Front matter (continued 9)

They relieve his flue of the soot, suggest that he burns a deal of coal in his kitchen, and the neighbours do say he ought to consume his own smoke! Browning tells them that his housemaid says they bring more dirt into the house than they remove. But he will not be hard upon them: “’twas God made you dingy,” he says. He will give them soap, however, and let them dance away and make a rattle with their brushes, which is a large share of their whole business, he thinks. He bids them not trample his grass, and flings out a liberal largess and bids them be off, or his housemaid will serve them as Xantippe served Socrates once; she will take the first thing that comes to her hand.

Notes.—Verse 2, “my Kirkup”: this was Baron Kirkup, an admirer of art and letters, who was on friendly terms with Browning at Florence. He received a title of nobility from the King of Italy for his services to literature. It was he who discovered Dante’s portrait in the Bargello at Florence. San Bernardino: St. Bernardino of Siena became, at the age of twenty-three, one of the most celebrated and eloquent preachers among the Franciscans, but he refused all ecclesiastical honours. He founded the Order of the “Observants” (see note to v. 17). He was born 1380. Bazzi: the Italian painter Giannantonio Bazzi (who, until recent years, was erroneously named Razzi) bore the name “Sodona” or “Il Sodoma,” as a family name, and signed it upon some of his pictures. Bazzi was corrupted into Razzi, and “Sodona” into “Sodoma.” He lived c. 1479-1549. Beccafumi: a distinguished painter of the Siena school, who lived at the beginning of the sixteenth century. v. 3, Sopra sotto, topsy-turvy. v. 5, Quiesco, I rest; “priest armed with bell, book, and candle”: in the major excommunication the bell is rung, the sentence read from the book, and the lighted candle extinguished. v. 6, frescanti, painters in fresco. v. 8, Boanerges: sons of Thunder—an appellation given by Jesus Christ to His disciples James and John. v. 9, Juvenal: the celebrated Roman satirist; flourished at Rome in the latter half of the first century. He severely chastised the follies and vices of his times. He was particularly outspoken concerning the licentiousness of the Roman ladies. “Quæ nemo dixisset in toto, nisi (ædepol) ore illoto”: which things no one would have spoken about fully, unless (by Gad) he had a dirty mouth. (Juvenal’s satires about the Roman ladies are inconceivably filthy, and if the things were true it was ill to speak of them in this manner. St. Paul was equally severe, but adopted another method.) Apage: away! begone! v. 11, “non verbis sed factis”: not by words but by deeds. v. 12, “fetch grain out of Sicily”: Sicily has always been famous for its wheat. Even at the present day the best wheat for making Naples macaroni comes from this beautiful island, and the people take in return the inferior wheat of Italy. Sicily was in ancient times sacred to Ceres, the goddess of the corn-lands. v. 13, “Freed Ones,” “Bardotti”: a revolutionary club so called, which was broken up by the authorities in 1535. Pacchia and Pacchiarotto both seem to have had some connection with it; bailiwick: the precincts in which a bailiff has jurisdiction. v. 15, “kai tà loipa,” Και τα λειπόμενα == and so forth; kappas, taus, lambdas (κ.τ.λ.): the initial letters of the above Greek words, commonly used in learned books. v. 16, “per ignes incedis”: thou art treading upon fires. Not quite correctly quoted, as to the order of the words, from Horace (Od. II. i. 6), “Et incedis per ignes, suppositos cineri doloso.” v. 17, St. John’s Observance: “The Italians call the Franciscans Osservanti, in France Pères ou Frères de l’Observance, because they observed the original rule as laid down by St. Francis, went barefoot, and professed absolute poverty. This order became very popular” (Mrs. Jameson’s Monastic Orders). v. 18, “haud in posse sed esse mens”: mind as it is, not as it might be. v. 21, thill-horse, a thiller horse, a horse which goes between the shafts, or thills. v. 22, imposthume, an abscess or boil. v. 23, “sæculorum in sæcula!” for ever and ever; Benedicite: Bless ye! May you be blessed. v. 27, aubade [Fr.], open-air music performed at daybreak before the window of the person whom it is intended to honour. v. 27, skoramis, a vessel of dishonour. v. 28, karterotaton belos, the strongest dart (see Pindar’s 1st Olympic Ode). “which Pindar declares the true melos” == mode. ad hoc, hitherto. os frontis, the forehead. “hebdome, hieron emar,” the seventh, the holy day. “tei gar Apollona chrusaora, egeinato Leto”: on which the golden-sworded Apollo was born of Latona.

Painting Poems. The great poems of this class are Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, and Fra Lippo Lippi. (Vasari’s Lives of the Painters should be read in connection with the poems which deal with the Italian artists.)

Palma. The heroine of Sordello. She was the daughter of Eccelino, the Ghibelline, by Agnes Este. The historical personage represented by Browning’s Palma was Cunizza.

Pambo. (Jocoseria, 1883.) The poem is based upon a passage in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus, Lib. iv., cap. xviii., “concerning Ammon the Monk, and divers religious men inhabiting the Desert.” In the time of St. Antony, in the Nitrian desert, A.D. 373, there was a monk named “Pambo, a simple and an unlearned man, who came unto his friend to learn a Psalm; and hearing the first verse of the thirty-ninth Psalm, which is there read: ‘I said, I will take heed unto my ways, that I offend not with my tongue’—would not hear the second, but went away saying, ‘This one verse is enough for me, if I learn it as I ought to do.’ And when his teacher blamed him for absenting himself a whole six months, he answered for himself that he had not well learned the first verse. Many years after that, when one of his acquaintances demanded of him whether he had learned the verse, he said again, that in nineteen years he had scarce learned in life to fulfil that one line.” His life is taken from Palladius, in Lausiac and Rufin. Hist. Patr. Sozomen. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, under the date September 6th, gives the following interesting account of the character, whose history was apparently only partially known by Mr. Browning, as in the second verse of the poem he says he does not know who he was:—“St. Pambo betook himself in his youth to the great St. Antony in the desert, and, desiring to be admitted among his disciples, begged he would give him some lessons for his conduct. The great patriarch of the ancient monks told him he must take care always to live in a state of penance and compunction for his sins, must perfectly divest himself of all self-conceit, and never place the least confidence in himself or in his own righteousness; must watch continually over himself, and study to act in everything in such a manner as to have no occasion afterward to repent of what he had done; and that he must labour to put a restraint upon his tongue and his appetite. The disciple set himself earnestly to learn the practice of all these lessons. The mortification of gluttony was usually laid down by the fathers as one of the first steps towards bringing the senses and the passions into subjection: this, consisting in something exterior and sensible, its practice is more obvious, yet of great importance towards the reduction of all the sensual appetites of the mind, whose revolt was begun by the intemperance and disobedience of our first parents. Fasting is also, by the Divine appointment, a duty of the exterior part of our penance. What a reproach are the austere lives which so many saints have led to those slothful and sensual Christians whose god is the belly, and who walk enemies to the Cross of Christ, or who have not courage, at least by frequent self-denials, to curb this appetite! No man can govern himself who is a slave to this base gratification of sense. St. Pambo excelled most other ancient monks in the austerity of his continual fasts. The government of his tongue was no less an object of his watchfulness than that of his appetite. A certain religious brother to whom he had applied for advice began to recite to him the thirty-ninth psalm: ‘I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue.’ Which words Pambo had no sooner heard, but, without waiting for the second verse, he returned to his cell, saying that was enough for one lesson, and that he would go and study to put it in practice. This he did by keeping almost perpetual silence, and by weighing well, when it was necessary to speak, every word before he gave any answer. He often took several days to recommend consultations to God, and to consider what answer he should give to those who addressed themselves to him. By his perpetual attention not to offend in his words, he arrived at so great a perfection in this particular that he was thought to have equalled, if not to have excelled, St. Antony himself; and his answers were seasoned with so much wisdom and spiritual prudence that they were received by all as if they had been oracles dictated by heaven. Abbot Poemen said of our saint: ‘Three exterior practices are remarkable in Abbot Pambo: his fasting every day till evening, his silence, and his great diligence in manual labour.’ St. Antony inculcated to all his disciples the obligation of assiduity in constant manual labour in a solitary life, both as a part of penance and a necessary means to expel sloth and entertain the vigour of the mind in spiritual exercises. This lesson was confirmed to him by his own experience, and by a heavenly vision related in the Lives of the Fathers as follows: ‘Abbot Antony, as he was sitting in the wilderness, fell into a grievous temptation of spiritual darkness; and he said to God: “Lord, I desire to be saved; but my thoughts are a hindrance to me. What shall I do in my present affliction? How shall I be saved?” Soon after he rose up, and, going out of his cell, saw a man sitting and working, then rising from his work to pray; afterward sitting down again and twisting his cord, after this rising to pray. He understood this to be an angel sent by God to teach him what he was to do, and he heard the angel say to him: “Do so, and thou shalt be saved.” Hereat the Abbot was filled with joy and confidence, and by this means he cheerfully persevered to the end.’ St. Pambo most rigorously observed this rule, and feared to lose one moment of his precious time. Out of love of humiliations, and a fear of the danger of vain-glory and pride, he made it his earnest prayer for three years that God would not give him glory before men, but rather contempt. Nevertheless God glorified him in this life, but made him by His grace to learn more perfectly to humble himself amidst applause. The eminent grace which replenished his soul showed itself in his exterior by a certain air of majesty, and a kind of light which shone on his countenance, like what we read of Moses, so that a person could not look steadfastly on his face. St. Antony, who admired the purity of his soul and his mastery over his passions, used to say that his fear of God had moved the Divine Spirit to take up His resting-place in him. St. Pambo, after he left St. Antony, settled in the desert of Nitria, on a mountain, where he had a monastery. But he lived some time in the wilderness of the Cells, where Rufinus says he went to receive his blessing in the year 374. St. Melania the Elder, in the visit she made to the holy solitaries who inhabited the deserts of Egypt, coming to St. Pambo’s monastery on Mount Nitria, found the holy abbot sitting at his work, making mats. She gave him three hundred pounds weight of silver, desiring him to accept that part of her store for the necessities of the poor among the brethren. St. Pambo, without interrupting his work, or looking at her or her present, said to her that God would reward her charity. Then, turning to his disciple, he bade him take the silver and distribute it among all the brethren in Lybia and the isles who were most needy, but charged him to give nothing to those of Egypt, that country being rich and plentiful. Melania continued some time standing, and at length said: ‘Father, do you know that here is three hundred pounds weight of silver?’ The Abbot, without casting his eye upon the chest of silver, replied: ‘Daughter, He to whom you made this offering very well knows how much it weighs without being told. If you give it to God, who did not despise the widow’s two mites, and even preferred them to the great presents of the rich, say no more about it.’ This Melania herself related to Palladius. St. Athanasius once desired St. Pambo to come out of the desert to Alexandria, to confound the Arians by giving testimony to the divinity of Jesus Christ. Our saint, seeing in that city an actress dressed up for the stage, wept bitterly; and being asked the reason of his tears, said he wept for the sinful condition of that unhappy woman, also for his own sloth in the Divine service, because he did not take so much pains to please God as she did to ensnare men. When Abbot Theodore begged of St. Pambo some words of instruction: ‘Go,’ said he, ‘and exercise mercy and charity toward all men. Mercy finds confidence before God.’ To the priest of Nitria who asked him how the brethren ought to live, he said: ‘They must live in constant labour and the exercise of all virtues, watching to preserve their conscience free from stain, especially from giving scandal or offence to any neighbour.’ St. Pambo said, a little before his death: ‘From the time that I came into this desert, and built myself a cell in it, I do not remember that I have ever ate any bread but what I had earned by my own labour, nor that I ever spoke any word of which I afterward repented. Nevertheless, I go to God as one who has not yet begun to serve Him.’ He died seventy years old, without any sickness, pain, or agony, as he was making a basket, which he bequeathed to Palladius, who was at that time his disciple, the holy man having nothing else to give him. Melania took care of his burial, and having obtained this basket, kept it to her dying day. St. Pambo is commemorated by the Greeks on several days. It was a usual saying of this great director of souls in the rules of Christian perfection, ‘If you have a heart, you may be saved.’ The extraordinary austerities and solitude of a St. Antony or a St. Pambo are not suitable to persons engaged in the world,—they are even inconsistent with their obligations; but all are capable of disengaging their affections from inordinate passions and attachment to creatures, and of attaining to a pure and holy love of God, which may be made the principle of their thoughts and ordinary actions, and sanctify the whole circle of their lives. Of this all who have a heart are, through the Divine grace, capable. In whatever circumstances we are placed, we have opportunities of subduing our passions and subjecting our senses by frequent denials, of watching over our hearts by self-examination, of purifying our affections by assiduous recollection and prayer, and of uniting our souls to God by continual exterior and interior acts of holy love. Thus may the gentleman, the husbandman, or the shopkeeper, become an eminent saint, and make the employments of his state an exercise of all heroic virtues, and so many steps to perfection and to eternal glory.”—Mr. Browning, in the last verse, addresses his critics in a jocular manner. He owns he is very much like Pambo,—he has spent much time in looking to his ways; yet, as he is so often reminded by his reviewers and critics, he still feels, he says, that he offends with his tongue!

Note.—“Arcades sumus ambo”: “we are both alike eccentric.” From Vergil’s Eclogues (vii.), where Corydon and Thyrsis are described as both Arcadians.

Pan and Luna. (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880.) Pan was the god of shepherds, of huntsmen, and of all the inhabitants of the country. He was a monster in appearance, had two small horns on his head, his complexion was ruddy, his nose flat, and his legs, thighs, and feet and tail, were those of a goat. The god of shepherds lived chiefly in Arcadia, and he is described by the poets as frequently occupied in deceiving and entrapping the nymphs of the neighbourhood. Luna was the same as Diana or Cynthia—names given to the moon. Mr. Browning quotes from Vergil, Georgics, iii., 390, at the head of the poem the words, “Si credere dignum est” (if we may trust report), the context giving the account according to Vergil—

The legend was the poetical way of accounting for an eclipse of the moon. The naked maid-moon flying through the night sought shelter in a fleecy cloud mass caught on some pine-tree top. “Shamed she plunged into its shroud,” when she was grasped by rough red Pan, the god of all that tract, who had made a billowy wrappage of wool tufts to simulate a cloud. Vergil says that Luna was a not unwilling conquest; Mr. Browning does more justice to the supposed austerity of the goddess of night. It is evident, however, that the moral of the poem is that she yielded herself to the love of Pan out of compassion. Pan exalted himself in aspiring to her austere purity; Luna voluntarily subjected herself to the lower nature out of sympathy, thus preserving her modesty by sanctifying it with sacrifice.

Paracelsus. [The Man.] Paracelsus was the son of a physician, William Bombast von Hohenheim, who taught him the rudiments of alchemy, surgery, and medicine; he studied philosophy under several learned masters, chief of whom was Trithemius, of Spanheim, Abbot of Wurzburg, a great adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. Under this teacher he acquired a taste for occult studies, and formed a determination to use them for the welfare of mankind. He could hardly have studied under a better man in those dark days. Tritheim himself was well in advance of most of the teachers of his time; he was of the Theosophists or Mystics, for they are of the same class, and probably, in their German form, derived their origin from the labours of Tauler of Strasburg, who afterwards, with “the Friends of God,” made their headquarters at Basle. The mysticism which is so dear to Mr. Browning, and which perhaps finds its highest expression in the poem which we are considering, is not therefore out of place. When he left his home he went to study in the mines of the Tyrol. There, we are told, he learned mining and geology, and the use of metals in the practice of medicine. “I see,” he says, “the true use of chemistry is not to make gold, but to prepare medicines.” Paracelsus is rightly termed “the father of modern chemistry.” He discovered the metals zinc and bismuth, hydrogen gas, and the medical uses of many minerals, the most important of which were mercury and antimony. He gave to medicine the greatest weapon in her armoury—the tincture of opium. His celebrated azoth some say was magnetised electricity, and others that his magnum opus was the science of fire. He acted as army surgeon to several princes in Italy, Belgium, and Denmark. He travelled in Portugal and Sweden, and came to England; going thence to Transylvania, he was carried prisoner to Tartary, visiting the famous colleges of Samarcand, and went thence with the son of the Khan on an embassy to Constantinople. All this time he had no books. His only book was Nature; he interrogated her at first-hand. He mixed with the common people, and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews, gipsies, and tramps, so gaining scraps of knowledge wherever he could, and giving colourable cause to his enemies to say he was nothing but a drunken vagabond fond of low company. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old country nurse than from a university lecturer, and was denounced accordingly and—naturally. If there was one thing he detested more than another, it was the principle of authority. He bent his head to no man. Paracelsus, as we find him in his works, was full of love for humanity, and it is much more probable that he learned his lessons while travelling, and mixing amongst the poor and wretched, and while a prisoner in Tartary, where he doubtless imbibed much Buddhist and occult lore from the philosophers of Samarcand, than that anything like the Constantinople drama was enacted. Be this as it may, we have abundant evidence in the many extant works of Paracelsus that he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit and doctrines of the Eastern occultism, and was full of love for humanity. A quotation from his De Fundamento Sapientiæ must suffice: “He who foolishly believes is foolish; without knowledge there can be no faith. God does not desire that we should remain in darkness and ignorance. We should be all recipients of the Divine wisdom. We can learn to know God only by becoming wise. To become like God we must become attracted to God, and the power that attracts us is love. Love to God will be kindled in our hearts by an ardent love for humanity, and a love for humanity will be caused by a love to God.” In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basle, where he was fortunate in curing Froben, the great printer, by his laudanum, when he had the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, who was associated with Œcolampadius; and soon after, upon the recommendation of Œcolampadius, he was appointed by the city magnates a professor of physics, medicine and surgery, with a considerable salary; at the same time they made him city physician, to the duties of which office he requested might be added inspector of drug shops. This examination made the druggists his bitterest enemies, as he detected their fraudulent practices: they combined to set the other doctors of the city against him, and as these were exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, poor Paracelsus found himself in a hornet’s nest. We find him then at Basle University in 1526, the earliest teacher of science on record. He has become famous as a physician, the medicines which he has discovered he has successfully used in his practice; he was now in the eyes of his patients at least,

In 1528 we find him at Colmar, in Alsatia. He has been driven by the priests and doctors from Basle. He had been called to the bedside of some rich cleric who was ill; he cured him, but so speedily that his fee was refused. Though not at all a mercenary man (for he always gave the poor his services gratuitously) he sued the priest, but the judge refused to interfere, and Paracelsus used strong language to him, and had to fly to escape punishment. The closing scene of the drama is laid in a cell in the hospital of Salzburg. It is the year 1541, his age but forty-eight, and the divine martyr of science lies dying. Recent investigations in contemporary records have proved that he had been attacked by the servants of certain physicians who were his jealous enemies, and that in consequence of a fall he sustained a fracture of the skull, which proved fatal in a few days. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, but in 1752 his bones were removed to the porch of the church, and a monument was erected to his memory by the archbishop. When his body was exhumed it was discovered that his skull had been fractured during life. Writers on magic, of whom Dr. Hartmann is one, describe azoth as being “the creative principle in Nature; the universal panacea or spiritual life-giving air—in its lowest aspects, ozone, oxygen, etc.” Much ridicule has been cast upon Paracelsus for his belief in the possibility of generating homunculi; but after all he may only mean that chemistry will succeed in bridging the gulf between the living and the not-living by the production of organic bodies from inorganic substances. Paracelsus held that the constitution of man consists of seven principles: (1) The elementary body; (2) The archæus (vital force); (3) The sidereal body; (4) The animal soul; (5) The rational soul; (6) The spiritual soul; (7) The man of the new Olympus (the personal God). Those who are familiar with Indian philosophy will recognise this anthropology as identical with its own. Paracelsus, in his De Natura Rerum, says, “The external man is not the real man, but the real man is the soul in connection with the Divine Spirit.” We understand now what Mr. Browning means when he says that “knowing is opening the way to let the imprisoned splendour escape.” His idea that all Nature was living, and that there is nothing which has not a soul hidden within it—a hidden principle of life—led him to the conclusion that, in place of the filthy concoctions and hideous messes that were in vogue with the doctors of his time, it was possible to give tinctures and quintessences of drugs, such as we now call active principles,—in a word, that it is more reasonable and pleasant to take a grain or two of quinine than a tablespoonful of timber. He set himself to study the causes and the symptoms of disease, and sought a remedy in common-sense methods. Mr. Browning is right when he makes him say he had a “wolfish hunger after knowledge”; and surely there never lived a man whose aim was to devote its fruits to the service of humanity more than his. There are many hints in his works that he knew a great deal more than he cared to make known. Take this example. He said: “Every peasant has seen a magnet will attract iron. I have discovered that the magnet, besides this visible power, has another and a concealed power.” Again: “A magnet may be prepared out of some vital substance that will attract vitality.” Mesmer, who lived nearly three hundred years after him, reaped the glory of a discovery made, as Lessing says, by the martyred fire-philosopher who died in Salzburg hospital. “Matter is the visible body of the invisible God,” says Paracelsus. Matter to him was not dead. “Matter is, so to say, coagulated vapour, and is connected with spirit by an intermediate principle which it receives from the spirit.” We cannot understand Paracelsus and the science of his time without a little inquiry as to what was meant by the search for the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, and the universal medicine. It is very difficult to discern what was really intended by these phrases. Dr. Anna Kingsford, who paid considerable attention to the hermetic philosophy, says: “These are but terms to denote pure spirit and its essential correlative, a will absolutely firm, and inaccessible alike to weakness from within and assault from without.” Another writer ingeniously tries to explain the universal solvent as really nothing but pure water, which has the property of more or less dissolving all the elements. His alcahest—as he termed it—as far as I can make out was nothing more than a preparation of lime; but writers of this school only desired to be understood by the initiated, and probably the words actually used meant something quite different. There was a reason for using an incomprehensible style for fear of the persecutions of the Church, and these books, like the rolls in Ezekiel, were “written within and without.” Many great truths, we know, were enshrouded in symbolic names and fanciful metaphors. It is certain that Paracelsus, like his predecessors, sought to possess the elixir of life. It does not appear from his writings that he thought it possible to render the physical body immortal; but he held it to be the duty—as the medical profession holds it still—of the physician to preserve life as long as possible. A great deal of matter attributed to Paracelsus on this subject is spurious, but there are some of his authentic writings which are very curious and entertaining. He describes the process of making the Primum Ens Melissæ, which after all turns out to be nothing but an alkaline tincture of the leaves of the common British plant known as the Balm or Melissa officinalis. Some very amusing stories are told of the virtues of this concoction by Lesebure, a physician to Louis XIV., and which speak volumes for the credulity of the doctors of those times. Another of his great secrets was his Primum Ens Sanguinis. This is extremely simple, being nothing more than the venous injection of blood from the arm of “a healthy young person.” In this we see that he anticipated our modern operation of transfusion. His doctrine of signatures was very curious and most absurd. He thought that “each plant was in a sympathetic relation with the Macrocosm and consequently with the Microcosm.” “This signature,” he says, “is often expressed even in the exterior forms of things.” So he prescribed the plant we call euphrasy or “eye bright” for complaints of the eyes, because of the likeness to an eye in the flower; small-pox was treated with mulberries because their colour showed that they were proper for diseases of the blood. This sort of thing still lingers in country domestic medicine. Pulmonaria officinalis or Lungwort, so called from its spotted leaves looking like diseased lungs, has long been used for chest complaints. (See my “Paracelsus the Reformer of Medicine” in Browning’s Message to his Time.)

Paracelsus. [The Poem, 1835.] Paracelsus Aspires: Book I. (Würzburg, 1512.) Paracelsus the student is talking with his friends Festus and Michal on the eve of his departure to seek knowledge of the deeper sort, that cannot be learned from books,—in the great world of men. It is a time to arouse young men. The dark night of ignorance yields to the rising sun of learning, for the art of printing and the glories of the Revival of Learning have liberated the minds of men. Authority no longer suffices: the men of Germany will see for themselves. So Paracelsus, pupil of the learned Abbot Trithemius, resolves to forsake the monastery cell and the ancient books, and go out to seek for himself knowledge in the byways of the world. His friends are timid. They mistrust his method; they call him proud and too self-confident, advise him to stick to the beaten ways of learning, nor venture into the tangled forests and pathless deserts which God has evidently closed against man’s rash intrusion. Paracelsus, on the contrary, feels that he has a great commission from God: he dare not subdue the vast longings which fill his soul. God’s command is laid upon him, and he must answer to His will. Festus objects that a man must not presume to serve God save in the appointed channels. God looks to means as well as ends, and Paracelsus ought not to scorn the ordinary means of learning. The impatient student suggests that his fierce energy, his striving instinct, the irresistible force which works within him, are proofs that he possesses a God-given strength never imparted in vain. He will abjure the idle arts of magic. New hopes animate him, new light dawns upon him: he is set apart for a great work. “Then,” replies his friend, “pursue it in an approved retreat; turn not aside from the famed spots where Learning dwells. Rome and Athens shall teach you; leave seas and deserts to their desolation.” Paracelsus declares his aspiration to be no less than a passionate yearning to comprehend the works of God, God Himself, all God’s intercourse with the human mind. He goes to prove his soul. God, who guides the bird in his trackless way, will guide him: he will arrive in God’s good time. His friends think that all this may be but self-delusion; at least, he is selfish to attempt this work alone. Festus declares that were he elect for such a task he would encircle himself with the love of his fellows, and not cut himself off from human weal; for there is nothing so monstrous in the world as a being not knowing what love is. Michal, the tender woman friend, urges him to cast his hopes away—warns him that he is too proud. He will find what he seeks, but will perish so! Paracelsus protests that he does not lightly give up either the pleasures of life or the love they praise. Truth, he says, is within ourselves; knowing consists in opening a way where the splendour imprisoned within the soul may escape. It comes not from outward things. He offers, therefore, no defiance to God in desiring to know. Humanity may beat the angels; yet, if once man rises to his true stature, Festus believes, and so does Michal, that Paracelsus will succeed. He plunges for the pearl; they wait his rise.

Paracelsus Attains: Book II. The scene is laid in a Greek conjuror’s house at Constantinople, 1521. Paracelsus is mentally taking stock of his attainments—what gained, what lost. He has made discoveries, but the produce of his toil is fragmentary—a confused mass of fact and fancy. He can keep on the stretch no longer: he will learn by magic what he has failed to learn by labour. His overwrought brain demands rest; even in failure he will have rest. True, he had hoped for attainment once, but that is past. His heart was human once. He had loving friends in Würzburg; but love has gone, and his life’s one idea has absorbed him, to obtain at all costs his reward in the lump. God may take pleasure in confounding such pride. He may have been fighting sleep off for death’s sake. Is his mind stricken? He believes that God would warn him before He struck. And now from within he hears a voice. It is that of Aprile, the spirit of a departed poet, who has aspired to love beauty only. As Paracelsus has sought knowledge alone, Aprile would love infinitely all forms of art and all the delights of Nature. Paracelsus demands he should do obeisance to him, the Knower. Aprile refuses to acknowledge the kingship of one who knows nothing of the loveliness of life. Paracelsus now sees the error into which both have fallen. He has excluded love, as Aprile has excluded knowledge. They are two halves of one dissevered world. Paracelsus, learning now wherein lies his defect, feels that he has attained.

Paracelsus: Book III. At Basle, 1526. Paracelsus meets his friend Festus, who has come to the famous university town to see the wondrous physician, whom they call “life’s dispenser, idol of the courts and schools.” He has heard him lecture from his Professor’s chair; has seen the benches thronged with eager students; has gathered from their approving murmurs full corroboration of his hopes: his pupils worship him. Paracelsus admits his outward success, but confides to his friend that he is indeed most miserable at heart. The hopes which fed his youth have not been realised. He aspired to know God: he has attained—a professorship at Basle! He has wrought certain cures by means of drugs whose uses he has discovered; he has a pile of diplomas and licences; he has received (what he values most) a generous acknowledgment of his merit from Erasmus; and he has a crowded class-room, and, in place of his high aims, there have sprung up in his soul like fungi at the roots of a noble tree, a host of petty, vile delights. As for his eager following, mere novelty and ignorant amazement, coupled with innate dulness and the opposition to the regular system of the schools, will account for it. Seeing all this, and feeling that the work to which he has addressed himself is too hard for him, he has sunk in his own esteem, fallen from his ambition, and has become brutal, half-stupid and half-mad. He feels that he precedes his age in his contempt and scorn for all who worked before him on the same path. He has in public burned the books of Aetius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna, and Averroes.

Paracelsus Aspires. Book IV. The scene is at Colmar, in Alsatia, at an inn, 1528. Yet once more Paracelsus aspires. He has sent for his friend Festus to tell him that he is exposed to the world as a quack, that he is cast off by those who erstwhile worshipped him, and denounced by those whom he has served. He has saved the life of a church dignitary, who not only refused afterwards to pay his fee, but made Basle impossible for him. His pupils grew tired of him when he attempted to teach them and gave up amusing them. The faculty drew off from him when their old methods were interfered with; and so he turned his back on the university. And once more the philosopher has started on his travels, seeking to know with all the enthusiasm of his youth—with the old aims, but not by the same means. No longer the lean ascetic, debarring his soul of her rightful pleasures; but embracing all the joys of life, and combining pleasure with knowledge. This is to be his new method. His appetites, he must own, are degraded—his joys impure. Festus warns him that the base pleasures which have superseded his nobler aims will never content him. Paracelsus declares he lives to enjoy all he can and to know all he can. He has cast off his remorseless care, is hardened in his fault; and as he sings the song of—

his friend Festus, alarmed at this impiety, urges him to renounce the past, to wait death’s summons amid holy sights, and return with him to Einsiedeln. Paracelsus declares this to be impossible: his baser life forbids; a sneering devil is within him; he is weary; the wine-cup, in which he has long tried to drown his disappointment, fails him now; he can hardly sink deeper. Festus attempts to comfort and advise: he too has felt sorrow: sweet Michal is dead. This rouses Paracelsus to endeavour on his part to comfort Festus by declaring his faith in the soul’s immortality.

Paracelsus Attains. Book V. In a cell in the hospital of Salzburg, in 1541, Paracelsus lies dying. His faithful friend is by his side, watching through the weary night; and as he watches the patient, he prays for the tortured champion of man. He has sinned, but surely he has sought God’s praise. Had God granted him success, it must have been to His honour. Say he erred, God fashioned him and knew how he was made. Festus could have sat quietly at the feet of God. He could never have erred in this great way. God is not made like us. It will be like Him to save him! Now Paracelsus awakes; his failing strength struggles like the flame of an expiring taper. At first, in half-delirious phrases, he tells of the hissing and contempt which struck at his heart at Basle—the measureless scorn heaped on him, as they called him quack and cheat and liar. And now he cries that human love is gone; he dreams of Aprile; he calls on God for one hour of strength to set his heart on Him and love. And then, with a clearer consciousness, he recognises Festus, who tells him that God will take him to His breast, and on earth splendour shall rest upon his name for ever,—the name of the master-mind, the thinker, the explorer. He sings of the gliding Mayne they knew so well; and the simple words loose the dying man’s heart, for he knows he is dying, and his varied life drifts by him. There is time yet to speak; but he will rise and speak standing, as becomes a teacher of men. He has sinned, he feels his need for mercy, and he can trust God. It was meant to be with him as had fallen out. His fevered thirst for knowledge was born in him. He has learned so much of God: His joy in creation; His intentions with regard to man. His final work the product of the world’s remotest ages; its æons of preparation; the love mingling with everything that tended towards the highest work of creation; the progress which is the law of life. The tendency to God he can descry even in man’s present imperfection. He sees now where his error lay: how he overlooked the good in man; how he had failed to note the good in evil, and to detect the love beneath the mask of hate; how he had denied the half-reasons, the faint aspirings, the struggles for truth; the littleness in man, despite his errors; the upward tendency in all his weakness. All this he knew not, and he failed. Yet if he

He “shall emerge one day.” And so he sinks to rest. And this is Browning’s Paracelsus.

It is in Paracelsus (the work that posterity will probably estimate as Browning’s greatest) that we must look for the strongest proof of his sympathy with man’s desire to know and bend the forces of Nature to his service. To some students this magnificent work will appear only the string of pearls and precious stones that some of us consider Sordello to be. To others it is a drama illustrating the contending forces of love and knowledge; others, again, find in it only an elaborate discussion on the Aristotelian and Platonic systems of philosophy. It is none of these alone: rather, if a single sentence could describe it, it is the Epic of the Healer, not of the hero who stole from heaven a jealously-guarded fire, but of him who won from heaven what was waiting for a worthy recipient to take and help us to. In so far as Paracelsus came short, it was deficiency of love that hindered him; of his striving after knowledge, and what he won for man, the epic tells in words and music that, to me at least, have no equal in the whole range of literature. It is most remarkable that long before the scientific men of our time had given Paracelsus credit for the noble work he did for mankind, and the lasting boon many of his discoveries conferred upon the race, Mr. Browning, in this wonderful poem, recognised both his labours and their results at their true value, and raising his reputation at this late hour from the infamy with which his enemies and biographers had covered it, set him in his proper place amongst the heroes and martyrs of science. We owe the poet a debt of gratitude for this rehabilitation. No man could have written this transcendent poem who had less than Browning’s power of thrusting aside the accidents and accretions of a character, and getting at the naked germ from which springs the life of the real man. That no follower of medicine, no chemist, no disciple of science, did this for Paracelsus is, in the splendid light of Mr. Browning’s research and penetration, a remarkable instance of the fact that the unjust verdicts of a time and a class need to be reversed in a clearer atmosphere, and in freedom from class prejudices not often accorded to contemporary biographers. A poet alone could never have done us this service; and a single attentive perusal of this work is enough to show that the intimate blending of the scientific with the poetic faculty could alone have effected the restoration. How lovingly the poet has taken this world-benefactor’s remains from the ditch into which his profession had cast them, and laid them in his own beautiful sepulchre, gemmed, chiselled, and arabesqued by all the lovely imagery of his fancy, no reader of Browning’s Paracelsus needs to be told.

[For a complete study of the life and work of Paracelsus, and Mr. Browning’s poem thereon, see the chapter “Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine,” in my Browning’s Message to his Time (Sonnenschein).]

Notes to Book I.—Würzburg is one of the most ancient and historically important towns of Germany. Its bishops were made dukes of Franconia in 1120. Its university was founded in 1582. Trithemius of Spanheim was abbot of Würzburg, and was a great astrologer and alchemist. Einsiedeln, in Canton Schwyz, Switzerland, is a noted place of pilgrimage on the Alpbach, thirty miles from Zurich, under the Herrenberg, with an abbey founded in 861, containing a black statue of the Virgin. Immense quantities of missals, rosaries, etc., are produced there. Zwingle was a priest here 1515-19; and not far from the town is the house where Paracelsus was born. Population now about 7650. Gier-eagle: supposed to be a small vulture (Lev. xi. 18). Black arts: Black magic == sorcery, as opposed to white magic == science. The Stagirite: Aristotle, who was born at Stagira, in Macedon.

Notes to Book II.—Constantinople, the city of the East where many astrologers practised their art. “A Turk verse along a scimitar”: the Arabs use verses of the Koran in the decoration of their walls, pottery, arms, etc. The Alhambra at Granada is profusely decorated in this way. The Arabic, Persian, and Turkish letters lend themselves admirably to ornamental purposes. Arch-genethliac: a genethliac is a calculator of nativities—an astrologer.

Notes to Book III.—Pansies: if these flowers were, as is said, favourites with Paracelsus, the choice was appropriate. Pensées for “the thinker, the explorer,” and “heartsease” for the anxious and overworked man. Rhasis, or Rhazes, was a distinguished physician of Bagdad (925-6). Basil == Basel, Basle. Œcolampadius, a Reformer of Basle, friend of Erasmus. Castellanus was Pierre Duchatel, a French prelate. When at Basle, Erasmus procured him employment as a corrector of the press with Frobenius. He was bishop of Tulle in 1539, of Maçon in 1544, and in 1551 of Orleans. He was a tolerant man in an intolerant age. Munsterus, a Christian Socialist, connected with the Peasants’ War; executed 1525. Frobenius, the friend of Erasmus, cured by Paracelsus. He was a famous printer at Basle. Rear mice: probably a device in the arms on the gate. Lachen, a village of 1200 inhabitants, on the margin of the lake of Zurich. The holy hermit Meinrad, the founder of Einsiedeln, originally lived on the top of the Etzel, near here. “Cross-grained devil in my sword”: the long sword of Paracelsus is famous:—

Naudæus (in his “History of Magic”) observes of this familiar spirit, “that though the alchymists maintain that it was the secret of the philosopher’s stone, yet it were more rational to believe that, if there was anything in it, it was certainly two or three doses of his laudanum, which he never went without, because he did strange things with it, and used it as a medicine to cure almost all diseases.” “Sudary of the Virgin”: a handkerchief, a relic of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Suffumigation, a medical fumigation, such as was used by Hippocrates. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam in 1466. The home of his old age was Basel, to which place he was attracted by the fame of the printing press of Frobenius. Here he made the acquaintance of Zwingle and Holbein, and other men full of the desire for learning. “Ape at the bed’s foot”: patients who suffer from delirium frequently see apes, rats, cats, and other animals and figures, mocking them at the foot of the bed. “Spain’s cork-groves”: cork is the bark of the cork-oak (Quercus suber). It grows in Spain, and is most abundant in Catalonia and Valencia. “Præclare! Optime!” == Bravo! well done! “I precede my age”: it has only recently been discovered how much our modern science owes to the labours and researches of Paracelsus. Aëtius was an Arian doctor, who was very skilful in medical disputation. He died at Constantinople in 367. Oribasius was the court physician of Julian the Apostate (326-403). Galen was a great anatomist and a physiological physician. Rhasis (see note, p. 324). Serapion, an Alexandrian physician, “a great name in antiquity.” Avicenna, an Arabian philosopher and physician, born about A.D. 980, who presented to his countrymen the doctrines of Galen blended with those of Aristotle. Averröes, an Arabian philosopher and physician, born at Cordova in 1126, the interpreter of the Aristotelian philosophy to the Mohammedans. Zuinglius == Zwingle the Reformer, of Zurich. Carolstadius, or Carlstadt, one of the first Reformers. He was professor of divinity at Wittemberg, and early joined Luther in the new religion. He became the leader of the fanatical sect of iconoclasts at Wittemberg, and excited them to excesses. He was banished, and died at Basle in 1541. Suabia, the name of an ancient duchy in the south-west part of Germany. Oporinus: lived two years in close intimacy with Paracelsus as his secretary, and has been suspected of defaming his memory. “Sic itur ad astra”: such is the way to immortality. Liechtenfels, a canon who was cured by Paracelsus when he was in danger of death, and refused afterwards to pay the stipulated fee.

Notes to Book IV.—“Quid multa?” why say more? Cassia, an inferior kind of cinnamon. “Sandal-buds”: the sandal is a low tree, like a privet, and has a great fragrance. “Stripes of labdanum” or ladanum: a fragrant, resinous exudation from the plants Cystus creticus and Cystus ladaniferus. Aloes: the fragrant resin of the agalloch or lign-aloe of Scripture. Nard == spikenard; very fragrant. “Sweetness from Egyptian shroud”: the faint odour from the spices used to embalm the mummy. “Fiat experientia corpore vili,” or fiat experimentum in corpore vili: Let the experiment be made on a body of no value (a hospital patient, e.g.!)

Notes to Book V.—Salzburg: the beautifully situated old city of Austria, eighty-seven miles S.E. of Munich. “Jove and the Titans”: the Titans were the sons of Saturn, who made war against Jupiter; and though they were of gigantic size, they were subdued. Phæton, the son of Phœbus and Clymene, who requested his father to give him leave to drive his chariot. The rash youth was unable to bear the light and heat, and dropped the reins. To prevent a general conflagration Jupiter struck him with thunder, and he dropped into the river Eridanus. Galen of Pergamos: an eminent physician of the time of Trajan. Persic Zoroaster “was one of the greatest teachers of the East, the founder of what was the national religion of the Perso-Iranian people from the time of the Achæmenidæ to the close of the Sassanian period.” He founded the wisdom of the Magi. The Zend-Avesta is the great Zoroastrian bible. “Thus he dwells in all,” etc., down to “Man begins anew a tendency to God,” is a faithful representation of the teaching of the Kabbalah (see Encyc. Brit., vol. xiii., p. 812, last ed.): “The whole universe, however, was incomplete, and did not receive its finishing stroke till man was formed, who is the acme of the creation and the microcosm. ‘Man is both the import and the highest degree of creation, for which reason he was formed on the sixth day. As soon as man was created everything was complete, including the upper and nether worlds, for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms’” (Zohar, iii., 48).

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. To wit: Bernard de Mandeville, Daniel Bartoli, Christopher Smart, George Bubb Dodington, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison. Introduced by A Dialogue between Apollo and the Fates; concluded by Another between John Fust and his Friends. The title-page stands thus, and the following dedication is on the next page: “In Memoriam J. Milsand. Obiit iv. Sept. MDCCCLXXXVI. Absens absentem auditque videtque.” Published 1887. M. Milsand was a well-known French critic, and was an early admirer of Mr. Browning’s works. Sordello was dedicated to M. Milsand in its revised edition. The Parleyings volume is dealt with in a lucid and sympathetic manner in Mr. Nettleship’s Essays and Thoughts.

Parting at Morning. See Meeting at Night, to which this poem is the sequel.

Patriot, The. An Old Story. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A patriot who has been the people’s idol, and now, having fallen from his pedestal, is on his way to execution. A year ago that very day they would have given him the sun from their skies had he asked it in that city whose air was a mist of joy bells. He strove his hardest to pluck down that sun to give them, and to-day the year is run out, and he goes bound, with bleeding forehead from the pelting stones, to the shambles. But God will repay, and he feels safe with that. It has been thought that this poem refers to Arnold of Brescia. Mr. Browning contradicted this.

Paul Desforges Maillard. (Two Poets of Croisic.) He is the second of the Poets, René Gentilhomme being the first. He competed for a prize at the French Academy, and was unsuccessful. The poem tells how he made his name known through his sister’s influence.

Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1832). The first work of the poet, and his embryonic work, because it contains in their rudiments all the peculiarities and powers of his genius. He wrote nothing which was not the legitimate development of the forces which we see in this inchoate work. It is nebulous, but it is a nebula which has within itself the potentiality of worlds of thought. Misty and vague as it everywhere seems, it is influenced by laws which will concentrate its thought into stars and planets, such as Paracelsus, and the Ring and the Book. It is autobiographical, and admits us into the laboratory of the writer’s thought; it is marvellously consistent with the latest utterances of the poet on the subjects nearest to his heart. High thoughts, which through the years of a long life will live in royal splendour in his brain, are born here in travail, as regal things are wont to be. It was a boy’s work,—the poet was only twenty years old when he wrote it,—but a competent critic could have detected evidence that in the anonymous author of Pauline a psychological poet had arisen, one who determined to probe to their depths the mysteries of the human soul. From Mr. Gosse’s article in The Century Magazine we learn that the young poet had produced a quantity of verses while a mere child, and had planned a number of soul-studies of a similar character to Pauline. He published the poem anonymously in 1833, when he was twenty years old. It was reprinted in 1867, with the following note: “The first piece in the series (Pauline) I acknowledge and retain with extreme repugnance, indeed purely of necessity; for not long ago I inspected one, and am certified of the existence of other transcripts, intended sooner or later to be published abroad: by forestalling these I can at least correct some misprints (no syllable is changed), and introduce a boyish work by an exculpatory word. The thing was my earliest attempt at ‘poetry, always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,’ which I have written since according to a scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch—a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular dramatis persona it would fain have reproduced; good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time.” With the “good draughtsmanship” and “right handling” of the work we need not concern ourselves; what is of paramount importance is the fact that in Pauline we have “the god, though in the germ.” If the mature artist was ashamed of his puerile performance, his disciples have always loved and admired it, and his deeper students have delighted to trace in its pages the nuclei of principles which have in his maturer works dowered the world with a priceless treasure. The poem is a fragment of a confession from a young man to a young woman whom he loves. It concerns Pauline very little, but is the revelation of the man as a study of the poet’s own naked soul. It is not a confession of deeds, but of moods and mental attitudes. He who could unpack his own heart so completely would be likely to reveal the innermost recesses of the characters with which he should deal in the future. It is the revelation of a soul all self-centred. A soul’s awakening, a soul in terror at its own capabilities, desires and forces too hard to be controlled—“made up of an intensest life”—imbued with “a principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all”—a soul terrified at its own vast shadow, fearing to face its own spectres, and instinctively “building up a screen” of woman’s love to be shut in with from a brood of fancies with which he dare not wrestle. Had he never left her side he had been spared this shame. He is sure of her love, though ghosts of the past haunt them. He has not the love to offer which befits her; but he has faith, and he trusts her as we trust the east for morning light. He has communed with her, but she knew not the shame which lurked behind his words and smiles, and she drove away despair from him. He has fallen, is ruined; he has felt in dreams he was a fiend chained in darkness, till, after ages had passed came a white swan to remain with him, and it contented him. And again, he had seemed to be a young witch who drew down a god to sing of heaven, and as he sang he perished grinning, but murmuring “I am still a god to thee.” He has thought that his early life, his songs and wild imaginings, were the only worthy things standing out distinct amid the fever of the after years. And this was his (Shelley’s) award. He, the Sun-treader, had drawn out from his worshipper the one spark of love remaining in his soul, and in his tears he praises him. He loved Shelley in his shame, and now he is renowned he watches him as a star, as one altered and worn and full of tears looks to heaven. He strips his mind bare, has a most clear consciousness of self, and recognises that of all his powers an imagination which has been an angel to him is the one which saves his soul from utter death. He feels a need, a trust, a yearning after God, which somehow is reconciled with a neglect of all he deemed His laws. He sees God everywhere, yet can love nothing; has had high dreams and low aims, and so lost himself. Then he turned to song, he gazed without fear on the works of mighty bards, for in them he recognised thoughts his own heart had also borne; then came the outburst of the soul’s power, a key to a new world, a sound as of angelic mutterings. He vowed himself to liberty. Men should be gods, earth,—heaven. His soul rose to meet the new life. As one watches for a fair girl that comes forth a withered hag, so all these high-born fancies dwindled into nothing; faith in man, freedom, virtue, motives, power, human loves, all vanished. They were not missed, for wit and mockery and pleasure came in their stead. His powers grew, his soul became as a temple; only God was gone, and a dark spirit sat in His seat, and mocking shadows cried “Hail!” to him. He resolved to wear himself out with joy, then to win men’s praise by undying song, and the mockery laughed out again. Then he met Pauline and knew she loved him; he looked in his heart for a love to return, and love and faith were gone, and selfishness wears him as a flame, and hunger for pleasure has become pain. Then came a craving after knowledge, as a sleepless harpy. He begins now to know what hate is. Yet with it all he has learned the great truth that his restless longings, his all encompassing selfishness, only prove that earth is not his sphere, because he cannot so narrow himself but he exceeds it. Hateful as his selfishness has grown to be, he can pass from such thoughts. Andromeda, rock-chained, awaiting the snake, causes you no fear for her safety: God will come in thunder from the stars to save her, so he will triumph over his decay; when the calm comes again after the fever has subsided, he will do something equal to his conjecture. He can project himself into all forms of Nature, live the life of plants, mount bird-like, breathe in a fish the morning air in the sun-warm water. He will build a thought-world; he is inspired. Pauline shall come with him to the world of fancy through the ghostly night and sun-warmed morning; he is concentrated, he drinks in the life of all, yet cannot be immortal for all these struggling aims. What is this passionate hunger for the All—this insatiable thirst for utmost pleasure? It is man’s cry for the satisfying presence of God in his soul. The alone to the Alone; nothing intervening can give peace and rest to the spirit of man; flame-like it tends upwards to its source. The only One, the Crucified, the Risen Christ—“Christus Consolator” is recognised as the remedy for his sense of infinite loss; and as he recognises the Divine love he is united with the purest earthly soul he knows:—“Pauline, I am thine for ever.” “Love me, Pauline—leave me not.” And so the hideous past shall be the past, and he will go forward with her—

Again he will go o’er the tracts of thought, again will beauteous shapes come to him and unknown secrets be divulged,—priest and lover as of old—“Shelley, Sun-treader,” he cries, “I believe in God, and truth, love—I would lean on thee.” Professor Johnson, in his paper on “Conscience and Art in Browning,” gives the following as the theme of the poem:—“The Divine call and anointing of the poet, so to speak; his sin, which consists in a self-divorce; his decline and degradation as he sinks into the ‘dim orb of self’; finally, his redemption and restoration by Divine love, mediated to him by human love.”

Notes.—“His award,” “Him whom all honour,” “Thou didst smile, poet,” “Sun-treader” (lines 142, 144, 151, 1020): all these refer to Shelley. “A god wandering after beauty” (line 321): Apollo seeking Daphne. Apollo pursued Daphne, who fled from him, seeking the aid of the gods, who changed her into a laurel. “A giant standing vast in the sunset” (line 322): Atlas, one of the Titans, is referred to here.

“After the fall of Troy, many of the Greek chiefs, among them Nestor, set sail for home, while others, at the desire of Agamemnon, remained behind to sacrifice to Pallas. Those who set sail went to the island of Tenedos, where they made offerings to the gods” (Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 244; Homer, Odyssey, iii.). “The dim clustered isles in the blue sea” (line 321): the islands of the Ægean Sea, east of Greece.

the swift-footed was Hermes, the name of Mercury among the Greeks. He was the messenger of the gods. He was presented by the King of Heaven with a winged cap, called petasus, and with wings for his feet, called talaria. Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres by Jupiter. “As Arab birds float sleeping in the wind” (line 479): this is considered by some to refer to the pelican, by others to the Birds of Paradise.

Agamemnon, to whom his loved Cassandra foretells his doom in vain:—

“The boy with his white breast,” etc. (line 574): see Potter’s “Choephoræ” of Æschylus, 1073: Orestes avenged his father’s death by assassinating his mother Clytemnestra and the adulterer Ægisthus. Andromeda (line 656): Andromeda was ordered to be exposed to a sea-monster, and was tied naked to a rock; but Perseus delivered her, changed the monster into a rock, and married her. “The fair pale sister went to her chill grave” (line 963): Antigone interred by night the remains of her brother Polynices against the orders of Creon, who commanded her to be buried alive. She, however, killed herself before the sentence could be executed (see “Antigone” of Sophocles). The long Latin preface to Pauline from the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius-Agrippa is thus englished in Mr. Cooke’s Browning Guide-Book:—“I doubt not but the title of our book, by its rarity, may entice very many to the perusal of it. Among whom many of hostile opinions, with weak minds, many even malignant and ungrateful, will assail our genius, who in their rash ignorance, hardly before the title is before their eyes, will make a clamour. We are forbidden to teach, to scatter abroad the seeds of philosophy, pious ears being offended, clear-seeing minds having arisen. I, as a counsellor, assail their consciences; but neither Apollo nor all the Muses, nor an angel from heaven, would be able to save me from their execrations, whom now I counsel that they may not read our books, that they may not understand them, that they may not remember them, for they are noxious—they are poisonous. The mouth of Acheron is in this book: it speaks often of stones: beware, lest by these it shape the understanding. You, also, who with fair wind shall come to the reading, if you will apply so much of the discernment of prudence as bees in gathering honey, then read with security. For, indeed, I believe you about to receive many things not a little both for instruction and enjoyment. But if you find anything that pleases you not, let it go that you may not use it, for I do not declare these things good for you, but merely relate them. Therefore, if any freer word may be, forgive our youth; I, who am less than a youth, have composed this work.” The preface is dated London, January 1833. V.A. XX. is the Latin abbreviation of Vixi annos viginti, I was twenty years old.

Pearl, A, a Girl. (Asolando, 1889.) According to Eastern fable there is a great power in a pearl: if you could speak the right word, you could call a spirit from the simple-looking stone which would make you lord of heaven and earth. Be this as it may, the poet says if you utter the right word, that evokes for you the love of a girl—held, perhaps, in little esteem by the world—her soul escapes to you, and you are creation’s lord!

“Periods” of Browning. It is usual with students to divide the poet’s work into some four or five periods. Mr. Fotheringham’s classification is as good as any: he makes the periods five.—Period I., “a time of youth and prelude” (1832-1840), the time of Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello. During this time the poet was trying the nature and compass of his theme and forming his style.—Period II., “the time of early manhood” (1841-1846), the time of the dramas and early dramatic lyrics. All the dramas except Strafford belong to this time. In this period he was studying how best to use his poetical powers.—Period III. is “the time of maturity,” his manhood and married life (1846-1869). Now he has found his standpoint; he is firm, vigorous, and confident. During this time he gave us Christmas Eve, Men and Women, Dramatis Personæ, and The Ring and the Book.—Period IV. is “the time of his later maturity” (1870-1878). Now the casuistic and argumentative element becomes more prominent; the dramatic aspect retires into the background, the philosophical teacher advances. “His hardest and least poetic work,” it has been said, was put forth in this period: Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, etc.—Period V. (1879-1889), “the time of the latest works.” A period of criticism of life, as in Ferishtah and the Parleyings.

Peter Ronsard. (The Glove.) He tells the story of Sir De Lorge, and how he leaped amongst the lions to recover his lady’s glove.

Pheidippides. (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Pheidippides, an athlete, has been commissioned by the Athenian government to run a race,—to reach Sparta for military assistance in a great crisis in Greek history. Persia has invaded Greece: in her extremity she implores help from the neighbouring Spartans; for two days and two nights Pheidippides the fleet-footed youth ran over hills and along the dales, as fire runs through stubble, and so he bounded on his way with his message. He broke into the midst of the Spartan assembly, told his story, and prayed the prayer of Athens; but Sparta, ever jealous and mistrustful of her great neighbour, heard it coldly, and cast about for excuses. Then the passionate runner cried to the gods of his country—to Pallas Athene, protector of the city, to Apollo, to Diana—to influence the deliberations of the council gathered to hear his message, and to say to them “Ye must!” And no bolt fell from heaven, as they still delayed. At last they gave their answer,—their religion forbade them to go to war while the moon was half-orbed in the sky; her circle must be full ere they could assist; Athens must wait in patience! The youth wasted neither word nor look on the false and vile Spartans, but turned his face homewards, crying to the gods of his land; rushing past the woods and streams where they had often manifested themselves to mortals he reproached them with faithlessness and ingratitude,—his countrymen had honoured them with sacrifice and libation, and in their extremity they disregarded their cry for help. All at once, as he ran by the ridge of Parnassus, there in the cool of a cleft was seated the majestical god Pan! Grave, kindly were his eyes, his face amused at the mortal’s awe of him. “Halt, Pheidippides!” he cried; and with his brain in a whirl the youth stood still. “Hither to me! Why pale in my presence?” he graciously began. “How is it Athens only in Hellas holds me aloof?” Then the god told the young man how they might trust him; that he was to bid Athens take heart,—that when the Persians were not only lying dead on their soil, but cast into the sea, then they were to praise great Pan, who had fought in their ranks and made one cause with the free and the bold Athenians. And for a pledge he gave him the fennel he grasped in his hand. He went on to speak of reward for himself, but of that Pheidippides would not speak; if he ran before, now he flew indeed; he touched not the earth with his foot, the air was his road. “Praise Pan!” he cried, as he reached Athens, “we stand no more in danger!” Then Miltiades asked him what his own reward should be? What had the god promised for him? “Release from the racer’s toil,” he said. “But he would fight and be foremost in the field of fennel, pounding Persia to the dust; then marry a certain maid when Athens was free, and in the coming days tell his children how the god was awful, yet so kind.” The brave youth fought at Marathon; and when Persia was dust. “Once more run,” they cried, “Pheidippides, to Akropolis, say Athens is saved, thank Pan,—go shout!” Then the youth flung down his shield and ran as before. “Rejoice! we conquer!” he cried; and with joy bursting his heart he died. He had gained the reward promised by Pan,—release from the racer’s toil, no vulgar reward in praise or in pelf,—he could desire no greater bliss. Herodotus tells the whole story (Book VI., 94-106). Darius was desirous of subduing those people of Greece who had refused to give him earth and water. He sent against Eretria and Athens Datis, who was a Mede by birth, and Artaphernes, son of Artaphernes, his own nephew; and he despatched them with strict orders, having enslaved Athens and Eretria, to bring the bondsmen into his presence. 102. “Having subdued Eretria, and rested a few days, they sailed to Attica, pressing them very close, and expecting to treat the Athenians in the same way as they had the Eretrians. Now, as Marathon was the spot in Attica best adapted for cavalry, and nearest to Eretria, Hippias, son of Pisistratus, conducted them there. 103. But the Athenians, when they heard of this, also sent their forces to Marathon; and ten generals led them, of whom the tenth was Miltiades.... 105. And first, while the generals were yet in the city, they despatched a herald to Sparta, one Pheidippides, an Athenian, who was a courier by profession, one who attended to this very business. This man, then, as Pheidippides himself said, and reported to the Athenians, Pan met near Mount Parthenion, above Tegea; and Pan, calling out the name of Pheidippides, bade him ask the Athenians why they paid no attention to him, who was well inclined to the Athenians, and had often been useful to them, and would be so hereafter. The Athenians, therefore, as their affairs were then in a prosperous condition, believed that this was true, and erected (after Marathon presumably), a temple to Pan beneath the Akropolis, and in consequence of that message they propitiate Pan with yearly sacrifices and the torch race. 106. This Pheidippides, being sent by the generals at that time when he said Pan appeared to him, arrived in Sparta on the following day after his departure from the city of the Athenians, and on coming in presence of the magistrates, he said, ‘Lacedæmonians, the Athenians entreat you to assist them, and not to suffer the most ancient city among the Greeks to fall into bondage to barbarians; for Eretria is already reduced to slavery, and Greece has become weaker by the loss of a renowned city,’ He accordingly delivered the message according to his instructions, and they resolved indeed to assist the Athenians; but it was out of their power to do so immediately, as they were unwilling to violate the law; for it was the ninth day of the current month, and they said they could not march out on the ninth day, the moon’s circle not being full. They therefore waited for the full moon.” How the Athenians won the famous battle of Marathon, “following the Persians in their flight, cutting them to pieces, till, reaching the shore, they called for fire and attacked the ships,” should be read also. Herodotus says the Persians lost about six thousand four hundred men; the Athenians only one hundred and ninety-two. Mr. Browning seems unduly severe on the Spartans, for Herodotus tells us (120) that “two thousand of the Lacedæmonians came to Athens after the full moon, making haste to be in time; that they arrived in Attica on the third day after leaving Sparta. But having come too late for the battle, they nevertheless desired to see the Medes; and having proceeded to Marathon, they saw the slain; and afterwards, having commended the Athenians and their achievement, they returned home.”

Notes.—Χαίρετε, νικωμεν: Rejoice! we conquer! Zeus, the Defender: Jupiter was worshipped under many aspects, such as “the Lightning Flasher,” “the Thunderer,” “the Flight Stayer,” “the Best and Greatest,” etc. “Her of the aegis and spear” == Minerva, who was represented with a shield and spear. “Ye of the bow and the buskin” == Diana, who was represented with a bow and buskined legs of a huntress. Pan, the goat-god. “Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix” (tettix, a grasshopper): the Athenians sometimes wore golden grasshoppers in their hair as badges of honour, because these insects are supposed to spring from the ground, and thus they showed they were sprung from the original inhabitants of the country. Sparta, the capital of Laconia, also called Lacedæmon. The distance from Athens to Sparta is from 135 to 140 miles. The trained couriers had great physical strength and powers of endurance, being regularly employed for such occasions as this. “Persia bids Athens proffer slaves’-tribute”: “Darius (B.C. 493) sent heralds into all parts of Greece to require earth and water in his name. This was the form used by the Persians when they exacted submission from those they were desirous of bringing under subjection.” (Rollins’ Ancient History, vol. ii., p. 267.) Eretria, one of the principal cities of Eubœa, which is the largest Island in the Ægean Sea, now called Negroponte. Hellas == Greece. Athené, Minerva. Phoibos, an epithet of Apollo; Artemis, the Greek name of Diana. Olumpos == Olympus, the mountain in Greece believed to be the seat of the gods. Filleted victim: sacrificial victims were generally decked out with ribbons and wreaths, and sometimes the cattle had their horns gilded. Fulsome libation—fulsome in the sense of rich, liberal. Libations were offerings of oil or wine poured on the ground in honour of the deity. Parnes: the mountain is called Parthenion above Tegea, by Herodotus. Ivy: the Greeks highly esteemed the ivy. It was consecrated to Apollo, and Bacchus had his brows and spear decked with it; Miltiades, the Greek general who commanded the Athenians at the battle of Marathon; Marathon day: “The victory of Marathon preserved the liberties of Greece, and perhaps of Europe, from the dominion of Persia; was fought in the month of September, B.C. 490” (Wordsworth’s Greece, p. 109). Akropolis, the citadel or stronghold of Athens. Fennel-field: Marathon in Greek meant this; when Pan gave the handful of fennel to the courier he gave him Μαραθρον—that is to say, the fennel field where the battle was to be. “Rejoice!” χαίρετε: the first of the two Greek words which are at the head of the poem. Pan (lit. “the pasturer”—from the same root as the Lat. pastor, shepherd, and panis, bread). He was the protecting deity of flocks and herds and hunters. He was represented by the ancients with a pug nose, very hairy, and with horns and feet of a goat. He was described as wandering about in the woods and dales and hills, playing with the nymphs and looking after the flocks. He was sleepy in the noonday sun, and did not like to be disturbed; at such times, therefore, shepherds did not play their pipes. His voice and appearance used to frighten those who saw him—so much so, that our word “panic” is derived from his name. It is said that he won the fight at Marathon for the Athenians by causing a “panic” amongst the Persians. He was the god of prophecy, and there were oracles of Pan. Pan as the Universe, the All, is a misinterpretation of his name. The Romans identified Pan with their Faunus. [Mrs. Browning’s fine poem The Dead Pan should be read in this connection.]

Pictor Ignotus. Florence, 15—. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845.) The subject is not historical, but is conceived in the true spirit which animated the work of the great religious (chiefly monastic) painters of the middle ages. The speaker says he could have painted pictures like those of a certain youth whose praise is in every one’s mouth. He could have executed all his soul conceived: hand and brain were pair, and all he saw he could have committed to his canvas. Each passion written on the countenance, whether Hope a-tiptoe for embrace, or Rapture with drooping eyes, or Confidence lighting up the forehead, all that human faces gave him, has he saved. He has dreamed of going forth in his pictures to pope or kaiser, to the whole world, with flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight, through streets re-named from the triumphal passing of his picture, to the house where learning and genius should greet his coming; and the thought has frightened him, and he has shrunk from the popularity as a nun shrinks from the gaze of rough soldiery; it terrified him to think of his works dragged forth to be bought and sold as household stuff, to have to live with people sunk in their daily pettiness, to see their faces, listen to their prate, and hear his work discussed. If at times he feels his work monotonous, as he goes on filling the cloisters and eternal aisles with the same Virgins, Babes, and Saints, with the same cold, calm, beautiful regard, at least no merchant traffics in his heart. The sacredness of the place where his pictures moulder and grow black will protect him from vain tongues which would criticise and discuss his work. This poem has been much misunderstood. Some have seen in it the bitter complaint and the wail of half-suppressed longing of one whom fame has passed unnoticed; he has failed to please the world, and will now retire to pursue his art in the cloister. Nothing could be further from the poet’s purpose in this work. Others, and those the majority of critics, have found in the poem a revelation of the true art-spirit, as though Mr. Browning had made a great discovery in this connection. The plain fact is that this spirit of retirement, this abhorrence of working for the praise of men, this hatred of applause-seeking and of self-advertisement, was that which animated the men of old Catholic times who built our cathedrals and our abbeys, and who painted our great pictures and glorified all Europe with works of art. The poem might fairly be considered as uttered by a Fra Angelico with reference to Raffaele. The great monastic painters, like Angelico, painted under the eye of God, looking upon their work as immediately inspired by His Spirit: for God and through God, not through men and for men, was their work done. It has been the life-work of Mr. Ruskin to point this out. These men were not actuated by the vain advertising spirit which animates so much of our modern work of all kinds. Humility is a virtue now little appreciated: it was the life of these old artists’ souls. Pictor Ignotus was not jealous of the popular youth whose pictures were decked with flowers by the people as they were borne through the streets which were re-named in their honour. He did not want the mob’s applause; he shrank from the appreciations of the thoughtless street folk as a nun would shrink from the compliments of a band of rough soldiery. All this beautiful spirit is fast dying out. When a writer like Browning reminds us that there were once, in “15—,” in a place like Florence, men animated by it, critics cry out, “What a discovery! How wonderful!” It is a discovery like ours of gold in South Africa, where the men of old time went to Ophir to find the precious metal.

Note.—Vasari says that the Borgo Allegri at Florence took its name from the joy of the inhabitants when a Madonna by Cimabue was carried through it in procession.

Pied Piper of Hamelin, The. (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842.) Written to amuse little Willie Macready. The story told in the poem is one of a class of legends dealing with the subject of cheating magicians of a promised reward for services rendered. Verstegan, in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1634), has the story on which apparently Mr. Browning’s poem is written. “A piper named Bunting undertook for a certain sum of money to free the town of Hamelin, in Brunswick, of the rats which infested it; but when he had drowned all the rats in the river Weser, the townsmen refused to pay the sum agreed upon. The piper, in revenge, collected together all the children of Hamelin, and enticed them by his piping into a cavern in the side of the mountain Koppenberg, which instantly closed upon them, and a hundred and thirty went down alive into the pit (June 26th, 1284). The street through which Bunting conducted his victims was Bungen, and from that day to this no music is ever allowed to be played in this particular street.” The same tale is told of the fiddler of Brandenberg: the children were led to the Marienberg, which opened upon them and swallowed them up. When Lorch was infested with ants, a hermit led the multitudinous insects by his pipe into a lake, where they perished. As the inhabitants refused to pay the stipulated price, he led their pigs the same dance, and they, too, perished in the lake. Next year a charcoal burner cleared the same place of crickets; and when the price agreed upon was refused, he led the sheep of the inhabitants into the lake. The third year came a plague of rats, which an old man of the mountain piped away and destroyed. Being refused his reward, he piped the children of Lorch into the Tannenberg. There are similar Persian and Chinese tales. (See Dr. Brewer’s Reader’s Handbook.) Hamlin or Hamelin is a town in the province of Hanover, Prussia. “Some trace the origin of the legend to the ‘Child Crusade,’ or to an abduction of children. For a considerable time the town dated its public documents from the event” (Encyc. Brit.). Julius Wolff wrote a poem on the subject (Berlin, 1876). See S. Baring Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 2nd ser., 1868; Grimm’s Deutsche Sagen, Berlin, 1866; and Reitzenstein’s edition of Springer’s Geschichte der Stadt Hameln, Hameln, 1861. Some authorities consider the story a myth of the wind.

Pietro Comparini (The Ring and the Book) was the reputed father of Pompilia, and was murdered with his wife by Count Guido.

Pietro of Abano. (Dramatic Idyls, second series, 1880.) [The Man.] Dr. Furnivall, in a note to Mr. Sharpe’s excellent paper on Pietro of Abano in the Browning Society’s Reports, No. V., gives the following particulars of the character from the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle, Paris, 1855, i. 29-31. “Pietro of A’bano, Petrus de A’pano or Aponensis, or Petrus de Padua, was an Italian physician and alchemist; born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He is said to have studied Greek at Constantinople, mathematics at Padua, and to have been made Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy at Paris. He then returned to Padua, where he was Professor of Medicine, and followed the Arabian physicians, especially Averroes. He got a great reputation, and charged enormous fees. He hated milk and cheese, and swooned at the sight of them. His enemies, jealous of his renown and wealth, denounced him to the Inquisition as a magician. They accused him of possessing the philosopher’s stone, and of making, with the devil’s help, all money spent by him come back to his purse, etc. His trial was begun; and had he not died naturally in time, he would have been burnt. The Inquisitors ordered his corpse to be burnt; and as a friend had taken that away, they had his portrait publicly burnt by the executioner. In 1560 a Latin epitaph in his memory was put up in the church of St. Augustine. The Duke of Urbino set his statue among those of illustrious men; and the Senate of Padua put one on the gate of its palace, beside those of Livy, etc. His best-known work is his Conciliator Differentiarum quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos versantur (Mantua, 1472, and Venice, 1476, fol.); often reprinted. Other works are: 1. De Venenis, eorumque Remediis, translated into French by L. Boet (Lyons, 1593, 12mo); 2. Geomantia (Venice, 1505, 1556, 8vo); 3. Expositio Problematum Aristotelis (Mantua, 1475, 4to); 4. Hippocrates de Medicorum Astrologia Libellus, in Greek and Latin (Venice, 1485, 4to); 5. Astrolabium planum in tabulis ascendens, continens qualibet hora atque minutæ æquationes Domorum Cæli, etc. (Venice, 1502, 4to); 6. Dioscorides digestus alphabetico ordine (Lyons, 1512, 4to); 7. Heptameron (Paris, 1474, 4to); 8. Textus Mesues noviter emendatus, etc. (Venice, 1505, 8vo); 9. Decisiones physionomiæ (1548, 8vo); 10. Questiones de Febribus (Padua, 1482); 11. Galeni tractatus varii a Petro Paduano, latinitate donati, MS. in St. Mark’s Library, Venice; 12. Les Eléments pour opérer dans les Sciences magiques, MS. in the Arsenal Library, Paris.” Murray’s Guide to Northern Italy says that “Abano may be visited either from Padua or from Monselice. Its baths have retained their celebrity from the time of the Romans. The place is also remarkable as being the birthplace of Livy, and also of the physician and reputed necromancer, Pietro d’Abano, in whom the Paduans take almost equal pride. This village is about three miles from the Euganean hills.” The medicinal springs procured this place its ancient name of Aponon, derived from α, privative, and πονος, pain. At Padua is the Palazzo della Ragione, built by Pietro Cozzo between 1172 and 1219, a vast building standing entirely upon open arches, surrounded by a loggia. Murray says: “The history of this hall is as remarkable as its aspect. It was built in 1306 by an Austin friar, Frate Giovanni, a great traveller; and he asked no other pay for his work than the wood and tiles of the old roof which he was to take down. The interior of the hall is covered by strange, mystical paintings designed by Giotto according to the instructions of Pietro d’Abano.” Pietro d’Abano was the first reviver of the art of medicine in Europe; and he travelled to Greece for the purpose of learning the language of Hippocrates and Galen, and of profiting by the stores which the Byzantine libraries yet contained. He practised with the greatest success; and his medical works were considered as amongst the most valuable volumes of the therapeutic library of the middle ages. His bust is over one of the doors of the hall; the inscription placed beneath it indignantly repudiates the magic and sorcery ascribed to him; but the votaries of the occult sciences smiled inwardly at this disclaimer. His treatises upon necromancy, geomancy, amulets and conjuration, were circulated from hand to hand. When at Padua, some years since, the Rev. John Sharpe found a stone set in the wall of the vestibule of the Sacristy of the Church of the Eremitani, to Pietro of Abano. It bore the following inscription:—

Petri Apon. Cineres Ob. AN. 1315 Aet. 66.

[The Poem.] Peter was a magician. He had been of all trades, architect, astronomer, astrologer, beside physician. Even worse than astrologer, for men scrupled not to accuse him of having dealings with the devil. This was the Middle Age way with men of science, and it must be confessed that the mystical manner of their writings and the uncanny nature of some of their doings give colour to the accusation. It was convenient, also, to accuse Peter of diabolic arts. When he had built a tower or cured a prince, it was an economical way of discharging the debt to accuse the old man of wizardry. So they cursed him roundly and then rid themselves of their liability. But Peter grinned and bore it all. He seems to have invented a steamboat which would have whirled through the water had not the priests broken up his evil-looking machine, and bastinadoed him beside. One night, as he reached his lodgings, some one plucked his sleeve and asked an interview with him. It was a young Greek, who professed great admiration for the mage. He tells him that he has heard that the price he pays for his potent arts is that he may not drink a drop of milk; but he has discovered this is not to be taken literally,—it is to be considered figuratively, as he will explain. He asks the master leave to become the friend of mankind, and that by being himself their model. He begs, therefore, to be taught the true magic, to learn the art of making fools subserve the man of mind. A prince is inspired with the idea of building a palace by an architect. The architect uses the prince as the means of furthering his own interests—his ambition to be honoured as a great architect. The workmen who build the mansion are animated by their desire for wages, and so the architect uses both prince and artisan as his tools. The young Greek wants to use men of high and low degree for similar ends. The magician says if he were to comply with his desire he would only make one ingrate more; he has been so often deceived this way. The Greek replies that what he wants is the milk of human kindness. He has not been animated by love of his species in what he has done for mankind. He has wrought wonders, but not for love. This is the meaning of his enforced abstinence from milk; but let him confer upon his supplicant this favour he asks, and he will earn his love and gratitude, which will remove from him his curse. Every step he lifts him up, by so much greater will the reward of the benefactor be. The magician determines to comply: he will test this man’s heart. “Shuffle the cards once more,” he says. Suddenly the young man becomes aware that he has undergone a great change. He was talking Plato to the master but a while ago; now he is surrounded by wealth, and has many friends. A year has passed when one day, lounging at his ease in his villa, his servant announces an old friend who desires to speak with him. It is old Peter, who is sore beset by his enemies, who want to burn him. He has come to the young man who owes him everything, to beg a hiding-place and a crust. The ingrate will not for a moment listen to his plea; he cannot think of harbouring him, as if it were to be discovered it would compromise him. He takes the opportunity, however, to ask for a greater favour,—he wishes to learn how to rule men and subject them to his pleasure. Then, if he will wait awhile, he may be able to show his gratitude. The old man turns his back and leaves the house. He is no sooner away than the spell begins to work. Politics were the prize now. He became a statesman and a friend of the Emperor. One day, after a council, he was pacing his closet, when there was a knock at the door, and Peter entered. He reminds him that ten years have passed since he refused him the favour he demanded. He had given him a mansion, out of which he only begged the use of a single chamber, that will no longer suffice. He now comes to beg a stronghold where he may be safe from his enemies: grant him this, and he will trouble the young man no more. But the latter is concerned only with thoughts of more power for himself: he wants now to rule the souls of men; from the temporal power he would rise to the spiritual; he would be no less than Pope. Having then reached the highest rung of the ladder, he promises to pay the debt he owes to the full. Once more old Peter turns to go, and already the influence is felt. He is at Rome, has been elected Pope, and has reached the summit of his desires. Seated in the palace of the Lateran, one day an intruder pushes aside the arras. It is old Peter again; he is ninety now, and does not care if they burn him; he has lived his day. He has, however, a favour to ask: he has written a great book, and he wants it preserved for the use of posterity. Will the Pope see to this? The Pontiff eyes the frowsy parchment with disgust, and when the old man kneels to kiss his foot, he spurns him. “We’re Pope,—once Pope, you can’t unpope us!” In a moment the vision was over. The three trial scenes of the Greek’s life were played out: he was himself again. The magic was dissolved; he had been tested, had been shown the corruption of his own heart in a moment, though it seemed a lifetime in the passing of the vision. Peter lived out his life, but he had never yet learned love. Perhaps in another life that lesson was to come. As for the Greek, nothing is recorded of him. The poet says he may go his way—he is too selfish not to thrive! The moral of the story is that to win men’s love we must not merely help them, not merely fling favours at them, but must consecrate ourselves to their service. In the loving service of, and the self-sacrificing endeavour to benefit our fellow-men, lies the secret of winning happiness for ourselves. It is more blessed to give than to receive only when the giving is to man for God’s sake—for the love of God manifested by efforts on behalf of our fellow-men.