Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
'My father, my dear father, these bursts of grief do not become your fame for wisdom. We must inquire, we must hold counsel. Let me see the Intendant of this English youth, and hear more than I have yet learnt. I cannot think that affairs are so hopeless as you paint them: I will believe that there is a spring near. Parleyings
As he showed no unwillingness to continue the discussion, Metellus occupied the remainder of his own tenure of the command in further parleyings. Envoys came and went, and the war was practically suspended. A delicate and promising negotiation was on foot; it remained to be seen whether it would be patiently continued or rudely interrupted by the new governor of Numidia.
Attendances at Court, conferences with learned monks and bishops, sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sun-smitten Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be fulfilled in the solitude of sea watches.
Milsand, we are told by his friend Th. "Only a Frenchman," exclaimed Browning, grasping both hands of his visitor, "would have done this." So began a friendship of an intimate and most helpful kind, which closed only with Milsand's death in 1886. To his memory is dedicated the volume published soon after his death, Parleyings with certain People of Importance.
There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of "The Fable of the Bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville.
Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he himself regarded as representative Paracelsus. The poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years afterwards he wrote Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote Paracelsus and Sordello. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the
But his nomination by the President, and the manner in which it was ratified by the Council and general body, gave him sincere pleasure. Early in 1887, the 'Parleyings' appeared. Their author is still the same Robert Browning, though here and there visibly touched by the hand of time.
The destruction of the Turkish squadron at Sinope under the shadow of our fleet touched the pride of England to the quick. The nation lost all patience as the contemptuous cartoons of 'Punch' show with the endless parleyings of Aberdeen, and a loud and passionate cry for war filled the country.
He was awake now, but, confused and startled, inclined to believe that he was on his trial; and that the faint parleyings with treason, small things hard to define, to which he had stooped, were known. Mechanically, to gain time, he repeated the name: "Basterga?" "Yes," Fabri repeated. "Do you know him?" "Cæsar Basterga, is it?" "That is his name."
'Tis an open secret that your patron has gone over to Navarre." "I know naught of it." "Well, pardieu! my Lord Mayenne does, then. If when he came to Paris M. de St. Quentin counted that the League would not know his parleyings, he was a fool." "His parleyings?" I echoed feebly. "Aye, the boy in the street knows he has been with Navarre.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking