1  Pauline:

A Fragment of a Confession

Plus ne suis ce que j’ai été,

Et ne le sçaurois jamais être.

          Marot

Text and publication

First publ. March 1833, B.’s first publ. poem, but issued anonymously: ‘a loophole I have kept for backing out of the thing if necessary’, B. wrote to W. J. Fox (Correspondence iii 74; for B.’s acquaintance with Fox, see below, p. 21). According to Mrs Orr, B.’s sister Sarianna was in the secret, but not his parents: ‘This is why his aunt [Mrs Christiana Silverthorne], hearing that “Robert” had “written a poem,” volunteered the sum requisite for its publication’ (Orr Life 54). In a letter of 15 Jan. 1846, B. told EBB. that even the publishers, Saunders and Otley, did not know his identity (LK 389). In a letter to Fanny Haworth of May 1842, B. referred disparagingly to Saunders and Otley: ‘they would print Montgomery’s execrabilities’ (Correspondence v 328; i.e. they would print anything for money; however, they later rejected Paracelsus). Not repr. separately; not 1849, 1863. Repr. 1868 (when B. first publicly acknowledged his authorship), 1888. There is no extant MS. Our text is 1833.

Several copies of 1833 with B.’s comments exist or have been described, the most important being a copy which was annotated by J. S. Mill (who planned a review which never appeared); B. wrote replies to Mill in the same copy, which he subsequently gave to John Forster; it is now in the Forster-Dyce Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. We refer to this copy as Mill. Early commentators assumed that the ‘preface’ which B. attached to Mill (see below) was addressed to Forster, and was therefore composed later than the replies to Mill’s annotations; the latter are presumed to date from 30 Oct. 1833, the date B. entered on the first page of the copy. However, Michael A. Burr (‘Browning’s Note to Forster’, VP xii [Winter 1974] 343–9) points out that B.’s final reply to Mill refers to the ‘preface’, making it unlikely that the latter was written for Forster. In R. H. Shepherd’s copy of 1833 (formerly in the Turnbull Library but now missing), B. commented on the number of printer’s errors, some of which can be deduced from his corrections in Mill; however, since in many cases it is impossible to distinguish between correction and revision, we have emended 1833 only where it is obviously defective. It is unlikely that B. borrowed back Mill from Forster to use as copy for 1868: although some of the Mill readings appear in 1868–88, many more do not, incl. the majority of substantive changes (see e.g. ll. 171, 361, 686). A revised copy of 1833 (hereafter Rylands) is in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It cannot be accurately dated, but its systematic substitution of ‘thou wast’ for ‘thou wert’ suggests a date in the 1860s, since it was in 1863 that B. regularly introduced this rev. into other works (see e.g. Paracelsus v 13n.). Its revs. are mainly of punctuation: many dashes are emended to commas, semi-colons or periods, and commas are usually introduced after ‘so’ when this word begins a clause, perhaps, as Oxford suggests, in response to Mill (see l. 392n.). We have recorded the few substantive variants in Rylands, and changes in punctuation which affect the sense. Another copy of 1833, presented to Frederick Locker [Locker-Lampson] and inscribed ‘Corrections made at London, 1867’, is in the Lowell Collection of the Library of Harvard University (Lowell). These corrections, like those in Berg (also presented to Locker-Lampson: see p. 99), are clearly a preliminary draft of revs. for a printed ed. (1868): there are directions to the printer such as ‘run on to next paragraph’; the changes correspond closely, but not uniformly, to 1868. The amount of revision in 1868 was relatively light, as B. himself indicated in the preface, though it went on occasion beyond the mere correction of misprints. The revision undertaken for 1888 was more substantial, and much in excess of B.’s own account in the supplementary preface to 1888 (for this, and the 1868 preface, see below, Contemporary criticism and revision).

Composition and date

The poem was written some time after 22 Oct. 1832, the date which appears at the end of the poem. According to B., he saw Edmund Kean acting in Richard III on that date and ‘conceived the childish scheme’ of which Pauline was the first (and only) product (Mill, p. 71; see our final note, p. 69). B. also explained this ‘childish scheme’ in a handwritten preface (Mill, p. 4):

The following Poem was written in pursuance of a foolish plan which occupied me mightily for a time, and which had for its object the enabling me to assume & realize I know not how many different characters;—meanwhile the world was never to guess that “Brown, Smith, Jones, & Robinson” (as the Spelling-books have it) the respective Authors of this poem, the other novel, such an opera, such a speech &c &c were no other than one and the same individual. The present abortion was the first work of the Poet of the batch, who would have been more legitimately myself than most of the others; but I surrounded him with all manner of (to my then notion) poetical accessories, and had planned quite a delightful life for him:

Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in this Fools paradise of mine.

RB

A version of this note, using very similar terms, appears in a letter of 9 Aug. 1837 to B.’s friend Amédée de Ripert-Monclar (Correspondence iii 265; for Ripert-Monclar see headnote to Paracelsus, I 101); it adds the information that after his disillusionment B. ‘destroyed “Pauline, Part 2”, and some other works written in pursuance of it, and set about a genuine work of my own’ (Paracelsus or Sordello). A version dated 14 Dec. 1838 is rec. in R. H. Shepherd’s copy of 1833 (see above; repr. Trumpeter 26, Collections 217). Maynard challenges B.’s account, arguing: ‘What seems actually to have happened is that Kean’s acting in Shakespeare began to suggest to him a different kind of art as he was in the midst of writing Pauline. Sarianna [B.’s sister] … recalled quite explicitly that it was while he was finishing the poem, not—as he implies—while he was conceiving it, that he was seeing Kean. In her remembrance, he composed the end of the poem in his head on one of several trips he made to Richmond around October 1832’ (Maynard 222; see also Edmund Gosse, Robert Browning: Personalia [1890] 27). In addition to the suggestion that Browning misrepresented the chronology of his composition of the poem, Sarianna’s account implies that Browning saw Kean in other roles than that of Richard III. Maynard notes that ‘In the Harvard Theatre Collection there is a playbill for Othello for Oct. 29, 1832. The season ended Nov. 9; along with Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth had also been acted (Sept. 26 and Oct. 3)’ (p. 436 n.73). However, Sarianna’s account, given in 1902, may not be reliable. The poem was presumably finished by Jan. 1833, the date given at the end of the epigraph (see below, p. 28), and confirmed by B.’s statement, in a letter to W. J. Fox shortly before the poem was publ. in Mar. 1833, that it was written ‘some months ago’ (Correspondence iii 73).

Contemporary criticism and revision

B.’s letter to Fox was intended to secure notice for the poem. Fox replied favour-ably, and B. sent him twelve copies for distribution to potential reviewers (Correspondence iii 74–5). Fox himself reviewed the book warmly (MR n.s. vii [Apr. 1833] 252–62), noting B.’s debt to Shelley, comparing him as a young and promising writer with Tennyson, and praising the composition’s ‘deep stamp of reality’: ‘though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, [it] has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius’. Fox’s efforts bore fruit in short but generally favourable notices in the Athenaeum (6 Apr. 1833, p. 216) and the Atlas (14 Apr. 1833, p. 228); three other notices (Literary Gazette, 23 March 1833, p. 183, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine iii [Aug. 1833] 668, and Fraser’s Magazine xlii [Dec. 1833] 699–70) were contemptuously dismissive. (The review in Fraser’s called the author of Pauline ‘The Mad Poet of the Batch’, a phrase which B. may echo in his ‘preface’ in Mill: see above.)

Fox sent a copy of the poem to J. S. Mill; Mill’s offer to review it was turned down first by the Examiner and then by Tait’s, whose one-line review had already appeared: ‘Paulina [sic], a piece of pure bewilderment’. Mill thereupon returned his copy to Fox: ‘I send Pauline having done all I could, which was to annotate copiously in the margin and sum up on the fly-leaf. On the whole the observations are not flattering to the author—perhaps too strong in the expression to he shown him’ (cited in Mary D. Reneau, ‘First Editions of Browning’s Pauline’, BBI, Second Series [July 1931] 45). Mill’s comment implies that his annotations were not intended as the basis for a review, but were made as a substitute for it. His marginal comments are rec. in our notes to the lines to which they refer; his ‘summing-up’ (not on the flyleaf, as stated, but on the recto and verso of a blank leaf at the end of the book) reads as follows:

With considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being—I should think it a sincere confession though of a most unloveable state, if the ‘Pauline’ were not evidently a mere phantom. All about her is full of inconsistency—he neither loves her nor fancies he loves her, yet insists upon talking love to her—if she existed and loved him, he treats her most ungenerously and unfeelingly. All his aspirings and yearnings and regrets point to other things, never to her—then, he pays her off towards the end by a piece of flummery, amounting to the modest request that she will love him and live with him and give herself up to him without his loving her, moyennant quoi he will think her and call her everything that is handsome and he promises her that she shall find it mighty pleasant. Then he leaves off by saying he knows he shall have changed his mind by tomorrow, & despise ‘these intents which seem so fair’, but that having been ‘thus visited’ once no doubt he will again—& is therefore ‘in perfect joy’ bad luck to him! as the Irish say.

A cento of most beautiful passages might be made from this poem—& the psychological history of himself is powerful and truthful, truth-like certainly all but the last stage. That he evidently has not yet got into. The self-seeking & self-worshipping state is well described—beyond that, I should think the writer had made, as yet, only the next step; viz. into despising his own state. I even question whether part even of that self-disdain is not assumed. He is evidently dissatisfied, and feels part of the badness of his state, but he does not write as if it were purged out of him—if he once could muster a hearty hatred of his selfishness, it would go—as it is he feels only the lack of good, not the positive evil. He feels not remorse, but only disappointment. A mind in that state can only be regenerated by some new passion, and I know not what to wish for him but that he may meet with a real Pauline.

Meanwhile he should not attempt to shew how a person may be recovered from this morbid state—for he is hardly convalescent, and ‘what should we speak of but that which we know?’

Fox did return Mill to B., whose reactions to some of Mill’s comments are rec. in our notes. He did not respond directly to the ‘summing-up’, but his comments in later years suggest that he misconstrued Mill’s remarks—whether by error or design, and whether at the time or retrospectively, is impossible to determine. He wrote to EBB. in an early letter: ‘I know myself—surely—and always have done so—for is there not somewhere the little book I first printed when a boy, with John Mill, the metaphysical head, his marginal note that “the writer possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever knew in a sane human being”’ (26 Feb. 1845, LK 28; note the replacement of ‘possessed with a more intense and morbid’ by ‘possesses a deeper’; there is another, similar ref., in a letter of 24 May 1845: see below). According to F. W. Farrar (Men I Have Known [New York 1897] 65), B. also claimed that the non-appearance of ‘an appreciative review from the pen of the first literary and philosophic critic of his day’, and its replacement by ‘one insolent epithet from some nameless nobody’ in Tait’s, ‘retarded any recognition of me by twenty years’ delay’; a claim which, as Lewis F. Haines argues (‘Mill and Pauline: The “Review” that “Retarded” Browning’s Fame’, MLN lix [June 1944] 410–12), was based on an exaggerated estimate of Mill’s status and influence as a critic at that period, as well as some distortion of his opinion of the poem. In later life, B. habitually blamed his slow progress towards public acceptance on the non-appearance of certain reviews or documents (such as Dickens’s appreciative letter on A Blot, ‘suppressed’, as B. saw it, by Forster), or the public reticence of influential friends, such as Carlyle, who praised him in private.

‘To the best of my belief’, B. wrote to T. J. Wise in 1886, ‘no single copy of the original edition of Pauline found a buyer; the book was undoubtedly “stillborn,”—and that despite the kindly offices of many friends, who did their best to bring about a successful birth’ (LH 251). In a letter of 27 Mar. 1835 to W. J. Fox, B. blamed this failure on the publishers, Saunders and Otley: ‘so much money was paid, so many copies stipulated for,—& from that time to this I have been unable to ascertain whether a dozen have been disposed of or two dozen really printed—but this I did ascertain, from more quarters than one, that several well-disposed folks actually sought copies & found none—& that so exorbitant a price was affixed to a trifle of a few pages, as to keep it out of the hands of everybody but a critic intending to “show it up”’ (Correspondence iii 130; the ‘exorbitant’ price of the first edition, which numbered 67 pages, is not known). B. eventually retrieved the unbound sheets from the publishers (letter to EBB., 15 Jan. 1846, ibid. xi 317), and suppressed all trace of his authorship, except among close friends such as Forster and Joseph Arnould (he did not however destroy the copies he retrieved, and several were presented to friends after the appearance of the poem in 1868: see Collections 427). Arnould wrote of it to Alfred Domett in 1847, in terms which may derive from B. himself, as ‘a strange, wild (in parts singularly magnificent) poet-biography: his own early life as it presented itself to his own soul viewed poetically: in fact, psychologically speaking, his “Sartor Resartus”: it was written and published three years before “Paracelsus,” when Shelley was his God’ (RB & AD 141). However, the poem was mentioned in an article in the New Quarterly Review in Jan. 1846 as an example of B.’s precocity in versification, the person who supplied knowledge of its existence being perhaps Thomas Powell, a former friend of B.’s (letter to EBB., 11 Jan. 1846, Correspondence xi 308). The article drew the poem to the attention of EBB., who asked to see it; B., however, successfully evaded her request: ‘Will you, and must you have “Pauline”? If I could pray you to revoke that decision! For it is altogether foolish and not boylike—and I shall, I confess, hate the notion of running over it—yet commented it must be; more than mere correction! I was unluckily precocious—but I had rather you saw real infantine efforts . . (verses at six years old,—and drawings still earlier)—than this ambiguous, feverish—Why not wait?’ (15 Jan. 1846, ibid. 317). EBB. agreed, on condition that she saw the poem ‘some day’ (15 Jan. 1846, ibid. 319); it is not known whether she did in fact ever see Pauline, since it was not included in 1849, but it is probable that B. did show it to her after their marriage. In 1847, Dante Gabriel Rossetti read the poem ‘with warm admiration’ in the British Museum and, remarking the ‘noticeable analogy in style and feeling to … Paracelsus’, guessed that B. was the author; he wrote to him at Florence asking him to confirm the fact (Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl [Oxford 1965] i 32; for B.’s account of this episode, see his letter of c. Aug. 1882 to William Sharp, LH 220 [wrongly dated c. 1883]). B. also mentioned the existence of the poem in a letter of 1848 to R. H. Horne (see I. 4).

There is no indication that B. revised the poem after his alterations in Mill, or that he would ever have considered republishing it voluntarily. But in Feb. 1867 he received a letter from R. H. Shepherd requesting permission to publish extracts from the poem, and replied, giving his permission ‘if you will strictly confine yourself to “a few extracts”—and will preface these with mention of the fact that the poem was purely dramatic and intended to head a series of “Men & Women” such as I have afterwards introduced to the world under somewhat better auspices,—mentioning this on your own authority, and not in any way alluding to this of mine—and, further, if you will subject the whole of the extracts to my approval—(not a single remark upon them,—only the extracts themselves) —in this case, and not otherwise, I give the leave you desire’ (cited in William L. Phelps, ‘Notes on Browning’s Pauline’, MLN xlvii [May 1932] 292–9). Though Shepherd did not go ahead with his project, B. clearly became alarmed at the possibility of an unauthorized edition of the poem appearing, and decided to include it in his forthcoming collection (1868). He did so with the following preface:

The poems that follow are printed in the order of their publication. The first piece in the series, I acknowledge and retain with extreme repugnance, indeed purely of necessity; for not long ago I inspected one, and am certain 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 since written 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 draughtsman-ship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time.

R.B.

London, December 25, 1867.

The phrase ‘poetry always dramatic in principle [etc.]’ comes from the supplementary ‘Advertisement’ to DL: see Appendix B, II 471. B.’s claim that ‘no syllable is changed’ is not strictly accurate—and the asterisks which emphasized the status of the text as a ‘fragment’ in 1833, disappear in 1868—but B. made no attempt to revise the poem as a whole. In 1888 B. repr. this preface and then added:

I preserve, in order to supplement it, the foregoing preface. I had thought, when compelled to include in my collected works the poem to which it refers, that the honest course would be to reprint, and leave mere literary errors unaltered. Twenty years’ endurance of an eyesore seems more than sufficient: my faults remain duly recorded against me, and I claim permission to somewhat diminish these, so far as style is concerned, in the present and final edition where “Pauline” must needs, first of my performances, confront the reader. I have simply removed solecisms, mended the metre a little, and endeavoured to strengthen the phraseology—experience helping, in some degree, the helplessness of juvenile haste and heat in their untried adventure long ago. …

R.B.

London: February 27, 1888.

The implication that the revs. are merely matters of style is misleading: many of them disembarrass the writer of the ‘juvenile haste and heat’ of his opinions and feelings, as well as his way of expressing them: see e.g. ll. 193–7n., 387–90n., 410–13n.

Biographical background

The vehemence of B.’s protestations that Pauline was a ‘dramatic’ poem has helped convince most biographers that it is actually autobiographical. However, the hero’s situation and personal (as opposed to intellectual) history are evidently imagined. Joseph Arnould may well have been echoing B. himself in calling the poem the story of B.’s ‘own early life as it presented itself to his own soul viewed poetically’; the details about the writer’s reading, and about the development of his religious and aesthetic ideas, are probably authentic (see below, Sources). Vivienne Browning (My Browning Family Album [1979] 39f.) argues that B.’s paternal aunt Jemima, who was only two years older than he, is the original of Pauline; there is however no hard evidence for this view, and the figure of Pauline is almost certainly, as Mill said, ‘a mere phantom’, at any rate as regards her sexual relationship with the writer. In other respects, there may well be, as Mrs Orr suggests, a recollection of Eliza Flower, whom B. knew with her sister Sarah when they were the wards of W. J. Fox in the late 1820s. At that time, Fox was a well-known Unitarian minister and a leading member of the liberal and Nonconformist intelligentsia. He later edited the Monthly Repository, in which, after the favourable review of Pauline, B. published five early poems; B. wrote to Fanny Haworth of his ‘magnificent and poetical nature’ and called him ‘my literary father’ (Correspondence iii 256). Eliza Flower (1803–46) was a talented musician and composer (B. later asked her to supply music for the songs in Pippa: see headnote, p. 82). Mrs Orr states that B. ‘conceived a warm admiration for Miss Flower’s talents, and a boyish love for herself. She was nine years his senior; her own affections became probably engaged, and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have subsided into one of warm and very loyal friendship … he never even in latest life mentioned her name with indifference’ (Orr Life 37). B.’s own account of the relationship is contained in a letter to R. H. Horne of 3 Dec. 1848 requesting Horne’s help in retrieving his letters and copies of early poems from Eliza Flower’s executors (LH 19–22; see headnote to The Dance of Death, I 3–4).

Sources and Influences

In its form, Pauline combines the confession and the fragment. The confession was originally a religious genre, stemming from the conversion of St Paul (see Acts ix 1–25), in which the autobiographer narrates the life he led previous to his conversion to the religious security he now enjoys. That life is marked as unregenerate by sinful conduct and thoughts or by religious doubt, as originally in St Augustine’s Confessions, and later in the seventeenth century ‘Puritan confession’, the most famous example of which, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, was in Browning’s father’s library (Collections A527–9, p. 47). Eighteenth-century and Romantic ‘confessions’ commonly omit or obscure the motif of religious conversion, as e.g. Rousseau’s Confessions (1781–8) and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), where the interest is more purely autobiographical, though the emphasis upon morally dubious conduct persists. Rousseau may be of particular significance because of Hazlitt’s admiration for the Confessions as an epic of egotism and sensibility; cp. his essay On the Character of Rousseau (1817): ‘His speculations are the obvious exaggerations of a mind, giving a loose to its habitual impulses, and moulding all nature to its own purposes … Hence his excessive egotism, which filled all objects with himself, and would have occupied the universe with his smallest interest … Hence his dissatisfaction with himself and with all around him; for nothing could satisfy his ardent longings after good, his restless appetite of being. Hence his feelings, overstrained and exhausted, recoiled upon themselves, and produced his love of silence and repose, his feverish aspirations after the quiet and solitude of nature’. In other examples, such as Hazlitt’s own Liber Amoris and Shelley’s Epipsychidion, the story is of a clandestine love-affair, in which the woman may be the addressee. Elements of all these varieties may be found in Pauline, though conversion is present only as a wish (see ll. 986–94); in this respect, and in several others, Pauline clearly owes much to Tennyson’s Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself (1830). This poem is however a soliloquy, and rhetorically much simpler than Pauline. B.’s placing of his writer in the middle of a shifting flux of moods and attitudes, rather than at a stable point of retrospection, together with the use of an addressee, suggests the influence of the Romantic ‘conversation poem’, e.g. Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp and Dejection: An Ode; cp. also The Picture, which contains a woodland description having features in common with ll. 732–80. Another source for this style could be the ‘chants de Corinne’ with which Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1809) is interspersed, and which Corinne herself describes thus: ‘I should say that improvisation is to me like animated conversation. I do not restrict myself to such and such subjects; I abandon myself to the impression produced by the interest of those who listen to me’.

The fragment had become a major literary genre during the Romantic period. Many examples are to be found in Wordsworth and Coleridge, such as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Christabel and Wordsworth’s Nutting and A Night-Piece; Keats’s Hyperion is probably the longest. In these poems, however, the fragmenting involves breaking off (Coleridge, Keats) or starting abruptly (Wordsworth); the internal fragmenting used in Pauline is most notably anticipated in Byron’s The Giaour, a narrative poem which concludes with a long confessional passage. The posthumous publication of many of Shelley’s fragments by Mary Shelley in 1824, and of some Byron fragments in 1830, may also have influenced this motif: B.’s first volume of Shelley (a pirated edition of 1826, publ. by William Benbow) contains, like Mary Shelley’s, a whole section entitled ‘Fragments’, as well as the fragmentary Triumph of Life. The pretence that a work is a fragmented manuscript was a common 18th-century device, e.g. Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (presented to B. by his father in Feb. 1833). These, and Pope’s Dunciad, also have pseudo-editorial footnotcs which may have influenced B.’s attribution of a footnote to Pauline (see l. 811n.). In the Romantic period, the technique of a fictitious textual apparatus was used by Shelley (Epipsychidion, Julian and Maddalo) and Scott (Tales of My Landlord). With a few exceptions, B. eschewed both confession and fragment in later works, though the form of the dramatic monologue owes something to both. B. continued on occasion to play on the ‘documentary’ status of his texts: see below, Parallels in B. Later editions of Pauline considerably tone down the fragmentariness of 1833, e.g. in the elimination of asterisks and incomplete lines.

B.’s note at the end of the poem in Mill suggests the importance of Richard III in the conception of Pauline, though B. implies that Kean himself rather than Shakespeare was the main influence. The play itself, with its themes of usurpation and despotism, and perhaps the sexual exploitation involved in Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne (I ii), may have influenced some aspects of the writer’s psychomachia. Richard’s defiant self-assertion in the face of guilt and defeat had already made him a proto-Romantic hero in the eyes of Byron and other writers; B.’s self-identification with him continued at least until his letter to Fox about Paracelsus:

therefore a certain writer who meditated a notice (it matters not laudatory or otherwise) on “Pauline” in the “Examiner,” must be benignant or supercilious as he may choose, but in no case an idle spectator of my first appearance on any stage (having previously only dabbled in private theatricals) and bawl “Hats off !” “Down in front!” &c., as soon as I get to the proscenium; and he may depend that tho’ my “Now is the winter of our discontent” be rather awkward, yet there shall be occasional outbreaks of good stuff—that I shall warm as I get on, and finally wish “Richmond at the bottom of the seas,” &c. in the best style imaginable. (Correspondence iii 135: B. quotes Richard III I i 1 and misquotes IV iv 463–4)

Equally, the performance imagined in this passage closely resembles B.’s description of the dying Kean’s (ll. 669–75), a description corroborated by other commentators. Thomas Talfourd wrote: ‘He whispers when he should shout; creeps and totters when he should spring or rush forward; and is even palpably assisted by his adversary to fight or fall. Yet his last look at Richmond as he stands is fearful’. John Doran, referring to a performance of 1832, commented: ‘The sight was pitiable. Genius was not traceable in that bloated face; intellect was all but quenched in those once matchless eyes; and the power seemed gone, despite the will that would recall it. I noted in a diary, that night, the above facts, and, in addition, that by bursts he was as grand as he had ever been’ (quoted H. N. Hillebrand, Life of Edmund Kean [New York 1933] 320). Richard III had been, in Kean’s own words, ‘that character which has been the foundation of my fame and fortune’, and B. could have read in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (2 vols., 1830) Byron’s comment on Kean’s performance of it in his prime: ‘Just returned from seeing Kean in Richard. By Jove, he is a soul! Life—nature—truth—without exaggeration or diminution. Kemble’s Hamlet is perfect;—but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard’ (i 500). B. almost certainly knew Hazlitt’s numerous reviews of performances by Kean (collected in A View of the English Stage, 1818), and some details seem to show Hazlitt’s influence, in particular the emphasis on power and manipulation: ‘Richard should woo, not as a lover, but as an actor—to shew his mental superiority, and power to make others the playthings of his will’ was Hazlitt’s comment: see e.g. ll. 340–3, 469–88. B.’s opinion of Kean included however an element of revulsion, presumably inspired by Kean’s notorious love-affair with one Mrs Cox, which had led to a lawsuit and Kean’s public disgrace and private decline; he wrote to EBB. on 24 May 1845: ‘[I] have known good & wicked men and women, gentle & simple, shaking hands with Edmund Kean and Father Mathew, you and—Ottima!’ (Correspondence x 234; Ottima’s crimes are adultery and murder: see Pippa i. Since Father Mathew was a well-known temperance reformer, B. may also have had Kean’s alcoholism in mind). B. went on: ‘Then, I had a certain faculty of self-consciousness, years, years ago, at which John Mill wondered, and which ought to be improved by this time, if constant use helps at all’—suggesting a continued association between Kean and Pauline.

Shelley is invoked in several passages (see ll. 142f., 404f. 1020f.); his poet-biography Alastor was clearly important in the formation of B.’s protagonist, and the poem’s vocabulary is frequently Shelleyan. However, Shelley’s influence should not be overestimated at the expense of other Romantic writers, notably Byron and Coleridge.

Various classical writers are cited, the most important of whom is Plato (see ll. 405–6): the story of a person driven through successive grades of experience by love, or the desire for love, clearly owes something to the Symposium. The Swiss nationality of Pauline herself points again to Rousseau’s Confessions, or more generally to the stress on erotic sensibility in Rousseau’s work, as e.g. La Nouvelle Héloïse, where the relation between St Preux and Julie has affinities with that between the writer and Pauline. A number of French sources have been suggested by H.-L. Hovelacque (La Jeunesse de Robert Browning [Paris 1932]) and reviewed by R. E. Gridley (The Brownings and France [1982]). Most involve no more than generalized affinities of character and situation; more useful is Gridley’s citation of Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831), ‘with its romantic egoist Raphael de Valentin seeking redemption through love for his Pauline [and] a long Alpine sojourn and a closing scene with Pauline cradling the head of the hero in his arms’ (p. 17). The supernatural powers associated with the ass’s skin link Balzac’s novel, like Pauline, to the Faustianism fashionable in this period. Balzac’s specific variation on this theme is to make it a critique of the Will: Valentin’s every wish is granted, but each consumes more of the substance of the wild ass’s skin whose disappearance will be the moment of his death. The speaker of Pauline (not to mention Kean) appears similarly consumed and prematurely aged by his desires. Gridley also draws attention to a possible affinity between B.’s anxiety in the successive prefaces to the poem to distinguish himself from its speaker and the preface to the first edition of La Peau de Chagrin in which Balzac discusses the relations between authors and their works, suggesting that there are those, such as himself, ‘whose spirit and manner strongly contrast with the form and depth of their works’. Gridley also suggests that Pauline’s monitory role owes something to the heroine of Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1809); for a verbal echo see p. 59.

Parallels in B.

The development of a poet, and his failure in his mission, are themes which dominate B.’s early work, esp. Paracelsus (I 98), with the poet Aprile, and Sordello (I 350); later figures are painters (Andrea del Sarto [p. 385] and Fra Lippo Lippi [p. 477]), or failures in life rather than art (Childe Roland [p. 384], Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau [1871]); Cleon (p. 563) is an exception to this pattern. Pauline, the maternal mistress, begins a gallery of similar figures: Michal in Paracelsus, Lady Carlisle in Strafford (1837), Palma in Sordello, Polyxena in King Victor and King Charles (1842), and Eulalia in A Soul’s Tragedy (II 180). The confessional motif reappears in B.’s autobiographical intervention in Sordello (iii 577f., I 562–3), where he also addresses a beloved female figure and relates the history of his poetic and moral development. The confession is later refracted into dramatic monologue, in the apologetics of such figures as Bishop Blougram (p. 279), Mr Sludge (p. 771), and Juan in Fifine at the Fair (1872). Note also Confessional (II 337), Confessions (DP, 1864), and A Forgiveness (Pacchiarotto, 1876). Similarly, the ‘physical’ fragmenting of the text was replaced by dramatic cuttings into and out of a spoken discourse addressed to an interlocutor (see e.g. My Last Duchess [p. 197] and Mr Sludge, though in Heretic’s Tragedy [III 219] and A Death [p. 714] it is again the poem-as-document which is emphasized). The external commentary introduced by Pauline’s note reappears as B.’s introduction to Holy-Cross Day (p. 540), in the end-comments in Bishop Blougram and The Statue and the Bust (III 342), and in later poems as prologues and epilogues which enter into complex relations with the main poem. The kind of elaborate descriptive ‘panel’ of ll. 732–810 does not reappear until Gerard de Lairesse (Parleyings, 1887), where it likewise takes the form of a conducted landscape tour, this time with the reader as companion.

Story and structure

The protagonist of Pauline is a young poet. He describes his early life as solitary and bookish (ll. 318–35). He was ambitious, though he had not yet found his vocation (ll. 339–43). In his adolescence he underwent a mental crisis, which his solitary life helped him to come through (ll. 344–56). In the aftermath of this crisis, he turned to writing poetry, as one of a number of possible modes of artistic expression (ll. 357–76). His first crude efforts were followed by imitations of ‘mighty bards’ (ll. 377–93). He then searched for a particular model, and found one in a writer he calls ‘sun-treader’ (i.e. Shelley: the term ‘sun-treader’ appears in an earlier invocation, l. 151). In a frenzy of enthusiasm, he adopted Shelley’s most radical political programmes: ‘Men were to be as gods, and earth as heaven’ (ll. 394– 428). The disappointment of these visionary hopes (ll. 429–39) was followed by a decision to ‘look on real life’ (ll. 440–6). However, this too proved disappointing, and he ended by abandoning his faith in, and sympathy with, mankind (ll. 447–61). He now entered a phase of narcissism and cynical detachment, which militated even against his poetic ambitions (ll. 462–544). At the end of this period he experienced some renewal of interest in ‘old delights’ such as music, and he describes himself as having been ‘most happy’, although it is clear that his creative faculty was still in abeyance (ll. 563–7). It was at this point that he first met Pauline (ll. 560–3). When he discovered that her love for him was of a higher kind than his for her, he realized the extent of his egotism and the damage it had done to his soul (ll. 577–85). He revealed his state of mind to Pauline, who encouraged him to hope for recovery (ll. 55–75). To help him resume his vocation as a poet, Pauline urged him to write an account of his development up to this point.

Pauline therefore purports to be the fragmentary text of the young man’s written confession to Pauline, which she has read and, as she explains in a footnote to l. 811, reluctantly allows to be published. In addition to the narrative passages which have been cited, the young man engages in abstract self-analysis (e.g. ll. 260–317) and invokes and addresses Pauline, the ‘sun-treader’, and God (e.g. the opening lines, ll. 151–229, 243–51, 729–810, 822–54). The addresses to Pauline are to her as reader and are not to be thought of as the text of a spoken utterance. Mill’s objection to the end of the poem (see final note) reflects a misunderstanding of this point.

[Epigraph]

Non dubito, quin titulus libri nostri raritate suâ quamplurimos

alliciat ad legendum: inter quos nonnulli obliquae

opinionis, mente languidi, multi etiam maligni, et in ingenium

nostrum ingrati accedent, qui temerariâ suâ ignorantiâ,

[5]   vix conspecto titulo clamabunt: Nos vetita docere, haeresium

semina jacere: piis auribus offendiculo, praeclaris ingeniis

scandalo esse: . … adeò conscientiae suae consulentes, ut

nec Apollo, nec Musae omnes, neque Angelus de coelo

me ab illorum execratione vindicare queant: quibus et ego

[10]  nunc consulo, ne scripta nostra legant, nec intelligant, nec

meminerint: nam noxia sunt, venenosa sunt: Acherontis

ostium est in hoc libro, lapides loquitur, caveant, ne

cerebrum illis excutiat. Vos autem, qui aequâ mente ad

legendum venitis, si tantam prudentiae discretionem

[15]  adhibueritis, quantam in melle legendo apes, jam securi legite.

Puto namque vos et utilitatis haud parùm et voluptatis

plurimùm accepturos. Quod si qua repereritis, quae vobis

non placeant, mittite illa, nec utimini. NAM ET EGO VOBIS

ILLA NON PROBO, SED NARRO. Caetera tamen propterea non

[20]  respuite. … … Ideo, si quid liberius dictum sit, ignoscite

adolescentiae nostrae, qui minor quam adolescens hoe

opus composui.—H. Cor. Agrippa, De Occult. Phil.

    London, January, 1833.

    V.A. XX.

Pauline, mine own, bend o’er me—thy soft breast

Shall pant to mine—bend o’er me—thy sweet eyes,

And loosened hair, and breathing lips, and arms

Drawing me to thee—these build up a screen

5  To shut me in with thee, and from all fear,

So that I might unlock the sleepless brood

Of fancies from my soul, their lurking place,

Nor doubt that each would pass, ne’er to return

To one so watched, so loved, and so secured.

10  But what can guard thee but thy naked love?

Ah, dearest! whoso sucks a poisoned wound

Envenoms his own veins,—thou art so good,

So calm—if thou should’st wear a brow less light

For some wild thought which, but for me, were kept

15  From out thy soul, as from a sacred star.

Yet till I have unlocked them it were vain

To hope to sing; some woe would light on me;

Nature would point at one, whose quivering lip

Was bathed in her enchantments—whose brow burned

20  Beneath the crown, to which her secrets knelt;

Who learned the spell which can call up the dead,

And then departed, smiling like a fiend

Who has deceived God. If such one should seek

Again her altars, and stand robed and crowned

25  Amid the faithful: sad confession first,

Remorse and pardon, and old claims renewed,

Ere I can be—as I shall be no more.

I had been spared this shame, if I had sate

By thee for ever, from the first, in place

30  Of my wild dreams of beauty and of good,

Or with them, as an earnest of their truth.

No thought nor hope, having been shut from thee,

No vague wish unexplained—no wandering aim

Sent back to bind on Fancy’s wings, and seek

35  Some strange fair world, where it might be a law;

But doubting nothing, had been led by thee,

Thro’ youth, and saved, as one at length awaked,

Who has slept thro’ a peril. Ah! vain, vain!

Thou lovest me—the past is in its grave,

40  Tho’ its ghost haunts us—still this much is ours,

To cast away restraint, lest a worse thing

Wait for us in the darkness. Thou lovest me,

And thou art to receive not love, but faith,

For which thou wilt be mine, and smile, and take

45  All shapes, and shames, and veil without a fear

That form which music follows like a slave;

And I look to thee, and I trust in thee,

As in a Northern night one looks alway

Unto the East for morn, and spring and joy.

50  Thou seest then my aimless, hopeless state,

And resting on some few old feelings, won

Back by thy beauty, would’st that I essay

The task, which was to me what now thou art:

And why should I conceal one weakness more?

55  Thou wilt remember one warm morn, when Winter

Crept aged from the earth, and Spring’s first breath

Blew soft from the moist hills—the black-thorn boughs,

So dark in the bare wood, when glistening

In the sunshine were white with coming buds,

60  Like the bright side of a sorrow—and the banks

Had violets opening from sleep like eyes—

I walked with thee, who knew not a deep shame

Lurked beneath smiles and careless words, which sought

To hide it—till they wandered and were mute;

65  As we stood listening on a sunny mound

To the wind murmuring in the damp copse,

Like heavy breathings of some hidden thing

Betrayed by sleep—until the feeling rushed

That I was low indeed, yet not so low

70  As to endure the calmness of thine eyes;

And so I told thee all, while the cool breast

I leaned on altered not its quiet beating;

And long ere words, like a hurt bird’s complaint,

Bade me look up and be what I had been,

75  I felt despair could never live by thee.

Thou wilt remember:—thou art not more dear

Than song was once to me; and I ne’er sung

But as one entering bright halls, where all

Will rise and shout for him. Sure I must own

80  That I am fallen—having chosen gifts

Distinct from theirs—that I am sad—and fain

Would give up all to be but where I was;

Not high as I had been, if faithful found—

But low and weak, yet full of hope, and sure

85  Of goodness as of life—that I would lose

All this gay mastery of mind, to sit

Once more with them, trusting in truth and love,

And with an aim—not being what I am.

Oh, Pauline! I am ruined! who believed

90  That tho’ my soul had floated from its sphere

Of wide dominion into the dim orb

Of self—that it was strong and free as ever:—

It has conformed itself to that dim orb,

Reflecting all its shades and shapes, and now

95  Must stay where it alone can be adored.

I have felt this in dreams—in dreams in which

I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt

A strange delight in causing my decay;

I was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever

100  Within some ocean-cave; and ages rolled,

Till thro’ the cleft rock, like a moonbeam, came

A white swan to remain with me; and ages

Rolled, yet I tired not of my first joy

In gazing on the peace of its pure wings.

105  And then I said, “It is most fair to me,

“Yet its soft wings must sure have suffered change

“From the thick darkness—sure its eyes are dim—

“Its silver pinions must be cramped and numbed

“With sleeping ages here; it cannot leave me,

110  “For it would seem, in light, beside its kind,

“Withered—tho’ here to me most beautiful.”

And then I was a young witch, whose blue eyes,

As she stood naked by the river springs,

Drew down a god—I watched his radiant form

115  Growing less radiant—and it gladdened me;

Till one morn, as he sat in the sunshine

Upon my knees, singing to me of heaven,

He turned to look at me, ere I could lose

The grin with which I viewed his perishing.

120  And he shrieked and departed, and sat long

By his deserted throne—but sunk at last,

Murmuring, as I kissed his lips and curled

Around him, “I am still a god—to thee.”

Still I can lay my soul bare in its fall,

125  For all the wandering and all the weakness

Will be a saddest comment on the song.

And if, that done, I can be young again,

I will give up all gained as willingly

As one gives up a charm which shuts him out

130  From hope, or part, or care, in human kind.

As life wanes, all its cares, and strife, and toil,

Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees

Which grew by our youth’s home—the waving mass

Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew—

135  The morning swallows with their songs like words,—

All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts.

So aught connected with my early life—

My rude songs or my wild imaginings,

How I look on them—most distinct amid

140  The fever and the stir of after years!

I ne’er had ventured e’en to hope for this,

Had not the glow I felt at His award,

Assured me all was not extinct within.

Him whom all honor—whose renown springs up

145  Like sunlight which will visit all the world;

So that e’en they who sneered at him at first,

Come out to it, as some dark spider crawls

From his foul nets, which some lit torch invades,

Yet spinning still new films for his retreat.—

150  Thou didst smile, poet,—but, can we forgive?

Sun-treader—life and light be thine for ever;

Thou art gone from us—years go by—and spring

Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful,

Yet thy songs come not—other bards arise,

155  But none like thee—they stand—thy majesties,

Like mighty works which tell some Spirit there

Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn,

Till, its long task completed, it hath risen

And left us, never to return: and all

160  Rush in to peer and praise when all in vain.

The air seems bright with thy past presence yet,

But thou art still for me, as thou hast been

When I have stood with thee, as on a throne

With all thy dim creations gathered round

165  Like mountains,—and I felt of mould like them,

And creatures of my own were mixed with them,

Like things half-lived, catching and giving life.

But thou art still for me, who have adored,

Tho’ single, panting but to hear thy name,

170  Which I believed a spell to me alone,

Scarce deeming thou wert as a star to men—

As one should worship long a sacred spring

Scarce worth a moth’s flitting, which long grasses cross,

And one small tree embowers droopingly,

175  Joying to see some wandering insect won,

To live in its few rushes—or some locust

To pasture on its boughs—or some wild bird

Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air,

And then should find it but the fountain-head,

180  Long lost, of some great river—washing towns

And towers, and seeing old woods which will live

But by its banks, untrod of human foot,

Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering

In light as some thing lieth half of life

185  Before God’s foot—waiting a wondrous change

—Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay

Its course in vain, for it does ever spread

Like a sea’s arm as it goes rolling on,

Being the pulse of some great country—so

190  Wert thou to me—and art thou to the world.

And I, perchance, half feel a strange regret,

That I am not what I have been to thee:

Like a girl one has loved long silently,

In her first loveliness, in some retreat,

195  When first emerged, all gaze and glow to view

Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and lips which bleed

Like a mountain berry. Doubtless it is sweet

To see her thus adored—but there have been

Moments, when all the world was in his praise,

200  Sweeter than all the pride of after hours.

Yet, Sun-treader, all hail!—from my heart’s heart

I bid thee hail!—e’en in my wildest dreams,

I am proud to feel I would have thrown up all

The wreathes of fame which seemed o’erhanging me,

205  To have seen thee, for a moment, as thou art.

And if thou livest—if thou lovest, spirit!

Remember me, who set this final seal

To wandering thought—that one so pure as thou

Could never die. Remember me, who flung

210  All honor from my soul—yet paused and said,

“There is one spark of love remaining yet,

“For I have nought in common with him—shapes

“Which followed him avoid me, and foul forms

“Seek me, which ne’er could fasten on his mind;

215  “And tho’ I feel how low I am to him,

“Yet I aim not even to catch a tone

“Of all the harmonies which he called up,

“So one gleam still remains, altho’ the last.”

Remember me—who praise thee e’en with tears,

220  For never more shall I walk calm with thee;

Thy sweet imaginings are as an air,

A melody, some wond’rous singer sings,

Which, though it haunt men oft in the still eve,

They dream not to essay; yet it no less,

225  But more is honored. I was thine in shame,

And now when all thy proud renown is out,

I am a watcher, whose eyes have grown dim

With looking for some star—which breaks on him,

Altered, and worn, and weak, and full of tears.

230  Autumn has come—like Spring returned to us,

Won from her girlishness—like one returned

A friend that was a lover—nor forgets

The first warm love, but full of sober thoughts

Of fading years; whose soft mouth quivers yet

235  With the old smile—but yet so changed and still!

And here am I the scoffer, who have probed

Life’s vanity, won by a word again

Into my old life—for one little word

Of this sweet friend, who lives in loving me,

240  Lives strangely on my thoughts, and looks, and words,

As fathoms down some nameless ocean thing

Its silent course of quietness and joy.

O dearest, if, indeed, I tell the past,

May’st thou forget it as a sad sick dream;

245  Or if it linger—my lost soul too soon

Sinks to itself, and whispers, we shall be

But closer linked—two creatures whom the earth

Bears singly—with strange feelings, unrevealed

But to each other; or two lonely things

250  Created by some Power, whose reign is done,

Having no part in God, or his bright world.

I am to sing; whilst ebbing day dies soft,

As a lean scholar dies, worn o’er his book,

And in the heaven stars steal out one by one,

255  As hunted men steal to their mountain watch.

I must not think—lest this new impulse die

In which I trust. I have no confidence,

So I will sing on—fast as fancies come

Rudely—the verse being as the mood it paints.

260  I strip my mind bare—whose first elements

I shall unveil—not as they struggled forth

In infancy, nor as they now exist,

That I am grown above them, and can rule them,

But in that middle stage, when they were full,

265  Yet ere I had disposed them to my will;

And then I shall show how these elements

Produced my present state, and what it is.

I am made up of an intensest life,

Of a most clear idea of consciousness

270  Of self—distinct from all its qualities,

From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;

And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all,

But linked in me, to self-supremacy,

Existing as a centre to all things,

275  Most potent to create, and rule, and call

Upon all things to minister to it;

And to a principle of restlessness

Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all—

This is myself; and I should thus have been,

280  Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.

And of my powers, one springs up to save

From utter death a soul with such desires

Confined to clay—which is the only one

Which marks me—an imagination which

285  Has been an angel to me—coming not

In fitful visions, but beside me ever,

And never failing me; so tho’ my mind

Forgets not—not a shred of life forgets—

Yet I can take a secret pride in calling

290  The dark past up—to quell it regally.

A mind like this must dissipate itself,

But I have always had one lode-star; now,

As I look back, I see that I have wasted,

Or progressed as I looked toward that star—

295  A need, a trust, a yearning after God,

A feeling I have analysed but late,

But it existed, and was reconciled

With a neglect of all I deemed his laws,

Which yet, when seen in others, I abhorred.

300  I felt as one beloved, and so shut in

From fear—and thence I date my trust in signs

And omens—for I saw God every where;

And I can only lay it to the fruit

Of a sad after-time that I could doubt

305  Even his being—having always felt

His presence—never acting from myself,

Still trusting in a hand that leads me through

All danger; and this feeling still has fought

Against my weakest reason and resolves.

310  And I can love nothing—and this dull truth

Has come the last—but sense supplies a love

Encircling me and mingling with my life.

These make myself—for I have sought in vain

To trace how they were formed by circumstance,

315  For I still find them—turning my wild youth

Where they alone displayed themselves, converting

All objects to their use—now see their course!

They came to me in my first dawn of life,

Which passed alone with wisest ancient books,

320  All halo-girt with fancies of my own,

And I myself went with the tale—a god,

Wandering after beauty—or a giant,

Standing vast in the sunset—an old hunter,

Talking with gods—or a high-crested chief,

325  Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos;—

I tell you, nought has ever been so clear

As the place, the time, the fashion of those lives.

I had not seen a work of lofty art,

Nor woman’s beauty, nor sweet nature’s face,

330  Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those

On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:

The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves—

And nothing ever will surprise me now—

Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,

335  Who bound my forehead with Proserpine’s hair.

And strange it is, that I who could so dream,

Should e’er have stooped to aim at aught beneath—

Aught low, or painful, but I never doubted;

So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life

340  To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath

Was a vague sense of powers folded up—

A sense that tho’ those shadowy times were past,

Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule.

Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down

345  My soul, till it was changed. I lost myself,

And were it not that I so loathe that time,

I could recall how first I learned to turn

My mind against itself; and the effects,

In deeds for which remorse were vain, as for

350  The wanderings of delirious dream; yet thence

Came cunning, envy, falsehood, which so long

Have spotted me—at length I was restored,

Yet long the influence remained; and nought

But the still life I led, apart from all,

355  Which left my soul to seek its old delights,

Could e’er have brought me thus far back to peace.

As peace returned, I sought out some pursuit:

And song rose—no new impulse—but the one

With which all others best could be combined.

360  My life has not been that of those whose heaven

Was lampless, save where poesy shone out;

But as a clime, where glittering mountain-tops,

And glancing sea, and forests steeped in light,

Give back reflected the far-flashing sun;

365  For music, (which is earnest of a heaven,

Seeing we know emotions strange by it,

Not else to be revealed,) is as a voice,

A low voice calling Fancy, as a friend,

To the green woods in the gay summer time.

370  And she fills all the way with dancing shapes,

Which have made painters pale; and they go on

While stars look at them, and winds call to them,

As they leave life’s path for the twilight world,

Where the dead gather. This was not at first,

375  For I scarce knew what I would do. I had

No wish to paint, no yearning—but I sang.

  And first I sang, as I in dream have seen

Music wait on a lyrist for some thought,

Yet singing to herself until it came.

380  I turned to those old times and scenes, where all

That’s beautiful had birth for me, and made

Rude verses on them all; and then I paused—

I had done nothing, so I sought to know

What mind had yet achieved. No fear was mine

385  As I gazed on the works of mighty bards,

In the first joy at finding my own thoughts

Recorded, and my powers exemplified,

And feeling their aspirings were my own.

And then I first explored passion and mind;

390  And I began afresh; I rather sought

To rival what I wondered at, than form

Creations of my own; so much was light

Lent back by others, yet much was my own.

   I paused again—a change was coming on,

395  I was no more a boy—the past was breaking

Before the coming, and like fever worked.

I first thought on myself—and here my powers

Burst out. I dreamed not of restraint, but gazed

On all things: schemes and systems went and came,

400  And I was proud (being vainest of the weak),

In wandering o’er them, to seek out some one

To be my own; as one should wander o’er

The white way for a star.

On one, whom praise of mine would not offend,

405  Who was as calm as beauty—being such

Unto mankind as thou to me, Pauline,

Believing in them, and devoting all

His soul’s strength to their winning back to peace;

Who sent forth hopes and longings for their sake,

410  Clothed in all passion’s melodies, which first

Caught me, and set me, as to a sweet task,

To gather every breathing of his songs.

And woven with them there were words, which seemed

A key to a new world; the muttering

415  Of angels, of some thing unguessed by man.

How my heart beat, as I went on, and found

Much there I felt my own mind had conceived,

But there living and burning; soon the whole

Of his conceptions dawned on me; their praise

420  Is in the tongues of men; men’s brows are high

When his name means a triumph and a pride;

So my weak hands may well forbear to dim

What then seemed my bright fate: I threw myself

To meet it. I was vowed to liberty,

425  Men were to be as gods, and earth as heaven.

And I—ah! what a life was mine to be,

My whole soul rose to meet it. Now, Pauline,

I shall go mad, if I recall that time.

   O let me look back, ere I leave for ever

430  The time, which was an hour, that one waits

For a fair girl, that comes a withered hag.

And I was lonely,—far from woods and fields,

And amid dullest sights, who should be loose

As a stag—yet I was full of joy—who lived

435  With Plato—and who had the key to life.

And I had dimly shaped my first attempt,

And many a thought did I build up on thought,

As the wild bee hangs cell to cell—in vain;

For I must still go on: my mind rests not.

440  ’Twas in my plan to look on real life,

Which was all new to me; my theories

Were firm, so I left them, to look upon

Men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys;

And, as I pondered on them all, I sought

445  How best life’s end might be attained—an end

Comprising every joy. I deeply mused.

And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke

As from a dream—I said,’twas beautiful,

Yet but a dream; and so adieu to it.

450  As some world-wanderer sees in a far meadow

Strange towers, and walled gardens, thick with trees,

Where singing goes on, and delicious mirth,

And laughing fairy creatures peeping over,

And on the morrow, when he comes to live

455  For ever by those springs, and trees, fruit-flushed,

And fairy bowers—all his search is vain.

Well I remember   

First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,

And faith in them—then freedom in itself,

460  And virtue in itself—and then my motives’ ends,

And powers and loves; and human love went last.

I felt this no decay, because new powers

Rose as old feelings left—wit, mockery,

And happiness; for I had oft been sad,

465  Mistrusting my resolves: but now I cast

Hope joyously away—I laughed and said,

“No more of this”—I must not think; at length

I look’d again to see how all went on.

My powers were greater—as some temple seemed

470  My soul, where nought is changed, and incense rolls

Around the altar—only God is gone,

And some dark spirit sitteth in his seat!

So I passed through the temple; and to me

Knelt troops of shadows; and they cried, “Hail, king!

475  “We serve thee now, and thou shalt serve no more!

“Call on us, prove us, let us worship thee!”

And I said, “Are ye strong—let fancy bear me

“Far from the past.”—And I was borne away

As Arab birds float sleeping in the wind,

480  O’er deserts, towers, and forests, I being calm;

And I said, “I have nursed up energies,

“They will prey on me.” And a band knelt low,

And cried, “Lord, we are here, and we will make

“A way for thee in thine appointed life,—

485  “O look on us!” And I said, “Ye will worship

“Me; but my heart must worship too.” They shouted,

“Thyself—thou art our king!” So I stood there

Smiling   

And buoyant and rejoicing was the spirit

490  With which I looked out how to end my days;

I felt once more myself—my powers were mine;

I found that youth or health so lifted me,

That, spite of all life’s vanity, no grief

Came nigh me—I must ever be light-hearted;

495  And that this feeling was the only veil

Betwixt me and despair: so if age came,

I should be as a wreck linked to a soul

Yet fluttering, or mind-broken, and aware

Of my decay. So a long summer morn

500  Found me; and ere noon came, I had resolved

No age should come on me, ere youth’s hopes went,

For I would wear myself out—like that morn

Which wasted not a sunbeam—every joy

I would make mine, and die; and thus I sought

505  To chain my spirit down, which I had fed

With thoughts of fame. I said, the troubled life

Of genius seen so bright when working forth

Some trusted end, seems sad, when all in vain—

Most sad, when men have parted with all joy

510  For their wild fancy’s sake, which waited first,

As an obedient spirit, when delight

Came not with her alone, but alters soon,

Coming darkened, seldom, hasting to depart,

Leaving a heavy darkness and warm tears.

515  But I shall never lose her; she will live

Brighter for such seclusion—I but catch

A hue, a glance of what I sing, so pain

Is linked with pleasure, for I ne’er may tell

The radiant sights which dazzle me; but now

520  They shall be all my own, and let them fade

Untold—others shall rise as fair, as fast.

And when all’s done, the few dim gleams transferred,—

(For a new thought sprung up—that it were well

To leave all shadowy hopes, and weave such lays

525  As would encircle me with praise and love;

So I should not die utterly—I should bring

One branch from the gold forest, like the knight

Of old tales, witnessing I had been there,)—

And when all’s done, how vain seems e’en success,

530  And all the influence poets have o’er men!

’Tis a fine thing that one, weak as myself,

Should sit in his lone room, knowing the words

He utters in his solitude shall move

Men like a swift wind—that tho’ he be forgotten,

535  Fair eyes shall glisten when his beauteous dreams

Of love come true in happier frames than his.

Ay, the still night brought thoughts like these, but morn

Came, and the mockery again laughed out

At hollow praises, and smiles, almost sneers;

540  And my soul’s idol seemed to whisper me

To dwell with him and his unhonoured name—

And I well knew my spirit, that would be

First in the struggle, and again would make

All bow to it; and I would sink again.

545  And then know that this curse will come on us,

To see our idols perish—we may wither,

Nor marvel—we are clay; but our low fate

Should not extend to them, whom trustingly

We sent before into Time’s yawning gulf,

550  To face what e’er may lurk in darkness there—

To see the painters’ glory pass, and feel

Sweet music move us not as once, or worst,

To see decaying wits ere the frail body

Decays. Nought makes me trust in love so really,

555  As the delight of the contented lowness

With which I gaze on souls I’d keep for ever

In beauty—I’d be sad to equal them;

I’d feed their fame e’en from my heart’s best blood,

Withering unseen, that they might flourish still.

560  Pauline, my sweet friend, thou dost not forget

How this mood swayed me, when thou first wert mine,

When I had set myself to live this life,

Defying all opinion. Ere thou camest

I was most happy, sweet, for old delights

565  Had come like birds again; music, my life,

I nourished more than ever, and old lore

Loved for itself, and all it shows—the king

Treading the purple calmly to his death,

—While round him, like the clouds of eve, all dusk,

570  The giant shades of fate, silently flitting,

Pile the dim outline of the coming doom,

—And him sitting alone in blood, while friends

Are hunting far in the sunshine; and the boy,

With his white breast and brow and clustering curls

575  Streaked with his mother’s blood, and striving hard

To tell his story ere his reason goes.

And when I loved thee, as I’ve loved so oft,

Thou lovedst me, and I wondered, and looked in

My heart to find some feeling like such love,

480  Believing I was still what I had been;

And soon I found all faith had gone from me,

And the late glow of life—changing like clouds,

’Twas not the morn-blush widening into day,

But evening, coloured by the dying sun

585  While darkness is quick hastening:—I will tell

My state as though’twere none of mine—despair

Cannot come near me—thus it is with me.

Souls alter not, and mine must progress still;

And this I knew not when I flung away

590  My youth’s chief aims. I ne’er supposed the loss

Of what few I retained; for no resource

Awaits me—now behold the change of all.

I cannot chain my soul, it will not rest

In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere—

595  It has strange powers, and feelings, and desires,

Which I cannot account for, nor explain,

But which I stifle not, being bound to trust

All feelings equally—to hear all sides:

Yet I cannot indulge them, and they live,

600  Referring to some state or life unknown. …

My selfishness is satiated not,

It wears me like a flame; my hunger for

All pleasure, howsoe’er minute, is pain;

I envy—how I envy him whose mind

605  Turns with its energies to some one end!

To elevate a sect, or a pursuit,

However mean—so my still baffled hopes

Seek out abstractions; I would have but one

Delight on earth, so it were wholly mine;

610  One rapture all my soul could fill—and this

Wild feeling places me in dream afar,

In some wide country, where the eye can see

No end to the far hills and dales bestrewn

With shining towers and dwellings. I grow mad

615  Well-nigh, to know not one abode but holds

Some pleasure—for my soul could grasp them all,

But must remain with this vile form. I look

With hope to age at last, which quenching much,

May let me concentrate the sparks it spares.

620  This restlessness of passion meets in me

A craving after knowledge: the sole proof

Of a commanding will is in that power

Repressed; for I beheld it in its dawn,

That sleepless harpy, with its budding wings,

625  And I considered whether I should yield

All hopes and fears, to live alone with it,

Finding a recompence in its wild eyes;

And when I found that I should perish so,

I bade its wild eyes close from me for ever;—

620  And I am left alone with my delights,—

So it lies in me a chained thing—still ready

To serve me, if I loose its slightest bond—

I cannot but be proud of my bright slave.

And thus I know this earth is not my sphere,

635  For I cannot so narrow me, but that

I still exceed it; in their elements

My love would pass my reason—but since here

Love must receive its objects from this earth,

While reason will be chainless, the few truths

640  Caught from its wanderings have sufficed to quell

All love below;—then what must be that love

Which, with the object it demands, would quell

Reason, tho’ it soared with the seraphim?

No—what I feel may pass all human love,

645  Yet fall far short of what my love should be;

And yet I seem more warped in this than aught,

For here myself stands out more hideously.

I can forget myself in friendship, fame,

Or liberty, or love of mighty souls.

650  But I begin to know what thing hate is—

To sicken, and to quiver, and grow white,

And I myself have furnished its first prey.

All my sad weaknesses, this wavering will,

This selfishness, this still decaying frame …

655  But I must never grieve while I can pass

Far from such thoughts—as now—Andromeda!

And she is with me—years roll, I shall change,

But change can touch her not—so beautiful

With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair

660  Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze;

And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,

Resting upon her eyes and face and hair,

As she awaits the snake on the wet beach,

By the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking

665  At her feet; quite naked and alone,—a thing

You doubt not, nor fear for, secure that God

Will come in thunder from the stars to save her.

Let it pass—I will call another change.

I will be gifted with a wond’rous soul,

670  Yet sunk by error to men’s sympathy,

And in the wane of life; yet only so

As to call up their fears, and there shall come

A time requiring youth’s best energies;

And strait I fling age, sorrow, sickness off,

675  And I rise triumphing over my decay.

And thus it is that I supply the chasm

’Twixt what I am and all that I would be.

But then to know nothing—to hope for nothing—

To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,

680  Lest, losing them, all’s lost, and nought remains.

There’s some vile juggle with my reason here—

I feel I but explain to my own loss

These impulses—they live no less the same.

Liberty! what though I despair—my blood

685  Rose not at a slave’s name proudlier than now,

And sympathy obscured by sophistries.

Why have not I sought refuge in myself,

But for the woes I saw and could not stay—

And love!—do I not love thee, my Pauline?

690  I cherish prejudice, lest I be left

Utterly loveless—witness this belief

In poets, tho’ sad change has come there too;

No more I leave myself to follow them:

Unconsciously I measure me by them.

695  Let me forget it; and I cherish most

My love of England—how her name—a word

Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat! . .

Pauline, I could do any thing—not now—

All’s fever—but when calm shall come again—

700  I am prepared—I have made life my own—

I would not be content with all the change

One frame should feel—but I have gone in thought

Thro’ all conjuncture—I have lived all life

When it is most alive—where strangest fate

705  New shapes it past surmise—the tales of men

Bit by some curse—or in the grasps of doom

Half-visible and still increasing round,

Or crowning their wide being’s general aim. …

These are wild fancies, but I feel, sweet friend,

710  As one breathing his weakness to the ear

Of pitying angel—dear as a winter flower;

A slight flower growing alone, and offering

Its frail cup of three leaves to the cold sun,

Yet joyous and confiding, like the triumph

715  Of a child—and why am I not worthy thee?

I can live all the life of plants, and gaze

Drowsily on the bees that flit and play,

Or bare my breast for sunbeams which will kill,

Or open in the night of sounds, to look

720  For the dim stars; I can mount with the bird,

Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves

And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,

Or rise cheerfully springing to the heavens—

Or like a fish breathe in the morning air

725  In the misty sun-warm water—or with flowers

And trees can smile in light at the sinking sun,

Just as the storm comes—as a girl would look

On a departing lover—most serene.

Pauline, come with me—see how I could build

730  A home for us, out of the world, in thought—

I am inspired—come with me, Pauline!

Night, and one single ridge of narrow path

Between the sullen river and the woods

Waving and muttering—for the moonless night

735  Has shaped them into images of life,

Like the upraising of the giant-ghosts,

Looking on earth to know how their sons fare.

Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell

Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting

740  Of thy soft breasts; no—we will pass to morning—

Morning—the rocks, and vallies, and old woods.

How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,—

Half in the air, like creatures of the place,

Trusting the element—living on high boughs

745  That swing in the wind—look at the golden spray,

Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract,

Amid the broken rocks—shall we stay here

With the wild hawks?—no, ere the hot noon come

Dive we down—safe;—see this our new retreat

750  Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,

Dark, tangled, old and green—still sloping down

To a small pool whose waters lie asleep

Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants

And tall trees over-arch to keep us in,

755  Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,

And in the dreamy water one small group

Of two or three strange trees are got together,

Wondering at all around—as strange beasts herd

Together far from their own land—all wildness—

760  No turf nor moss, for boughs and plants pave all,

And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters,

Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head,

And old grey stones lie making eddies there;

The wild mice cross them dry-shod—deeper in—

765  Shut thy soft eyes—now look—still deeper in:

This is the very heart of the woods—all round,

Mountain-like, heaped above us; yet even here

One pond of water gleams—far off the river

Sweeps like a sea, barred out from land; but one—

770  One thin clear sheet has over-leaped and wound

Into this silent depth, which gained, it lies

Still, as but let by sufferance; the trees bend

O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl,

And thro’ their roots long creeping plants stretch out

775  Their twined hair, steeped and sparkling; farther on,

Tall rushes and thick flag-knots have combined

To narrow it; so, at length, a silver thread

It winds, all noiselessly, thro’ the deep wood,

Till thro’ a cleft way, thro’ the moss and stone,

780  It joins its parent-river with a shout.

Up for the glowing day—leave the old woods:

See, they part, like a ruined arch,—the sky!

Nothing but sky appears, so close the roots

And grass of the hill-top level with the air—

785  Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats, laden

With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,

Floating away in the sun in some north sea.

Air, air—fresh life-blood—thin and searching air—

The clear, dear breath of God, that loveth us:

790  Where small birds reel and winds take their delight.

Water is beautiful, but not like air.

See, where the solid azure waters lie,

Made as of thickened air, and down below,

The fern-ranks, like a forest spread themselves,

795  As tho’ each pore could feel the element;

Where the quick glancing serpent winds his way—

Float with me there, Pauline, but not like air.

Down the hill—stop—a clump of trees, see, set

On a heap of rocks, which look o’er the far plains,

800  And envious climbing shrubs would mount to rest,

And peer from their spread boughs. There they wave, looking

At the muleteers, who whistle as they go

To the merry chime of their morning bells, and all

The little smoking cots, and fields, and banks,

805  And copses, bright in the sun; my spirit wanders.

Hedge-rows for me—still, living, hedge-rows, where

The bushes close, and clasp above, and keep

Thought in—I am concentrated—I feel;—

But my soul saddens when it looks beyond;

810  I cannot be immortal, nor taste all.

O God! where does this tend—these struggling aims!^⋆

⋆ Je crains bien que mon pauvre ami ne soit pas toujours parfaitement

compris dans ce qui reste à lire de cet étrange fragment—mais il est moins

propre que tout autre à éclaircir ce qui de sa nature ne peut jamais être

que songe et confusion. D’ailleurs je ne sais trop si en cherchant à mieux

[5]  co-ordonner certaines parties l’on ne courrait pas le risque de nuire au

seul mérite auquel une production si singulière peut prétendre—celui de

donner une idée assez précise du genre qu’elle n’a fait qu’ébaucher.—

Ce début sans prétention, ce remuement des passions qui va d’abord en

accroissant et puis s’apaise par degrés, ces élans de l’âme, ce retour soudain

[10]  sur soi-même, et par dessus tout, la tournure d’esprit toute particulière

de mon ami rendent les changemens presque impossibles. Les raisons qu’il

fait valoir ailleurs, et d’autres encore plus puissantes, ont fait trouver grâce

à mes yeux pour cet écrit qu’autrement je lui eusse conseillé de jeter au

feu—Je n’en crois pas moins au grand principe de toute composition—

[15]  à ce principe de Shakspeare, de Raffaelle, de Beethoven, d’où il suit que

la concentration des idées est due bien plus à leur conception, qu’à leur

exécution … j’ai tout lieu de craindre que la première de ces qualités

ne soit encore étrangère à mon ami—et je doute fort qu’un redoublement

de travail lui fasse acquérir la seconde. Le mieux serait de brûler

[20]  ceci; mais que faire?

    Je crois que dans ce qui suit il fait allusion à un certain examen qu’il

fit autrefois de l’âme ou plutôt de son âme, pour découvrir la suite

des objets auxquels il lui serait possible d’attèndre, et dont chacun une

fois obtenu devait former une espèce de plateau d’où l’on pouvait

[25]  apercevoir d’autres buts, d’autres projets, d’autres jouissances qui, à leur

tour, devaient être surmontés. Il en résultait que l’oubli et le sommeil

devaient tout terminer. Cette idée que je ne saisis pas parfaitement lui

est peutêtre aussi inintelligible qu’à moi.

PAULINE.

What would I have? what is this “sleep,” which seems

To bound all? can there be a “waking” point

Of crowning life? The soul would never rule—

815  It would be first in all things—it would have

Its utmost pleasure filled,—but that complete

Commanding for commanding sickens it.

The last point I can trace is, rest beneath

Some better essence than itself—in weakness;

820  This is “myself”—not what I think should be,

And what is that I hunger for but God?

My God, my God! let me for once look on thee

As tho’ nought else existed: we alone.

And as creation crumbles, my soul’s spark

825  Expands till I can say, “Even from myself

“I need thee, and I feel thee, and I love thee;

“I do not plead my rapture in thy works

“For love of thee—or that I feel as one

“Who cannot die—but there is that in me

830  “Which turns to thee, which loves, or which should love.”

Why have I girt myself with this hell-dress?

Why have I laboured to put out my life?

Is it not in my nature to adore,

And e’en for all my reason do I not

835  Feel him, and thank him, and pray to him?—Now.

Can I forego the trust that he loves me?

Do I not feel a love which only ONE. … .

O thou pale form, so dimly seen, deep-eyed, I have denied thee calmly—do I not

840  Pant when I read of thy consummate deeds,

And burn to see thy calm, pure truths out-flash

The brightest gleams of earth’s philosophy?

Do I not shake to hear aught question thee? . …

If I am erring save me, madden me,

845  Take from me powers, and pleasures—let me die

Ages, so I see thee: I am knit round

As with a charm, by sin and lust and pride,

Yet tho’ my wandering dreams have seen all shapes

Of strange delight, oft have I stood by thee—

850  Have I been keeping lonely watch with thee,

In the damp night by weeping Olivet,

Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less—

Or dying with thee on the lonely cross—

Or witnessing thy bursting from the tomb!

855  A mortal, sin’s familiar friend, doth here

Avow that he will give all earth’s reward,

But to believe and humbly teach the faith,

In suffering, and poverty, and shame,

Only believing he is not unloved. …

860  And now, my Pauline, I am thine for ever!

I feel the spirit which has buoyed me up

Deserting me: and old shades gathering on;

Yet while its last light waits, I would say much,

And chiefly, I am glad that I have said

865  That love which I have ever felt for thee,

But seldom told; our hearts so beat together,

That speech is mockery, but when dark hours come;

And I feel sad; and thou, sweet, deem’st it strange

A sorrow moves me, thou canst not remove,

870  Look on this lay I dedicate to thee,

Which thro’ thee I began, and which I end,

Collecting the last gleams to strive to tell

That I am thine, and more than ever now—

That I am sinking fast—yet tho’ I sink,

875  No less I feel that thou hast brought me bliss,

And that I still may hope to win it back.

Thou know’st, dear friend, I could not think all calm,

For wild dreams followed me, and bore me off,

And all was indistinct. Ere one was caught

880  Another glanced: so dazzled by my wealth,

Knowing not which to leave nor which to choose,

For all my thoughts so floated, nought was fixed—

And then thou said’st a perfect bard was one

Who shadowed out the stages of all life,

885  And so thou badest me tell this my first stage;—

’Tis done: and even now I feel all dim the shift

Of thought. These are my last thoughts; I discern

Faintly immortal life, and truth, and good.

And why thou must be mine is, that e’en now,

890  In the dim hush of night—that I have done—

With fears and sad forebodings: I look thro’

And say, “E’en at the last I have her still,

“With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven,

“When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist,

895  “And clouds float white in the sun like broods of swans.”

How the blood lies upon her cheek, all spread

As thinned by kisses; only in her lips

It wells and pulses like a living thing,

And her neck looks like marble misted o’er

900  With love-breath, a dear thing to kiss and love,

Standing beneath me—looking out to me,

As I might kill her and be loved for it.

Love me—love me, Pauline, love nought but me;

Leave me not. All these words are wild and weak,

905  Believe them not, Pauline. I stooped so low

But to behold thee purer by my side,

To show thou art my breath—my life—a last

Resource—an extreme want: never believe

Aught better could so look to thee, nor seek

910  Again the world of good thoughts left for me.

There were bright troops of undiscovered suns,

Each equal in their radiant course. There were

Clusters of far fair isles, which ocean kept

For his own joy, and his waves broke on them

915  Without a choice. And there was a dim crowd

Of visions, each a part of the dim whole.

And a star left his peers and came with peace

Upon a storm, and all eyes pined for him.

And one isle harboured a sea-beaten ship,

920  And the crew wandered in its bowers, and plucked

Its fruits, and gave up all their hopes for home.

And one dream came to a pale poet’s sleep,

And he said, “I am singled out by God,

“No sin must touch me.” I am very weak,

925  But what I would express is,—Leave me not,

Still sit by me—with beating breast, and hair

Loosened—watching earnest by my side,

Turning my books, or kissing me when I

Look up—like summer wind. Be still to me

930  A key to music’s mystery, when mind fails,

A reason, a solution and a clue.

You see I have thrown off my prescribed rules:

I hope in myself—and hope, and pant, and love—

You’ll find me better—know me more than when

935  You loved me as I was. Smile not; I have

Much yet to gladden you—to dawn on you.

No more of the past—I’ll look within no more—

I have too trusted to my own wild wants—

Too trusted to myself—to intuition—

940  Draining the wine alone in the still night,

And seeing how—as gathering films arose,

As by an inspiration life seemed bare

And grinning in its vanity, and ends

Hard to be dreamed of, stared at me as fixed,

945  And others suddenly became all foul,

As a fair witch turned an old hag at night.

No more of this—we will go hand in hand,

I will go with thee, even as a child,

Looking no further than thy sweet commands.

950  And thou hast chosen where this life shall be—

The land which gave me thee shall be our home,

Where nature lies all wild amid her lakes

And snow-swathed mountains, and vast pines all girt

With ropes of snow—where nature lies all bare,

955  Suffering none to view her but a race

Most stinted and deformed—like the mute dwarfs

Which wait upon a naked Indian queen.

And there (the time being when the heavens are thick

With storms) I’ll sit with thee while thou dost sing

960  Thy native songs, gay as a desert bird

Who crieth as he flies for perfect joy,

Or telling me old stories of dead knights.

Or I will read old lays to thee—how she,

The fair pale sister, went to her chill grave

965  With power to love, and to be loved, and live.

Or we will go together, like twin gods

Of the infernal world, with scented lamp

Over the dead—to call and to awake—

Over the unshaped images which lie

970  Within my mind’s cave—only leaving all

That tells of the past doubts. So when spring comes,

And sunshine comes again like an old smile,

And the fresh waters, and awakened birds,

And budding woods await us—I shall be

975  Prepared, and we will go and think again,

And all old loves shall come to us—but changed

As some sweet thought which harsh words veiled before;

Feeling God loves us, and that all that errs

Is a strange dream which death will dissipate;

980  And then when I am firm we’ll seek again

My own land, and again I will approach

My old designs, and calmly look on all

The works of my past weakness, as one views

Some scene where danger met him long before.

985  Ah! that such pleasant life should be but dreamed!

But whate’er come of it—and tho’ it fade,

And tho’ ere the cold morning all be gone

As it will be;—tho’ music wait for me,

And fair eyes and bright wine, laughing like sin,

990  Which steals back softly on a soul half saved;

And I be first to deny all, and despise

This verse, and these intents which seem so fair;

Still this is all my own, this moment’s pride,

No less I make an end in perfect joy.

995  E’en in my brightest time, a lurking fear

Possessed me. I well knew my weak resolves,

I felt the witchery that makes mind sleep

Over its treasures—as one half afraid

To make his riches definite—but now

1000  These feelings shall not utterly be lost,

I shall not know again that nameless care,

Lest leaving all undone in youth, some new

And undreamed end reveal itself too late:

For this song shall remain to tell for ever,

1005  That when I lost all hope of such a change,

Suddenly Beauty rose on me again.

No less I make an end in perfect joy,

For I, having thus again been visited,

Shall doubt not many another bliss awaits,

1010  And tho’ this weak soul sink, and darkness come,

Some little word shall light it up again,

And I shall see all clearer and love better;

I shall again go o’er the tracts of thought,

As one who has a right; and I shall live

1015  With poets—calmer—purer still each time,

And beauteous shapes will come to me again,

And unknown secrets will be trusted me,

Which were not mine when wavering—but now

I shall be priest and lover, as of old.

1020  Sun-treader, I believe in God, and truth,

And love; and as one just escaped from death

Would bind himself in bands of friends to feel

He lives indeed—so, I would lean on thee;

Thou must be ever with me—most in gloom

1025  When such shall come—but chiefly when I die,

For I seem dying, as one going in the dark

To fight a giant—and live thou for ever,

And be to all what thou hast been to me—

All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me,

1030  Know my last state is happy—free from doubt,

Or touch of fear. Love me and wish me well!

    RICHMOND,

    October 22, 1832.

Motto. ‘I am no more that which I have been, and shall never be able to be it’. From Clément Marot (1496–1544), Epigrammes Diverses ccxix. Maynard 436 points out the parallel with Byron, Childe Harold IV clxxxv: ‘I am not now / That which I have been’. This passage strongly influenced the closing movement of Pauline: see ll. 831–1031n. Marot’s poem continues: ‘Mon beau printemps & mon esté / Ont faict le sault par la fenestrc, / Amour, tu as esté mon maistre / Ie t’ay servy sur toutes les Dieux; / O si ie pouvois deux fois naistre, / Comme ie te serviroys mieux’ [My fair spring and my summer have gone out of the window. Love, you have been my master; I have served you above all gods; Oh, if I could be born a second time, how much better would I serve you!].

Epigraph. Taken from the preface to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, first publ. 1531, included in an anthology which was, with other of Agrippa’s works, in Browning’s father’s library (Maynard 210, 434–5; Collections A27, p. 5). Agrippa was the most famous alchemist and occultist before Paracelsus. F. A. Pottle (Shelley and Browning: A Myth and Some Facts [1923 repr. 1965] 84–90) notes the following omissions:

[1]. nostri raritate] nostri de Occulta Philosophia, sive de Magia, raritate

[4–5]. ignorantiâ, vix] ignorantia, Magiae nomen in deteriorem partem accipientes, vix

[5]. vetita docere] vetitas artes docere

[7]. esse: . … adeo] esse: maleficum esse, superstitiosum esse, daemoniacum esse, Magus qui sim. Quibus si respondeam, Magum apud literatos viros, non maleficum, non superstitiosum, non daemoniacum sonare: sed sapientem, sed sacerdotem, sed prophetam: Sibyllas magas fuisse, proinde de Christo tam apertissime prophetasse: iam vero et Magos ex mirabilibus mundi arcanis, ipsius mundi autorem Christum cognovisse natum, omniumque primos venisse ad illum adorandum, ipsumque Magiae nomen acceptum Philosophis, laudatum a Theologis, etiam ipsi Evangelio non ingratum. Credo ego istos tam pertinacis supercilii censores Sibyllis et sanctis Magis, et vel ipso Evangelio prius sibi interdicturos, quam ipsum magiae nomen recepturi sint in gratiam: adeo

[20]. respuite… … Ideo] respuite. Nam et medicorum volumina inspicientibus contingit, cum antidotis et pharmacis simul etiam venena legere. Fateor praeterea magiam ipsam multa supervcua, et ad ostentationem curiosa docere prodigia: simul haec ut vana relinquite, causas tamen illorum ne ignorate. Quae vero ad hominum utilitatem, ad advertendos malos eventus, ad destruendum maleficia, ad curandos morbos, ad exterminanda phantasmata, ad conservandam vitae, honoris, fortunae dexteritatem, sine Dei offensa, sine religionis iniuria fieri possunt: quis illa non tam utilia censeat, quam etiam necessaria? Sed quia admonui vos, multa me narrando potius quam affirmando scripsisse: sic enim opus esse visum fuerat, quo pauciora praeteriremus: multa insuper Platonicorum caeterorumque gentilium Philisophorum placita secuti sumus, ubi instituto nostro scribendi suggerebant argumentum: ideo si quid] si alicubi erratum sit, sive quid

We use the 17th-century translation of the whole passage (repr. Pottle, pp. 87–8), bracketing B.’s omissions; it will be seen that he has chosen to omit all direct refs. to magic. Pottle notes that B.’s ‘vetita’ (l. [6]), revised from ‘vetitas artes’, changes ‘forbidden arts’ to ‘forbidden things’.

I do not doubt but the title of our book [of Occult Philosophy, or of Magic,] may by the rarity of it allure many to read it, amongst which, some of a disordered judgment and some that are perverse will come to hear what I have to say, who, by their rash ignorance, may [take the name of Magic in the worse sense and], though scarce having seen the title, cry out that I teach forbidden [Arts], sow the seeds of heresies, offend the pious, and scandalize excellent wits; [that I am a sorcerer, and superstitious and devilish, who indeed am a Magician: to whom I answer, that a Magician doth not, amongst learned men, signify a sorcerer or one that is superstitious or devilish; but a wise man, a priest, a prophet; and that the Sibyls were Magicianesses, and therefore prophecied most clearly of Christ; and that Magicians, as wise men, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ, the author of the world, to be born, and came first of all to worship him; and that the name of Magic was received by philosophers, commended by divines, and is not unacceptable to the Gospel. I believe that the supercilious censors will object against the Sibyls, holy Magicians and the Gospel itself sooner than receive the name of Magic into favor.] So conscientious are they that neither Apollo nor all the Muses, nor an angel from heaven can redeem me from their curse. Whom therefore I advise that they read not our writings, nor understand them, nor remember them. For they are pernicious and full of poison; the gate of Acheron is in this book; it speaks stones—let them take heed that it beat not out their brains. But you that come without prejudice to read it, if you have so much discretion of prudence as bees have in gathering honey, read securely, and believe that you shall receive no little profit, and much pleasure; but if you shall find any things that may not please you, let them alone and make no use of them, for I do not approve of them, but declare them to you. But do not refuse other things, [for they that look into the books of physicians do, together with antidotes and medicines, read also of poisons. I confess that Magic teacheth many superfluous things, and curious prodigies for ostentation; leave them as empty things, yet be not ignorant of their causes. But those things which are for the profit of men—for the turning away of evil intents, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honour, or fortune—may be done without offense to God or injury to religion, because they are, as profitable, so necessary. But I have admonished you that I have writ many things rather narratively than affirmatively; for so it seemed needful that we should pass over fewer things, following the judgments of Platonists and other Gentile Philosophers when they did suggest an argument of writing to our purpose.] Therefore if [any error have been committed, or] anything hath been spoken more freely, pardon my youth, for I wrote this being scarce a young man.

Mill wrote above the passage: ‘too much pretension in this motto’; he also underlined ‘vix conspecto titulo’ (l. [5–6]) and wrote in the margin ‘why?’ (since the phrase applies to Agrippa’s title, not B.’s). In 1888 B. added a note in square brackets beneath the passage. ‘This introduction would appear less absurdly pretentious did it apply, as was intended, to a completed structure of which the poem was meant for only a beginning and remains a fragment’. For the ‘completed structure’, see B.’s ‘preface’ in Mill (headnote, p. 2). For other comments added to the printed text in 1868 and 1888, see headnote, pp. 19–20. B.’s use of ‘pretentious’ suggests that he was recalling Mill’s comment, even at this late date.

5. fear,] fear; (Mill, Lowell-1888).

6–7. the sleepless brood / Of fancies: the writer compares his ‘fancies’ to the Furies who, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, torment Orestes after he murders his mother Clytemnestra. There is an explicit ref. to the Furies at ll. 573–6 and see also l. 624. Another source may be Milton’s Samson Agonistes 19–22: ‘restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm / Of hornets armed, no sooner found alone. / But rush upon me thronging, and present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now’; cp. also the Marot motto, p. 1.

10. ‘Naked’ can mean ‘simple’, ‘unconcealed’, ‘unadorned’, but also ‘vulnerable, defenceless’ (OED); the nature of Pauline’s love for the speaker may both expose her to, and protect her from, contamination (see next lines). Cp. Sordello ii 211 (I 746) where the phrase ‘naked love’ refers to a physical body.

17. to sing: i.e. compose poetry; OED’s earliest citation is Milton, Lycidas (1637)

10–11: ‘Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’; this sense is common throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. 18. Nature would point at one: Mill underlined this phrase and put a cross in the margin, keyed to a note at the bottom of the page: ‘not I think an appropriate image—and it throws considerable obscurity over the meaning of the passage’. whose quivering lip: Oxford compares Shelley, Alastor 291: ‘his quivering lips’.

21. Oxford compares Sordello i 7f. (I 394); cp. also Ring i 745–59.

27. as I shall be no more: Mill underlined this phrase and put a cross in the margin, with the comment: ‘same remark’. Oxford takes this to be a repetition of Mill’s previous note (see l. 18n.): the (less likely) alternative is that Mill had noticed the similarity between this phrase and the Marot motto.

31. Or with them: ‘or if you had been with them [the “wild dreams”]’.

32. nor] or (1868–88).

34. Fancy’s wings] fancy’s wings (Lowell-1888). See l. 368n.

36. But doubting nothing: Mill underlined this phrase and wrote in the margin: ‘not even poetically grammatical’. B. added a comma after ‘But’ in 1888. Cp. l. 338n.

42. the darkness] the dark (1888).

44–6. take … slave: the sense of this difficult passage seems to be that Pauline is to embody the writer’s innermost fantasies, which would otherwise prey on him. The ‘form’ of l. 46, might be hers (her body, or, more broadly, her self), which will disappear in these masquerades; alternatively, it is the creative imagination itself, which Pauline’s physical presence will ‘veil’, i.e. both conceal and suggest. Cp. Jonson’s Epigramme xxv, On Sir Voluptuous Beast, in which ‘Beast’ degrades ‘his faire, and innocent wife’: see esp. ll. 5–6: ‘And now her (hourely) her owne cucqueane makes, / In varied shapes, which for his lust shee takes’. Cp. also Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, where Valentin transforms in fantasy the humble Pauline into something more desirable: ‘Combien de fois n’ai-je pas vêtu de satin les pieds mignons de Pauline, emprisonné sa taille svelte comme un jeune peuplier dans une robe de gaze, jeté sur son sein une légère écharpe en lui faisant fouler les tapis de son hôtel et la conduisant à une voiture élégante; je l’eusse adorée ainsi, je lui donnais une fierté qu’elle n’avait pas, je la dépouillais de toutes ses vertus, de ses grâces naïves, de son délicieux naturel, de son sourire pour la plonger dans le Styx de nos vices’ [How often have I clothed Pauline’s dainty feet in satin, confined her form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a light scarf over her breast while making her tread the carpets of her mansion and conducting her to a splendid carriage; I would have adored her so, I gave her a pride she lacked, I stripped her of all her virtues, her naive charms, her delightful naturalness, of her smile, in order to plunge her in the Styx of our vices]. Mill put a note in the margin opposite ll. 45–6: ‘qu. meaning?’

50. Cp. Epilogue (Asolando, 1889) 9: ‘Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel[?]’ B. was revising Pauline for 1888 at the time this poem was written.

53. The task: i.e. of ‘singing’, as opposed to uttering the ‘confession’.

56–7. Cp. Shelley, Alastor 11–12: ‘spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes / Her first sweet kisses’.

58. wood,] emended from ‘wood;’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

61. Cp. Winter’s Tale IV iv 120–1: ‘violets, dim, / But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes’.

62. knew] knew’st (1870–88).

73. words, like] words like (Lowell-1888). words: i.e. Pauline’s words.

74. be what I had been: cp. l. 27n.

78–9. In the light of the following lines, presumably a ref. to the various appearances of Satan amongst his followers: see e.g. PL i 541–3, x 441–59.

83. faithful found: cp. PL v 896–7: ‘So spake the Seraph Abdiel faithful found, / Among the faithless, faithful only he’. Cp. ll. 168–9n.

86. gay mastery of mind: cp. ‘gai saber’ (‘the gay science’), a Provençal name for the art of poetry.

88.] In 1833 this line ends the page; there is no line-space after it in 1868–75, but there is in 1888. The likelihood that B. intended a line-space in 1833 is diminished by the fact that at ll. 267, 393, and 619 the page was left a line short to indicate a space before the next line.

91. wide] wild (1868–88); Oxford suggests a mispr., pointing out that it is not in Lowell. Cp. l. 612n, and see also l. 238n.

92. that] yet (Mill).

99–123. The fiend visited by the white swan and the young witch drawing down a god are inversions of the Andromeda myth: see ll. 656–67.

99–111. Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam VII xiif., in which Cythna is imprisoned in a sea cave and visited by an eagle and a ‘Nautilus’; an inverse source might be the swan which in Alastor rises up as the Poet approaches and departs towards its home (ll. 272–95). Shelley’s emphasis on transformations of identity, and on the passage of time, may have influenced B.’s treatment.

102. Oxford points out that the swan is sacred to Apollo; it was a traditional emblem of poetry from classical times.

103. my first joy] my first free joy (1888). ‘Tired’ in 1833 is a dissyllable.

112–23. This passage combines several classical and post-classical motifs. There is a clear allusion to stories in Greek mythology about love between gods and mortals; but B. alters the usual balance of power in such relationships in a way which recalls the tradition, in occult literature, that mortals can summon and control spirits. The dethronement of B.’s ‘god’ echoes that of Hyperion, and inverts the deification of Apollo, in Keats’s Hyperion (see ll. 114–15n. and l. 120n.); there are several myths involving Apollo’s pursuit of river-nymphs (Daphne, Cyrene), and the association is strengthened by B.’s lifelong interest in the figure of Apollo as god of poetry (e.g. Sordello i 893–7, I 454). In addition, the ‘young witch’ who ruins a god or godlike hero recalls other temptresses, e.g. the Sirens, Circe, Eve, Delilah. Cp. also Fifine at the Fair (1872) 218–26, referring to Cleopatra, and suggesting that the decline of the ‘god-like’ Antony under her influence may have been in B.’s mind here, particularly in view of Antony’s reconciliation with her after her apparent betrayal of him at Actium (Antony and Cleopatra III ix).

114–15. I watched his radiant form / Growing less radiant: cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound III iv 155–6: ‘gentle radiant forms, / From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure’; and Keats, Hyperion ii 343–5: ‘And be ye mindful that Hyperion, / Our brightest brother, still is undisgraced— / Hyperion, lo! his radiance is here!’

120. he shrieked and departed: contrast the (fragmented) end of Keats’s Hyperion iii 134–6: ‘At length / Apollo shriek’d;—and lo! from all his limbs / Celestial’. See ll. 112–23n.

122. Mill wrote underneath this line, which ends the page in 1833: ‘a curious idealisation of self-worship, very fine, though’. The note presumably refers to the whole passage, not just this line.

123.] B. drew a line below this line in Mill; there is no line-space in 1868–75, but there is in 1888.

125. For] Since (1888).

129–30. Cp. Shelley, preface to Alastor, condemning those who ‘keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief’. This idea is taken up in Paracelsus (see esp. pt. ii) and in Sordello.

133. our youth’s home: the ‘our’ is general, and does not refer exclusively to the writer’s experience.

135. Cp. Pippa iv 214–16 (p. 167).

136. clear: underlined by Mill.

137. So] So, (Lowell-1888).

138. rude: primitive; see also ll. 258–9.

140. The fever and the stir: cp. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey 52–3: ‘the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world’, and Keats, Ode to a Nightingale 23: ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’.

141–229. B. here pays homage to Shelley: cp. Arnould’s comment that the poem was written ‘when Shelley was his God’ (see headnote, pp. 5, 9).

142. His award: Mill underlined the phrase, adding in l. margin: ‘what does this mean? His opinion of yourself ?’, and in r. margin: ‘only at the fourth reading of the poem I found out what this meant’. B. asterisked the phrase and put a note at the bottom of the page: ‘The award of fame to Him. The late acknowledgment of Shelley’s genius’. Maynard 209f. argues convincingly that B. had in mind a series of articles in the Athenaeum during July and Aug. 1832 by Shelley’s friend Thomas Medwin, in which Medwin affirmed Shelley’s status as a major poet, and gave a description of his character and opinions which in some respects anticipates B.’s account in Shelley (Appendix A, p. 851).

144. Him] His (Lowell-1888).

145. Cp. Psalms xix 6: ‘His [the sun’s] going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof’.

147–9. as some dark spider … his retreat: Mill noted: ‘a bad simile the spider does not detest or scorn the light’. The comparison of critics or writers to spiders is common in the 18th century; see e.g. Swift’s Battle of the Books.

150. Thou didst smile, poet: cp. Shelley, Lines to a Reviewer 4–5: ‘in vain would you assuage / Your frowns upon an unresisting smile’. Cp. also Shelley’s preface to The Revolt of Islam: ‘calumny and misrepresentation, though it may move me to compassion, cannot disturb my peace … If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their virulent writings! As it is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives’. The italics in ‘we’ and the line-space after the line were removed in Lowell-1868.

151. Sun-treader: Oxford cites Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 151: ‘toward the flaming dawn, sun-trodden’, but mistakenly adds: ‘Shelley thus becomes the dawn’: the image would be of Shelley as the sun treading on the dawn. Alternatively, the image might be of Shelley treading on, i.e. triumphing over, the sun; ‘tread’ in Shelley frequently has the sense of ‘trample, extinguish’, e.g. Triumph of Life 382–90. B. may also be recalling Keats’s Hyperion, in which Apollo supersedes Hyperion as the sun-god and god of poetry, and Revelation xix 17: ‘And I saw an angel standing in the sun’.

152–71. B. distinguishes between Shelley’s real existence, which has terminated with his death (ll. 152–60), and his life in his works, which still continues for B. The phrase ‘thou art still for me’ (ll. 162, 168) means ‘you still really exist’, the emphasis falling on ‘art’. Cp. ll. 239–41 of Christopher Smart’s Song to David, a favourite poem of Browning’s: ‘All nature, without voice or sound, / Replied, O Lord, THOU ART. // Thou art, to give and to confirm [etc.]’.

152–5. Cp. Sordello iii 93–102 (I 530).

156–60. Cp. the description of the poet’s deathbed in How It Strikes (ll. 99–109, p. 444), which in turn echoes Shelley’s Adonais 262f.

156. Spirit] spirit (Lowell-1888).

162–7. Cp. ll. 383–93n.

163–6. Mill wrote ‘beautiful’ vertically in the margin opposite these lines (possibly with ref. also to ll. 161–2).

165. I felt of mould like them: combining two senses of ‘mould’: (a) earth regarded as the material of the human body; (b) a pattern by which something is shaped.

166.] And with them creatures of my own were mixed, (1888).

168–9. who have adored, / Tho’ single: cp. PL v 901–3: ‘Nor number nor example with him wrought / To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, / Though single’. The ref. is again to Abdiel, as at l. 83.

171. Scarce] Not (Mill). wert] wast (Rylands, Lowell-1888). a star to men: cp. the closing lines of Shelley’s Adonais: ‘The soul of Adonais, like a star / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are’. Note that for Shelley, Keats is a star, not to men generally, but to the voyager who is ‘borne darkly, fearfully afar’, i.e. Shelley himself. The phrase is applied to Paracelsus in Paracelsus i 534 (I 137). The image of the poet as a star is a commonplace of elegy: see e.g. Dryden, To the Pious Memory of … Mrs Anne Killigrew 165–77. Cp. also B.’s Popularity 1–10 (pp. 450–1).

173–80. Mill wrote vertically in the margin: ‘most beautiful’.

177–8. some wild bird … the trackless air: the phrase ‘trackless air’ occurs in Shelley, The Witch of Atlas 115; cp. also Paracelsus i 567 (I 139): ‘I see my way as birds their trackless way’.

180–9. some great river … some great country: cp. the description of the Arve in Shelley’s Mont Blanc 120–6, and Wordsworth, The River Duddon (1820) sonnet xxxiii: ‘Beneath an ampler sky a region wide / Is opened round him [the Duddon]:—hamlets, towers, and towns, / And blue-topped hills behold him from afar’ (ll. 9–11).

184–5. as some thing … wondrous change: ‘as some thing lies half-way between life and death, waiting for God to bring about the change from mortality to immortality’.

187. Mill underlined ‘ever’.

190. Wert] Wast (Rylands, Lowell-1888).

192. I am not what I have been to thee: ‘I can no longer consider myself your sole admirer’. Cp. the Marot motto, p. 14.

193–200. This simile can apply either to Shelley or to the speaker. The sense is that one or the other has left the retreat in which they were all-sufficient to each other; either Shelley, by being discovered to be worshipped in the outside world, or the speaker, in producing this poem.

193–7.]

Like a girl one has silently loved long

In her first loneliness in some retreat,

When, late emerged, all gaze and glow to view

Her fresh eyes and soft hair and lips which bloom

Like a mountain berry: doubtless it is sweet (1888)

193–4. Cp. (noting ‘star’ and ‘spring’, ll. 171–2, and ‘untrod of human foot’, l. 182) Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways, esp. ll. 1–8: ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove, / A Maid whom there were none to praise / And very few to love: // A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye! / —Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky’.

196–7. lips which bleed / Like a mountain berry: OED defines ‘bleed’ as ‘to be red as blood’, but cites only this passage; if ‘bleed’ is taken in its otherwise universal sense, as meaning ‘to emit blood’, the image here has an unusual rhetorical structure, in which a simile linking two noun-phrases (red lips / red berries) is mediated by a verb, ‘bleed’, which derives metonymically from the first noun-phrase (since lips are filled with blood), but applies metaphorically to the second (since berries are filled with red juice).

199. Mill underlined the clause ‘when all the world was in his praise’ and wrote in the margin ‘obscurely expressed’. The sense is ‘when his [the lover’s] praise meant the whole world to her’. In 1888, B. revised to ‘our praise’.

200. all the pride] any pride (1888).

203.] I proudly feel I would have thrown to dust (1888).

205. To have seen] To see (Lowell, 1888). There is no line-space after this line in 1868–75. Cp. Memorabilia (p. 553).

207–19. The threefold repetition of ‘Remember me’ (ll. 207, 209, 219) recalls the ghost’s injunction to Hamlet in Hamlet I v: see esp. ll. 91–112. Note the inversion by which the writer here asks a ‘spirit’ to ‘remember’ him.

207–8. set this final seal / To wandering thought: underlined by Mill, who put a cross in the margin; he wrote at the top of the page: ‘The passages where the meaning is so imperfectly expressed as not to be easily understood, will be marked X’. The sense is ‘came to this final conclusion’.

211–18. Cp. the similar abnegation of Shelley in Sordello i 60–73 (I 398). Mill put a cross against ll. 213–14 and wrote vertically in the margin (probably referring to the whole passage): ‘the obscurity of this is the greater fault as the meaning if I can guess it right is really poetical’.

217.] “Of harmonies he called profusely up; (1888).

218. So] So, (Lowell-1888).

220–9. Mill wrote vertically in the margin: ‘beautiful’. Cp. his own simile for the poet in What is Poetry? (1833): ‘Who can hear the affecting words … and fancy that he sees the singer? That song has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen, in the next’.

225. in shame: in the period when Shelley’s genius was not recognized, and he was attacked for atheism and immorality.

227–9. Contrast Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer: ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’.

236–7. I the scoffer, who have probed / Life’s vanity: conflating a number of biblical texts, notably Ecclesiastes i 12–14: ‘I … gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven … and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit’; and 2 Peter iii 3: ‘there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts’. Cp. also Proverbs xiv 6: ‘A scorner seeketh wisdom and findeth it not’.

238. old] own (1868–88); Oxford suggests that this is a mispr., pointing out that it is not in Lowell. B. however, after 1849, frequently revises by replacing a word with another of similar sound: see e.g. ll. 91n., 351–5n., 501n. There are many similar examples in Paracelsus. for] by (1888).

241–2. Cp. Tennyson, The Kraken (publ. 1830); B. read Tennyson’s early poems as they appeared, and with great enthusiasm.

245–51. Possibly referring to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus and Asia, created during the reign of Saturn, resist and reject the world ruled by Jupiter.

247–8. two creatures whom the earth / Bears singly: i.e. each is the only one of its kind.

249. But] Save (1888).

251. world.] emended from ‘world,’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in 1868–88.

250. Power] power (Lowell-1888).

252. whilst ebbing day dies soft: cp. Keats, Ode to Autumn 25: ‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’.

259. Rudely: ‘in a rough-and-ready manner’; cp. l. 138n.

260–7. Mill drew a line through this passage, commenting at the bottom of the page: ‘this only says “you shall see what you shall see” & is more prose than poetry’. The scheme proposed here modifies the traditional confessional stance of, e.g., Rousseau, who traces his identity back to its beginnings (see l. 260.), but does not amount to a self-analysis in structural terms of the writer’s psychology.

260. first elements: ‘primary constituents’ (not ‘earliest in time’). The ‘elements’ referred to are not the four traditional elements (air, earth, fire, water) of which all matter was held to be composed; note also that the word does not occur at all in Paracelsus, and Paracelsus himself was opposed to the theory of the elements. OED cites this passage as the first clear application of the word to human psychology.

263. rule them,] rule—(Lowell-1888).

268–80. This formulation clearly owes a good deal to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), in which Coleridge, following Schelling, argued that self-consciousness is the leading principle or absolute ground of all knowledge. The qualification in ll. 272– 6 probably reflects Coleridge’s distinction between the ‘primary imagination’, which is common to all men as their essential self-consciousness, and the ‘secondary imagination’, which is self-consciousness in action, and exclusive to the poet.

272. tracked,] emended from ‘tracked’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell, 1888 (though not 1868–75). in all: ‘in all men’.

277–8. The first occurrence of an idea to which B. returns in other (esp. early) poems, e.g. Paracelsus ii 199f. (I 165), Sordello i 541f. (I 430), and Cleon (p. 563); cp. also B. to EBB., 3 May 1845, where he speaks of a ‘primitive folly of mine, which I shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot do all,—seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no seeing & getting & enjoying wholly’ (Correspondence x 199–200).

280. meanest: ‘most poorly endowed’, or, possibly, ‘humblest in station’.

282. desires] desire (Lowell-1888).

282–3. a soul … clay: the imprisonment of the soul in the body, a stock idea in Christian thinking, is central in B.’s thought. The particular source here may be Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel 156–8: ‘A fiery soul, which, working out its way, / Fretted the pigmy body to decay, / And o’er-informed the tenement of clay’. See also ll. 547, 593–4, and Sordello iii 27–9 (I 526). It may be significant that Hazlitt used the same quotation to describe Kean’s acting (A View of the English Stage [1818] 380: see headnote, p. 23). After Sordello, B. uses ‘clay’ in the literal sense of the material for sculpture as well as in the figurative sense of ‘flesh’, possibly reflecting his own growing interest in clay modelling; there are frequent refs. to the metaphor of the potter (deriving ultimately from Job x 9) in the poems of DP (e.g. James Lee [p. 665] and Rabbi Ben Ezra [p. 649]).

283. which is] of powers (1888).

284. Mill underlined ‘imagination’ and wrote in the margin: ‘not imagination but Imagination[.] The absence of that capital letter obscures the meaning’. B. made the change in Mill, but it was not followed in 1868–88. B. very rarely uses ‘imagination’ in the sense of ‘the faculty responsible for poetry’; he had probably recently read Biographia Literaria (see ll. 268–80n.).

285. an angel to me] a very angel (1888).

290. up—to quell] up to quell (Lowell-1888). Note the slight change of meaning.

292. A recurring image in B.: see e.g. Sordello iii 309f. (I 544), Two in the Campagna 55 (p. 548), My Star (III 386); see esp. Fifine at the Fair (1872) 900–3: ‘each soul lives, longs and works / For itself, by itself, because a lodestar lurks, / An other than itself,—in whatsoe’er the niche / Of mistiest heaven it hide’.

293–4. wasted, / Or progressed] halted / Or hastened (1888). ‘Halted’ means ‘limped’.

295–9. The idea here is akin to the Calvinist doctrine of ‘assurance’; see headnote to Johannes Agricola, pp. 74–5.

300–2. Cp. the elaboration of this theme in Mr. Sludge 914–85 (pp. 823–6).

303–4. And I … after-time: ‘I can only attribute it to the events of a sad later period’.

305–8.]

Even his being—e’en the while I felt

His presence, never acted from myself,

Still trusted in a hand to lead me through

All danger; and this feeling ever fought (1888)

307–8. a hand that leads me through / All danger: the images of the hand of God, and of God leading the righteous man, are biblical commonplaces. Cp. Paracelsus v 52 (I 275): ‘So doth thy right hand guide us through the world’; B.’s letter to EBB. of 24 May 1845: ‘my own way of worldly life is marked out long ago … and I am set going with a hand, winker-wise, on each side of my head, and a directing finger before my eyes’ (Correspondence x 235); Popularity 7 (p. 451): ‘That loving hand of His which leads you’; and Ring i 38–41: ‘I found this book … when a Hand, / Always above my shoulder, pushed me once’.

309. resolves] resolve (1888).

310–12. Mill wrote in the margin: ‘explain better what this means’. It means that sensual love, i.e. lust, performs the role which ought to belong to (spiritual) love.

311. sense: sensuality; cp. Measure for Measure I iv 59: ‘The wanton stings and motions of the sense’.

312. Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound I i 79–81: ‘I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt / His presence flow and mingle through my blood / Till it became his life’.

313–14. The speaker is seeking to identify the essentials of his nature, as distinct from qualities which are the product of experience. He implicitly rejects, like Coleridge, the Locke-Hartley tabula rasa theory, in which the mind was assumed to have been born without innate characteristics.

313. myself] underlined by B. in Mill, but not Lowell-1888. for I have sought] I have long sought (1888).

315–16.] Yet ever found them mould my wildest youth / Where they alone displayed themselves, converted (1888).

315. For] And (Mill). turning: in the double sense of ‘changing the course of’ and ‘forming the shape of’ (i.e. ‘turning’ as on a lathe). Or possibly, ‘turning over [in my mind] my wild youth etc.’.

318–35. B. draws here on his own childhood experience, though as with Development (Asolando, 1889) we need not interpret this passage as strictly autobiographical. B.’s father was a bibliophile whose library (of over 6,000 volumes) contained many rare and curious items. B. received comparatively little formal education. On this subject see Maynard 85–91, 241–86.

321–2. a god, / Wandering after beauty: the use of the word ‘wandering’ makes a ref. to myths such as those of Apollo and Daphne, or Pan and Syrinx, implausible, since these involve pursuit rather than quest. However, there may be an echo of Keats’s Hyperion, in which Apollo (not yet a god) ‘wandered forth’ towards his encounter with Mnemosyne.

322–4. a giant, / Standing vast in the sunset: almost certainly referring to the myth of Atlas, one of the Titans, who, after the Titans’ unsuccessful attempt to conquer Olympus, was banished by Zeus to the far west (hence ‘in the sunset’) where he was condemned to support the heavens on his shoulders.

323–4. an old hunter, / Talking with gods: Penguin suggests Peleus, who took part in the famous hunt for the Calydonian boar, and was favoured, as the most virtuous of mankind, by the gods, who gave him the nereid Thetis in marriage and attended the wedding with gifts. In the context of the following refs. to the Trojan war (ll. 324–5) and, possibly, to Achilles (l. 334), it is suggestive that this wedding was the occasion for the quarrel between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athene which led to the Trojan war, and that Achilles was the son of Peleus and Thetis. Oxford’s suggestion of Orion as the ‘old hunter’ rests on the parallel with Paracelsus ii 370–1 (I 176–7), but is otherwise unsupported.

324–5. a high-crested chief … Tenedos: one of the leaders of the Greek expedition against Troy, possibly Agamemnon, whose fate in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is alluded to later (ll. 567–71); Tenedos, ‘a small and fertile island of the Aegean sea, opposite Troy, … became famous during the Trojan war, as it was there that the Greeks concealed themselves the more effectually to make the Trojans believe that they were returned home, without finishing the siege’ (Lemprière). The epithet ‘high-crested’ is however particularly associated with the Trojan hero, Hector; cp. e.g. Pope’s Iliad ii: ‘The godlike Hector, high above the rest, / Shakes his huge spear, and nods his plumy crest: / In throngs around his native bands appear’.

331. I.e. the islands of the Aegean; cp. Byron’s lyric ‘The isles of Greece’, in Don Juan iii, and Cleon 1–3 (pp. 565–6): ‘the sprinkled isles, / Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea, / And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece”’.

334. the naked Swift-footed: the allusion may be to Achilles, the Greek hero in the Trojan war (see above, ll. 323–4n.), to whom Homer applies the epithet ‘swift’, or Hermes, the messenger of the gods, who, as Oxford points out, was sent to fetch Proserpine from the Underworld (see next note). But ‘swift-footed’ was a cult epithet of Artemis (cp. Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis); if the ref. is to her, then her being seen ‘naked’ carries the connotations of a proscribed act, as in the story of her transformation of Actaeon into a stag for slaughter by his own hounds in retribution for his having glimpsed her bathing.

335. Proserpine’s] B. put an accent on the first ‘e’ in Mill to indicate the metrical stress. Proserpine (Persephone, or Koré) was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility; she was abducted by Hades, the god of the Underworld, and was restored to her mother at the instigation of Zeus, though only for half of each year. Proserpine therefore represents a combination of the erotic and the fatal; but the precise application of the image here is uncertain. Cp. Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) 2618–47; note esp. ll. 2618–21: ‘Koré,—throned and crowned / The pensive queen o’ the twilight, where she dwells / Forever in a muse, but half away / From flowery earth she lost and hankers for’, and ll. 2623–8: ‘the softened eyes / Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still / Straying among the flowers in Sicily’.

336. And] emended from ‘An’’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Rylands, Lowell-1888. The contraction appears nowhere else in his work.

338. but I never doubted: Mill underlined this clause and put a cross in the margin to indicate obscurity; the sense is that the writer, although he has ‘stooped’ to inferior aims, ‘never doubted’ the true nature of his vocation. B. frequently used ‘doubt’ in this intransitive way. Cp. l. 36n.

339–40. So … wants: B’.s choice of phrasing here may echo Richard’s first soliloquy in Richard III I i 14–16: ‘But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks … I, that am rudely stamp’d’. See headnote, pp. 8–9, for the influence of Richard III on the poem. Contrast also Hamlet V ii 10–11: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’. ‘Rudely’ means ‘roughly, unevenly, unskilfully’. See ll. 138, 259, 382.

341. powers] power though (1888), making a monosyllable of 1833’s ‘powers’.

342. those shadowy times: Mill underlined this phrase and wrote in the margin: ‘what times? your own imaginative times? or the antique times themselves?’ The fact that B. made no immediate response perhaps indicates that he intended either reading, or both; in 1888 he revised the phrase to ‘those shades and times’, which inclines slightly towards Mill’s second reading, though not decisively.

343. Oxford compares Romans viii 9: ‘But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you’. and I should rule] with them should rule (1868–88).

344–56. There may be a ref. to a period of B’.s own youth during which he quarrelled with his family over his Shelleyan ideas. However, the theme of guilt and remorse was a commonplace of Romantic writing (e.g. Byron). See also ll. 398–9.

344–5. chained down / My soul: cp. ll. 504–5, 593.

346. that time] that loss (1888).

351–5.]

Came cunning, envy, falsehood, all world’s wrong

That spotted me: at length I cleansed my soul.

Yet long world’s influence remained; and nought

But the still life I led, apart once more,

Which left me free to seek soul’s old delights, (1888)

352. spotted: tainted (as with marks of the plague); this sense is common in B.’s early work. Cp. Sordello v 992–5n (I 715).

358–76. In this passage, the writer considers and compares the various arts in which his imagination might express itself. Poetry (or ‘song’) is chosen as uniting the qualities of music and painting. Painting is represented as the less significant form (cp. Old Pictures 49–56, p. 413).

358–9. the one … combined. cp. Sordello ii 440–51 (I 490).

361. Was … shone] Is … shines (Mill).

365–7. For music … revealed: B. is here close to one of the main tenets of German (as opposed to English) Romantic aesthetics; M. H. Abrams (The Mirror and the Lamp [New York 1958] 93) cites Wackenroder: ‘So is it with the mysterious stream in the depths of the human spirit—speech reckons and names and describes its changes in a foreign material; music streams it out before us as it is in itself … In the mirror of tones the human heart learns to know itself’. Cp. also Mme de Staël’s Corinne: ‘when listening to pure and lovely melody we seem nearly to penetrate the secret of creation, the mystery of life. No words can express this’ (p. 163). B.’s own love of music rivalled that of poetry in his youth (see Maynard 140–1) and continued throughout his life. Cp. Abt Vogler (p. 759).

365. earnest of a heaven: ‘earnest’ in the sense of ‘pledge’; cp. Ephesians i 14: ‘ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of God’s own possession, unto the praise of his glory’.

367. is as a voice] is like a voice (1888). Mill put a cross in the margin and wrote: ‘do you mean is to you as a voice &c.?’

368. Fancy] fancy (Lowell-1888); as usually in B., a synonym for imagination.

370. she: Mill underlined this word and wrote in the margin: ‘who? Fancy or Music?’ Again, the lack of revision, either in Mill’s copy or in later eds., may imply that B. was prepared to allow the ambiguity.

371. pale: i.e. envious. they: the ‘dancing shapes’ of l. 370.

372. While] Till (1888).

373–4. Mill put a cross in the margin opposite these lines, indicating obscurity, but did not underline the particular phrase he had in mind. Possibly he found the phrase ‘This was not at first’ puzzling; it refers to the writer’s active choice of ‘song’ over the other arts; he is repeating what he said above (ll. 360–4), that this choice was not immediately obvious.

376.] An impulse but no yearning—only sang. (1888).

377–9. B. may have in mind W. J. Fox’s criticism of his early poems: ‘Their faults seem to have lain in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little wealth of thought; and Mr. Fox … confessed afterwards to Mr. Browning that he had feared these tendencies as his future snare’ (Orr Life 36–7).

377. seen] emended from ‘seen,’ in 1833, a correction made in Mill and Lowell-1888.

382. Rude: crude, inexpert: see above, ll. 339–40n.

383–93. This passage expresses a recurrent preoccupation in B.’s early work with imitation as the necessary first stage of a young poet’s career. Imitation is rejected by Paracelsus (see Paracelsus i 581f. [I 139f.]), but embraced by Sordello (see Sordello ii 71–84 [I 466–9]); both positions are articulated by the sculptor Jules in Pippa (see ii 68–98, and iv 37–47, pp. 128–9, 159–60). The principle is most clearly set out in Chatterton (see Appendix C, II 476). The passage may be related to B.’s early collection, Incondita (see headnote to The Dance of Death, II 3–4).

384–5.] What other minds achieved. No fear outbroke / As on the works of mighty bards I gazed, (1888).

387–90.]

Recorded, my own fancies justified,

And their aspirings but my very own.

With them I first explored passion and mind,—

All to begin afresh! I rather sought (1888)

388. And] at (Mill; sic lower case).

392–4.]

Creations of my own; if much was light

Lent by the others, much was yet my own.

I paused again: a change was coming—came: (1888)

392. so: Mill underlined this word and put a cross in the margin; at the bottom of the page he wrote: ‘this writer seems to use “so”, according to the colloquial vulgarism, in the sense of “therefore” or “accordingly”—from which occasionally comes great obscurity & ambiguity—as here’. B. in turn put a cross above the word ‘vulgarism’, drew a line from it to another cross in the r. margin, and wrote: ‘The recurrence of “so” thus employed is as vulgar as you please: but the usage itself of “so in the sense of accordingly” is perfectly authorized,—take an instance or two, from Milton. So farewel Hope, & with Hope farewel Fear! P[aradise]. L[ost]. 4.108[.] So on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, d[itt]0.132. So down they sat and to their viands fell. 5.433. So both ascend In the visions of God 11.376. So death becomes his final remedy 11.60. So in his seed all nations shall be blest 12.450. So law appears imperfect 12.300[.] So all shall turn degenerate 11.806. So violence proceeded, and oppression 11 671 [.] So send them forth, tho sorrowing yet in peace 11.117’. (B’.s quotations are substantially correct; in the third, ‘And to their viands fell’ is a new line; in the fifth, the line ref. should be 61; in the ninth, ‘Proceeded, and oppression’ is a new line.) Despite this comprehensive rebuttal, B. added a comma after ‘so’ in Mill, and Rylands, Lowell and 1868–75 (1888 has a different reading: see next note). Mill’s comment seems to have had a listing impact on him, as a reviser if not a composer, for there are many examples of commas added to ‘so’ in revs. of later poems. (The reader is spared ‘an instance or two’.)

395–6. the past … worked: Mill underlined the first clause, and put a cross in the margin indicating obscurity. The sense is that the writer’s past identity was giving way to the change which was coming, and that this process resembled a fever (which would ‘break’ from sickness to health).

396–7.] Before the future and like fever worked. / I thought on my new self, and all my powers (1888).

398–9. See ll. 344–56n.

401–2.] In wandering o’er thought’s world to seek some one / To be my prize, as if you wandered o’er (1888).

403.] The white way for a star.

                                            And my choice fell

Not so much on a system as a man—(Lowell-1888; 1888 has ‘White Way’). For this and all subsequent occurrences, the 1833 asterisks were eliminated in 1868–88.

403. The white way: the Milky Way.

404–28. Penguin cites Orr Handbook 21, where the ‘one’ is identified as Plato, but phrases such as ‘passion’s melodies’ (l. 410) favour a renewed allusion to Shelley, whose works B. assiduously collected (see l. 412). That B. was aware of Shelley’s interest in Plato is indicated by the parallel between l. 414 and l. 435; and note Shelley’s contention in the Defence of Poetry that ‘Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive’.

404. one] One (Mill). would not] shall not (1888).

410–13.]

Clothed in all passion’s melodies: such first

Caught me and set me, slave of a sweet task,

To disentangle, gather sense from song:

Since, song-inwoven, lurked there words which seemed (1888)

415–20.]

Of angels, something yet unguessed by man.

How my heart leapt as still I sought and found

Much there, I felt my own soul had conceived,

But there living and burning! Soon the orb

Of his conceptions dawned on me; its praise

Lives in the tongues of men, men’s brows are high (1888)

417. there] emended from ‘there!’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill; Lowell-1888 have ‘there,’.

419–23. their praise … bright fate: the writer argues that since Shelley’s ideas are now known and admired, he need not describe his earlier absorption of them. The 1833 reading contrasts ‘tongues’ and ‘brows’ (l. 420), i.e. homage which is spoken or conceived, with the writer’s ‘weak hands’, an image which combines the feebleness of a gesture with the ineffectiveness of writing as a means of expression. The 1888 reading (see next note) eliminates this contrast.

422–3.] So, my weak voice may well forbear to shame / What seemed decreed my fate: I threw myself (1888).

425. Recalling both the serpent’s temptation of Eve in Genesis iii 5 (‘ye shall be as gods’) and the traditional idea of the millennium as heaven on earth. Cp. Pope, Essay on Man iv 131–66, in which the idea of a ‘kingdom of the Just’ (l. 133) is ridiculed: ‘“No—shall the good want Health, the good want Pow’r?” / Add Health and Pow’r, and ev’ry earthly thing; / “Why bounded Pow’r? why private? why no king?” / Nay, why external for internal giv’n? / Why is not Man a God, and Earth a Heav’n?’ (ll. 158–62).

426. to be] to prove (1888).

429–31. Mill drew a vertical line in the margin by the first two of these lines and wrote ‘fine’. The comment probably applies to the whole sentence, and not, as Oxford suggests, only up to the word ‘time’ in the second line.

429. ere] emended to agree with 1888 from ‘e’er’ (1833–75); an obvious mispr.

430. that one waits] one fondly waits (1888).

432–5. Possibly, as Maynard 268 suggests, referring to B.’s own brief and unsatisfactory period of study at the new London University (now University College London), Oct. 1828-May 1829. Cp. Coleridge, Frost at Midnight 51–5: ‘For I was reared / In the great city, pent’mid cloisters dim, / And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. / But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores’, and Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey 67–8: ‘when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains’.

434. joy] bliss (1888).

435. See ll. 404–28n.

439.] For I must still advance, no rest for mind. (1888).

440–3. This movement from theoretical to practical knowledge reappears in Paracelsus, with Paracelsus’ determination to leave Würzburg for a life of travel and discovery (pt. i), and in Sordello, in the transition from Sordello’s fantasy life at Goito to the ‘veritable business of mankind’ (i 1000 [I 460]) at Mantua.

441–4.]

The life all new to me; my theories

Were firm, so them I left, to look and learn

Mankind, its cares, hopes, fears, its woes and joys;

And, as I pondered on their ways, I sought (1888)

444–5. an end / Comprising every joy: see ll. 277–8n, 601–19.

447. Mill wrote in the margin: ‘This, to page 36, is finely painted, & evidently from experience’. Page 36 in 1833 consists of ll. 490–506; there is a full stop in l. 506, though no clear break in the argument.

451–6.]

Strange towers and high-walled gardens thick with trees,

Where song takes shelter and delicious mirth

From laughing fairy creatures peeping over,

And on the morrow when he comes to lie

For ever’neath those garden-trees fruit-flushed

Sung round by fairies, all his search is vain. (1888). We supply a comma after 1835 ‘fruit-flushed’.

457.] Not Lowell-1888.

459–61.]

Next—faith in them, and then in freedom’s self

And virtue’s self, then my own motives, ends

And aims and loves, and human loves went last. (1888)

464. And happiness] Light-heartedness (1888).

467. B. extended the speech to ‘think’ in Mill.

468. how all went on] if all went well (1888).

471–2. Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound II iv 2–3: ‘I see a mighty darkness / Filling the seat of power’, referring to Demogorgon, who is about to overthrow Jupiter.

473. So] So, (Lowell-1888).

477. strong—] strong? (1868–88). The alteration changes the meaning from ‘if you are strong …’ to a straight question.

479. Cp. Shelley, Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici 4–6: ‘Like an albatross asleep, / Balanced on her wings of light, / Hovered in the purple night’.

481–2. Under ‘nurse’ (sense 5), J. cites Locke: ‘By what fate has vice so thriven amongst us, and by what hands been nurs’d up into so uncontroul’d dominion?’ The idea, and the use of ‘energies’ here, recalls Blake, but it is not certain that B. had encountered his work at this period.

483–4. we will make / A way for thee: cp. Isaiah xl 3: ‘Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a high way for our God’. See also Mark i 3.

484–6.]

“Safe way for thee in thine appointed life!

But look on us!” And I said “Ye will worship

Me; should my heart not worship too?” They shouted (1888)

484. thee in … life,—] emended from ‘thee—in … life’ in 1833, a correction made in Mill; 1868–75 have ‘life!’. For the 1888 reading, see prec. note.

488.] Smiling. … . (1868–75); Smiling—oh, vanity of vanities! (1888). There is no line-space after this line in 1868–88; in 1868–75 the line comes at the bottom of a page.

489–93.]

For buoyant and rejoicing was the spirit

With which I looked out how to end my course;

I felt once more myself, my powers—all mine;

I knew while youth and health so lifted me

That, spite of all life’s nothingness, no grief (1888)

490. looked out: inquired.

495–7.]

And that this knowledge was the only veil

Betwixt joy and despair: so, if age came,

I should be left—a wreck linked to a soul (1888)

496. so] so, (Lowell-1888).

497. be as a] be a mere (Mill).

497–8. a soul / Yet fluttering: ‘yet’ means ‘still’. The Greek word for soul, ‘psyche’, also means ‘butterfly’, as Oxford notes; the butterfly became a traditional emblem for the soul. Cp. Pippa ii 216 ^217n. (p. 137).

501. youth’s hopes went] youth was spent (1888).

500–4. I had resolved … and die: see ll. 601–19.

503–10.]

Which wasted not a sunbeam; every hour

I would make mine, and die.

And thus I sought

To chain my spirit down which erst I freed

For flights to fame: I said “The troubled life

Of genius, seen so gay when working forth

Some trusted end, grows sad when all proves vain—

How sad when men have parted with truth’s peace

For falsest fancy’s sake, which waited first (1888)

506–59. the troubled life … still] in quotation marks, Lowell-1888, with the exception of the parenthesis in ll. 523–8.

506–10. I said … fancy’s sake: the sense is that the trials of ‘genius’ only seem worthwhile when some concrete end is in view, and are otherwise futile, most of all when actual pleasures have been sacrificed in the process, since the ‘wild fancy’, which at first served its possessor like an obedient spirit, degenerates as soon as it becomes the sole means of securing pleasure. The tone here, and the use of the terms ‘joy’ and ‘fancy’, may owe something to Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode.

506–7. the troubled life / Of genius: cp. Naddo in Sordello i 692–9 (I 440–2).

510. waited: served, attended.

512. not with her alone] without fancy’s call (1888).

513. Coming] Comes (Lowell-1888). hasting] hastening (1868–75); hastens (1888). 514.] 1868–88 leave no space after this line.

515–21. Mill marked this passage with a cross, indicating obscurity. The sense is: ‘But I shall never lose my “fancy”; it will be all the more powerful for operating in a fitful and fragmentary way. I only catch isolated glimpses of my subject, and therefore pleasure [at its glory] is linked with pain [at the impossibility of expressing it adequately], because I am unable to represent the splendour of my visions. But this very incapacity means that I alone possess my visions, and can keep them to myself; it does not matter if they remain unexpressed, since others just as splendid will rapidly replace them’. The thought here anticipates the analysis of Sordello’s creativity in terms of the relation between vision and poetic expression; see e.g. Sordello ii 137ff., 601–5 (I 470ff., 500): also below, l. 811n.

515. her: the ‘wild fancy’ of l. 510; and see l. 284n.

516. Brighter] Dearer (1888). such seclusion: referring to the fact that ‘fancy’, when ‘secluded’ from other sources of delight, becomes intermittent and transient (see ll. 506–14).

517. what I sing: my subject (not ‘my singing’). so] so, (Lowell-1888).

519–20.] Half the bright sights which dazzle me; but now / Mine shall be all the radiance: let them fade (1888).

521–2.] B. drew a line between these two lines in Mill, but there is no line-space in 1868–88.

522–30. The sense is that the writer, under the influence of the ‘new thought’ that writing actual poems would bring him fame and thereby guarantee the survival of some authentic token of his vision (the ‘branch from the gold forest’), attempts to write, but only manages to convey a ‘few dim gleams’ of that vision; this, which constitutes ‘success’ in the eyes of the world, seems futile to him, either in comparison with the original and inexpressible vision or because of the essential hollowness (or insincerity: see l. 539) of contemporary acclaim.

523–6.]

(For a new thought sprang up how well it were,

Discarding shadowy hope, to weave such lays

As straight encircle men with praise and love,

So, I should not die utterly,—should bring (1888; ‘hope’ is a reading which dates from Lowell).

524. lays: the ‘lay’ was originally a short poem set to music, associated with the work of the medieval minstrels (cp. its use in Sordello, e.g. ii 82, I 468); ‘from the 16th to the 18th centuries the word was a mere poetical synonym for “song”’ (OED), but Romantic writers such as Scott (Lay of the Last Minstrel) popularized the term as an archaism for a lyric poem or ballad. Note the satiric use in Flight of the Duchess 104 (II 302).

526–8. I should bring … there: B. combines two classical stories: that of the golden apples of the Hesperides, which Heracles obtained as one of his twelve labours, and the golden bough in Virgil’s Aeneid vi 136ff., which gives entry to the Underworld. The word ‘knight’ suggests that B. is also thinking of later fairy-tales in which a hero is required to bring back proof that he has been to some magical place.

526. I should not die utterly: Horace Odes III xxx 6: ‘non omnis moriar’.

530. And all the influence] The vaunted influence (1888).

531–44. The first sentence (ll. 531–6) corresponds to the ‘new thought’ of ll. 523–8, about the value of fame; the remainder (ll. 537–44) corresponds to the realization (in ll. 522, 529–30) that vision cannot be represented in writing.

534–5. he be forgotten, / Fair eyes] dead and gone, / New eyes (1888).

537–8. brought … Came … laughed] brings … Comes … laughs (1888).

539–44.]

At hollow praises, smiles allied to sneers;

And my soul’s idol ever whispers me

To dwell with him and his unhonoured song:

And I foreknow my spirit, that would press

First in the struggle, fail again to make

All bow enslaved, and I again should sink. (1888)

539. Praise is ‘hollow’ when directed at the imperfect work rather than its more perfect conception. See Sordello iii 599–614 (I 564–6).

540–1. ‘It seemed better to me to abjure actual writing, which attracted “hollow praises”, in favour of the pure imagination which was “unhonoured” [not recognized]’ (but note 1888 ‘unhonoured song’). Cp. Sordello iii 32–3 (I 526): ‘Better sure be unrevealed / Than part-revealed’; and B. to EBB., 11 Feb. 1845: ‘I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers . . I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear!’ (Correspondence x 71).

542–4. The sense is that the writer knows that his imagination would not yield first place to the inferior faculty which was necessary to the production of poetry, but would insist on its own primacy, and thus cause his efforts to fail—there would therefore be no point in making such efforts.

544. would sink again] should sink again (Mill, Lowell-1875); again should sink (1888).

546–54. we may wither … Decays: i.e. ‘it is fitting that we inferior beings should perish, since we are merely mortal; but not that this fate should extend to our admired forbears, whose physical death we had not expected to compromise their works’ immortality. It is painful to see a painter’s reputation fade, to lose sympathy with a piece of music, or worst of all, to see an artist destroy his reputation by the works of his dotage’. Maynard compares Childe Harold IV cxxii–cxxiv: ‘cure / Is bitterer still, as charm by charm unwinds / Which robed our idols … / So we are doubly cursed’. With l. 546 cp. also cxxiv: ‘We wither from our youth’. B. has altered Byron’s argument, which is that both love and art are futile attempts to express an ideal which cannot exist outside the mind itself.

547. Nor marvel—we] Nor marvel, we (Lowell); Nor marvel we (1868–75; probably a mispr.); No marvel, we (1888).

548. extend to] emended from ‘extend’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill (but not in Lowell) and followed in 1868–88. them,] those (1888).

549–50. Cp. the writer’s description of himself at ll. 1026–7.

549. Time’s yawning gulf: cp. Richard III III vii 128–9: ‘the swallowing gulf / Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion’.

550. what e’er may] whate’er might (Lowell-1875); what dread may (1888).

551. see] find (1888). painters’] painter’s (1870–88).

554–61.]

Decays! Nought makes me trust some love is true,

But the delight of the contented lowness

With which I gaze on him I keep for ever

Above me; I to rise and rival him?

Feed his fame rather from my heart’s best blood,

Wither unseen that he may flourish still.”

Pauline, my soul’s friend, thou dost pity yet

How this mood swayed me when that soul found thine, (1888)

554–9. Nought … still: the idea that the true love is that of the inferior for the superior is a common one in B. Cp., e.g., Sordello iii 304ff., vi 41–3 (I 544, 718) and B. to EBB., 10 Aug. 1846: ‘There is no love but from beneath, far beneath,—that is the law of its nature’ (Correspondence xiii 242).

557. I’d be sad to equal them: Mill underlined this clause and put a cross in the margin, indicating obscurity. The meaning is that if the writer were to ‘equal’ his predecessors he would no longer admire them, since he would no longer be in an inferior position (see prec. note).

561. wert] wast (Rylands, Lowell-1888)

563–6.]

Defying all past glory. Ere thou camest

I seemed defiant, sweet, for old delights

Had flocked like birds again; music, my life,

Nourished me more than ever; then the lore (1888)

567–71. the king … doom: in a letter to T. J. Wise of 5 Nov. 1886 B. explained: ‘The “King” is Agamemnon, in the Tragedy of that name by Aeschylus, whose treading the purple carpets spread before him by his wife, preparatory to his murder, is a notable passage’ (LH 256; see also ll. 573–6n.). The Agamemnon is the first play in Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia. In Mill, B. transcribed in the margin two lines in Greek from the Agamemnon, which he was later to render in his version of the play (1877): ‘So,—since to hear thee, I am brought about thus,— / I go into the palace—purples treading’ (ll. 956–7 in original, ll. 962–3 in B.’s transl.). B. seems to have supplied this gloss, and the two following, on his own initiative, and not in response to a query by Mill: see also ll. 963–5n. 567. the king] the King (Mill); that king (1888).

572–3. And him … sunshine: the ref. is to Ajax, the Greek hero of the Trojan war. ‘After the death of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses disputed their claim to the arms of the dead hero. When they were given to the latter, Ajax was so enraged that he slaughtered a whole flock of sheep, supposing them to be the sons of Atreus, who had given the preference to Ulysses, and stabbed himself with his sword’ (Lemprière). The ‘madness of Ajax’ was a traditional subject for Greek tragedy. B. drew a line from ‘And’ in l. 572, which forms the second line of p. 41 (a right-hand page) of 1833, downwards and over the facing page (p. 40), at the bottom of which he transcribed in Greek five lines from the Ajax of Sophocles, three depicting Ajax’ dejection when he realizes what he has done: ‘But now, confounded in his abject woe, / Refusing food or drink, he sits there still, / Just where he fell amid the carcases / Of the slain sheep and cattle’ (ll. 323–5 in the original), and two his abandonment by his friends: ‘Ho Teucer! where is Teucer? Will his raid / End never? And the while I am undone!’ (ll. 342–3 in the original).

572. him] Him (Mill).

573–6. and the boy … reason goes: B. wrote to Wise (see ll. 567–71n.): ‘“The boy” is Orestes, as described at the end of the Choephoroi by the same Author’. The Choephoroi (‘Libation Bearers’), the second play in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, concerns the return of Orestes to Argos and his murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for her murder of Agamemnon. As a punishment for his crime, Orestes is tormented by the Furies, who appear at the end of the play and drive him away. See ll. 6–7n. In Mill, B. put a cross in the margin, keyed to a note at the bottom of the page, where he transcribed in Greek two short passages from the play: ‘But—since I would have you know—for I know not how’twill end—methinks I am a charioteer driving my team far outside the course’ (ll. 1021–3 in the original); ‘But while I still keep my senses, I proclaim to those who hold me dear and declare that not without justice did I slay my mother’ (ll. 1026–7 in the original). Mill wrote in the margin opposite these lines: ‘striking’; this comment is wrongly ascribed by Oxford to the image of Ajax in the prec. lines.

573. boy] Boy (Mill).

575. and striving] but striving (1888).

577. as I’ve loved so oft: i.e. lightly, superficially, in contrast to her love for him: see following lines. I’ve loved] love seemed (1888).

578.] Thou lovedst me indeed: I wondering searched (1888).

580. what] much (1888). See the Marot motto and note, p. 1.

581–5.]

Too soon I found all faith had gone from me,

And the late glow of life, like change on clouds,

Proved not the morn-blush widening into day,

But eve faint-coloured by the dying sun

While darkness hastens quickly. I will tell (1888)

583. morn-blush: underlined by Mill, though there is no cross in the margin to indicate obscurity; the image is traditional.

585–7. I will tell … with me: Mill put a cross in the margin opposite this passage, indicating obscurity, probably in the interpretation of the last clause, which could be (fairly nonsensically) read, ‘thus despair is with me’. B.’s addition of a comma after ‘near me’ (l. 587) in Mill may have been intended to ward off this interpretation, but the clause remains ambiguous between ‘this [i.e. what follows] is how I am’ and ‘it is my nature not to despair’: hence the 1888 rev. (see next note).

587–92.]

Cannot come near us—this it is, my state.

Souls alter not, and mine must still advance;

Strange that I knew not, when I flung away

My youth’s chief aims, their loss might lead to loss

Of what few I retained, and no resource

Be left me: for behold how changed is all! (1888)

588. Cp. l. 439.

593–4. Cp. ll. 282–3n.

594. prison,] emended from ‘prison;’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

595–600.]

It has strange impulse, tendency, desire,

Which nowise I account for nor explain,

But cannot stifle, being bound to trust

All feelings equally, to hear all sides:

How can my life indulge them? yet they live,

Referring to some state of life unknown. (1888)

599–600. Mill put a cross in the margin opposite this passage, indicating obscurity. The sense is that the writer cannot surrender to his impulses, and therefore they exist in him as anticipations or hints of an unexperienced mode of existence.

603. is pain] grows pain (1888).

604. mind] soul (1888).

605. with its energies] its whole energies (1888).

606.] To elevate an aim, pursue success (1888).

607–8. hopes / Seek out] hope / Seeks out (1888).

608–9. but one / Delight on earth] one joy, / But one in life (1888).

612. wide country] wild country (1868 –75); vast country (1888). Oxford suggests that the 1868–75 reading was a mispr., since it is not in Lowell. Cp. l. 91n, and see also l. 238n.

614.] With shining towers and towns, till I grow mad (1888).

616–17.] Some pleasure, while my soul could grasp the world, / But must remain this vile form’s slave. I look (1888).

619. the sparks] what sparks (1888).

620–33. Remodelling—inverting—the argument put forward by the old man in ch. ix of Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin: ‘L’homme s’épuise par deux actes instinctivement accomplis qui tarissent les sources de son existence. Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes que prennent ces deux causes de la mort: VOULOIR et POUVOIR. Entre ces deux termes de l’action humaine, il est une autre formule dont s’emparent les sages, et je lui dois le bonheur et ma longévité. Vouloir nous brûle et Pouvoir nous détruit; mais SAVOIR laisse notre faible organisation dans un perpétuel état de calme. Ainsi le désir ou le vouloir est mort en moi, tué par la pensée; le mouvement ou le pouvoir s’est résolu par le jeu naturel de mes organes’ [Man exhausts himself by two actions, instinctively performed, which dry up the springs of his being. Two verbs express all the forms taken by these two causes of death: TO WILL and TO HAVE POWER. Between these two extremes of human action there is another mode which the wise have seized upon, and I owe to it my happiness and my longevity. To will consumes us, and To have power destroys us; but TO KNOW leaves our feeble organism in a perpetual state of calm. Thus desire or the will is dead in me, killed by thought; motion or power has been dissolved by the natural working of my organs (i.e. ageing)].

622. Of a] Of yet (1888). Mill underlined ‘that power’, put a cross in the margin, indicating obscurity, and commented: ‘you should make clearer what power’. The ref. is to the ‘craving after knowledge’ of the prec. line.

624.] The sleepless harpy with just-budding wings (1888). The harpies were ‘winged monsters, who had the face of a woman, with the body of a vulture, and had their feet and fingers armed with sharp claws. … They emitted an infectious smell, and spoiled whatever they touched by their filth and excrements’ (Lemprière). The harpies traditionally represented rapacious and destructive appetite, and were associated with divine retribution.

625–6.] And I considered whether to forego / All happy ignorant hopes and fears, to live, (1888).

630. my delights] old delights (1888).

631. So … ready] See! … prompt (1888).

634–9.]

How should this earth’s life prove my only sphere?

Can I so narrow sense but that in life

Soul still exceeds it? In their elements

My love outsoars my reason; but since love

Perforce receives its object from this earth

While reason wanders chainless, the few truths (1888)

636. in their elements: Mill underlined this phrase and put a cross in the margin, indicating obscurity; the sense is: ‘in their first principles’ (referring to ‘love’ and ‘reason’ in the next line) as distinct from ‘in their manifestation’ (on ‘this earth’, l. 638); see l. 260.

637–45. In Mill, the words ‘love’ and ‘reason’ were altered to ‘Love’ and ‘Reason’ in ll. 637, 639, 641, and 645; note that ‘love’ in l. 644 was unchanged. These revs. were not followed in 1868–88.

637–43. but since here … seraphim?: ‘but since, in this life, love is tied to earthly objects, whereas reason transcends this limitation, the few truths discovered by my reason have made earthly love impossible; how glorious then must be that love which, in company with the object of its devotion, would in turn transcend even the highest flight of reason?’ The argument is that, since love is inherently superior to reason, reason’s dominance in earthly life reflects the inadequacy of the objects life offers for love, not of love itself. The idea of a hierarchy of objects for love is Platonic (e.g. Symposium and Phaedrus); for an analogous Platonic hierarchy, see l. 811n. (Pauline’s footnote). The argument that the power to conceive something greater than what is already known argues the existence of that greater thing derives from Descartes, who uses it to ‘prove’ the existence of God (the ‘Ontological Proof’). Mill wrote ‘self-flattery’ vertically in the margin opposite ll. 639–43.

641–3.]

Love chained below; then what were love, set free,

Which, with the object it demands, would pass

Reason companioning the seraphim? (1888)

647–9.]

Myself stands out more hideously: of old

I could forget myself in friendship, fame,

Liberty, nay, in love of mightier souls; (1888; there is no space after l. 649 in Lowell-1888).

648–9. Mill wrote in the margin: ‘inconsistent with what precedes’.

653–5.]

Hate of the weak and ever-wavering will,

The selfishness, the still-decaying frame …

But I must never grieve whom wing can waft (1888)

654. this still decaying frame: ‘this ever-decaying body’.

656–67. Andromeda … save her: Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, king of Ethiopia, and Cassiope; the latter ‘boasted herself to be fairer than the Nereides; upon which, Neptune, at the request of these despised nymphs … sent a huge sea monster to ravage Ethiopia. The wrath of Neptune could be appeased only by exposing Andromeda, whom Cassiope tenderly loved, to the fury of this sea monster; and just as she was going to be devoured, Perseus delivered her’ (Lemprière). The painting of Andromeda ‘is that of Polidoro di [sic, for ‘da’] Caravaggio [c. 1500–1543], of which Mr. Browning possesses an engraving, which was always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems’ (Orr Handbook 21n.). The painting, originally a fresco panel, is now in the Museo di Roma; Maynard 150–1 argues that B’.s print was the ‘eighteenth-century engraving by Volpato in the Piranesi series’, an identification perhaps strengthened by the specific mention of Volpato as a master of engraving in A Likeness 61 (p. 647). B. states his admiration for Caravaggio in a letter to Fanny Haworth of 1841 (Correspondence v 188), and mentions the Andromeda print twice in letters to EBB.: on 26 Feb. 1845: ‘my Polidoro’s perfect Andromeda’ (Correspondence x 99) and 15 May 1846: ‘my noble Polidoro’ (ibid. xii 329). See also A Likeness 42–3 (pp. 646–7). B. alludes to the myth in Sordello (see ii 211–12n, I 477) and, in Francis Furini (Parleyings, 1887), he alludes both to the myth and to a painting of it by Francisco Furini (c. 1600–1649), in a defence of the nude in art, and of art itself: ‘Outlining, orb by orb, Andromeda— / God’s best of beauteous and magnificent / Revealed to earth—the naked female form’ (141–3); ‘Who proffers help of hand / To weak Andromeda exposed on strand / At mercy of the monster? Were all true, / Help were not wanting: “But’tis false,” cry you, / “Mere fancy-work of paint and brush!” No less, / Were mine the skill, the magic, to impress / Beholders with a confidence they saw / Life,—veritable flesh and blood in awe / Of just as true a sea-beast,—would they stare / Simply as now, or cry out, curse and swear, / Or call the gods to help, or catch up stick / And stone, according as their hearts were quick / Or sluggish?’ (478–90); ‘Acquaint you with the body ere your eyes / Look upward: this Andromeda of mine— / Gaze on the beauty, Art hangs out for sign / There’s finer entertainment underneath’ (517–20). Cp. also the adaptations of the myth in Ring, discussed by W. C. DeVane, ‘The Virgin and the Dragon’, Yale Review xxxvii (1947) 33–46, repr. P. Drew (ed.), Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) 96–109, which traces the Andromeda-motif in B’.s poetry, and its application to his relationship with Elizabeth Barrett. See also ll. 99–123n.

659. dark eyes] fixed eyes (1888).

661. red beam] emended from ‘red-beam’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

662. face and hair] hair, such hair (1888).

666–9.]

I doubt not, nor fear for, secure some god

To save will come in thunder from the stars.

Let it pass! Soul requires another change.

I will be gifted with a wondrous mind, (1888)

668. I will call another change: ‘I will summon up another image’.

669–75. Referring to the actor Edmund Kean, whose performance in Richard III at the end of his career, when he was ravaged by alcoholism and disease, powerfully affected B. See headnote, pp. 8–9.

670. Mill marked this line as obscure; the sense is either ‘Yet so degraded by my faults as to excite people’s pity’, or ‘Yet degraded by people’s misapprehension of me as pitiable’ (not ‘mistakenly sympathizing with mankind’).

672. As to call up their fears: Mill underlined this phrase and put a cross in the margin, indicating obscurity; the sense is that the anxiety aroused by the writer’s apparent senility will prove unfounded.

674. strait] straight (1868–75; for the 1888 reading, see next note.) ‘Strait’ is a possible, though rare, spelling for ‘straight’ in the sense of ‘straightaway, at once’, and no correction is made in either Mill or Lowell; B. uses it to mean ‘narrow, confined’ everywhere else in his work except Sordello i 915 (I 454) and ii 720 (I 508); in the former case he overrode the printer’s correction of ‘strait’ to ‘straight’ in proof.

674–5.] And lo, I fling age, sorrow, sickness off, / And rise triumphant, triumph through decay. (1888).

676–7. Mill marked these lines as obscure; it is hard to see why. B. revised l. 677, but only in 1888, and his rev. does not seem to be in response to a sense of obscurity (see next note).

677. that I would be] I fain would be (1888).

678–80. Mill commented in the margin: ‘deeply true’. Mill’s own nervous breakdown in 1826, described in his Autobiography (1873), gives this note a special poignancy.

681. ‘Something is playing wicked tricks with my powers of reasoning’. Cp. Macbeth V viii 19–20: ‘And be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense’. B. uses the word ‘juggle’ three times in Paracelsus (ii 8, 174 and v 177; I 155, 164, 280) and once in Flute-Music (Asolando, 1889) 152, but nowhere else; Oxford therefore exaggerates in calling it ‘a favourite word’.

684–9. A degree of incoherence is clearly intended here, but the general sense is that, despite his ‘despair’, the writer still responds to ‘impulses’ (l. 683) such as the love of liberty: he has never felt so outraged as now by the idea of slavery, or by the thought that human sympathy could be rationalized away by specious arguments. It is this perception of suffering, and of his own inability to prevent it, that has kept him from self-absorption. As for the love which this human impulse implies, does he not feel it for Pauline? Note the 1888 revs.

685–8.]

Rose never at a slave’s name proud as now.

Oh sympathies, obscured by sophistries!—

Why else have I sought refuge in myself,

But from the woes I saw and could not stay? (1888)

686. Mill marked this line as obscure; B. first changed the punctuation, putting three dots at the end in order to suggest the disconnection in the writer’s train of thought (see ll. 684–9n.), and then deleted the whole line, putting a semicolon at the end of the prec. line; however, the line was retained in 1868–75 (note also the 1888 rev.).

689.] No space after this line in Lowell-1888. The asterisks would in any case have disappeared: see l. 403n. and cp. l. 715n.

690. prejudice: ‘prepossession; judgment formed beforehand without examination’ (J.)—the sense is weaker than that of ‘unfair bias’.

691. this belief] my belief (1888).

692. too;] emended in agreement with 1868–88 from ‘too’ in 1833. Mill has ‘too—’.

697. hers] emended in agreement with 1888 from ‘her’s’ in 1833–75.

698–708. Mill drew a line through this passage to indicate that it should be deleted (it was retained in later eds., however). See also ll. 810–21n.

698.] Pauline, could I but break the spell! Not now—(1888).

703. conjuncture: ‘combination of many circumstances or causes’; ‘occasion, critical time’ (J.). B. is fond of this word in his early work (five occurrences before 1844, one thereafter). Cp. esp. Paracelsus i 778 (I 148).

705.] New-shapes it past surmise—the throes of men (1888).

708. general aim. …] general aim. (1888, which has no space or asterisks after the line).

712–15. Oxford compares Sordello ii 290 (I 480); cp. also the Pope’s description of Pompilia, Ring x 1003–46.

715.] No space after this line in Lowell-1888. Cp. l. 689n.

716–28. Anticipating the account of Sordello’s childhood at Goito, Sordello i 626ff (I 436ff.). Cp. Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, ch. li, where Raphaël, in refuge from his premature old age and imminent death, is described ‘restant des journées entières comme une plante au soleil, comme un lièvre au gîte … Ou bien, il se familiarisait avec les phénomènes de la végétation, avec les vicissitudes du ciel, épiant le progrès de toutes les oeuvres, sur la terre, dans les eaux ou les airs … Il tenta de s’associer au mouvement intime de cette nature, et de s’identifier assez complètement à sa passive obéissance, pour tomber sous la loi despotique et conservatrice qui régit les existences instinctives’ [spending whole days like a plant in the sun, or a hare in its form … Or he would familiarise himself with the phenomena of the vegetation, with the changes in the sky, noting the progress of all things, on earth, in the water, or in the air … He tried to associate himself with the secret working of this natural world, and to identify so completely with its passive obedience, as to fall under the despotic and preserving law which governs instinctive beings].

724. breathe in] breathe deep (1888).

725–6. flowers / And trees] flower / And tree (1888).

729–810. This descriptive exploration seems to owe something to Coleridge’s The Picture (1802), in which a lover similarly descends into a dark, tangled wood, finds a river and a waterfall, and emerges into light again. Like this passage, Coleridge’s poem is narrated in the present tense, developing the manner of the ‘conversation poems’. Similar passages occur in Sordello ii 13–33 (I 462) and By the Fire-Side (p. 456). Cp. the analogous account of the progress of a day in terms of landscape ‘panels’, Gerard de Lairesse (Parleyings, 1887) 181–362. See also l. 773n.

729–31. Cp. (noting the landscape descriptions that follow) Keats, Ode to Psyche 50–62: ‘Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: / Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees / Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; / And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, / The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep; / And in the midst of this wide quietness / A rosy sanctuary will I dress / With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, / With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, / With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign’. Cp. also Coleridge. The Picture 45–54: ‘This is my hour of triumph! I can now / With my own fancies play the merry fool … here will I couch my limbs, / Close by this river, in this silent shade, / As safe and sacred from the step of man / As in invisible world—unheard, unseen’.

730. world,] emended from ‘world;’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

731.] I am uplifted: fly with me, Pauline! (1888).

736. giant-ghosts] giant ghosts (1888).

737. know] see (1868–75). A rare example of both innovation in 1868 and reversion to 1833 in 1888.

738–40. Cp. The Picture 58–64: ‘The breeze, that visits me, / Was never Love’s accomplice … never half disclosed / The maiden’s snowy bosom, scattering thence / Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth’.

745. golden spray] silver spray (1888).

746–7. the cataract, / Amid the broken rocks: cp. The Picture 138–9: ‘a tall weedy rock / That overbrows the cataract’. Oxford compares Shelley, Alastor 345–6: ‘fled, like foam / Down the steep cataract of a wintry river’.

761. waters] lymph (1888). Oxford compares Shelley, The Question 5: ‘Along a shelving bank of turf’; and the whole poem, which B. certainly knew, has affinities with the landscape descriptions here.

764– 5. Cp. The Picture 120–1: ‘O lead, / Lead me to deeper shades and lonelier glooms’.

766–71. This is … silent depth: cp. By the Fire-Side 36–40 (p. 462): ‘A turn, and we stand in the heart of things; / The woods are round us, heaped and dim; / From slab to slab how it slips and springs, / The thread of water single and slim, / Thro’ the ravage some torrent brings!’

768–77. Mill wrote vertically in the margin: ‘good descriptive writing’.

773. as wild men watch a sleeping girl: cp. Gerard de Lairesse (Parleyings, 1887) 262–307.

774. stretch out] out-stretch (1888).

776. flag-knots: clumps of flag, ‘a water-plant with bladed leaf and yellow flower’ (J.).

780.] There is a space after this line in 1888.

781–2. Cp. The Picture 135–40: ‘I pass forth into light … How bursts / The landscape on my sight’.

782. arch,—] emended from 1833 ‘arch,’: the correction is in Mill. Lowell-1888 have ‘arch:’.

783. roots] emended from ‘root’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in both Mill and Lowell-1888.

784. level with the air: cp. Paracelsus ii 232n. (I 167); ‘level’ here is a verb, not an adjective.

785–6. a great cloud … like a dead whale: adapting Hamlet III ii 376–82: ‘[Hamlet] Do you see yonder cloud … like a whale. [Polonius] Very like a whale’.

792–3. Cp. Shelley, Ode to Naples 10–11: ‘The isle-sustaining ocean-flood, / A plain of light between two heavens of azure’.

796. quick glancing] quick-glancing (1888). Milton has ‘sporting with quick glance’ (referring to fish), PL vii 405.

797.] (Float with me there, Pauline), but not like air. (Rylands); Float with me there, Pauline!—but not like air. (Lowell-1888). There is a space after this line in 1888.

799. rocks] rock (1888). plains] plain (1868–88).

800. And] So, (1888).

801. boughs. There] boughs; wide (1888).

802. as they go] on their way (1888).

803–4.] To the merry chime of morning bells, past all / The little smoking cots, mid fields and banks (1888).

804–6. Cp. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey 11–18: ‘These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, / Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, / Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves / ’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see / These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, / Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!’

805. wanders.] B. added four dots after the full stop in Mill.

806.] Hedgerows for me—those living hedgerows where (1888).

808. concentrated: the metre demands a stress on the second syllable—the pronunciation given in J., as Oxford notes. The only other examples in B’.s work where this pronunciation is indicated occur in Prince Hohenstiel (1871) 785, 815, 1061; early uses favour the modern pronunciation.

809–10. See ll. 277–8n., and cp. Cleon 239–50 (p. 580) for a development of the idea that ‘life’s inadequate to joy’.

810. nor taste all] taste all joy (1888, which leaves a space after this line).

810–21. Mill drew a line through this passage and the accompanying note, indicating that he thought they should be deleted (they are retained in later eds., however). See also ll. 698–708n.

811. does this tend] do they tend (1888).

811. footnote: (i) [translation]. ‘I very much fear that my poor friend will not always be perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment—but he is less fitted than anyone else to make clear what of its very nature can never be other than dream and confusion. Besides, I am not sure that in seeking to improve the co-ordination of certain parts one would not run the risk of damaging the only merit to which so peculiar a production can lay claim—that of giving a fairly exact idea of the kind of work of which it is only a sketch.—This unpretentious opening, this stirring of passions which at first increases and then gradually dies down, these motions of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and, above all, my friend’s idiosyncratic cast of mind, make changes virtually impossible. The reasons which he puts forward elsewhere, and others even more compelling, have persuaded me to look favourably on this writing which I would otherwise have advised him to throw in the fire—Not that I believe any the less in the great principle of all composition—the principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, of Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas owes a good deal more to their conception than to their execution … I have every reason to fear that my friend is a stranger to the first of these qualities—and I strongly doubt whether he could acquire the second even by a redoubling of effort. It would be best to burn this; but what is to be done?

I think that in what follows he alludes to a certain study of the soul, or rather of his own soul, which he made some time ago in order to discover the series of aims which it would be possible for him to accomplish, each one of which, once obtained, was to form a kind of plateau from which other goals, other enterprises, other joys might be perceived, to be surmounted in their turn. The result was that oblivion and sleep were to end all. This idea, which I do not altogether grasp, is perhaps equally unintelligible to him’.

811. footnote (ii) [textual notes]. B. had a good knowledge of French (see Maynard 250, 254ff., 302ff.), but there are several grammatical and orthographical errors in the 1833 footnote. Some may be the printer’s (though B. made only one grammatical correction in Mill, at l. [8], and got it wrong); most were corr. in Lowell-1875 (one further error was introduced, at l. [10]), and the others in 1888. There were two misprs. of substance, at ll. [10] and [29]. We have emended the text as follows: [5]. au] an (1833); [6] singulière] singuliere (1833); [8]. qu’ébaucher] que’ébaucher (1833; ‘que d’ébaucher’, Mill); [9]. s’apaise] s’appaise (1833–75); [9]. âme] ame (1833); [10] soi-même, et] soi-même.—Et (1833); particulière] parliculière] (1833; 1868–88 mistakenly correct the prec. word ‘toute’ to ‘tout’); [16]. due] dûe (1833–75); [17]. exécution] execution (1833–75); [19]. brûler] bruler (1833); [22]. plutôt] plutot (1833); suite] suité (1833); [28]. inintelligible] intelligible (1833; B. made the correction in Mill, Rylands and Lowell). The forms ‘changemens’ (l. [12], for ‘changements’) and ‘attèndre’ (l. [23], for ‘atteindre’) are correct, though now archaic.

811. footnote (iii) [annotation]. For possible sources of the technique of ‘editorial’ intervention here, see headnote, p. 22. The relation of ‘conception’ to ‘execution’ is one of B.’s most constant preoccupations. The argument here, that primacy in composition belongs to imagination rather than knowledge of rules, may owe something to the heroine’s praise of Raphael in Mme de Staël’s Corinne: ‘She admired the simple composition of Raphael’s pictures … All the figures are turned towards one central object, without the artist’s dreaming of grouping them in attitudes to produce an effect. She considered that this sincerity in imagination … is a characteristic of genius, and that any prearrangement for effect is almost always fatal to enthusiasm’ (Corinne [Paris 1809] i 144). This argument differs in emphasis from B.’s later belief that the greatest artists are those whose ideas are the most powerful, though their actual work may be technically defective, since the context requires that there should be a contrast between the work of the three artists cited by Pauline and the poem itself. The contrast is between their achieving ‘la concentration des idées’ by virtue of their imaginative power, and his failing to do so, not between their conception and their execution. For B.’s later position, cp. Andrea 103–16, 193–6 (pp. 395–6, 400) where Andrea imagines Raphael, ‘Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him, / Above and through his art—for it gives way’; there may be a technical defect in Raphael’s draughtsmanship, but ‘its soul is right’. Cp. also Shelley 299–312 (Appendix A, p. 865), where B. speaks of ‘an embodiment of verse more closely answering to and indicative of the process of the informing spirit, (failing as it occasionally does, in art, only to succeed in highest art)’ and praises the ‘spheric poetical faculty of Shelley, as its own self-sufficing central light, radiating equally through immaturity and accomplishment, through many fragments and occasional completion, reveals it to a competent judgment’; and note that B.’s allusion to Kean’s acting in Richard III (see headnote and ll. 669–75, and the subscription which follows the last line of the poem) involves a parallel contrast between the ‘wondrous soul’ of the performer and his physical imperfection. The passage is an early example of B.’s lifelong admiration for Beethoven; in a letter to EBB. of 15 Aug. 1845 he recalls attending a performance of Fidelio ‘in the first season of German Opera’, i.e. May 1832 (Correspondence xi 29, 31 n. 1), and repeats his admiration in a letter of 15 May 1846 (ibid. xii 329). Fidelio is alluded to in By the Fire-Side 101 (p. 466), and Beethoven figures again in Ring (1888 text, xii 862–7). [9] élans de l’âme: the phrase occurs in Corinne: ‘un sacrifice, quel qu’il soit, est plus beau, plus difficile, que tous les élans de l’âme et de la pensée’ [a sacrifice, of whatever kind, is more beautiful, more difficult, than any motion of the soul or the intellect] (i 195). [16]. la concentration des idées: the sense is ambiguous between ‘the intensity of an idea’ and ‘the distillation of the elements of artistic conception’; cp. ll. 619, 808 for other occurrences of ‘concentrate’. [22–8]. la suite des objets … terminer: the hierarchy of perception alluded to here is Platonic in origin (as suggested by the subliminal pun on ‘plateau’). Cp. Sordello iii 141–5 (I 532); also Shelley 197–200: ‘that mighty ladder, of which … the world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend’ and 257–8: ‘Did the poet ever attain to a higher platform than where he rested and exhibited a result?’ (Appendix A, pp. 862–3).

812–14. what is … crowning life: cp. Tempest IV i 156–8: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep’; and Donne, Divine Meditations x 13–14: ‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die’. Cp. also Flight of the Duchess 686–8 (II 326), noting ‘crowning’ in l. 676.

814. crowning life: consummate life, i.e. life after death; cp. Revelation ii 10: ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life’.

814–19. The soul … weakness: cp. Sordello iii 302–9 (I 544).

816. but that complete: ‘but once that is accomplished’.

818–21. Cp. Sordello vi 588ff (I 750).

818. point I] emended from ‘point that I’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888. B. is rarely unmetrical without strong reason; the emphasis in this line seems designed to fall on ‘last’ rather than ‘point’. ‘That’ may have strayed from l. 816 or more likely l. 821, which has ‘that I’.

821.] There is a space after this line in 1888.

822. My God, my God: cp. (noting l. 853) Mark xv 34: ‘And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice … My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ 824. as creation crumbles: cp. In a Year 77–80 (p. 273): ‘Well, this cold clay clod / Was man’s heart. / Crumble it—and what comes next? / Is it God?’

824–5. my soul’s spark / Expands: cp. Ring xi 2370–2: ‘The soul’s condensed and, twice itself, expands / To burst thro’ life, in alternation due, / Into the other state whate’er it prove’. ‘Spark of soul’ occurs in Fifine at the Fair (1872) 674. 828. or] nor (Lowell-1888).

830.] There is no space after this line in Lowell-1875. To ‘turn to the Lord’ is a biblical commonplace, e.g. Lamentations iii 40, Joel ii 13, 2 Corinthians iii 16.

831–1031. With this closing movement of the poem cp. Byron, Childe Harold IV clxxxv–clxxxvi: ‘My task is done, my song hath ceased, my theme / Has died into an echo; it is fit / The spell should break of this protracted dream. / The torch shall be extinguish’d which hath lit / My midnight lamp—and what is writ, is writ; / Would it were worthier! But I am not now / That which I have been —and my visions flit / Less palpably before me—and the glow / Which in my spirit dwelt, is fluttering, faint, and low. // Farewell! a word that must be, and bath been— / A sound which makes us linger;—yet—farewell! / Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene / Which is his last, if in your memories dwell / A thought which once was his, if on ye swell / A single recollection, not in vain / He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell; / Farewell! with him alone may rest the pain, / If such there were—with you the moral of his strain’. Note the echo of the motto to Pauline from Clément Marot: see note, p. 14. This passage may also have influenced the ending of Sordello (I 768).

831–6. Mill wrote vertically in the margin: ‘why should this follow the description of scenery?’

835. him?—Now.] him—now? (Lowell, 1888).

837. which only ONE: ‘which only one [i.e. Christ] can inspire’.

840. deeds] power (1888).

843.] No space after this line in 1888.

845–6. let me die / Ages, so I see thee: cp. Marlowe, Dr Faustus V ii 179–80: ‘Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved’.

850–1. See Mark xiv 26–42, Christ’s vigil before his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, near Mount Olivet (or the Mount of Olives), during which he rebukes the disciples for falling asleep and being unable to ‘watch’ with him, and prays to the Father to be spared his coming ordeal.

852. See John xiii 23, the Last Supper: ‘Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved’.

854. thy bursting] thine outburst (1888). No direct witness to the Resurrection is recorded in the Gospels.

855. friend,] emended in agreement with 1868–88 from ‘friend’ in 1833.

859–60. In the space between these lines, Mill wrote: ‘strange transition’.

862–5.]

Desert me, and old shades are gathering fast;

Yet while the last light waits, I would say much,

This chiefly, it is gain that I have said

Somewhat of love I ever felt for thee (1888)

863. while its last light waits: the first appearance in B. of a recurrent motif, the delay of sunset to allow a final revelation: e.g. Sordello v 305–12, Childe Roland 187–8 (p. 365), Gerard de Lairesse (Parleyings, 1887) 308–15.

867. is mockery] seemed mockery (1888).

868. I feel sad] joy departs (1888).

868–9. strange … remove,] emended from ‘strange; … remove.’ in 1833. Neither correction was made by B. in Mill, but both appear in Lowell-1888, and fit the syntax of ll. 867–70 (‘when dark hours come … Look on this lay’) better than the 1833 punctuation, which, though not nonsensical, destroys the development of the passage.

871. and which I end] which thus I end (1888).

872–3. Cp. ll. 575–6.

873–9.]

How I am thine, and more than ever now

That I sink fast: yet though I deeplier sink,

No less song proves one word has brought me bliss,

Another still may win bliss surely back.

Thou knowest, dear, I could not think all calm,

For fancies followed thought and bore me off,

And left all indistinct; ere one was caught (1888)

877–82. Cp. Paracelsus ii 522–41 (1 215), and Two in the Campagna 52–5 (p. 562): ‘Must I go / Still like the thistle-ball, no bar, / Onward, whenever light winds blow, / Fixed by no friendly star?’

880. glanced: ‘appeared briefly’; cp. Sordello ii 25–6 (I 462). so] so, (Lowell-1888).

881–2.] I knew not which to leave nor which to choose, / For all so floated, nought was fixed and firm. (1888).

883–4. Cp. the development of this idea in Aprile’s speeches in Paracelsus ii.

884–8.]

Who chronicled the stages of all life,

And so thou bad’st me shadow this first stage.

’T is done, and even now I recognize

The shift, the change from last to past—discern

Faintly how life is truth and truth is good. (1888)

885. first stage] first Stage (Mill).

891.] With fears and sad forebodings,—I look through (Lowell); With fears and sad forebodings, I look through (1868–75); Despite the sad forebodings, love looks through—(1888). Note the slight change of meaning in 1868–75.

892. And say] Whispers (1888).

892–5.] B. deleted the quotation marks in Mill and Lowell, and they do not appear in 1868–1888.

895. in the sun] above (1888).

896–902. Anticipating the description of Porphyria and her lover’s account of his murder of her in Porphyria (p. 70).

896. all spread] outspread (1888).

899. looks] emended from ‘looks,’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

900–5.]

With love-breath,—a Pauline from heights above,

Stooping beneath me, looking up—one look

As I might kill her and be loved the more.

So, love me—me, Pauline, and nought but me,

Never leave loving! Words are wild and weak,

Believe them not, Pauline! I stained myself (1888)

910. me] mine (1888).

911–24. There were … touch me: Pauline is successively compared to a star, a beautiful island, and a dream, each of which loses its place in the larger scheme to which it naturally belongs by devoting itself to a particular object (i.e. the writer). Cp. Sordello i 505–21 and notes (I 428–30). Mill placed a cross in the margin opposite ll. 921–4, indicating obscurity.

916. the dim whole] some grand whole (1888).

917. a star] one star (1888).

919–21. Alluding to the episode of the Lotus-eaters in Odyssey ix.

921. fruits] fruit (1868–75). for home] of home (1888).

924–5. I am very weak, / But what I] Words are wild and weak, / But what they (1888); see ll. 900–5n.

927. Loosened—watching] Loosened, be watching (Lowell-1888).

930–4.]

A help to music’s mystery which mind fails

To fathom, its solution, no mere clue!

O reason’s pedantry, life’s rule prescribed!

I hopeless, I the loveless, hope and love.

Wiser and better, know me now, not when (1888)

932. Mill wrote ‘poor’ in the margin opposite this line.

936.] Much yet to dawn on you, to gladden you. (1888).

936^937] there is no space here in Lowell-1875; the line ends a page in 1888, but as the page is a line short, a line-space may be indicated.

938–40.]

I have too trusted my own lawless wants,

Too trusted my vain self, vague intuition—

Draining soul’s wine alone in the still night, (1888)

939. intuition—] emended from ‘intuition.’ in 1833, a correction made by B. in Mill and followed in Lowell-1888.

943–6.]

And grinning in its vanity, while ends

Foul to be dreamed of, smiled at me as fixed

And fair, while others changed from fair to foul

As a young witch turns an old hag at night. (1888)

946. Cp. l. 431.

948–9.] I with thee, even as a child—love’s slave, / Looking no farther than his liege commands. (1888, which leaves a space after this line).

950–7. The allusion is to Switzerland; Rousseau, whose writings are a source for the poem (see headnote, p. 24), was Swiss by birth. B. had not visited Switzerland when he wrote the poem; the comparison of the grandeur of the Swiss landscape with the defects of the Swiss peasantry (through inbreeding) was a Romantic commonplace.

953. all girt] begirt (1888).

961. Who … he] Which … it (1888).

963–5. how she … and live: an allusion to Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Antigone, for according burial rites to her brother Polynices against the King’s decree, is sentenced to be buried alive, and commits suicide. In Mill, below l. 963, which ends the page in 1833, B. quoted in Greek from Sophocles’ play: ‘My nature is for mutual love, not hate … And now he drags me … A bride unwed, amerced of marriage-song / And marriage-bed and joys of motherhood, / By friends deserted to a living grave’ (ll. 523, 916–20). As with the Greek glosses to ll. 567–76, B. seems to have added this gloss on his own initiative; there is no prompting query from Mill.

963. old lays] great lays (1888).        she] She (Mill).

964. sister] Sister (Mill).

966 –70. Or we … mind’s cave: the main clause is ‘we will go together over the unshaped images etc.’, the intervening phrases being interpolations. The comparison between the creative process and awaking the dead is common in B.: see esp. Sordello i 31–54 (I 396–8) and Ring i 707–72. The ‘twin gods’ refer to Dis and Persephone, god and goddess of Hades; with the ‘mind’s cave’, cp. Shelley, Mont Blanc, esp. ll. 34–48, where ‘my own, my human mind’ contains ‘the still cave of the witch Poesy’, adapting Plato’s image in the Republic of the mind as a cave within which the immortal Forms are shadowily reflected.

971. doubts] doubt (1888).

972. And sunshine comes] With sunshine back (1888).

974–5. Mill underlined ‘I shall be / Prepared’ and wrote in the margin: ‘he is always talking of being prepared—what for?’ B. put a cross underneath Mill’s note and wrote at the bottom of the page: ‘Why, “that’s tellings,” as schoolboys say’. Oxford notes that B. repeats this phrase in a letter to Mrs Story in 1863 (American Friends 132).

975–82.]

Prepared, and we will question life once more,

Till its old sense shall come renewed by change,

Like some clear thought which harsh words veiled before;

Feeling God loves us, and that all which errs

Is but a dream which death will dissipate.

And then what need of longer exile? Seek

My England, and, again there, calm approach

All I once fled from, calmly look on those (1888)

978. errs] emended in agreement with 1868–88 from ‘errs,’ in 1833.

979. Cp. Shelley, Adonais 344: ‘He has awakened from the dream of life’.

988–9.] As it may be;—tho’ music wait to wile, / And strange eyes and bright wine lure, laugh like sin (1888).

991–3.]

And I the first deny, decry, despise,

With this avowal, these intents so fair,—

Still be it all my own, this moment’s pride! (1888)

1006. Beauty] beauty (Lowell-1888).

1008.] For I, who thus again was visited, (1888).

1010 –14.]

And, though this weak soul sink and darkness whelm,

Some little word shall light it, raise aloft,

To where I clearlier see and better love,

As I again go o’er the tracts of thought

Like one who has a right, and I shall live (1888)

1016. to me again] for me to seize (1888).

1018.] Which were denied the waverer once; but now (1888).

1019. priest and lover: perhaps recalling Keats, Ode to Psyche 50: ‘Yes, I will be thy priest’; note that Psyche is an emblem of love. lover] prophet (1888).

1025. When such shall come] If such must come (1888).

1026. seem dying] seem, dying (Lowell-1888).

1027. and live] but live (1888).

1029-subscription. Mill put a line in the margin opposite ll. 1029–31 and wrote underneath the subscription: ‘this transition from speaking to Pauline to writing a letter to the public with place & date, is quite horrible’. B. put a cross in the margin opposite the subscription and wrote below Mill’s note: ‘Kean was acting there: I saw him in Richard III that night, and conceived the childish scheme already mentioned: there is an allusion to Kean, page 47. I don’t know whether I had not made up my mind to act, as well as to make verses, music, and God knows what.—que de châteaux en Espagne!’ For the ‘childish scheme’, see head-note, p. 15; for the ‘allusion to Kean’, see ll. 669–75. The French phrase means ‘what castles in the air’, ‘what fantasies’.