God is so good, he wears a fold
       Of heaven and earth across his face—­
     Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

     But still I feel that his embrace
       Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
     Through sight and sound of every place: 

     As if my tender mother laid
       On my shut lids her kisses’ pressure,
     Half-waking me at night; and said
       “Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?”

     CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON

     I think we are too ready with complaint
       In this fair world of God’s.  Had we no hope
       Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
     Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
     To muse upon eternity’s constraint
       Round our aspirant souls.  But since the scope
       Must widen early, is it well to droop
     For a few days consumed in loss and taint? 
     O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,—­
       And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
     Singing beside the hedge.  What if the bread
       Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
     To meet the flints?—­At least it may be said,
       “Because the way is short, I thank thee, God!”

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

BY E.L.  BURLINGAME

Robert Browning was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812, the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the Bank of England—­the one for more than forty and the other for full fifty years.  His surroundings were apparently typical of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theorizing of biographers, except indeed in a single point.  His grandmother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first generation to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family of the opposite type from her husband’s.  Whether this crossing of the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning’s, is the only question suggested by his ancestry.  It is noticeable that his father wished to go to a university, then to become an artist—–­ both ambitions repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official’s career unwillingly.  He seems to have been anything but a man of routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work; to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remarkable vivacity, with unbroken health—­altogether a personality thoroughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all traditional ideas of a poet’s youth.