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It appears inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him,
His parents had means; but Browning did not receive the ordinary education of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college, and his learning, though sufficiently various, was privately obtained. Pauline, his first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about two years earlier.
"You don't think," queried the first speaker, appealing personally to the president, "that Mr. Browning can really have meant that evil is blessed, do you?" The president regarded her with an affectionate and fatherly smile. "I think," he said, with an air of settling everything, "that the explanation of his meaning is to be found in the line which follows, "'It's use in Time is to environ us."
So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy.
Things have altogether changed since the sixties and seventies, when I published my most important work—at a time when the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. The old critical oracles are now dumb; the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not go back so far as the sixties.
I am sorry you were not at home, so that you might have seen what a change had come over Mrs. Browning." Dora looked inquiringly. "That is the name that Miriam has given to the mare." Dora laughed. "If Mrs. Browning is one of your sister's favorite poets," she said, "that will be a bond between us, for I like her poems better than I do her husband's, at least I understand them better.
Youth is confused; yet never So dull was I but, when that spirit passed, I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep." BROWNING: Paracelsus. This was the letter which Sir Hugo put into Deronda's hands: My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that I wish to see you.
Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket.
Undoubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoyment not only his admiration of Browning; a suspicion showing not only the persistence of the Sordello-born tradition of "obscurity," but the harm worked by those commentators who approach him as a problem.
We lack faith in man, confidence in simple humanity, apart from its environments. "The age shows, to my thinking, more infidels to Adam, Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God." Elizabeth B. Browning.
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