the one poet who thoroughly knows how to grow old. He has the wealth of ripened experience, but he keeps also the bounding life and eager, forward-looking hopes of youth. All seasons meet in him. He reaps the harvests of life's autumn, but he has still in his heart the joys of its spring. For myself, of later years, when I have a birthday I read the only modern poem I know that is really helpful on such occasions, Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra. Let me close by reading its opening and closing stanzas that show how Robert Browning welcomed the swift-coming years: Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith, "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!" So, take and use thy work: What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! ART, LOVE, AND RELIGION IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING A I MONG the many pleasant anecdotes of Mr. Browning that have been told since his death is one to the effect that a very young lady who had just been introduced to him one evening in London and who evidently had little knowledge of his poetry, said to the great man somewhat timidly, "I don't know whether you care for music, Mr. Browning, but if you do, my mother, Lady J—, is having some on Monday." "Why, my dear!" said Browning with the hearty sympathetic manner so characteristic of him, "Care for music? I care for nothing else." The love of music was born in him. Very likely he inherited it, with the romantic emotional strain in his blood, from his maternal grandmother, who was a Creole, born in the West Indies. With Browning's own mother also, a woman of great depth of feeling, music was a passion. Mr. Sharp in his Life of Browning tells a pretty story of the childhood of the poet. One afternoon his mother was playing in the dusk of twilight to herself, when she was startled by a sound behind her. Glancing round, she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large, wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his pangs of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with shy urgency, "Play! Play!" Those evening hours of his mother's-happy hours of darkness, solitude, and musicwere among the tenderest lifelong memories of Browning. Every reader of his poetry knows what manifold proof of his love of music there is in every volume; and the musicians say that such poems as A Toccata of Galuppi's, or Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, or Abt Vogler betray considerable technical knowledge of the art. Certainly such poems are remarkable examples of Browning's power to interpret the spirit and meaning of music. I have sometimes thought it singular that with his keen susceptibility to the charm of music, Browning's own faculty of poetic utterance should have had so little musical quality,-at all events, so little clear and haunting melody. But I don't know that Browning's love for music was any deeper than his love for painting, indeed for all kinds of art. No modern poet, I suppose, had such an eager and intelligent interest in all forms of art. It isn't merely that he has a large group of poems dealing exclusively with art or artists, though there are more than a score of such poems, -Fra Lippo, Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, Old Pictures in Florence, The Guardian-Angel, Abt Vogler, A Toccata of Galuppi's and the rest; it is rather that almost all his best work is saturated with the history and the spirit of art. Most of his life was passed in Italy, and of all the many English poet-lovers of Italy, he loved her most. Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary's saying serves for me (When fortune's malice Lost her, Calais) Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, "Italy." Such lovers old are I and she: So it always was, so ever shall be! Yet it wasn't chiefly her history that Browning cared for. The Italy he loved was not the great past Italy that holds the memories of the world. It was rather the artist's Italy that captivated him, I think. He loved his Italy not so much because of its august historical associations with the early world, as because there, at every turn, in every square, in every dim and shabby church, you might come upon some statue, tomb, fresco, painting,-some effort of man to ex press himself in art. He knew the history of the early Christian painters a good deal better, I suspect, than the history of the early Roman emperors. His longer poems, like The Ring and the Book, are full of traces of minute and loving study of the art of Italy; while in all, the score of volumes he wrote during his life in Italy, I doubt whether there is a single passage expressive of that solemn sense of the irrevocable past, that broad feeling for the general life of man, which Scott and Byron felt so keenly. The historic sense was very feeble in Browning. The rise and fall of states, the social life of man as embodied in institutions, the broad movements of men in the mass, political or military, -these things which loom so large on the pages of history, Browning didn't care for. He didn't think of them. His interest was not in man, but in individual men and women. And that is the reason why he cared so much for art. For art is the only way the individual has of perpetuating his personality. Art to Browning means always the expression of spiritual aspiration, the effort of the individual after larger and higher life. It is the record of our continual strivings after an ideal we can never fully attain. Not to copy, though never so accurately, the beauty that the eye may see, but to reveal, even to suggest, inadequately, but with ever repeated effort, some higher beauty, some divine truth, this is the work of art. It was natural that with these views Browning should care little for technical excellence. In the poem, Old Pictures in Florence, he expresses a most emphatic preference for the crudest work of the early Christian painters over the most perfect statue Greek chisel ever cut. And that because while the statue is the skillful embodiment of a complete, self-sufficient beauty, in the pictures the artist is struggling, albeit in rude and untaught fashion, to utter his soul, to express the invisible things of God: On which I conclude, that the early painters, To cries of "Greek Art and what more wish you?"— And paint man man, whatever the issue! Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs-what matters?" Indeed complete technical excellence would seem to Browning to indicate some deficiency of soul. If the hand can execute perfectly all that the imagination can conceive, it is a proof that the imagination has little sight of the highest things; that the artist is losing that temper of ideal aspiration in which alone is the salvation of the man. The saddest failure is that of him who feels that he has consummate skill, but no vision. This is the pathos of that poem I sometimes think the most pathetic Browning ever wrote, the Andrea del Sarto. Andrea is the faultless painter. His unerring pencil can mend the lines of Raphael himself. Yet as he sits by his window in the hush of twilight and looks backward over his life, he knows that life a failure. In his heart he knows that the great artists are not those who skillfully execute but those who greatly conceive; that success consists not in doing perfectly what you undertake, but rather in nobly daring more than any man can perfectly attain; a man's reach should exceed his grasp, -Or what's a heaven for? I hardly recall any picture in modern poetry more saddening. And it is conceived with vivid dramatic truth; in the tone of the man's speech, in the very atmosphere of that still, gray evening that hangs upon the slopes of Fiesoli, there is something listless, hopeless. It is his wife, you remember, to whom he is speaking: I often am much wearier than you think, |