Front matter (continued 5)

Notes.—Stanza iv., “In all Gods acts (as Plato cries He doth) He should geometrise”: see Plutarch, Symposiacs, viii. 2. “Diogenianas began and said, ‘Let us admit Plato to the conference, and inquire upon what account he says—supposing it to be his sentence—that God always plays the geometer.’ I said: ‘This sentence was not plainly set down in any of his books; yet there are good arguments that it is his, and it is very much like his expression.’ Tyndares presently subjoined: ‘He praises geometry as a science that takes off men from sensible objects, and makes them apply themselves to the intelligible and Eternal Nature, the contemplation of which is the end of philosophy, as a view of the mysteries of initiation into holy rites.’” vi., “My list of coleoptera”: in entomology, an order of insects having four wings—the beetle tribe. “A Grignon with the Regent’s crest”: Grignon was a famous snuff-box maker, and his name was used for the fashionable boxes. vii., “Jonah’s whale”: The latest theory is that the great deity of Nineveh was a “fish-god.” Mr. Tylor considers the story to be a solar myth. Madame Blavatsky says (Isis Unveiled, vol. ii., p. 258), “‘Big Fish’ is Cetus, the latinised form of Keto—κητω, and Keto is Dagon, Poseidon.” She suggests that Jonah simply went into the cell within the body of Dagon, the fish-god. Orpheus, the mythical poet, whose mother was the Muse Calliope. His song could move the rocks and tame wild beasts (see Eurydice to Orpheus). Dionysius Zagrias. Zagreus was a name given to Dionysus by the Orphic poets. The conception of the Winter-Dionysus originated in Crete: sacrifice was offered to him at Delphi on the shortest day. This is quite evidently one of the myths of winter. xii., Æschylus: “the giving men blind hopes.” In the Prometheus Chained of Æschylus the chorus of ocean nymphs ask Prometheus—

xiv., “The kingcraft of the Lucomons”: Heads of ancient Etruscan families, and combining both priest and patriarch. The kings were drawn from them. (Dr. Furnivall.) Fourier’s scheme: Fourierism was the system of Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, who recommended the reorganisation of society into small communities living in common. xx., “Flesh refine to nerve”: this is a remarkable instance of the poet’s scientific apprehension of the process of nerve formation five years before Herbert Spencer speculated on the evolution of the nervous system. (See my Browning’s Message to his Time: “Browning as a Scientific Poet.”) xxvi., Buonarrotti == Michael Angelo.

Eccelino da Romano III. (Sordello.) Known as Eccelin the Monk, or Ezzelin III. He was the Emperor Frederick’s chief in North Italy, and was a powerful noble. He was termed “the Monk” because of his religious austerity. He is described by Mr. Browning in the poem as “the thin, grey, wizened, dwarfish devil Ecelin.” He was the most prominent of Ghibelline leaders, was tyrant of Padua, and nicknamed “the Son of the Devil.” Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, iii. 33, describes him as

“His story,” says Longfellow, in his notes to Dante’s Inferno, “may be found in Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, chap. xix. He so outraged the religious sense of the people by his cruelties that a crusade was preached against him, and he died a prisoner in 1259, tearing the bandages from his wounds, and fierce and defiant to the last. ‘Ezzelino was small of stature,’ says Sismondi, ‘but the whole aspect of his person, all his movements, indicated the soldier. His language was bitter, his countenance proud, and by a single look he made the boldest tremble. His soul, so greedy of all crimes, felt no attraction for sensual pleasures. Never had Ezzelino loved women; and this, perhaps, is the reason why in his punishments he was as pitiless against them as men. He was in his sixty-sixth year when he died; and his reign of blood had lasted thirty-four years.’”

Eccelino IV. was the elder of the two sons of Eccelino III., surnamed the Monk, who divided his little principality between them in 1223, and died in 1235. In 1226, at the head of the Ghibellines, he got possession of Verona, and was appointed Podesta. He became one of the most faithful servants of the Emperor Frederick II. In 1236 he invited Frederick to enter Italy to his assistance, and in August met him at Trent. Eccelino was soon after besieged in Verona by the Guelfs, and the siege was raised by the Emperor. Vicenza was next stormed and the government given to Eccelino. In 1237 he marched against Padua, which capitulated, when he behaved towards the people with great cruelty. He then besieged Mantua, and mastered the Trevisa. In 1239 he was excommunicated by the Pope and deprived of his estates. He behaved with such terrible cruelty that the Emperor would have gladly been rid of him. Dante, in the Divina Commedia, Inferno xii., places Eccelino in the lake of blood in the seventh circle of hell.

Echetlos. (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series: 1880.) A Greek legend (of which there are many) about the battle of Marathon, in which the Athenians and Platæans, under Miltiades, defeated the Persians, 490 B.C. Wherever the Greeks were hardest pressed in the fight a figure driving a ploughshare was seen mowing down the enemy’s ranks. After the battle was over the Greeks were anxious to learn who was the man in the clown’s dress who had done them this great service. They demanded of the oracles his name. But the oracles declined to tell: “Call him Echetlos, the Ploughshare-wielder,” they said. “Let his deed be his name:

Notes.—“Not so the great name—Woe for Miltiades, woe for Themistokles!” After the victory of Marathon, Miltiades sullied his honour by employing the fleet in an attempt to wreak a private grudge on the island of Paros. He was sentenced to a heavy fine, which he was unable to pay, and died in debt and dishonour. Themistocles was accused of having entered into a traitorous communication with the Persians in his own interest. He was banished from Greece, and died at Magnesia.

Elcorte (Sordello, Book ii.) was a poor archer who perished in saving a child of Eccelin’s. He was supposed to be Sordello’s father, but the poet discovered that he was not.

Eglamour. (Sordello.) The minstrel defeated by Sordello at the contest of song in the Court of Love. He was the chief troubadour of Count Richard of St. Bonifacio. He died of grief at his discomfiture in the art of song by Sordello. “He was a typical troubadour, who loved art for its own sake; thought more of his songs than of the things about which he sang, or of the soul whose passion song should express” (Fotheringham, Studies in Browning, p. 116). Mrs. James L. Bagg, in a comparative study of Eglamour and Sordello, gives the following as the chief characteristics of this poet:—“He was a poet not without effort and often faltering; he exhibits the beautiful as the natural outburst of a heart full of a sense of beauty that possesses it. He loses himself in his song,—it absorbs his life; his art ends with his art, and is its own reward. He understands and loves nature; they are bound up together. He loves all beauty for its own sake, asking no reward. He craves nothing, takes no thought for the morrow. He lacks character, and is dreamy, inactive; and attempting little, fails in little. His life is barren of results as men reckon; he lives and loves, and sings and dies. His life is almost one unbroken strain of harmony—he is pleased to please and to serve. His nature is simple and easily understood; Eglamour is born and dies a creature of perceptions, never conscious that beyond these there lies a world of thought. His life goes out in tragic giving up of love, hope and heart.”

Elvire. (Fifine at the Fair.) The wife of Don Juan, who discusses with her husband the nature of conjugal love, after he has been fascinated by the gipsy girl at Pornic fair. She is the Donna Elvira of Molière’s Don Juan, and the part she plays in this poem of Fifine is suggested by her speech in Act i., Scene 3:—

Englishman in Italy, The: Piano di Sorrento (the Plain of Sorrento). (Dramatic Romances, published in Bells and Pomegranates, VII. 1845.)—Sorrento, in the province of Naples, is situated on the north side of the peninsula that separates the Bay of Naples from the Bay of Salerno. In the time of Augustus it was a finer city than Naples itself. The neighbourhood of this delightful summer resort is the realm of the olive tree, and its plain is clothed with orange and lemon groves. A deep blue sky above and a deep blue sea below, coast scenery unequalled for loveliness even in Italy, and an atmosphere breathing perfume and intoxicating the senses with the soft delights of a land of romance and gaiety, combine to make a residence in this earthly paradise almost too luxurious for a phlegmatic Englishman. It has a drawback in the form of the Scirocco—a hot, oppressive and most relaxing wind, crossing from North Africa over the Mediterranean, and the “long, hot, dry autumn” referred to in the poem. The Englishman is seated by the side of a dark-complexioned tarantella-dancing girl, whom he is sheltering from the approaching storm, and who is timidly saying her rosary, and to whom he is describing the incidents of Italian life which have most interested him—the ripening grapes, the quails and the curious nets arranged to catch them, the pomegranates splitting with ripeness on the trees, the yellow rock-flower on the road side, all the landscape parched with the fierce Southern heat, which the sudden rain-storm was about to cool and moisten. The quail nets are rapidly taken down, for protection; on the flat roofs, where the split figs lie in sieves drying in the sun, the girls are busy putting them under cover; the blue sea has changed to black with the coming storm; the fishing boat from Amalfi—loveliest spot in all the lovely landscape—sends ashore its harvest of the sea, to the delight of the naked brown children awaiting it. The grape harvest has begun, and in the great vats they are treading the grapes, dancing madly to keep the bunches under, while the rich juice runs from beneath; and still the laden girls pour basket after basket of fresh vine plunder into the vat, and still the red stream flows on. And under the hedges of aloe, where the tomatoes lie, the children are picking up the snails tempted out by the rain, which will be cooked and eaten for supper, when the grape gleaners will feast on great ropes of macaroni and slices of purple gourds. And as he dwells on all the Southern wealth of the land, he tempts the timid little maid with grape bunches, whose heavy blue bloom entices the wasps, which follow the spoil to the very lips of the eater; with cheese-balls, white wine, and the red flesh of the prickly pear. Now the Scirocco is loose—down come the olives like hail; fig trees snap under the power of the storm; they must keep under shelter till the tempest is over: and now he amuses the girl by telling her how in a few days they will have stripped all the vines of their leaves to feed the cattle, and the vineyards will look so bare. He rode over the mountains the previous night with her brother the guide, who feasted on the fruit-balls of the myrtles and sorbs, and while he ate the mule plodded on, now and then neighing as he recognised his mates, laden with faggots and with barrels, on the paths below. Higher they ascended till the woods ceased; as they mounted the path grew wilder, the chasms and piles of loose stones showed but the growth of grey fume reed, the ever-dying rosemary, and the lentisks, till they reached the summit of Calvano; then he says—

The crystal of heaven and its blue solitudes; the “infinite movement” of the mountains, which seem, as they overlook the sensual landscape, to enslave it—filled him with a grave and solemn fear. And now he turns to the sea, wherein slumber the three isles of the siren, looking as they did in the days of Ulysses; he will sail among them, and visit with his companion their strangely coloured caves, and hear the secret sung to Ulysses ages ago. The sun breaks out over Calvano, the storm has passed; the gipsy tinker ventures out with his bellows and forge, and is hammering away there under the wall; the children watch him mischievously. He rouses his sleepy maiden, and bids her come with him to see the preparations at the church for the Feast of the Rosary; for the morrow is Rosary Sunday, and it was on that day the Catholic powers of Europe destroyed the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto, and in every Catholic church the victory is annually commemorated by devotions to Our Lady of the Rosary, whose prayers, they say, won the contest for the Christian arms. The Dominican brother is to preach the sermon, and all the gay banners and decorations are being put up in the church. The altar will be ablaze with lights, the music is to be supplemented by a band, and the statue of the Virgin is to be borne in solemn procession through the plain. Bonfires, fireworks, and much trumpet-blowing will wind up the day; and the Englishman anticipates as great pleasure from the festival as any child, and more—for, “Such trifles!” says the girl. “Trifles!” he replies; “why, in England they are gravely debating if it be righteous to abolish the Corn Laws!”

Epilogue to “Asolando” (1889). The words of this poem have a peculiar significance: they are the last which the poet addressed to the world, and the volume in which they appeared was published in London on the very day on which he died in Venice. Had he known when he wrote them that these were the last lines of his message to the world—that he who had for so many years urged men to “strive and thrive—fight on!” would pass away as they were given to the world, would he have wished to close his life’s work with braver, better, nobler words than these? All Browning is here. From Pauline to this epilogue the message was ever the same, and the confidence in the ultimate and eternal triumph of right uniform throughout. In the Pall Mall Gazette of February 1st, 1890, there appeared the following reference to this poem: “One evening, just before his death illness, the poet was reading this (the third verse) from a proof to his daughter-in-law and sister. He said, ‘It almost looks like bragging to say this, and as if I ought to cancel it; but it’s the simple truth; and as it’s true, it shall stand.’ His faith knew no doubting. In all trouble, against all evil, he stood firm.”

Epilogue to “Dramatic Idyls” (Second Series). This poem combats the notion that a quick-receptive soil, on which no feather seed can fall without awakening vitalising virtue, is the hot-bed for a poet; rather must we hold that the real song-soil is the rock, hard and bare, exposed to sun and wind-storm, there in the clefts where few flowers awaken grows the pine tree—a nation’s heritage. (Compare on this Emerson’s Woodnotes II.)

Epilogue to “Dramatis Personæ.”—First Speaker, as David. At the Feast of the Dedication of Solomon’s Temple, when Priests and Levites in sacrificial robes attended with the multitude praising the Lord as a single man; when singers and trumpets sound and say, “Rejoice in God, whose mercy endureth for ever,” then the presence of the Lord filled the house with the glory of His cloud. This is the highest point reached by the purest Theism of the Hebrew people.

Second Speaker, as Renan. A star had beamed from heaven’s vault upon our world, then sharpened to a point in the dark, and died. We had loved and worshipped, and slowly we discovered it was vanishing from us. A face had looked from out the centuries upon our souls, had seemed to look upon and love us. We vainly searched the darkling sky for the dwindling star, faded from us now and gone from keenest sight. And so the face—the Christ-face—we had seen in the old records, the Gospels which had seemed to dower us with the Divine-human Friend, and which warmed our souls with love, has faded out, and we search the records and sadly fail to find the face at all, and our hope is vanished and the Friend is gone. The record searchers tell us we shall never more know ourselves are seen, never more speak and know that we are heard, never more hear response to our aspirations and our love. The searcher finds no god but himself, none higher than his own nature, no love but the reflection of his own, and realises that he is an orphan, and turning to his brethren cries, with Jean Paul, “There is no God! We are all orphans!”

Third Speaker is Mr. Browning himself, who offers us consolation in our bereavement; he asks us to see through his eyes. In head and heart every man differs utterly from his fellows; he asks how and why this difference arises; he bids us watch how even the heart of mankind may have some mysterious power of attracting Nature’s influences round himself as a centre. In Arctic seas the water gathers round some rock-point as though the waste of waves sought this centre alone; for a minute this rock-point is king of this whirlpool current, then the waves oversweep and destroy it, hastening off to choose another peak to find, and flatter, and finish in the same way. Thus does Nature dance about each man of us, acting as if she meant to enhance his worth; then, when her display of simulated homage is done with, rolls elsewhere for the same performance. Nature leaves him when she has gained from him his product, his contribution to the active life of the time. The time forces have utilised the man as their pivot, he has served for the axis round which have whirled the energies which Nature employed at the moment. His quota has been contributed; he has not been a force, but the central point of the forces’ revolution; as the play of waves demanded for their activity the rock-centre, so the mind forces required for their gyrations the passive man-centre; the rock stood still in the dance of the waves, but their dance could not have existed without its mysterious influence on their motion. The man was necessary to the mind-waves; the play of forces could not have been secured without just that soul-point standing idly as the centre of the dance of influences. The waves, having obtained the whirl they demanded, submerge the rock—the mind forces having gained such direction, such quality of rotation, dispense with the man; the force lives, however, and his contribution to its direction is not lost, hot husbanded. Now, there is no longer any use for the old Temple service of David, neither is the particular aspect of the Christ-face required as at first beheld. The face itself does not vanish, or but decomposes to recompose. The face grows; the Christ of to-day is a greater conception than that which Renan thinks he has decomposed. It is not the Christ of an idea that sufficed for old-world conception, but one which expands with the age and grows with the sentient universe.

Epilogue to “Ferishtah’s Fancies” (Venice, December 1st, 1884). This poem brings into a focus the rays of the fancies which compose the volume: the famous ones of old, the heroes whose deeds are celebrated in the different poems, were not actors merely, but soldiers, and fought God’s battle; they were not cowards, because they had confidence in the supremacy of good, and fighting for the right knew they could leave results to the Leader. But a chill at the heart even in its supremest joy induces the question: What if all be error?—if love itself were responsible for a fallacy of vision?

Epilogue to “Pacchiaratto and other Poems” (1876). In this poem the author deals with his critics. “The poets pour us wine,” and as they pour we demand the impracticable feat of producing for us wine that shall be sweet, yet strong and pure. One poet gives the world his potent man’s draught; it is admitted to be strong and invigorating, yet is swallowed at a gulp, as evidently unpleasant to the taste. Another dispenses luscious sweetness, fragrant as a flower distillation; and men say contemptuously it is only fit for boys—is useless for nerving men to work. Now, it is easy to label a bottle as possessing body and bouquet both, but labels are not always absolute guarantees of that which they cover. Still there is wine to be had, by judicious blending, which combines these qualities of body and bouquet. How do we value such vintage when we do possess it? Go down to the vaults where stand the vats of Shakespeare and Milton wine: there in the cellar are forty barrels with Shakespeare’s brand—some five or six of his works are duly appreciated, the rest neglected; there are four big butts of Milton’s brew, and out of them we take a few drops, pretending that we highly esteem him the while! The fact is we hate our bard, or we should not leave him in the cellar. The critics say Browning brews stiff drink without any flavour of grape: would the public take more kindly to his wine if he gave it all the cowslip fragrance and bouquet of his meadow and hill side? The treatment received by Shakespeare and Milton proves that the public taste is vitiated, notwithstanding all the pretence of admiration of them. It is our furred tongue that is at fault; it is nettle-broth the world requires. Browning has some Thirty-four Port for those who can appreciate it; as for the multitude, let them stick to their nettle-broth till their taste improves.

Notes.—Verse i., “The Poets pour in wine”: the quotation is from Mrs. Browning’s “Wine of Cyprus.” V. 20, “Let them ‘lay, pray, bray’”: this in ridicule of Byron’s grammar in verse clxxx. of Canto IV. of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:—“And dashest him again to earth;—there let him lay.”

Epilogue to the “Two Poets of Croisic” (1878). (Published in the Selections, vol. ii., as A Tale). A bard had to sing for a prize before the judges, and to accompany his song on the lute. His listeners were so pleased with his melody that it seemed as though they would hasten to bestow the award even before the end of the song; when, just as the poet was at the climax of his trial, a string broke, and all would have been lost, had not a cricket “with its little heart on fire” alighted on the instrument, and flung its heart forth, sounding the missing note; and there the insect rested, ever at the right instant shrilling forth its F-sharp even more perfectly than the string could have done. The judges with one consent said, “Take the prize—we took your lyre for harp!” Did the conqueror despise the little creature who had helped him with all he had to offer? No: he had a statue of himself made in marble, life-size; on the lyre was “perched his partner in the prize.” The author of the volume of poems of which this story forms the epilogue, says that he tells it to acknowledge the love which played the cricket’s part, and gave the missing music; a girl’s love coming aptly in when his singing became gruff. Love is ever waiting to supply the missing notes in the arrested harmony of our lives.

Notes.—“Music’s Son”: Goethe. “Lotte,” of the Sorrows of Werther, was Charlotte Buff, who married Kestner, Goethe’s friend, the Albert of the novel. Goethe was in love with Charlotte Buff, and her marriage with Kestner roused the temper of his over-sensitive mind. (See Dr. Brewer’s Reader’s Handbook.)

Epistle, An, Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. (Men and Women, vol. i., 1855.) [The subject of the poem is the raising of Lazarus from the dead.] Karshish, a wandering scholar-physician, writing to the sage Abib, from whom he has learned his art, gives him an account of certain matters of medical interest which he has discovered in the course of his travels, and which, like a good student, he communicates to his venerable teacher. After informing him that he has sent him some samples of rare pharmaceutical substances, he says that his journeyings brought him to Jericho, on the dangerous road from which city to Jerusalem he had met with sundry misadventures, and noted several cases of clinical interest, all of which he reports in the matter-of-fact way which betokens the scientific practitioner of the period. Amongst his plague, ague, epileptic, scalp-disease, and leprosy cures, he particularly describes “a case of mania subinduced by epilepsy,” which especially interested him. The disorder seemed to him of quite easy diagnosis: “Tis but a case of mania,” complicated by trance and epilepsy, but well within his powers as a physician to account for, except in the after circumstances and the means of cure. “Some spell, exorcisation or trick of art” had evidently been employed by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who bade him, when he seemed dead, “Rise!” and he did rise. He was “one Lazarus, a Jew”—of good habit of body, and indeed quite beyond ordinary men in point of health; and his three days’ sleep had so brightened his body and soul that it would be a great thing if the medical art could always ensure such a result from the use of any drug. He has undergone such change of mental vision that he eyes the world now like a child, and puts all his old joys in the dust. He has lost his sense of the proportion of things: a great armament or a mule load of gourds are all the same to him, while some trifle will appear of infinite import; yet he is stupefied because his fellow-men do not view things with his opened eyes. He is so perplexed with impulses that his heart and brain seem occupied with another world while his feet stay here. He desires only perfectly to please God; he is entirely apathetic when told that Rome is on the march to destroy his town and tribe, yet he loves all things old and young, strong and weak, the flowers and birds, and is harmless as a lamb: only at ignorance and sin he is impatient, but promptly curbs himself. The physician would have sought out the Nazarene who worked the cure, and would have held a consultation with him on the case, but discovered that he perished in a tumult many years ago, accused of wizardry, rebellion, and of holding a prodigious creed. Lazarus—it is well, says the physician, to keep nothing back in writing to a brother in the craft—regards the curer as God the Creator and sustainer of the world, that dwelt in flesh amongst us for a while; but why write of trivial matters? He has more important things to tell.

He begs the sage’s pardon for troubling him with this man’s tedious case, but it has touched him with awe, it may be partly the effect of his weariness. But he cannot close his letter without returning to the tremendous suggestion once more. “Think, Abib! The very God!”—

Professor Corson says this poem “is one of Browning’s most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarise the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. It is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and limitations of its situation.” Lazarus has seen things as they are. “This show of things,” so far as he is concerned, is done with. He now leads the actual life; his wonder and his sorrow are drawn from the reflection that his fellow-men remain in the region of phantasm. He lives really in the world to come. How infinitely little he found the things of time and sense in the presence of the eternal verities is grandly shown in the poem. The attitude of Lazarus under his altered conditions affords an answer to those who demand that an All-Wise Being should not leave men to struggle in a region of phenomena but exhibit the actual to us in the present life. Under such conditions our probation would be impossible. As Browning shows in La Saisiaz, a condition of certainty would destroy the school-time value of life; the highest truths are insusceptible of scientific demonstration. Lazarus is the hero of the poem, not Karshish. As the Bishop of Durham says in his paper “On Browning’s View of Life,” Lazarus “is not a man, but a sign: he stands among men as a patient witness of the overwhelming reality of the divine—a witness whose authority is confessed, even against his inclination, by the student of nature, who turns again and again to the phenomena which he affects to disparage. In this crucial example Browning shows how the exclusive dominance of the spirit destroys the fulness of human life, its uses and powers, while it leaves a passive life, crowned with an unearthly beauty.” The professional attitude of Karshish is drawn with marvellous fidelity. A paper in the Lancet on such a “case” would be precisely on the same lines to-day, though the wandering off into side details would not be quite so obvious, and there would be an entire absence of any trifling with the idea that “the All-Great were the All-Loving too.” This is “emotional,” and modern science has nothing but contempt for that.

Notes.—Snake-stone, a name applied to any substance used as a remedy for snake-bites. Professor Faraday once analysed several which had been used for this purpose in Ceylon. One turned out to be a piece of animal charcoal, another was chalk, and a third a vegetable substance like a bezoar. The animal charcoal might possibly have been useful if applied immediately. The others were valueless for the purpose. (Tennant, Ceylon, third ed., i., 200.) “A spider that weaves no web.” Dr. H. McCook, a specialist in spider lore, has explained this passage in Poet-Lore, vol. i., p. 518. He says the spider referred to belongs to the Wandering group: they stalk their prey in the open field, or in divers lurking places, and are quite different in their habits from the web-spinners. The spider sprinkled with mottles he thinks is the Zebra spider (Epiblemum scenicum). It belongs to the Saltigrade tribe. The use of spiders in medicine is very ancient. Pliny describes many diseases for which they were used. Spiders were boiled in water and distilled for wounds by Sir Walter Raleigh. Greek-fire was the precursor of gunpowder; it was the oleum incendiarum of the Romans. Probably petroleum, tar, sulphur, and nitre were its chief ingredients. Blue flowering borage (Borago officinalis). The ancients deemed this plant one of the four “cordial flowers” for cheering the spirits, the others being the rose, violet, and alkanet. Pliny says it produces very exhilarating effects. The stem contains nitre, and the whole plant readily gives its flavour even to cold water. (See Anne Pratt’s Flowering Plants, vol. iv., p. 75.)

Este. (Sordello.) A town of Lombardy, in the delegation of Padua, situated at the southern extremity of the Euganean hills. The Rocca or castle is a donjon tower occupying the site of the original fortress of Este.

Este, The House of. (Sordello.) One of the oldest princely houses of Italy, called Este after the name of the town above mentioned. Albert Azzo II. first bore the title of Marquis of Este; he married a sister of Guelph III., who was duke of Carinthia. The Italian title and estates were inherited by Fulco I. (1060-1135), son of Albert Azzo II. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries the history of the house of Este is mixed up with that of the other noble houses of Italy in the struggles of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The Estena were the head of the Guelph party, and at different times were princes of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Obizzo I., son of Folco I., entered into a league against Frederick Barbarossa, and was comprehended in the Venetian treaty of 1177, by which municipal podestas (chief magistrates of great cities) were instituted” (Encyc. Brit.). Strife existed between this house and that of the Torelli, which raged for two centuries, in consequence of Obizzo I. carrying off Marchesella, heiress of the Adelardi family, of Ferrara, and marrying her to his son Azzo V.

Eulalia. (A Soul’s Tragedy.) The shrewd woman who was betrothed to Luitolfo.

Euripides. The Greek tragic poet, who was born of Athenian parents in 480 B.C. He brought out his first play—The Peliades—at the age of twenty-five. At thirty-nine he gained the first prize, which honour he received only five times in his long career of fifty years. He was the mediator between the ancient and modern drama, and was regarded at Athens as an innovator. Aristophanes was an exceedingly hostile and witty critic of Euripides, and from his point of view his conduct was justified, taking as he did the standard of Æschylus and Sophocles as the only right model of tragedy. He is variously said to have written seventy-five, seventy-eight and ninety-two tragedies. Eighteen only have come down to us: The Alcestis, Andromache, Bacchæ, Hecuba, Helena, Electra, Heraclidæ, Heracles in Madness, The Suppliants, Hippolytus, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia among the Tauri, Ion, Medea, Orestes, Rhesus, the Troades, the Phœnissæ, and a satiric play, the Cyclops. “Aristophanes calls Euripides ‘meteoric,’ because he was always rising into the air; he was famous for allusions to the stars, the sea and the elements. Aristophanes uses the epithet sneeringly: Browning, praisingly” (Br. P. iii. 43).

Eurydice to Orpheus. A Picture by Leighton. (Published for the first time in the Royal Academy Catalogue, 1864. It was reprinted in the first volume of the Selections in 1865.) Orpheus was a famous mythical poet, who was so powerful in song that he could move trees and rocks and tame wild beasts by the charms of his voice. His wife (the nymph Eurydice) died from the bite of a serpent, and Orpheus descended to the lower regions in search of her. He so influenced Persephone by his music that she gave him permission to take back his wife on the condition that he should not look round during his passage from the nether world to the regions above. In his impatience he disregarded the condition, and having turned his head to gaze back, Eurydice had to return for ever to Hades (Vergil, Geor. iv., v. 457, etc.). The poet has represented Eurydice speaking to Orpheus the passionate words of love which made him forget the commands of Pluto and Persephone not to look back on pain of losing his wife again.

Euthukles. (Balaustion’s Adventure; Aristophanes’ Apology.) He was the man of Phokis who heard Balaustion recite Alcestis at Syracuse, and who followed her when she returned to Athens, and married her. On their voyage to Rhodes, after the fall of Athens, Balaustion dictated to him the Apology of Aristophanes, which he wrote down on board the vessel. It was Euthukles, according to Browning, who saved Athens from destruction by reciting at a critical moment the lines from Euripides’ Electra and Agamemnon.

Evelyn Hope. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) The lament of a man who loved a young girl who died before she was old enough to appreciate his love. The maiden was sixteen, the man “thrice as old.” He contemplates her as she lies in the beauty of death, and asks: “Is it too late then? Because you were so young and I so old, were we fellow-mortals and nought beside? Not so: God creates the love to reward the love,” and he will claim her not in the next life alone, but, if need be, through lives and worlds many yet to come. His love will not be lost, for his gains of the ages and the climes will not satisfy him without his Evelyn Hope. He can wait. He will be more worthy of her in the worlds to come. Modern science has taught us that no atom of matter can ever be lost to the world, no infinitesimal measure of energy but is conserved, and the poet holds that there shall never be one lost good. The eternal atoms, the vibrations that cease not through the eternal years, shall not mock at the evanescence of human love.

Face, A. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) A portrait of a beautiful girl painted in words by a poet who had all the sympathies of an artist.

Family, The. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 4: “On the Lawfulness of Prayer.”) Ferishtah has prayed for a dying man that he might recover. An objector asks why he does this: if God is all-wise and good, what He does must be right: “Two best wills cannot be.” Man has only to acquiesce and be thankful. The dervish tells a tale. A man had three sons, and a wife who was bitten by a serpent. The husband called in a doctor, who said he must amputate the injured part. The husband assented. The eldest son said, “Pause, take a gentler way.” The next in age said, “The doctor must and should save the limb.” The youngest said, “The doctor knows best: let him operate!” He agreed with the doctor. Let God be the doctor; let us call the husband’s acquiescence wise understanding, call the first son’s opinion a wise humanity. In the second son we see rash but kind humanity; in the youngest one who apes wisdom above his years. “Let us be man and nothing more,” says Ferishtah.—man hoping, fearing, loving and bidding God help him till he dies. The lyric bids us while on earth be content to be men. The wider sense of the angel cannot be expected while we remain under human conditions.

Fancy and Reason, in La Saisiaz, discuss the pros and cons of the probabilities of the existence of God, the soul, and future life, etc.

Fears and Scruples. (Pacchiarotto and Other Poems, 1876: “The Spiritual Uses of Uncertainty.”) “Why does God never speak?” asks the doubter. The analogy of the poem compares this silence of the Divine Being with that of a man’s friend, who wrote him many valued letters, but otherwise kept aloof from him. It is suggested by experts that the letters are forgeries. The man loves on. It is then suggested that his friend is acting as a spy upon him, sees him readily enough and knows all he does, and some day will show himself to punish him. But this is to make the friend a monster! Hush!—“What if this friend happen to be—God?” In explanation of this poem, Mr. Kingsland received from the poet the following letter:—“I think that the point I wanted to illustrate in the poem you mention was this: Where there is a genuine love of the ‘letters’ and ‘actions’ of the invisible ‘friend,’ however these may be disadvantaged by an inability to meet the objections to their authenticity or historical value urged by ‘experts’ who assume the privilege of learning over ignorance, it would indeed be a wrong to the wisdom and goodness of the ‘friend’ if he were supposed capable of overlooking the actual ‘love’ and only considering the ‘ignorance’ which, failing to in any degree affect ‘love,’ is really the highest evidence that ‘love’ exists. So I meant, whether the result be clear or no.”

Ferishtah’s Fancies. A criticism of Life: Browning’s mellow wisdom. Published in 1884, with the following quotations as mottoes on the page facing the title:—

“His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very serious.”—Article Shakespeare, Jeremy Collier’s Historical, etc., Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1701. “You, sir, I entertain you for one of my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed.”—King Lear, Act III., sc. vi.

The work embraces the following collection of poems:—Prologue. 1. “The Eagle.” 2. “The Melon-seller.” 3. “Shah Abbas.” 4. “The Family.” 5. “The Sun.” 6. “Mihrab Shah.” 7. “A Camel-driver.” 8. “Two Camels.” 9. “Cherries.” 10. “Plot Culture.” 11. “A Pillar at Sebzevah.” 12. “A Bean Stripe: also Apple Eating.” Epilogue. There was a real personage named Ferishtah, a celebrated Persian historian, born about 1570. He is one of the most trustworthy of the Oriental historians. Several portions of his work have been translated into English. He has, however, no connection with the subject-matter of Mr. Browning’s book, but it is probable that his name suggested itself to the poet as a good one for his work. We have here Mr. Browning in a dervish’s robe, philosophising in a Persian atmosphere, yet talking the most perfect Browningese, just as do the Pope in the Ring and the Book and the rabbis in the Jewish poems. Age, experience, and the calm philosophy of a religious mind, are required for the poet’s highest teaching. It matters little, these being given, whether the philosophers wear the tiara of the pope, the robe of the dervish, or the gaberdine of the Jew: the philosophy is the same. The aim is “to justify the ways of God to men,” and to make reasonable an exalted Christian Theism. Three great Eastern classics—The Fables of Bidpai, Firdausi’s Sháh-Námeh, and the Book of Job—are the sources of the inspiration of the pages of Ferishtah’s Fancies. Both the Sháh-Náhmeh and the Fables of Bidpai, or Pilpay as they are commonly termed, are published in the Chandos Classics. Bidpai is supposed to be the author of a famous collection of Hindū fables. The name Bidpai occurs in their Arabic version. Their origin was doubtless the Pantcha Tantra, or “Five Sections,” a great collection of fables. The Hitopadesa is another such collection. The fables were translated into Pehlvi in the sixth century. Then the Persian fables were translated into Arabic, and were transmitted to Europe. They were translated into Greek in the eleventh century, then into Hebrew and Latin, afterwards into nearly every European tongue. We must go to Firdausi, the Persian author of that “standing wonder in poetic literature,” the Sháh Námeh, for an explanation of several allusions in the poem. This great chronicle, the Persian Book of Kings, is a history of Persia in sixty thousand verses. The poem is as familiar to every Persian as our own great epics to us, and the use Mr. Browning makes of it in this work is managed in the most natural manner. This we shall notice more particularly in dealing with the separate poems which compose the volume. In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote:—“I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the poem will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the poet’s inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such poet as Ferishtah—the stories are all inventions.... The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the concocters of novel schools of morality put forth as discoveries of their own.”

Festus. (Paracelsus.) The old and faithful friend of Paracelsus, who believes in him from the first. He is the husband of Michal, and both influence the mind of the hero of medicine for good at various stages of his career.

Fifine at the Fair. (1872.) The key-note of the work is given in the quotation before the Prologue, which is the motto of the poem, from Molière’s Don Juan, Act I., Sc. 3. There is a certain historic basis for the character of the Don Juan of European legend. In Seville, in the time of Peter the Cruel, lived Don Juan Tenorio, the prince of libertines. He attempted to abduct Giralda, daughter of the governor of Seville: the consequence was a duel, in which the lady’s father was killed. The sensual excesses of Don Juan had destroyed his faith, and he defied the spirit-world so far as to visit the tomb of the murdered man and challenge his statue to follow him to supper. The statue accepted the invitation, and appeared amongst the guests at the meal, and carried the blaspheming sceptic to hell. “As a dramatic type,” says the author of the article “Don Juan,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Don Juan is essentially the impersonation of the scepticism that results from sensuality, and is thus the complement of Faust, whose scepticism is the result of speculation.” The Prologue describes a swimmer far out at sea, disporting himself under the noon-sun; as he floats, a beautiful butterfly hovers above him, a creature of the sky, as he for the time a creature of the water; neither can unite with the other, for neither can exchange elements; still, if we cannot fly, the next best thing is to swim,—a half-way house, as it were, between the world of spirit and that of grosser earth. Poetry is in this sense, a substitute for heaven: whatever the heaven-dwellers are, the poets seem; what deeds they do, the poets dream. Does the soul of his departed wife hover over him in this way, and look with pity on the mimicry of her airy flight? he wonders. (Mrs. Browning died eleven years before Fifine was published.)—The scenery of the poem is that of the neighbourhood of Pornic, a seaside town in the department of the Loire, in Brittany, the little town being twenty-seven miles distant from Nantes. It is noted for its sea bathing and mineral waters, and, like many other places in Brittany, possesses some curious Druidical and other architectural remains. Mr. Browning, while staying at Pornic with his family, saw the gipsy woman who suggested to him the idea of Fifine. He selected her as a type of the sensual woman, in contrast to the spiritual type of womanhood. The poem deals with incidents connected with Pornic fair. Don Juan, addressing his wife Elvire, says: “Let us see the strolling players and the fun of the fair! Who would have supposed that the night could effect such a change? Yesterday all was rough and raw—mere tubs, poles and hoarding; now this morning all is gay as a butterfly, the scaffolding has burst out in colour like a flower-bed in full bloom. Nobody saw them enter the village, but that is the way of these tumblers, they like to steal a march and exhibit their spectacle only when the show is ready. Had any one wandered about the place at night he would have seen the sober caravan which was the bud that blossomed to-day into all this gaiety. An airy structure pitched beneath the tower appeared in the morning surmounted by a red pennon fluttering in the air, and frantic to be free. To be free!—the fever of the flag finds a response in my soul, my heart fires up for liberty from the restraints of law, I would lead the bohemian life these players lead. Why is it that disgraced people, those who have burst the bonds of conventional life, always seem to enjoy their existence more than others? They seem conscious of possessing a secret which sets them out of reach of our praise or blame; now and again they return to us because they must have our money, just as a bird must bear off a bit of rag filched from mankind to work up into his nest. But why need they do that? We think much of our reputation and family honour, but these people for a penny or two will display themselves undraped to any visitor. You may tell the showman that his six-legged sheep is an imposition,—he does not care, he values his good name at nothing. But offer to make these mountebanks respectable, promise them any reward you like to forsake their ways, to work and live as the rest of the world, and your offer will not tempt them. What is the compensatory unknown joy which turns dross to gold in their case? You sigh,” says the speaker to his wife, “you shake your head: what have I said to distress you? Fifine, the gipsy beauty of the show, will illustrate my meaning: this woman is to me a queen, a sexless, bloodless sprite; yet she has conquered me. I want to understand how. There is a honeyed intoxication in the Eastern lily, which lures insects to their death for its own nourishment: is that a flaw in the flower? Wiser are we not to be tempted by such dangerous delights; we may admire and keep clear of them: not poison lilies, but the rose, the daisy, or the violet, for me,—it is Elvire, not Fifine, I love. You ask how does this woman explain my thought? When Louis the Eleventh lay dying he had a procession of the famous women of all time made to pass before him: Helen of Troy, who magically brought men to acquiesce in their own destruction; next was Cleopatra, all the wonder of her body dominated by her high and haughty soul, and trampling on her lovers; then the saint of Pornic church who saves the shipwrecked sailors, and who thinks in her innocence that Cleopatra has given away her clothes to the poor; then comes my gipsy beauty Fifine, with her tambourine. Suppose you, Elvire, in spirit join this procession; then you confront yourself, and I will show you how you beat each personage there—even this Fifine, whom I will reward with a franc that you may study her. You draw back your skirts from such filth as you consider her to be; though, born perhaps as pure and sensitive as any other woman, she can afford to bear your scorn possibly,—we know such people often thus minister to age and the wants of sick parents. Her ogre husband, with his brute-beast face, takes the money she has earned by her exhibiting herself to us as she passes into the tent. I want to make you see the beauty of the mind underlying the form in all these women. No creature is made so mean but boasts an inward worth: this Fifine, a mere sand-grain on the shore, reflects some ray of sunshine. Say that there was no worst of degradation spared this woman, yet she makes no pretence—she is absolutely truthful, she assumes not to be Helen or the Pornic Saint, she only offers to exhibit herself to you for money.” The wife is not deceived by all this sophistry; Fifine’s attraction for the man lies in the fact, not that she possesses some hidden beauty of soul, but some unconcealed physical charms which awaken desire in him because they are not his own. What is one’s own is safe, and so despised; any waif which is a neighbour’s is for the time more desirable,—“Give you the sun to keep, you would want to steal a boor’s rushlight or a child’s squib.” He explains that this is always women’s way about such matters—they cannot be made to comprehend mental analysis. He reminds her how at great cost and a year’s anxiety he had purchased a Rafael; he gloated over his prize for a week, and then had more relish in turning over leaf by leaf Doré’s last picture-book. Suppose the picture reproached him with inconstancy, he would reply that he knew the picture was his own; anxiety had given place to confidence, and were the house on fire, he would risk his life to save it, though he were knee deep in Doré’s engravings. He tells his wife she is to him as the Rafael, the Fifines are as Doré’s wood engravings. Elvire is the precious wife, her face fits into the cleft in the heart of him, to him she is perfection; but is she perfect to her mirror? He thinks not. Where, then, is her beauty? In his soul. He cannot explain the reason, any more than naming the notes will explain a symphony or describing lines will call up the idea of a picture. Still there is reason in our choice of each other. It is principally the effort of one soul to seek its own completion—that which shall aid its development—in another’s. As the artist’s soul sees the form he is about to create in the marble block, so does the lover see in his choice that which will draw out his soul-picture into concrete perfection. The world of sense has no real value for any of us, save in so far as our souls can detect and appropriate it. It is the idea which gives worth to that on which it is exercised. The value of all externals to the soul is just in proportion to its own power of transmuting them into food for its own growth. The soul flame is maintained not only by gums and spices, but straw and rottenness may feed it; if the soul has power to extract from evil things that which supports its life, what matters the straw so long as the ash is left behind? and so of the conquests of the soul, its power to evoke the good from the ungainly and the partial, gives us courage to ignore the failures and the slips of our lives. The pupil does not all at once evoke the masterpiece from the marble—he puts his idea in plaster by the side of the Master’s statue. If the scholar at last evoke Eidotheé, the Master is to thank. “To love” in its intensest form means to yearn to invest another soul with the accumulated treasures of our own. The chemic force exerted by one soul in transmuting coarse things to beautiful is aided by another’s flame. Each may continue to supplement the other, till the red, green, blue and yellow imperfections may be fused into achromatic white, the perfect light-ray. Soul is discernible by soul, and soul is evoked by soul—Elvire by Don Juan. The wife objects that he abdicates soul’s empire and accepts the rule of sense: man has left the monarch’s throne, and lies in the kennel a brute. Searching for soul through all womankind, you find no face so vile but sense may extract from it some good for soul. This fine-spun theory, this elaborate sophistry, she declares, is merely an ingenious excuse for sensuality:—

Don Juan would reply by an illustration from music, which can penetrate more subtly than words: he would show how we may rise out of the false into the true, out of the dark into the brightness above the dense and dim regions where doubt is bred. Bathing in the sea that morning, out in mid-channel, he was standing in the water with head back, chin up, body and limbs below—he kept himself alive by breath in the nostrils, high and dry; ever and again a wavelet or a ripple would threaten life, then back went the head, and all was safe. But did he try to ascend breast high, wave arms free of tether, to be in the air and leave the water, under he went again; before he had mastered his lesson he had plenty of water in mouth and eyes. “I compare this,” he says, “to the spirit’s efforts to rise out of the medium which sustains it.” He was upborne by that which he beat against, too gross an element to live in, were it not for the dose of life-breath in the soul. Our business is with the sea, not with the air, so we must endure the false below while we bathe in this life. It is by practice with the false that we reach the true. We gain confidence, and learn the trick of doing what we will—sink or rise. His senses do not reel when a billow breaks over him; he grasps at a wave that will not be grasped at all, but glides through the fingers—still the failure to grasp the water sends the head above, far beyond the wave he tried to hold:—

we try to grasp a soul, catch at it, think we have a prize; it eludes us, yet the soul helped ours to mount. He seizes Elvire by grasping at Fifine. Not even this specious reasoning deceives the wife. It is an ugly fact that the wave grasped at is a woman. He replies that a woman can be absorbed into the man: women grow you, men at best depend upon you. A rill that empties itself into the sea can never be separated from it. That is woman. Man takes all and gives nought. To raise men you must stoop to teach them, learn their ignorance, stifle your soul in their mediocrities; but to govern women you must abandon stratagem, cast away disguise, and reveal your best self at your uttermost. When the music of Arion attracted the dolphins to the doomed man, one of them bore him on its back to the coast, and so saved his life; revealing his best to this “true woman-creature,” he was saved from the men who would have killed him for gain. A man never puts out his whole self in love—this is reserved for hate. You do not get the best out of a man by nourishing his root, but by pruning his branch; as wine came through goats, which, browsing on the tendrils of the grape, “stung the stock to fertility,” and so gained “the indignant wine—wrath of the red press.” Mites of men are sore that God made mites at all; love avails not from such men-animalculæ to coax a virile thought, but touch the elf with hate, and the insect swells to thrice its bulk “and cuckoo-spits some rose!” Nothing is to be gained from ruling men; women take nothing, and give all. Elvire and Fifine, in their degree, are alike in this respect. “To have secured a woman’s faith in me is to have centred my soul on a fact. Falseness and change I see all around me; I expect truth because Fifine knows me much more than Elvire does.” To this his wife replies, “Why not only she? There can be for each but one Best, which abolishes the simply Good and Better. Why not be content with the Elvire, who substitutes belief in truth, in your own soul, for the falseness which you fear? By toil and effort the boatman may do with pole and oars what by waiting a few hours the rising water would do for him without his labour; but men affect unusual ways,—Elvire could do far better for you all that you expect from Fifine.” To this he replies that “a voyage may be too safe; there is no excitement, no experiment when wind and tide do all the needful work. Then may not our hate of falsehood be that which charms us in these actors who confess ‘A lie is all we do or say’? Everything has a false outside, stage-play is honest cheating. The poet never dreams; prose-folk always do.” Then he tells how his thought had recently sought expression in music rather than in words—as he played Schumann’s Carnival, and reflected that in the masque of life and banquet of the world we have ever the same things in a new guise, the difficulty was ever to conquer commonplace and spice the same old viands and games. His fancies bore him to a pinnacle above St. Mark’s at Venice, in Carnival time; he gazed down on a prodigious Fair, the men and women were disguised as beasts, birds, and fishes. Descending into the crowd, disgust gave way to pity; the people were not so beast-like, but much more human, than when he viewed them from the height, and he began to contemplate them with a delight akin to that which animates the chemist when he untwines the composite substance, traces effect back to cause, and then constructs from its elements the complex and complete. So did he get to know the thing he was, while contemplating in that Carnival the thing he was not. Thus Venice Square became the world, the masquerade was life, the disgust at the pageant was due to the distance from which it was contemplated, when he learned that the proper goal for wisdom is the ground and not the sky, he discovered how wisely balanced are our hates and loves, and how peace and good come from strife and evil. It is no business of ours to fret about what should be, but we should accept and welcome what is—is, that is to say, for the hour, for change is the law even of the religions by which man approaches God. His temples fade to recompose into other fanes. And not only temples, but the domes of learning and the seats of science are subject to the same law. Yet Religion has always her true temple-type; Truth, though founded in a rock, builds on sands; churches and colleges that grow to nothing always reappear as something; some building, round or square or polygonal, we shall always have. But leave the buildings, and let us look at the booths in the Fair. History keeps a stall, Morality and Art set up their shops. They acquiesce in law, and adapt themselves to the times; and so, as from a distance the scene is contemplated as a whole, the multiform subsides in haze, the buildings, distinct in the broad light of day, merge and lose their individuality in a common shape. See this Druid monument: how does its construction strike you? How came this cross here? Learning cannot enlighten us. It meant something when it was erected which is lost now, yet the people of the place respect it and are persuaded that what a thing meant once it must still mean. They thought it had some reference to the Creator of the world, and was there to remind them that the world came not of itself. And so, with all the change in religions, there is an imperial chord which subsists and underlies the mists of music. In all the change there is permanence as a substratum. Truth inside and truth outside, but falsehood is between each; it is the falsehood which is change, the truth is the permanence. There is an unchanging truth to which man in all his waverings is constant. This Druid monument said what it had to say to its own age; it never promised to help our dream. Don Juan and his wife having now completed their walk, he proposes to return home to end where they began; as we were nursed into life, death’s bosom receives us at last, and that is final, for death is defeat. Our limbs came with our need of them, our souls grew by mastering the lessons of life; but when death comes, the soul, which ruled by right while the bodily powers remained, loses its right to rule. And so the soul has run its round. Love ends too where love began, and goes back to permanence; each step aside (from Elvire to Fifine, for example) proves divergency in vain:

And as they reach their villa, he resolves to live and die a quiet married man, earning the approbation of the mayor, and unoccupied with soul problems, especially those of women. At that moment a letter is put into his hand: there has been some mistake, Fifine thinks—he has given her gold instead of silver; he will go and see about it, and is off. Five minutes was all the time he asked. He is absent much longer, and on his return Elvire has vanished.

The Epilogue describes the householder sitting desolate in his melancholy home, weary and stupid; he is suddenly surprised by the appearance of his lost wife, whose spirit has returned to claim him; he tells her how the time has dragged without her, “And was I so much better off up there?” quoth she. For decency, arrangements are made that the reunion may be in order; and so, the powers above and those below having been duly conciliated, husband and wife are once more united: “Love is all, and death is nought”—the final lesson of life.

The means whereby we may rise from the false to the true are never wanting to the earnest and faithful striver, this is the esoteric truth of Fifine at the Fair. The exoteric meaning may be “an apologia for the revolt of passion against social rules and fetters.” “Frenetic to be free,” like the pennon, is in this sense the concentration of its meaning. What was Browning’s object in this difficult and remarkable work? The question is not so difficult to answer as it appears at first sight. The poet is a soul analyst first, and a teacher next. He teaches admirably in scores of passages in Fifine, but his main idea has been to interpret the mental processes which he supposed might underlie the actions of such a selfish and heartless voluptuary as Don Juan. Not, of course, was there any idea of rehabilitating the character of the historic personage; but, as Browning held that every soul has something to say for itself, every man some ideal soul-advance at which he aims, however mistaken may be his methods, so he imagined that even this selfish libertine had his golden ideal, however deeply bedded in mire. He has not—like the great dramatists—sunk himself in his character, and striven thus to present the real man on his stage, but he has lent Don Juan his Browning soul for a while, that he may make his Apologia to the wife, whom he finds it very hard to deceive. Dr. Furnivall once asked the poet what his idea really was in the poem. The poet replied that his “fancy was to show morally how a Don Juan might justify himself partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry.” (Browning Society Papers, vol. ii., p. 242*.) See also vol. i., pp. 377, 379, pp. 18*, 61*, vol ii., p. 240*. Mr. Nettleship’s exhaustive analysis leaves nothing to be desired. (Essays, p. 221.)

Notes.—Verse ii., “bateleurs and baladines,” conjurors and mountebanks. Verse iv., “Gawain to gaze upon the Grail”: Gawain was the son of King Lot and Margause, in the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail. Verse xv., almandines, a variety of garnet. Verse xix., sick Louis: King Louis XI. of France. Verse xxv., tricot: a knitted vest. Verse xxvii., Helen: she was declared by some of the Greeks never to have been really present at Troy, and that Paris only carried off a phantom created by Hera: the real Helen, they said, was wafted by Hermes to Proteus in Egypt, whence she was taken home by Menelaus. Verse xxxvi., pochade, a rough sketch. Verse xlii., Razzi, a corruption of Bazzi, or properly Il Sodona, the Italian painter (1479-1549). Verse xlvii., Gerôme, a French painter (born 1824): he exhibited a great picture at the Exposition of 1859, called “The Gladiators.” Verse lii., Eidotheé: a sea-goddess, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Verse lix., Glumdalclich, in Gulliver’s Travels, was a girl nine years old, and “only forty feet high.” “Theosutos e broteios eper kekramene,” Greek for “God, man, or both together mixed,” from the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Verse lx., Chrysopras: a precious stone, a variety of chalcedony, or perhaps beryl. Verse lxvii. cannot be understood without reference to the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold: the lines and words between inverted commas are taken from verse clxxx., and the argument is directed against Byron’s teaching as therein expressed: this verse was particularly obnoxious to Mr. Browning, both on account of its sentiments and grammar (see under La Saisiaz, p. 247). Verse lxix., Thalassia: sea-nymph, from the Greek word for the sea: Triton, a sea deity, a son of Neptune. Verse lxxviii., Arion: a Greek poet and musician: he was rescued from drowning on the back of a dolphin; his song to his lyre drew the creatures round the vessel, and one of them bore him to the shore. Periander, the tyrant of Corinth. “Methymnæan hand”: Arion was born at Methymna, in Lesbos. Orthian, of Orthia: this was a surname of Diana. Tænarus, the point of land to which the dolphin carried Arion, whence he travelled to the court of Periander. Verse lxxxii., “See Horace to the boat”: the ode is the third of the First Book of Horace’s Odes. Verse lxxxiii., “The long walls of Athens” (see under Aristophanes’ Apology, p. 36). Iostephanos, violet crowned—a name of Athens. Verse xcviii., Simulacra, images or likenesses. Verse cxxiv., protoplast, the original, the thing first formed. Verse cxxv., Moirai Trimorphoi, the Tri-form Fates.

Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial: A Reminiscence of A.D. 1676. (Pacchiarotto and other Poems, 1876.) Filippo Baldinucci was a distinguished Italian writer on the history of the arts. He was born at Florence in 1624, and died in 1696. His chief work is entitled Notizie de Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in quà (dal 1260 sino al 1670), and was first published, in six vols. 4to, 1681-1728. The Encyclopædia Britannica says: “The capital defect of this work is the attempt to derive all Italian art from the schools of Florence.” The incidents of the poem are historical, and are related in the account which Baldinucci gives of the painter Buti. Its subject is that of the persecution to which the Jews were subjected in Italy, as in other countries of Europe, and unhappily down to the present time in Russia. We have the story as told by a frank persecutor, who regrets that the altered state of the law no longer permits the actual pelting of the Jews. The good old times had departed, but in his youth they could play some capital tricks with “the crew,” as he will narrate. There was a Jews’ burying-place hard by San Frediano, in Florence. Just below the Blessed Olivet, and adjoining this cemetery, was “a good farmer’s Christian field.” The Jews hedged their ground round with bushes, to conceal their rites from Christian gaze, for the public road ran by one corner of it. The farmer, partly from devotion, partly to annoy the Jews, built a shrine in his vineyard, and employed the painter Buti to depict thereon the Virgin Mary, fixing the picture just where it would be most annoying to the Jews. They tried to bribe the owner of the shrine to turn the picture the other way, to remove its disturbing presence from spectators to whom it could do no good, and let it face the public road, frequented by a class of Christians evidently much in need of religious supervision and restraint. The farmer agreed to remove the offending fresco in consideration of the bag of golden ducats offered; and he at once called the painter to cause Our Lady to face the other way. Buti covers up the shrine with a hoarding, and sets to work. Meanwhile the Chief Rabbi’s wife died, and was taken for burial to the cemetery. In passing the shrine in the farmer’s field the mourners became aware of a scurvy trick played upon them by the Christians; for the Virgin was removed according to the bargain, but a Crucifixion had been substituted, and now confronted them. The cheated Jews protested, but in vain: there was nothing for them but to suffer. Next day, as the farmer and his artist friend sat laughing over the trick, the athletic young son of the Rabbi entered the studio, desiring to purchase the original oil painting of the Madonna from which the fresco of the shrine was painted. The artist was so frightened at his stalwart form, and so amazed at the request, that, taken unaware, he asked no more than the proper price! and Mary was borne in triumph to deck a Hebrew household. They thought a miracle had happened, and that the Jew had been converted; but the Israelite explained that the only miracle wrought was that which had restrained him from throttling the painter. The truth was, he had changed his views about art, and had reflected that, since cardinals hung up heathen gods and goddesses in their palaces, there was no reason why his picture of Mary should not be hung with Ledas and what not, and be judged on its merits, or, more probably, on its flaws! And he walked off with his picture.

Fire is in the Flint. (Ferishtah’s Fancies—opening words of the fifth lyric.)

Flight of the Duchess, The. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845—in Bells and Pomegranates, VII.). When Mr Browning was little more than a child, he heard a woman one Guy Fawkes’ Day sing in the street a strange song, whose burden was, “Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!” The singular refrain haunted his memory for many years, and out of it was ultimately born this poem. There is a strange fascination in the mysterious story, which is told by an old huntsman, who has spent his life in the service of a Duke and his mother at their castle in a land of the North which is an appanage of the German Kaiser. The young Duke’s father died when he was a child, and his mother took him in early life to Paris, where they remained till the youth grew to manhood. Returning to the old castle with his head full of mediæval fancies, the Duke upset everybody by his revivals of outlandish customs and feudal fashions, and this in a manner which irritated every one concerned. In course of time the Duchess found a wife for her son—a young, warm-hearted girl from a convent, who won the affection of the servants of the castle, but was treated with coldness and severity by its lord and his “hell-cat” of a mother. Chilled by the want of affection, and neglected by those whose care it should have been to make her happy, the girl sickened, and was visibly pining away. It occurred to the Duke to revive, amongst other old customs, those connected with the hunting of the stag, and a great hunting party on mediæval lines was arranged. In the course of his researches into the customs of mediæval hunting, he discovered that the lady of the castle had a special office to perform when the stag was killed. The authorities said the dame must prick forth on her jennet and preside at the disembowelling. But the poor, mewed-up little duchess, secluded from all the pleasures of life, did not care to be brought out just to play a part in a ceremony for which she had no heart, and thanking the Duke for the intended honour, begged to be excused on account of her ill-health; and so the Duke had to give way, but he sent his mother to scold her. When the hunt began the Duke was sulky and disheartened; as he rode down the valley he met a troop of gipsies on their march, and from the company an old witch came forth to greet the huntsmen. Sidling up to the Duke, she began to whine and make her appeal for the usual gifts. She said she desired to pay her duty to the beautiful new Duchess, at which the Duke was struck by the idea that he might use the old crone as a means to frighten his wife and make her more submissive, so he bade the huntsman who tells the story conduct the gipsy to the young Duchess. The old hag promised to engage in the project with hearty goodwill, and, quickened by the sight of a purse as the sign of a forthcoming reward, she hobbled off to the castle, and the Duke rejoined his party. The huntsman had a sweetheart at the castle named Jacynth, who conducted the crone to the lady’s chamber while he waited without. And now began the mysteries of that eventful day. The maid protested she never could tell what it was that made her fall asleep of a sudden as soon as the gipsy was introduced to her mistress. The huntsman had waited on the balcony for some considerable time, when his attention was arrested by a low musical sound in the chamber of his lady; then he pushed aside the lattice, pulled the curtain, and saw Jacynth asleep along the floor. In the midst of the room, on a chair of state, was the gipsy, transformed to a queen, with her face bent over the lady’s head, who was seated at her knees, her face intent on that of the crone. Wondering whether the old woman was banning or blessing the Duchess, he was about to spring in to the rescue, when he was stopped by the strange expression on her face. She was drinking in “Life’s pure fire” from the old woman, was becoming transformed by some powerful influence that seemed to stream from the elder to the younger woman; her very tresses shared in the pleasure, her cheeks burned and her eyes glistened. The influence reached the soul of the retainer, and he fell under the potent spell as he listened to the gipsy’s words as she told the Duchess she had discovered she was of their race by infallible signs. At last he came to know that his mistress was being bewitched, and he ran to the portal, where he met her, so altered and so beautiful that he felt that whatever had happened was for the best and he had nothing to do but take her commands. He was hers to live or to die, and he preceded his mistress, followed by the gipsy, who had shrunk again to her proper stature. They went to the courtyard, where, as he was desired, he saddled the Duchess’s palfrey, which his mistress mounted with the crone behind her; then, putting a little plait of hair into the servant’s hand, the Duchess rode off, and they lost her. As the old retainer tells the tale, thirty years have passed since the flight took place. No search was made for the lady; the Duke’s pride was wounded, and he would not seek her, and made small inquiry about her. The man says he must see his master through this life, and then he will scrape together his earnings and travel to the land of the gipsies, to find his lady or hear the last of her. Has all this an allegorical meaning? Many have tried to find such in this remarkable poem. But Browning does not teach by allegory: he rather prefers to let events as they actually happen tell their own lessons to minds awakened to receive them. It is not at all difficult, without resorting to allegorical interpretation, to discover what the poem teaches. And in the first place we are taught that a human soul cannot thrive without the living sympathy of its kind. The Duchess was withering under the chill neglect of the hateful mother-in-law and her contemptible son. The bewitchment of the gipsy was the charm of love—the strong, passionate love of a great human heart, enshrined though it was in a witch-like and decrepit frame. The outpouring of the old woman’s sympathy on this friendless girl sufficed to transfigure the crone till she became to the huntsman a young and a beautiful queen herself. In the supreme act of perfectly loving, the woman herself became lovely; for there is no rejuvenescence like that which comes from loving others and helping the weak. Then we learn that, as the Duchess seemed to be imbibing new life from the gipsy queen, virtue goes forth from every true lover of his kind, and degrees of rank, education, and station, are no barriers to the magnetism which streams forth from a human heart, however humble, towards another human heart, however highly placed. Life without love is a living death, and the Duchess no more did wrong when she rode off with the gipsy who saw the signs of her people in the marks on her forehead than the flowers do wrong when they bloom at the invitation of the Spring. The sign which the gipsy saw was that of a soul capable of responding to a heart yearning to help it. The girl had a right to human love; she had a right to seek it in a gipsy heart when she could find it nowhere else. In the sermon by Canon Wilberforce preached before the British Medical Association, at their meeting at Bournemouth in 1891, speaking of the power of Jesus over human diseases, the preacher said, “The secret of this power was His perfect sympathy. He violated or suspended no natural laws.... His healings were an influential outpouring of that inherent divine life which is latent and in some degree operative in every man, but which existed in fulness and perfection of operation only in Him. Is not this the force of the word “compassion” used of Him? The verb σπλαγχνίζομαι is not found in any former Greek author. It indicates, so far as language can express it, a forceful movement of the whole inward nature towards its object, and personal identification with it. It indicates that compassion and love are not superficial emotions, but dynamic forces.” Mrs. Owen, of Cheltenham, read a paper at the meeting of the Browning Society, Nov. 24th, 1882, entitled “What is ‘The Flight of the Duchess?’” in which it was suggested that the Duke represents our gross self; the huntsman represents the simple human nature that may either rise with the Duchess or sink with the Duke,—the better man. The Duchess represents the soul, the highest part of our complex nature. The huntsman aids the Duchess (the soul) to free herself from the coarse, low, earth-nature, the Duke. So that the ‘Flight of the Duchess’ is “the supreme moment when the soul shakes off the bondage of self and finds its true freedom in others.” The paper is published in the Browning Society’s Transactions (Part iv., p. 49*), and is well worthy of study by those who seek a deeper spiritual meaning in “this mystic study of redeemed womanhood” than its primary sense conveys.

Notes.—Stanza iii., merlin, a species of hawk anciently much used in falconry; falcon-lanner, a species of long-tailed hawk. vi., urochs, wild bulls; buffle, buffalo. x., St. Hubert, before his conversion, was passionately devoted to hunting: he is the patron saint of hunters; venerers, prickers, and verderers, huntsmen, light horsemen, and preservers of the venison. xi., wind a mort, to sound a horn at the death of the stag; a fifty-part canon: Mr. Browning explained that “a canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated in various keys, and, being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the “canon”—the imperative law to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal; to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.” xiii., hernshaw, a heron; fernshaw, a fern-thicket; helicat, a hag; “imps the wing of the hawk”: to “imp” means to insert a feather in the broken wing of a bird. xiv., tomans, Persian gold coins. xv., gor-crow, the carrion crow. xvii., morion, a kind of open helmet. Orson the wood-knight: twin-brother of Valentine; born in a wood near Orleans, and carried off by a bear, which suckled him with its cubs. He became the terror of France, and was called “the wild man of the forest.”

Flower’s Name, The. (Garden Fancies, I.—Dramatic Lyrics.) [Published in Hood’s Magazine, July 1844.] With very few exceptions, Browning did not contribute to magazines. At the request of Mr. Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), he sent The Flower’s Name, Tokay and Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis to “help in making up some magazine numbers for poor Hood, then at the point of death from hæmorrhage of the lungs, occasioned by the enlargement of the heart, which had been brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil.” A lover visits a garden, and recalls a previous walk therein with the woman he loved; he remembers the flowers which she noticed, especially one whose name—“a soft, meandering Spanish name”—she gave him; he must learn Spanish “only for that slow, sweet name’s sake.” The very roses are only beautiful so far as they tell her footsteps.

Flower Songs, Italian. (Fra Lippo Lippi.) The flower songs in this poem are of the description known as the stornello. This is not to be confounded with the rispetto, which consists of a stanza of inter-rhyming lines, ranging from six to ten in number. “The Luccan and Umbrian stornello is much shorter, consisting indeed of a hemistich having some natural object which suggests the motive of the little poem. The nearest approach to the Italian stornello appears to be, not the rispetto, but the Welsh triban” (Encyc. Brit., xix. 272). See also notes to Fra Lippo Lippi.

Flute-music with an Accompaniment. (Asolando, 1889.) “Is not outside seeming real as substance inside?” A man hears a bird-like fluting; he wonders what sweet thoughts find expression in such sweet notes. Passion must give birth to such expression. Love, no doubt! Assurance, contentment, sorrow and hope—he detects all these moods in the music, softened and mellowed by the interposing trees. His lady companion brushes away all his fancy-spun notions by telling the prosy fact that the music proceeds from a desk-drudge, who spends the hour of his luncheon with the Youth’s Complete Instructor how to Play the Flute, the plain truth being that his hoarse and husky tootlings have not the remotest relation to the romantic ideas with which her male companion has associated them. Distance has altered the sharps to flats; the missing bar was not due to “kissing interruption,” but to a blunder in the playing. The man philosophises on this to the effect that, if fancy does everything for us, it matters little what may be the facts. If appearance produces the effect of reality, seeming is as good as being.

Forgiveness, A. (Pacchiarotto, and other Poems, 1876.) A man kneels in confession before a monk in a church. He tells the story of a life destroyed by an insane jealousy of his wife, who was innocent of any fault in the matter but some slight deception. The penitent was a statesman, happy in the love of wife and home, but neglectful of his duties to both in his absorption in the affairs of his sovereign. Returning home one night, he enters by the private garden way, and sees the veiled figure of a man flying from the house. Before him, as he turns to enter his door, he sees his wife, “stone-still, stone-white.” “Kill me!” she cried. “The man is innocent; the fault is mine alone. I love him as I hate you. Strike!” But he refrains from this speedy vengeance: henceforth they act a part before strangers—all goes on as though nothing had happened; alone, they never meet, never speak. Three years of this life pass, when one night the wife demands that the acting shall end; she will explain. “Follow me to my study,” he replies. The wife begins, “Since I could die now....” and then tells him she had loved him and had lost him through a lie. She had thought he gave away his soul in statecraft; she strung herself therefore, to teach him that the first fool she threw a fond look upon would prize beyond life the treasure which he neglected. It was contempt for the woman which filled his mind now. At this avowal his feeling rose to hate. He made her write her confession in words which he dictated, and with her own blood, drawn by the point of a poisoned poniard. The monk was the woman’s lover; the husband killed him also.

Founder of the Feast, The. This was the title of some inedited lines by Browning, written in the album presented to Mr. Arthur Chappell (of the St. James’s Hall Saturday and Monday Popular Concerts), April 5th, 1884. They are printed in the Browning Society’s Notes and Queries, vol. ii., p. 18*.

Fra Lippo Lippi. (Men and Women, 1855; Rome, 1853-54.) [The Man.] Fra Filippo Lippi (1412-69), the painter, was the son of a butcher in Florence. His mother died while he was a baby, and his father two years later than his mother. His aunt, Monna Lapaccia, took him to her home, but in 1420, when the boy was but eight years old, placed him in the community of the Carmelites of the Carmine in Florence. He stayed at the monastery till 1432, and there became a painter. He seems to have ultimately received a more or less complete dispensation from his religious vows. In 1452 he was appointed chaplain to the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence, and in 1457 he was made rector of S. Quirico at Legnaia. At this time he made a large income; but ever and again fell into poverty, probably on account of the numerous love affairs in which he was constantly indulging. Lippi died at Spoleto on or about Oct 8th, 1469. Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, tells the whole romantic story of his life.

[The Poem.] Brother Lippo the painter, working for the munificent House of the Medici, has been mewed up in the Palace, painting saints for Cosimo dei Medici. Unable longer to tolerate the restraint (for he was a dissolute friar, with no vocation for the religious life), he has tied his sheets and counterpane together and let himself out of the window for a night’s frolic with the girls whom he heard singing and skipping in the street below. He has been arrested by the watchmen of the city, who noticed his monastic garb, and did not consider it in accord with his present occupation. He is making his defence and bribing them to let him go. He tells them his history: how he was a baby when his mother and father died, and he was left starving in the street, picking up fig skins and melon parings, refuse and rubbish as his only food. One day he was taken to the monastery, and while munching his first bread that month was induced to “renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,” and so became a monk at eight years old. They tried him with books, and taught him some Latin; as his hard life had given him abundant opportunity for reading peoples’ faces, he found he could draw them in his copybooks, and so began to make pictures everywhere. The Prior noticed this, and thought he detected genius, and would not hear of turning the boy out: he might become a great painter and “do our church up fine,” he said. So the lad prospered; he began to draw the monks—the fat, the lean, the black, the white; then the folks at church. But he was too realistic in his work: his faces, arms and legs were too true to nature, and the Prior shook his head—

He told him his business was to paint men’s souls and forget there was such a thing as flesh:

And so they made him rub all out. The painter asks if this was sense:

He maintained that if we get beauty we get the best thing God invents. But he rubs out his picture and paints what they like, clenching his teeth with rage the while; but sometimes, when a warm evening finds him painting saints, the revolt is complete, and he plays the fooleries they have caught him at. He knows he is a beast, but he can appreciate the beauty, the wonder and the power in the shapes of things which God has made to make us thankful for them. They are not to be passed over and despised, but dwelt upon and wondered at, and painted too, for we must count it crime to let a truth slip. We are so made that we love things first when we see them painted, though we have passed them over unnoticed a hundred times before—

“The world is no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good.” “Ah, but,” says the Prior, “your work does not make people pray!” “But a skull and cross-bones are sufficient for that; you don’t need art at all.”... And then the poor monk begs the guard not to report him: he will make amends for the offence done to the Church; give him six months’ time, he will paint such a picture for a convent! It will please the nuns. “So six months hence. Good-bye! No lights: I know my way back!”

Notes.—“The Carmine’s my cloister,” the monastery of the friars Del Carmine, where Fra Lippo was brought up. “Cosimo of the Medici” (1389-1464), the great Florentine statesman, who was called the “Father of his country.” Saint Laurence == San Lorenzo at Florence, the church which contains the Medici tombs and several of Michael Angelo’s pictures. “Droppings of the wax to sell again”: in Catholic countries, where many wax torches are used, the wax drippings are carefully gathered by the poor boys to sell; in Spain they pick up even the ends of the wax vestas used by smokers at the bull fights for the same purpose. The Eight, the magistrates who governed Florence. Antiphonary, the Roman Service-Book, containing all that is sung in the choir—the antiphons, responses, etc.; it was compiled by Gregory the Great. Carmelites, monks of the Order of Mount Carmel in Syria; established in the twelfth century. Camaldolese, an order of monks founded by St. Romualdo in 1027; the name is derived from the family who owned the land on which the first monastery was built—the Campo Maldoli. “Preaching Friars”: the Dominicans, established by St. Dominic; the name of the “Brothers Preachers” or “Friars Preachers” was given them by Pope Innocent III. in 1215. Giotto, a great architect and painter (1266-1337); he was a friend of Dante. Brother Angelico == Fra Angelico; his real name was Giovanni da Fiesole; he was the famous religious painter, painting the soul and disregarding the flesh; he was said to paint some of his devotional pictures on his knees. Brother Lorenzo, Don Lorenzo. Monaco == the monk; he was a great painter, of the Order of the Camaldolese. Guidi == Tommaso Guidi or Masaccio, nicknamed Hulking Tom, was a painter, born 1401; he “laboured,” says the chronicler, in “nakeds.” “A St. Laurence at Prato,” near Florence, where are frescoes by Lippi: St. Laurence suffered martyrdom by being burned upon a gridiron; he bore it with such fortitude, says the legend, that he cried to his tormentors to turn him over, as he “was done on one side.” Chianti wine, a famous wine of Tuscany. Sant’ Ambrogio’s == Saint Ambrose’s at Florence. “I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe”: the beautiful picture of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence is the one referred to in these lines. The Browning Society in 1882 published a very fine photograph of this great work, by Alinari Brothers of Florence. The flower songs in the poem are of the variety known as the stornelli; the peasants of Tuscany sing these songs at their work, “and as one ends a song another caps it with a fresh one, and so they go on vying with each other. These stornelli consist of three lines. The first usually contains the name of a flower, which sets the rhyme, and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or repetition with the first.” [See Poet Lore, vol ii., p. 262. Miss R. H. Busk’s “Folk Songs of Italy,” and Miss Strettel’s “Spanish and Italian Folk Songs.”]