never ceased to send its waters up to refresh the world.  These are romantic passions.  On the whole, Browning does not often touch them in their earthly activities.  His highest romance was beyond this world.  It claimed eternity, and death was the entrance into its enchanted realm.  When he did bring romantic feeling into human life, it was for the most part in the hunger and thirst, which, as in Abt Vogler, urged men beyond the visible into the invisible.  But now and again he touched the Romantic of Earth. Childe Roland, The Flight of the Duchess, and some others, are alive with the romantic spirit.

But before I write of these, there are a few lyrical poems, written in the freshness of his youth, which are steeped in the light of the story-telling world; and might be made by one who, in the morning of imagination, sat on the dewy hills of the childish world.  They are full of unusual melody, and are simple and wise enough to be sung by girls knitting in the sunshine while their lovers bend above them.  One of these, a beautiful thing, with that touch of dark fate at its close which is so common in folk-stories, is hidden away in Paracelsus.  “Over the sea,” it begins: 

      Over the sea our galleys went,
    With cleaving prows in order brave
    To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
      A gallant armament: 
    Each bark built out of a forest-tree
      Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
    And nailed all over the gaping sides,
    Within and without, with black bull-hides,
    Seethed in fat, and suppled with flame,
    To bear the playful billows’ game.

It is made in a happy melody, and the curious mingling in the tale, as it continues, of the rudest ships, as described above, with purple hangings, cedar tents, and noble statues,

    A hundred shapes of lucid stone,

and with gentle islanders from Graecian seas, is characteristic of certain folk-tales, especially those of Gascony.  That it is spoken by Paracelsus as a parable of the state of mind he has reached, in which he clings to his first fault with haughty and foolish resolution, scarcely lessens the romantic element in it.  That is so strong that we forget that it is meant as a parable.

There is another song which touches the edge of romance, in which Paracelsus describes how he will bury in sweetness the ideal aims he had in youth, building a pyre for them of all perfumed things; and the last lines of the verse I quote leave us in a castle of old romance—­

    And strew faint sweetness from some old
      Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud
    Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
      Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
    From closet long to quiet vowed,
    With mothed and dropping arras hung,
    Mouldering her lute and books among,
    As when a queen, long dead, was young.

The other is a song, more than a song, in Pippa Passes, a true piece of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to Eastern and mediaeval elements, in its roving imaginations.  It is admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and still air which, in men’s fancy, was breathed by the happy children of the Golden Age.  I quote a great part of it: