1849.]

ROBERT BROWNING'S POEMS.

'Tis only when they spring to heaven, that angels
Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day
and lie down at night by you,
Beside you,
Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep,
And all at once they leave you, and you know

them!"

Is there not many a heart which could respond to this, with an exceeding bitter cry? Further on, he says, still in his delirium, unconscious of his friend's presence :

"Truly there needs another life to come! If this be all-(I must tell Festus that,) And other life await us not,-for one,

I

'tis say, a poor cheat, a stupid bungle, A wretched failure. I, for one, protest Against it, and I hurl it back with scorn!”

| see that the lowliest Christian child may be
wiser than the heathen sage. As a poem,
"Paracelsus" is a very noble creation, not
devoid here and there of a certain objection-
able mysticism of thought and expression,
but nevertheless worthy of the most atten-
tive study.

After this he relapses into a fit of madness, believing that all men are scorning and At last he pauses, spitting at him. ed. Festus speaks :

exhaust

"Have you no thought, no memory for me, Aureole? I am so wretched:-my pure Mi

chal alone are left to me; Is and gone, you Take my handAnd even you forget me.

Lean on me, thus.-Do you not know me, Aureole ?

PARACELSUS. Festus, my own friend, you are come at last ?"—

session of his senses.

From this moment he never loses the posFestus predicts his future glory: he rejects all idea of this, but rises from his couch, to make a final revela tion of his faith. We cannot scan its philosophy here: poetically, it is most beautiful; it predicts a future millennium of glory for mankind, it proclaims the duty of love-true love for man and God. It is not distinctly and dogmatically Christian, as was Aprile's

noble speech; who, seeing in the moment of his death the errors of his past life, exclaimed:

"Man's weakness is his glory; for the strength,
Which raises him to heaven and near God's
self,

Came spite of it: God's strength his glory is ;-
(man's)

For thence came with our weakness sympathy,
Which brought God down to earth, a man like us."

Nevertheless, the conclusion of "Paracel-
sus" is in many respects satisfactory, and the
whole impression conveyed by the work is
We see the
one of a very salutary nature.
utter futility of all attempts to attain to the
knowledge of God, without revelation: we

"Pippa Passes," the next in order of these works, will not now engage much of our attention. It is a wild but beautiful little drama, (if we can so call it,) marred, however, by two or three unpleasant stains, Its leadwhich we cannot leave unnoticed.

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ing idea is charming. A little girl, Pippa,
from the silk-mills at Asolo in the Trevisan,
'passes" by certain individuals, pertaining
to various degrees of life, far above her own,
and by her simple songs, which she carols
entire existence of those whom she thus
almost unconsciously, is made to control the
The moral is, that God can and
"passes.'
does effect the greatest ends by the simplest
ministers. We have already referred to the
two drawbacks, of which we have to com-
plain in particular: the one is the virtual en-
couragement of regicide, which we trust to
see removed from the next edition, being as
unnatural as it is immoral: the other is a
careless audacity in treating of licentious-
ness, which in our eyes is highly reprehensi-
ble, though it may, no doubt, have been ex-
hibited with a moral intention, and though
Mr. Browning may plead the authority of
in his favor. These things set on one side,
Shakspeare, Goethe, and other great men,
we should have little to do but to admire;
had not Mr. Browning most marvelously de-
ing certain alterations in them, for the pur-
stroyed some of his finest passages by mak-
pose, we presume, of attaining greater clear-
ness, an end which has not been attained,
though ease, grace, and nature have been
sacrificed. We will give one instance. In
Bells and Pome-
the former edition, called “
granates," Mr. Browning had made Pippa
say, talking of her own intention to imagine
herself in the position of certain characters
throughout the day :-

Up the hill-side, through the morning!
Love me, as I love!'

I am Ottima, take warning,” &c.

This is now changed to

"See! Up the hill-side yonder, through the morning,

Some one shall love me, as the world calls love;

I am no less than Ottima, take warning," &c.

which is obviously void of the original's |
grace and nature.
We might quote other,
even worse, instances. The additions, too,
are in almost all cases unnatural, if not posi-
tively offensive. We shall make one or two
citations from the speeches of Luigi, the
young Italian who means to kill the Emperor
of Austria, to save his country, and who
ought to be converted from his purpose by
Pippa's song, but unfortunately is not, as
the case now stands. He is talking to his
mother about Italy's woes and the trouble
they occasion him, and he goes on:-

"No, trouble's a bad word: for, as I walk,

There's springing, and melody, and giddiness:
And old quaint turns and passages of my youth,
Dreams long forgotten, little in themselves,
Return to me, whatever may amuse me;
And earth seems in truce with me, and heaven

Accords with me; all things suspend their strife;
The very cicalas laugh, There goes he, and
there!

Feast him-the time is short; he is on his way

tyrant. By plotting and counterplotting he had at last contrived to get himself into an almost hopeless situation; for having entered into secret treaties for directly opposite purposes with two opposed powers, Spain and Austria, at the same time, and Spain and Austria having happened to compare books and so ascertain his treachery, they resolved to deprive him of his newly-acquired crown, and wipe Sardinia out of the map of Europe. In this extremity he conceived the following Jesuitical scheme. Charles, his son, being of a mild, frank, and ingenuous nature, had shared none of his father's treacheries: so Victor thought he could go through the form of resigning his crown, get Charles to accept it, and leave him to settle the difficulties with foreign powers, intending all the while to return again in a year or two, and dispossess carried into effect. Charles by his honesty his son once more. This purpose he partly and candor really satisfied Spain and Austria, and saved the state; he further pacified his

For the world's sake,-feast him this once, our home subjects, who had been highly exasperfriend!'

And in return for all this I can trip
Cheerfully up the scaffold-steps. I go
This evening, mother."

How admirably does this embody the happy, genial, impulsive southern nature! The exquisite propriety of the rhythm can scarcely escape observation. Every line is in this respect a study. Once more he says:

"Too much

Have I enjoy'd these fifteen years of mine,
To leave myself excuse for longer life.
Was not life press'd down, running o'er with joy,
That I might finish with it ere my fellows,
Who sparelier feasted, made a longer stay?—
I was put at the board-head, help'd to all
At first; I rise up happy and content.
God must be glad, one loves His world so much!"

But we pause, from lack of space. What pity is it, that a youth who so much engages our sympathies, should be confirmed in sin by Pippa's pious song!

We pass on to the next work, a tragedy, "King Victor and King Charles." This is one of the finest dramatic illustrations of history with which we are acquainted, and in it Mr. Browning has been scrupulously true to his authorities. The idea of the piece is to demonstrate the superiority of moral excellence and kindness to cunning and worldly wisdom. King Victor Amadeus of Savoy, the first of that race who attained the regal crown, was a great diplomatist and a selfish

ated by the tyrannic policy of Victor. But Charles's sense of duty prevented his resigning the sceptre, which he had sworn to keep for life, to hands so certain to misuse it; and Victor, unable to bully or wheedle his son out of the kingdom, intrigued with France, and entered into a conspiracy to bring a French army into the land. At this epoch, however, before he could carry this last scheme into execution, he died, and Charles remained in undisturbed possession of the

crown.

This union of a king with a foreign army against his own people, is what Voltaire denominated "a terrible event without consequences;" and from these simple elements Mr. Browning has produced a great dramatic work. It is composed, properly speaking, of two parts and four acts. The first division plays in 1730, when King Victor still reigns, at the period of his resignation of the crown: the second plays the year after, in 1731, under King Charles, when Victor returns to reassume, by fraud or force, his forfeit sovereignty. The principal characters, only four in number, (indeed these are absolutely the only speakers in the tragedy,) are Victor, Charles, D'Ormea, Victor's minister, and subsequently Charles's also, and Polyxena, the wife of Charles; all these are admirably conceived and embodied. The self-distrust, but genuine worth and feeling, of Charles are touchingly delineated. His noble wife, who teaches him to esteem himself, and is throughout his mainstay, covering all his deficiencies, and breathing her own spirit of

prefers, however, to resign royalty, and confer happiness on Valence, the Advocate of Cleves; the only man who stood by her in the hour of trial, when all her former courtiers shrank away. The tendencies of this work might appear democratic at first sight; but we question their being so in reality. When Colombe talks of the loss of her duchy as a trifle, Valence replies:

greatness into him, is one of the noblest female | sion; he, on his accession, makes some portraitures we ever met with. Admirable amends by proffering her his hand. She in their way, too, are Victor and D'Ormea. The scene betwixt the former on his return to Turin and his son is a perfect master-piece of its kind. It is difficult to give any extracts from such a work as this, which should give any due idea of its merits; it is so preeminently real and dramatic, that scarcely a word could be spared. It is not, indeed, devoid of faults. Probability is, we think, sometimes sacrificed to effect; and the reader not previously acquainted with the history on which the drama is founded, is not likely to understand for some time what King Victor and his minister D'Ormea are individually and conjointly driving at. We want a clue of some kind at the beginning which is not provided us. We will conclude with quoting a few lines from Victor's half-remorseful soliloquy, when he returns to deprive his son of the crown he had so nobly earned; though we question whether the reader will be able to appreciate them apart from the con

text:

"Faith,

This kind of step is pitiful-not due
To Charles, this stealing back--hither, because
He's from his Capitol! Oh Victor! Victor!
But thus it is: The age of crafty men
Is loathsome: youth contrives to carry off
Dissimulation; we may intersperse
Extenuating passages of strength,
Ardor, vivacity, and wit, may turn
Even guile into a voluntary grace:

But one's old age, when graces drop away,
And leave guile the pure staple of our lives,

Ah, loathsome!"

And how nobly is this confirmed by Charles's subsequent speech to his father!

Keep within your sphere, and mine;
It is God's province we usurp on else.—
Here, blindfold through the maze of things we
walk,

"Ill have I spoken, if you thence despise
Juliers. Though the lowest on true grounds
Be worth more than the highest rule on false,
Aspire to rule on the true grounds!"

miseries of the manufacturers of Cleves, his
And again, where Valence speaks of the
townsmen, and inquires, wherefore they do
not rise, arms in their hands, to redress their
wrongs by brute force, he thus proceeds :-

"There is a Vision in the heart of each,
Of justice, mercy, wisdom, tenderness
To wrong and pain, and knowledge of its cure;
And these embodied in a Woman's Form,
That best transmits them, pure as first received,
From God above her to mankind below."

Our royal mistress, Queen Victoria, would scarcely disapprove of this description. It is impossible to enumerate the many, even the chief, points of excellence in this play. Grace is its prevailing characteristic; but power and dignity, displayed whenever there that grace is accompanied by very striking is occasion for them. A very remarkable Prince Berthold, the noble-hearted man of and successfully depicted character is that of the world; only a man of the world, and yet noble-hearted. We are at a loss again for fitting extracts, but will cull a few beauties here and there; though no procedure can be more unjust to Mr. Browning, who is a dramatist, not an English playwright; who creates a whole, and does not seek for prettynesses and gems and the order of passages which English critics almost invariably reWe pass to the next work in these vol- gard as the tests of dramatic power! It umes, a play, entitled "Colombe's Birthday," may be affirmed, indeed, with justice, that of a lighter and happier character; in which no civilized nation's critics are so ignorant of the question seems to be, in the Poet's own the first principles of the dramatic art as words, "Is Love or Vanity the best ?" The those of our country. How this should be, plot is somewhat complicated. We will not with Shakspeare's great example, it might attempt to unravel it here. Colombe, how- seem difficult to conceive; but Shakspeare, ever, (so much we may say,) is presumed with all his glories, had, perhaps, too deDuchess of Juliers and Cleves; but it turns cided a predilection for the didactic; and it out that she is barred by the Salic law, and is precisely this one drawback to his otherher kinsman, Prince Berthold, takes posses-wise matchless power which is regarded as VOL XVIIL NO. IV.

By a slight thread-of false, true,-right and

wrong:

All else is rambling and presumption."

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