded his loins and kept his lamp constantly lit. His genius, such as it was—this was the field given him to till, and he must see that it bore fruit. "I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I die"—so he wrote in 1865. There were gains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses. A man of so active a mind by planting himself before a subject could always find something to say; but it might happen that such sheer brain-work was carried on by plying other faculties than those which give its highest value to poetry.⁸⁷

In the late summer and early autumn of 1862 Browning, in company with his son, was among the Pyrenees at "green pleasant little Cambo, and then at Biarritz crammed," he says, "with gay people of whom I know nothing but their outsides." The sea and sands were more to his liking than the gay people.⁸⁸ He had with him one book and no other—a Euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness. At present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the Roman murder story"—the story of Pompilia and Guido and Caponsacchi—he describes as being pretty well in his head. It needed a long process of evolution before the murder story could uncoil its sinuous lengths in a series of volumes. The visit to Ste-Marie "a wild little place in Brittany" near Pornic, in the summer of 1863—a visit to be repeated in the two summers immediately succeeding—is directly connected with two of the poems of Dramatis Personae. The story of Gold Hair and the landscape details of James Lee's Wife are alike derived from Pornic. The solitude of the little Breton hamlet soothed Browning's spirit. The "good, stupid and dirty" people of the village were seldom visible except on Sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the coast; fruit and milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and these were Browning's diet. "I feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as I sit here at the window.... Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!" But the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought back the old Siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. The mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs Miss Blagden (Aug. 18, 1863) that having yesterday written a poem of 120 lines, he means to keep writing whether he likes it or not.⁸⁹

"With the spring of 1863," writes Mr Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him. He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him." "Accordingly," goes on Mr Gosse, "he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process." Mrs Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was "a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after the death of his lady,

 
Trembled on the verge
Of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge
He tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse,
But took again, for better or for worse,
The old way of the world, and, much the same
Man o' the outside, fairly played life's game.
 

Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. And as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the victor:

 
Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court,
And yet esteem the silken company
So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown,
For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve.
Strength amid crowds as late in solitude
May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.⁹⁰
 

One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive London seasons. And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception room. But the truth is, as Mrs Browning had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. If he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his mind. The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.

In 1864 Dramatis Personae was published. It might be described as virtually a third volume of Men and Women. And yet a certain change of tone is discernible. Italy is no longer the background of the human figures. There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold "joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul. In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of A Death in the Desert, which had hardly been reached before. Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in Maud, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of Men and Women, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of Dramatis Personae. A slight metrical complication—the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of Dîs aliter visum and in the third line of the quatrains of May and Death—may be noted as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments. In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, "a mass of brass," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.