Brownings Shorter Poems | Page 6

Cavalier Tunes, Time's
Revenges, and many more, he achieves beauty, or nobility, or fitness of
phrase such as only a poet is capable of. It is in these last pieces and
their like that his fame lies for the future. It was his lot to be strong as
the thinker, the moralist, with "the accomplishment of verse," the
scholar interested to rebuild the past of experience, the teacher with an
explicit dogma in an intellectual form with examples from life, the
anatomist of human passions, instincts, and impulses in all their gamut,
the commentator on his own age; he was weak as the artist, often
unnecessarily and by choice, in the repulsive form,--in the awkward,
the obscure, the ugly. He belongs with Jonson, with Dryden, with the
heirs of the masculine intellect, the men of power not unvisited by
grace, but in whom mind is predominant. Upon the work of such poets
time hesitates, conscious of their mental greatness, but also of their
imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; at last the good is sifted from
that whence worth has departed.--From GEORGE EDWARD
WOODBERRY'S _Studies in Letters and Life_.
When it is urged that for a poet the intellectual energies are too strong

in Browning, that for poetry the play of intellectual interests and
activities is too great in his work, and that Browning often and at times
ruthlessly sacrifices the requirements and effects of art for the
expression of thought, that "though he refreshes the heart he tires the
brain," we should admit this with regard to a good deal of the work of
the third period. We should allow that this is the side to which he leans
generally, but still hold that, though to many his intellectual quality and
energy may well seem excessive, yet in great part of his work, and that
of course, his best, the passion of the poet and his kind of imagination
are just as fresh and powerful as the intellectual force and subtlety are
keen and abundant.--JAMES FROTHINGHAM, Studies of the Mind
and Art of Robert Browning.
Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
And voiceless hangs
the world beside his bier,
Our words are sobs, our cry or praise a tear:

We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
We see a spirit on earth's
loftiest peak
Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:

See a great Tree of Life that never sere
Dropped leaf for aught that
age or storms might wreak;
Such ending is not death: such living
shows
What wide illumination brightness sheds
From one big
heart,--to conquer man's old foes:
The coward, and the tyrant, and the
force
Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
When Song is
muck from springs of turbid source.
--GEORGE MEREDITH.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF BROWNING'S WORKS
1833. Pauline.
1835. Paracelsus.
1837. Strafford (A tragedy).

1840. Sordello.
1841. Bells and Pomegranates, No I.,
Pippa Passes.
1842. Bells and Pomegranates, No. II.,
King Victor and King Charles.
1842. Bells and Pomegranates, No.
III.,

Dramatic Lyrics.
Cavalier Tunes.
Italy and France.
Camp and
Cloister.
In a Gondola.
Artemis Prologises.
Waring.
Queen
Worship.
Madhouse Cells.
Through the Metidja.
The Pied Piper
of Hamelin.
1843. Bells and Pomegranates, No. IV.,
The Return of the Druses (A tragedy).
1843. Bells and Pomegranates,
No. V.,
A Blot In the 'Scutcheon (A tragedy).
1844. Bells and Pomegranates,
No. VI.,
Colombe's Birthday (A play).
1845. Bells and Pomegranates, No.
VII.
"How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Pictor Ignotos.

The Italian in England.
The Englishman in Italy.
The Lost Leader.

The Lost Mistress.
Home Thoughts from Abroad.
The Bishop
Orders his Tomb.
Garden Fancies.
The Laboratory.
The
Confessional.
The Flight of the Duchess.
Earth's Immortalities.

Song: "Nay, but you,--who do not love her."
The Boy and the Angel.

Night and Morning.
Claret and Tokay.
Saul.
Time's Revenges.

The Glove.
1846. Bells and Pomegranates, No. VIII.,
Luria, and A Soul's Tragedy.
1850. Christmas Eve and Easterday.

1852. Introductory Essay to Shelley's Letters.
1855. Men and
Women.
VOLUME I.
Love among the Ruins.
A Lover's Quarrel.
Evelyn Hope.
Up at a
Villa--Down in the City.
A Woman's Last Word.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

A Toccata of Galuppi's.
By the Fireside.
Any Wife to Any
Husband.
An Epistle (Karshish).
Mesmerism.
A Serenade at the
Villa.
My Star.
Instans Tyrannus.
A Pretty Woman.
"Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
Respectability.
A Light Woman.


The Statue and the Bust.
Love in a Life.
Life in a Love.
How it
Strikes a Contemporary.
The Last Ride Together.
The Patriot.

Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.
Bishop Blougram's Apology.

Memorabilia.
VOLUME II.
Andrea del Sarto.
Before and After.
In Three Days.
In a Year.

Old Pictures in Florence.
In a Balcony.
Saul.
"De Gustibus--."

Women and Roses.
Protus.
Holy-Cross Day.
The Guardian Angel.

Cleon.
The Twins.
Popularity.
The Heretic's Tragedy.
Two in
the Campagna.
A Grammarian's Funeral.
One Way of Love.

Another Way of Love.
"Transcendentalism."
Misconceptions.

One Word More.
1864. Dramatis Personæ.
James Lee.
Gold Hair.
The Worst of It.
Dîs Aliter Visum.
Too
Late.
Abt Vogler.
Rabbi Ben Ezra.
A Death in the Desert.

Caliban upon Setebos.
Confessions.
May and Death.
Prospice.

Youth and Art.
A Face.
A Likeness.
Mr. Sludge, "The Medium."

Apparent Failure.
Epilogue.
1868-69. The Ring and the Book.

1871. Balaustion's Adventure.
1871. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

1872. Fifine at the Fair.
1873. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.

1875. Aristophanes' Apology.
1875. The Inn Album.
1876.
Pacchiarotto, and other Poems
(including Natural Magic and Hervé Riel).
1877. The Agamemnon of
Æschylus.
1878. La Saisiaz, and The Two Poets of Croisic.

1879-80. Dramatic