Life of Robert Browning eBook

William Sharp
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 287 pages of information about Life of Robert Browning.

Life of Robert Browning eBook

William Sharp
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 287 pages of information about Life of Robert Browning.

“So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time,—­see my own five saints!”

or these—­

                      “Thus, all my life,

I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades. 
—­Even to my babe!  I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine——­”

once more—­

                     “One cannot judge

Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying.... 
Now it is over, and no danger more ... 
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past——­”

Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first “thrill of dawn’s suffusion through her dark,” the “light of the unborn face sent long before:”  or those unique lines of the starved soul’s Spring (ll. 1512-27):  or those, of the birth of her little one—­

     “A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine
      A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. 
      All women are not mothers of a boy.... 
      I never realised God’s birth before—­
      How he grew likest God in being born. 
      This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
      Lying a little on my breast like hers.”

When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words—­

     “God stooping shows sufficient of His light
      For us i’ the dark to rise by.  And I rise——­”

who does not realise that to life’s end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?

But the two succeeding “books” are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections—­the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of “Caponsacchi” and “Pompilia.”  In the next “book” Innocent XII. is revealed.  All this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind.  It must be read from first to last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse:—­

     “For the main criminal I have no hope
      Except in such a suddenness of fate. 
      I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
      I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
      Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: 
      But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—­
      Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
      Through her whole length of mountain visible: 
      There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
      And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
      So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
      And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Life of Robert Browning from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.