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scale precedes the tonic or chord on the first degree of the scale. The name arises from the modes used in early church music called Plagal Modes, which were a transposition of the authentic modes beginning on the fourth degree of the authentic modes. 12. Bought of Aldabrod, etc. Clement's arraignment of Jacques or John being that the riches won piously by the order during the Crusades, he had not scrupled to sell again to Saladin, the Sultan, who is portrayed by Scott in 'The Talisman.'- 14. Pope Clement. The fifth Clement, 1305-1314.-18. clavicithern, a cithern with keys like a harpsichord.—35. Sing "Laudes." Sing the seven Psalms of praise making up the service of the church called Lauds. 47. Salva, etc. The bidding to greet here with a reverence, according to custom, the Host, or Christ's flesh, which had been mentioned.-59. Sharon's rose. Solomon's Song ii. 1. ('Men and Women,' 1855.)

P. 278. Holy-Cross Day reflects the attitude of the corrupt mediaval Christians and Jews toward each other. The prose preceding the poem gives the point of view of an imaginary Bishop's Secretary, who congratulates himself upon the good work the Church is doing in forcing its doctrine on the Jews in the Holy-Cross Day sermon, and effecting many conversions. The poem shows that the Jews regard this solicitude on the part of the Christians with hatred and scorn, and that their conversions are in derision of their would-be converters. The sarcasm of the speaker reaches a pinnacle of bitterness when he accuses the Christian bishops of being men he had helped to their sins and who now help him to their God. From scorn toward such followers of Christ, he passes, in the contemplation of Rabbi Ben Ezra's death song, to a defence of Christ against these followers who profess but do not act his precepts, and a hope that if the Jews were mistaken in not accepting Christ, the tortures they now suffer will be received as expiation for their sin.

Holy-Cross Day is September 14. The discovery of the true cross by St. Helen inaugurated the festival, celebrated both by Latins and Greeks as early as the fifth or sixth centuries, under the title of the Exaltation of the Cross and later in commemoration of the alleged miraculous appearance of the Cross to Constantine in the sky at midday. Though the particular incidents of the poem are not historical, it is a fact (see Milman's ' History of the Jews ') that, by a Papal Bull issued by Gregory XIII. in 1584, all Jews above the age of twelve years were compelled to listen every week to a sermon from a Christian priest.—52. Corso, a street in Rome.-67. Rabbi Ben Ezra. See Notes, P. 207.111. Ghetto, the Jew's quarter. Pope Paul IV. first shut the Jews up in the Ghetto and prohibited them from leaving it after sunset. ('Men and Women,' 1855.)

P. 282. Amphibian is a fancy suggested by the contrast between a creature whose realm is merely the air and man whose realm of earth can be exchanged at times, as in swimming, for an amphibious life, dependent partly on water, partly on air, and which images a similar contrast between the life of a man on earth and that of an unbodied soul beyond death, whose spiritual realm is approached by the man through his ability to disport himself in the corresponding realm of thought and passion, which is poetry. (Prologue to 'Fifine at the Fair,' 1872.)

P. 285. St. Martin's Summer argues that old loves though buried come forth in ghostly shape to haunt the new love, and remind it that it may not be enduring; therefore it is better not to protest too much, not to consider it as durable masonry, vhich tempts destruction, but rather as a light trellis that may either bend with circumstances, or else fall flat without causing much dismay. But even this concession to the ghosts fails to reduce their interference to "faint march-music." While the new love is congratulating itself upon having found a safe basis, the ghosts assert themselves, proving that they are more real than the new love which, in

fact, receives all its glamour through the interfusion of their spirit, and the conclusion is that tears and clamor are the sole portion of the new love, and in the discovery of this the lover is even bereft of the comfort of ghosts of old love.

St. Martin's Summer. From October 9 to November II. Also called Martinmas and Martelmas, because the feast of St. Martin is kept on November 11. The feast of St. Luke being on October 18, it is also called St. Luke's Summer. It corresponds with our Indian Summer. —71. When Penelope and Ulysses meet after their long separation, in the last book of the 'Odyssey,' she, as soon as she is convinced that it is indeed her husband, throws her arms about his neck and weeps. ('Pacchiarotto, with Other Poems,' 1876.)

P. 288. James Lee's Wife. A cycle of love-lyrics, each representing a scene in the growth of a husband's estrangement as reflected in the mood of the constant wife. In I., which represents her as having turned to look out upon the world. descrying in the face of nature a change ominous to her of a change in their love, the mood is one of vague dread and forecast. In II, seated by the fireside, whose security and cheer kindle sinister suggestions of wreck by sea and land, the mood is one of poignant foreboding. In III., the outer world again calling her attention to the stormy and decrepit aspects of the waning year, the mood is one of remonstrance against the overpowering of the light of the inner life by the law of change which masters the external world. In IV., the home being left behind, the walk and talk along the beach reveal husband and wife on the brink of alienation. Alike irksome to him are her loving idealization and criticism of him, and the mood which here leads her to anatomize his love, is one of clear recognition of the estrangement. In V., on the cliff, left alone and aloft, her mood is one of brooding over the meaning of love, finding appropriate images for her thoughts and feelings in dry turf and cold rock, dreary in spite of sunshine, but which the cricket and butterfly visit with color, even as love with its resplendent grace dowers the low mind with a sudden winged glory. In VI, turning for distraction to a book, she reads a fanciful poem of the wind as a voice of human woes. Her impatience with the young poet for his easy assumption of defeat by imagination instead of experience, leads her to put her own actual experience into imaginative shape, transitoriness, she typifies in the flitting beauty of the dawn, making its perpetual call upon the spiritual faculty of man, and urging him onward ceaselessly. Then recognizing this insight into the use of change as a step further on, her mood turns again to the contemplation of the human piteousness of perpetual change. In VII., at the sea's edge, among its rocks, the mood that finds expression is one of spiritual aspiration as the fruit of suffering. The autumn of the "brown old earth" diffusing cheer, though weighted with experience, seems to her fancy the embodiment of her insight that the love which is disappointed of its satisfaction on the natural plane of life must seek through that disappointment a finer spiritual fruition. In VIII., beside the drawing-board, pursuing in art the impulse she has just received to seek the significance of love on a higher impersonal plane, the hand whose beauty she is learning, through her faulty drawing, to love becomes to her one of God's many exemplifications of love in skill or in power. Her perception of its beauty as beyond the human power, even of a Da Vinci to outvie, leads her to understand a Da Vinci's interest in the actual as well as in the beautiful. The crude peasant hand in its structure and uses, showing God's power, is as worthy of study as the perfect hand that shows God's skill. The mood expressed is one of rapid insight through analogies of art and experience, which imply that her bemoaning her love for lack of the ideal perfection she craved is like her scorn of the peasant hand for lack of the beauty of the cast. The use that survives the beauty, and the use that

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philosopher. -232. Carlino, Carlo Dolci (1616–1686), whose pictures were smoothed into lifelessness.—236. A certain tablet. This, Browning wrote Dr. Corson, "was a famous 'Last Supper' mentioned by Vasari, gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by some stranger. I saw it, genuine or no, a work of great beauty."-242. Ognissanti. All Saints Church. 244. Detur Amanti. Let it be given to the loving one. -245. Kohinoor. The celebrated diamond, "Mountain of light," presented to Queen Victoria in 1850; the Jewel of Giamschid, its only rival, belonging to the king of Persia.—249. A certain dotard. Joseph Wenzel Radetzky (1766-1858), governor of Italy for the Austrians. For the allusions in stanza thirty-three, see, as Browning suggests, Mrs. Browning's 'Casa Guidi Windows,' Part I.—260. Quod videas ante, “which you may have seen before."-264. Orgagna, Andrea (1315-1376), an artist who derived from Giotto yet without imitation. - 271. Chimæra. A three-headed monster, one indeed," says Hesiod, "of a grim-visaged lion, one of a goat, and another of a serpent,". —an unnatural birth.—275. Half-told tale. Chaucer's unfinished story of Cambuscan in the 'Squire's Tale.' - 277. Beccaccia. Woodcock. - 279. Fifty braccia, etc. The Campanile, as Giotto planned it, was to have been crowned by a spire fifty braccia (cubits) high. ('Men and Women,' 1855.) P. 347. Bishop Blougram's Apology is made over the wine after dinner, to defend himself from the criticisms of a doubting young literary man, who despises him because he considers that he cannot be true to his convictions in conforming to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He builds up his defence from the proposition that the problem of life is not to conceive ideals which cannot be realized, but to find what is and make it as fair as possible. The bishop admits his unbelief, but being free to choose either belief or unbelief, since neither can be proved wholly true, chooses belief as his guiding principle, because he finds it the best for making his own life and that of others happy and comfortable in this world. Once having chosen faith on this ground, the more absolute the form of faith, the more potent the results; besides, the bishop has that desire of domination in his nature, which the authorization of the Church makes safer for him. To Gigadibs' objection that were his nature nobler, he would not count this success, he replies he as God made him, and can but make the best of himself as he is. To the objection that he addresses himself to grosser estimators than he ought, he replies that all the world is interested in the fact that a man of his sense and learning, too, still believes at this late hour. He points out the impossibility of his following an ideal like Napoleon's, for conceding the merest chance that doubt may be wrong, and judgment to follow this life, he would not dare to slaughter men as Napoleon had for such slight ends. As for Shakespeare's ideal, he can't write plays like his if he wanted to, but he has realized things in his life which Shakespeare only imagined, and which he presumes Shakespeare would not have scorned to have realized in his life, judging from his fulfilled ambition to be a gentleman of property at Stratford. He admits, however, that enthusiasm in belief, such as Luther's, would be far preferable to his own way of living, and after this, enthusiasm in unbelief, which he might have if it were not for that plaguy chance that doubt may be wrong. Gigadibs interposes that the risk is as great for cool indifference as for bold doubt, Blougram disputes that point by declaring that doubts prove faith, and that man's free will preferring to have faith true to having doubt true tips the balance in favor of faith and shows that man's instinct or aspiration is toward belief, that unquestioning belief, such as that of the Past, has no moral effect on man, but faith which knows itself. through doubt is a moral spur. Thus the arguments from

expediency, instinct, and consciousness, all bear on the side of faith and convince the bishop that it is safer to keep his faith intact from his doubts. He then proves that Gigadibs, with all his assumption of superiority in his frankness of unbelief, is in about the same position as himself, since the moral law which he follows has no surer foundation than the religious law the bishop follows, both founded upon instinct. The bishop closes as he began, with the consciousness that rewards for his way of living are of a substantial nature, while Gigadibs has nothing to show for his frankness, and does not hesitate to say that Gigadibs will consider his conversation with the bishop the greatest honor ever conferred upon him. The poet adds some lines, somewhat apologetic for the bishop, intimating that his arguments were suited to the calibre of his critic, and that with a profounder critic he would have made a more serious defence. Speaking of a review of this poem by Cardinal Wiseman, Browning says in a letter to a friend, printed in Poet-lore, May, 1896, "The most curious notice I ever had was from Cardinal Wiseman on Blougrami.e., himself. It was in the Rambler, a Catholic journal of those days, and certified to be his by Father Prout, who said nobody else would have dared put it in." This review praises the poem for its "fertility of illustration and felicity of argument," and says that “ though utterly mistaken in the very groundwork of religion, though starting from the most unworthy notions of the work of a Catholic bishop, and defending a self-indulgence every honest man must feel to be disgraceful, [it] is yet in its way triumphant.” – 10. Brother Pugin (1810-1852), an eminent English architect, who, becoming a Catholic, designed many cathedrals for the Catholic Church. - 34. Corpus Christi Day, Thursday after Trinity Sunday, when the Feast of the Sacrament of the Altar is celebrated. 45. Che, what. - 54. Count D'Orsay (1798–1852), a clever Frenchman, distinguished as a man of fashion, and for his drawings of horses.-113. Parma's pride, the Ferome; 114. Correggio 117. Modenese. In the Ducal academy at Parma, one of the most important paintings is the St. Jerome by Correggio. He was born in the territory of Modena, Italy. 184. A chorus-ending from Euripides. The Greek dramatist, Euripides (480 B.C.-406 B.C.), frequently ended his choruses with this thought-sometimes with slight variations in expression: "The Gods perform many things contrary to our expectations, and those things which we looked for are not accomplished; but God hath brought to pass things unthought of." —316. Hildebrand (Gregory VII., 1973-85), claimed the temporal power of the Popes and the authority of the Papacy over sovereigns.— 411. Schelling, distinguished German philosopher (1775-1854).— 516. Giulio Romano (1492–1546), Italian painter, referred to in 'Winter's Tale,' v. ii. Dowland, English musician, praised for his lute playing in a sonnet in The Passionate Pilgrim,' attributed to Shakespeare. — 588. Strauss (1808–74), one of the Tübingen philosophers, author of a Rationalistic 'Life of Jesus.'-715. King Bomba, means King Puffcheek, King Liar, King Knave, a sobriquet given to Ferdinand II., late king of the Two Sicilies. Lazzaroni, Naples beggars, named from Lazarus.—716. Antonelli, Cardinal, secretary of Pope Pius IX.-728. Naples liquefaction. The supposed miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius the Martyr. A small quantity of it is preserved in a crystal reliquary in the great church at Naples, and when brought into the presence of the head of the saint it melts. -744. Fichte (1762-1814), celebrated German metaphysician. He defined God as the "moral order of the universe."-877. Pastor est tui Dominus, the Lord is your shepherd. — 915. Anacreon, Greek lyric poet of the sixth century B.C. -972. In partibus, Episcopus, etc. "In countries where the Roman Catholic faith is not regularly established, as it was not in England before the time of Cardinal Wiseman, there were no bishops of sees in the kingdom itself, but they took their titles from heathen lands" (Dr. Berdoe). ('Men and Women,' 1855.)

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P. 369. Mr. Sludge the Medium is a humorous monologue conveying an American medium's defence to his patron who has caught him in cheating, followed by a short soliloquy conveying his unequivocal self-exposure. The whole presents dramatically the conditions and nature, both of spiritualism and the belief in spiritualism, current in the middle part of the nineteenth century, illustrating the credulity of the public and the self-deception of the medium. Hawthorne, in his 'French and Italian Note-books,' June 9, 1858, writes: "Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Home [the American medium, David D. Home], and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Home, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic.”. 168. Porson, Richard (1759–1808), the celebrated sc' olar, professor of Greek and librarian of the London Institution. - 346. Hymn in G with natural F, etc. Impossible music, of course, since the scale of G requires F sharp, and a piece set in consecutive fourths would be cacophony.-788. Pasiphe. Wife of Minos, and according to the Greek myth enamoured of a bull.-921. Charles's Wain. The constellation of the Great Bear. -1140. Bridgewater Book. The Bridgewater treatises were written to meet the thesis set by the Earl of Bridgewater, "On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in Creation," for which purpose he bequeathed £8000, in 1829, to the Royal Society. ('Dramatis Personæ,' 1864.)

P. 403. The Boy and the Angel. An imaginary legend illustrating the worth of humble, human love to God, who missed in the praise of the Pope, Theocrite, and of the Angel Gabriel, the precious human quality in the song of the poor boy, Theocrite. (Hood's Magazine, August, 1844, rewritten with five new couplets added in 'Bells and Pomegranates, No. 7 - Dramatic Romances and Lyrics,' 1845. In the 'Poetical Works' of 1868, a fresh verse was added.)

P. 406. A Death in the Desert is a supposed MS. account of St. John's dying testimony to the truth of the revelation of God made man through Christ. John's own spiritual faith transcends the idea of evidence as dependent upon witness or memory of signs and wonders. He has been nourished on such external evidence to the end that his faith now rests upon internal evidence, has become one with the desires and aspirations of his soul. Foreseeing future scrutiny of the superficial truth of fact, he meets these doubts by declaring that there must be development in the nature of the evidence which shall appeal to developing man; and that man's progress is dependent on his finding a developing internal warrant for faith in Absolute Love and Power, the good for man of proof, consisting merely in its capacity to educe his faith, not to enable him to dispense with the need of it. So, when man can perceive will and love in man, before assumed to be altogether God's, instead of requiring conviction from the sort of proof that satisfied less developed man, let him exert his faith in the essential truth, acknowledging its action as a result of old processes outgrown because assimilated, and not disproved because in essence true. Pamphylax, Xanthus, Valeus, Theotypas, and narrative and gloss are all imagined by Browning, the Revelation and Gospel of St. John being the main sources feeding the inspiration of the poem.-6. Terebinth. The turpentine tree. - 23. The decree. Some decree ordering the persecution of the Christians, perhaps Domitian's. -50. Ball of nard. Spikenard, giving an aromatic odor.-279. Prometheus. The Titan who stole fire from Olympos and brought it to man, defying Zeus who had refused it. Æschylus founded his Prometheus Bound' upon the myth, and possibly in the two other parts of this

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