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Updated: June 6, 2025
What battle-piece is so pathetic as Browning's "Grammarian's Funeral"? Do not waste your gymnastics on the West Point or Annapolis student, whose whole life will be one of active exercise, but bring them into the professional schools and the counting-rooms.
It was determined that we would try our subject with poetry, and also that we would try him with "something big." For a long time we discussed what this something "big" was to be. Choice nearly fell on "A Grammarian's Funeral," but I am glad this was not adopted; for, though it represented very well our own views of Snarley Bob, I doubt if it would have appealed directly to the subject himself.
I know, Mr. Speaker, that the first clause of this paragraph has been read, with all the superciliousness of a grammarian's triumph "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union," accompanied with this most consequential inquiry: "Is not this a new State to be admitted? And is there not here an express authority?"
The pair were lionized, and on all sides presents were made to them. They were presented to King George IV., who gave Hongi a suit of armour. On his return this grammarian's assistant heard at Sydney that his tribe was at war with the natives of the Hauraki or Thames district, and that one of his relatives had been killed. Now was his time.
It was with a keen sense of that humor which comes, as Sydney Smith says, from sudden and unexpected contrast, that I read a heavily bordered sheet entitled in large letters, "A Grammarian's Funeral."
For the consideration and investigation of Browning Societies, I give a few lines from this New England conception of a Grammarian's Funeral. "Eight parts of Speech This Day wear Mourning Gowns, Declin'd Verbs, Pronouns, Participles, and Nouns.
So would a mother's talk to a child be absurd in print; so would a lover's to his bride. That sweet, artless poetry bears no translation; and is too subtle for grammarian's clumsy definitions.
"But isn't it possible," said Vincent, "for a man to get the best out of life for himself by a sort of passion for exact knowledge like the man in the Grammarian's funeral, I mean?" "Personally," said Father Payne, "I always think that Browning did a lot of harm by that poem. He was glorifying a real vice, I think.
The same doctrine which is applied to art in Old Pictures in Florence, that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the pursuit of knowledge in A Grammarian's Funeral. The time is "shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe"; the place a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture!
And musing on the scholar and his kindred, a favourite line of Browning's came into my mind "This man decided not to live but to know." Indeed the whole of "A Grammarian's Funeral" were here appropriate. Is it not men after this type of whom we feel "Our low life was the level's and the night's. He's for the morning"? To my surprise I found the church of St. Aspais locked.
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