Gwendolen Tresham. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) The cousin of Mildred Tresham.

Gypsy. (The Flight of the Duchess.) The old crone who is sent by the Duke to frighten the Duchess, and who rescues her from her unhappy life.

Hakeem or Hakem. (Return of the Druses.) He was the chief of the Druses. The first hakeem was the Fatimite Caliph B’amr-ellah. He professed to be the incarnate deity. He was slain near Cairo, in Egypt, on Mount Makattam.

Halbert and Hob. (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Two men, father and son, of brutal type, and the last of their line, are sitting quarrelling one Christmas night in their homestead. High words, followed by taunts and curses, led to an attack on the father by his furious son, who flew at his throat with the intention of casting him out in the snow. The father was strong and could have held his own in the scuffle, but suddenly all power left him: he was struck mute. This still more enraged the son, who pulled him from the room till they reached the house-door-sill. Slowly the father found utterance and told his son that on just such a Christmas night long ago he had attacked his father in a similar manner and had dragged him to the same spot, when he was arrested by a voice in his heart. “I stopped here; and, Hob, do you the same!” The son relaxed his hold of his father’s throat, and both returned upstairs, where they remained in silence. At dawn the father was dead, the son insane. “Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?” Certainly there is, says the mental pathologist. Persons born with such and such cranial and cerebral characteristics cannot help being brutal and criminal. They are handicapped heavily by nature from the hour of their birth, and they only follow out a law of their development, for which they are not responsible when they become criminal. The mental pathologist would have no difficulty in drawing the portraits of Halbert and Hob. There is a monotony and family likeness in the criminal physiognomy which does not require an expert to detect. When a specialist such as Dr. Down goes over a great prison like Broadmoor, he has no difficulty in indicating for us the precise aberrations from the normal type which distinguish between the honest man and the criminal. This would be a terrible reflection on the Divine providence, if we omitted to take into account the pregnant last line of Mr. Browning’s poem:

“That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear.”

As Nature is never without her compensations, so there is a reason above all our materialism, our facial angles, our oxycephalic and our microcephalic heads which justifies the ways of God to men. Doctors are slow to recognise this, but judges always act upon the principle. Experts in criminal pathology find responsibility with great difficulty in the men they are endeavouring to save from the gallows. The judge, however, keeps to the common-sense rule that if the criminal knew that he was doing what he ought not to do, he is responsible before the law for his crime. Halbert heard the voice in his heart—Hob relaxed his hold of the father’s throat. Conscience rules supreme even over heredity and cerebral aberration. The basis of this story is found in Aristotle’s Ethics, I., vii., c. 6.

“Heap Cassia, Sandal-buds, and Stripes.” The first line of the song in Paracelsus iv.

Helen’s Tower. Lines written at the request of the Earl of Dufferin and Clandeboye, on the tower which the Earl erected to the memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Giffard. (Printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 28th, 1883.)

Henry, Earl Mertoun. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) He was Mildred Tresham’s lover, and was killed by her brother, Earl Tresham.

Herakles == Hercules, who wrestles with death, conquers him, and restores Alkestis to her husband, in Balaustion’s Adventure. The Raging Hercules of Euripides, which Balaustion read to Aristophanes, is translated by Mr. Browning in the volume Aristophanes’ Apology.

Heretic’s Tragedy, The; A Middle-Age Interlude. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) “It would seem to be a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg Molay, at Paris, A.D. 1314; as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries.” [The History.] Molay was Grand Master of the order of the Knights Templars, suppressed by a decree of Pope Clement V. and the general council of Vienne, in 1312. The Knights Templars were instituted by seven gentlemen at Jerusalem, in 1118, to defend the holy places and pilgrims from the insults of the Saracens, and to keep the passes free for such as undertook the voyage to the Holy Land. They took their name from the first house, which was given them by King Baldwin II., situated near the place where anciently the temple of Solomon stood. By the liberality of princes, immense riches suddenly flowed to this Order, by which the knights were puffed up to a degree of insolence which rendered them insupportable even to the kings who had been their protectors; and Philip the Fair, king of France, resolved to compass their ruin. They were accused of treasons and conspiracies with the infidels, and of other enormous crimes, which occasioned the suppression of the Order. The year following, the Grand Master, who was a Frenchman, was burnt at Paris, and several others suffered death, though they all with their last breath protested their innocence as to the crimes that were laid to their charge. These were certainly much exaggerated by their enemies, and doubtless many innocent men were involved with the guilty. A great part of their estates was given to the Knights of Rhodes or Malta. (Butler’s Lives of the Saints—sub May 5.) For half a century before the suppression of the Order, horrible stories about various unholy rites practised at its midnight assemblies had been in circulation. It was said that every member on his initiation was compelled to deny the Lord Jesus Christ, to spit upon and trample under foot a crucifix, and submit to certain indecent ceremonies. It was charged against them that hideous four-footed idols were worshipped, and other things too terrible to narrate were said to be done at these assemblies. Whether these things were true or not, has been hotly disputed ever since the accusations were made. The spitting on the cross seems, at any rate in France, to have been admitted by the accused; many of the worst things confessed were admitted under the most cruel tortures, and are consequently more likely to have been false than true. In Carlyle’s essay on the “Life and Writings of Werner” (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i., p. 66: 1888), the whole story of these mysterious rites is discussed. After several pages of quotations from Werner’s drama The Templars in Cyprus, Carlyle says, “One might take this trampling on the Cross, which is said to have been actually enjoined on every Templar at his initiation, to be a type of his secret behest to undermine that institution (the Catholic Church) and redeem the spirit of religion from the state of thraldom and distortion under which it was there held. It is known at least, and was well known to Werner, that the heads of the Templars entertained views, both on religion and politics, which they did not think meet for communicating to their age, and only imparted by degrees, and under mysterious adumbrations, to the wiser of their own order. They had even publicly resisted, and succeeded in thwarting, some iniquitous measure of Philippe Auguste, the French king, in regard to his coinage; and this, while it secured them the love of the people, was one great cause, perhaps second only to their wealth, of the hatred which that sovereign bore them, and of the savage doom which he at last executed on the whole body.”

[The Poem.] The Abbot Deodaet and his monks are singing in the choir of their church about the burning alive of the Master of the Temple two hundred years before. He has sinned the unknown sin, and sold the influence of the Order to the Mohammedan. In a graphic and lurid manner they picture the details of the execution. They have no pity for the victim, and seem to be gloating over his sufferings. They imagine that the victim calls in his agony on the Saviour whom he forsook and traitorously sold; he cries now “Saviour, save Thou me!” The Face upon which he had spat, the Face on the crucifix which he trampled upon, is revealed to the burning man feature by feature; he now sees his awful Judge, his voice dies, and John’s soul flares into the dark. Said the Abbot, “God help all poor souls lost in the dark!”

Notes.—i., Organ: plagal cadence. The cadence formed when a subdominant chord immediately precedes the final tonic chord. ii., Emperor Aldabrod, probably the family name of one of the Greek emperors, but I can find nothing about him. Sultan Saladin, of Egypt and Syria, whose portrait is so faithfully drawn by Sir Walter Scott, in The Talisman. Pope Clement V. (1305-14). Platina, in his life of this Pope, says only a few words on the Templars: “He took off the Templars, who were fallen into very great errors (as denying Christ, etc.), and gave their goods to the Knights of Jerusalem”; clavicithern: an upright musical instrument like a harpsichord. iv., Laudes: a Catholic service associated with Matins. It consists, amongst other devotions, of five Psalms. vi., Salvâ reverentiâ: “saving reverence,” like the “saving your presence” of the Irishman. vii., Sharon’s Rose: Solomon’s Song, ii. 1. The rose was the symbol of secrecy. viii., leman: a sweetheart of either sex.

Hervé Riel. (Published in the Cornhill Magazine, March 1871. Browning received £100 for it, which sum he gave to the Paris Relief Fund, to provide food for the starving people after the siege of Paris. Published in the Pacchiarotto volume in 1876.) The story told in the poem is strictly historical. Hervé Riel was a Breton sailor of Le Croisic, who, after the great naval battle of La Hogue in 1692, saved the remains of the French fleet by skilfully piloting the ships through the shallows of the Rance, and thereby preventing their capture by the English. For this splendid service he was permitted to ask whatever reward he chose to name. The brave Breton asked merely for a whole day’s holiday, that he might visit his wife, the Belle Aurore. Dr. Furnivall says: “The facts of the story had been forgotten, and were denied at St. Malo, but the reports of the French Admiralty were looked up, and the facts established. The war between Louis XIV. and William III. was undertaken by the former with the object of restoring James II. to the English throne. Admiral Turnville engaged the English fleet off Cape La Hogue, and thereby wrecked the French fleet and the cause of James. Apropos of Hervé Riel, Mr. Kenneth Grahame says (Browning Society’s Papers, March 30th, 1883, p. 68*): ‘In Rabelais’ Pantagruel, lib. IV., cap. xxi., Panurge says, ‘... quelque fille de roy ... me fera exiger quelque magnificque cenotaphe, comme feit Dido à son mary Sychee; ... Germain de Brie à Hervé, le nauctrier Breton,’ etc. Then a note says, ‘En 1515, dans un combat naval, le Breton Hervé Primoguet, qui commandoit la Cordelière, attacha son navire en feu au vaisseau amiral ennemi la Regente d’Angleterre, et se fit sauter avec lui. Germain de Brie ou Brice (Brixius) qui celebra ce trait heroique dans un poeme latin, etoit un des amis de Rabelais.’ This was a forerunner of Browning’s hero. The coincidence of names, etc., is curious.”

Hippolytos. (See Artemis Prologizes.) The Hippolytus of Euripides is the chaste worshipper of Diana (Artemis), who will give no heed to Venus. His step-mother Phædra loves him, and kills herself when she discovers he will not succumb to her attentions.

Hohenstiel-Schwangau. See Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

Holy-Cross Day [On which the Jews were forced to attend an annual Christian Sermon in Rome]. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.)—[The History.] Holy Cross Day, or the Festival of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, falls on September 14th annually. It is kept in commemoration of the alleged miraculous appearance of the Cross to Constantine in the sky at midday. The discovery of the True Cross by St. Helen gave the first occasion of the festival, which was celebrated under the title of the Exaltation of the Cross on September 14th, both by the Latins and Greeks, as early as in the fifth or sixth centuries at Jerusalem, from the year 335. (See for the history of the festival Butler’s Lives of the Saints, under September 14th.) The particular details of this poem are not historical, but it is quite true that such a sermon was preached to Jews from time to time, and that they were driven to church to listen to it. A papal bull, issued in 1584, formerly compelled the Jews to hear sermons at the church of St. Angelo in Pescheria, close to the Jewish quarter. The Pescheria or fish market adjoins the Ghetto, the quarter allotted to the Jews by Paul IV. This pope compelled the Jews to wear yellow head-gear; and, among other oppressive exactions, they had to provide the prizes for the horse-races at the Carnival. In a note at the end of the poem Mr. Browning says, “The late Pope abolished this bad business of the Sermon.” The conduct of the popes towards the Jews varied according to the policy or humanity in the character of the pontiff. “In 1442 Eugenius IV. deprived them of one of their most valuable privileges, and endeavoured to interrupt their amicable relations with the Christians: they were prohibited from eating and drinking together. Jews were excluded from almost every profession, were forced to wear a badge, to pay tithes; and Christians were forbidden to bequeath legacies to Jews. The succeeding popes were more wise or more humane. In Naples the celebrated Abarbanel became the confidential adviser of Ferdinand the Bastard and Alphonso II.; they experienced a reverse, and were expelled from that city by Charles V. The stern and haughty Pope Paul IV. renewed the hostile edicts; he endeavoured to embarrass their traffic by regulations which prohibited them from disposing of their pledges under eighteen months; deprived them of the trade in corn and in every other necessary of life, but left them the privilege of dealing in old clothes. Paul first shut them up in their Ghetto, a confined quarter of the city, out of which they were prohibited from appearing after sunset. Pius IV. relaxed the severity of his predecessor. He enlarged the Ghetto, and removed the restriction on their commerce. Pius V. expelled them from every city in the papal territory except Rome and Ancona; he endured them in those cities with the avowed design of preserving their commerce with the East. Gregory XIII. pursued the same course: a bull was published, and suspended at the gate of the Jews’ quarter, prohibiting the reading of the Talmud, blasphemies against Christ, or ridicule against the ceremonies of the Church. All Jews above twelve years old were bound to appear at the regular sermons delivered for their conversion; where it does not seem, notwithstanding the authority of the pope and the eloquence of the cardinals, that their behaviour was very edifying. At length the bold and statesmanlike Sextus V. annulled at once all the persecuting or vexatious regulations of his predecessors, opened the gates of every city in the ecclesiastical dominions to these enterprising traders, secured and enlarged their privileges, proclaimed toleration of their religion, subjected them to the ordinary tribunals, and enforced a general and equal taxation.” (Milman’s History of the Jews, book xxvii.)

[The Poem.] Part of the satire of the poem is in the fictitious extract from the Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600, prefixed to it. The Bishop looks upon the matter as though he were compelling the Jews to come in and partake of the gospel feast; he flatters himself that many conversions have taken place in consequence of the enforcement of this law, and that the Church was conferring a great blessing on the Jews by permitting them to partake of the heavenly grace. What the Jews themselves thought of the business is told in the poem. The speaker describes the crowding of the church by the Israelites, packed like rats in a hamper or pigs in a stye; to the life the poet hits off the behaviour of the wretched audience, compelled to listen to that which they abhorred, and to pretend to be converted, and to affect compunction and interest in doctrines which they detested. Then the most serious part of the poem begins: the speaker complains that the hand which gutted his purse would throttle his creed, and for reward the men whom he has helped to their sins would help him to their God; then the pathos deepens, and while the pretended converts are going through the farce of acknowledging their conversion in the sacristy, the speaker meditates on Rabbi Ben Ezra’s Song of Death. The night the Jewish saint died he called his family round him and said their nation in one point only had sinned, and he invokes Christ if indeed He really were the Messiah, and they had given Him the cross when they should have bestowed the crown, to have pity on them and protect them from the followers of His teaching, whose life laughs through and spits at their creed. Perhaps, indeed, they withstood Christ then: it is at least Barabbas they withstand now! Let Rome make amends for Calvary. Let Him remember their age-long torture, the infamy, the Ghetto, the garb, the badge, the branding tool and scourge, and this summons to conversion; by withstanding this they are but trying to wrest Christ’s name from the devil’s crew.

Home, D. D.: the Spiritualist medium. See Mr. Sludge the Medium.

Home Thoughts from Abroad. (Published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845.) In praise of all the mighty ravishment of our English spring, and the lovely sister months April and May,—

“May flowers bloom before May comes,
To cheer, a little, April’s sadness.”

And nowhere, surely, are these months so delightful as in England! Melon-flowers do not make up “for the buttercups, the little children’s dower.” In many parts of Southern Europe the trees have all been ruthlessly cut down, lest they should harbour birds. The absence of our hedgerows does much to mar the beauty of a Continental landscape in spring.

Home Thoughts from the Sea. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, VII., 1845.) Patriotic reflections on passing the Bay of Trafalgar by one who, remembering how here England helped the Englishmen, asks himself “How can I help England?”

House. (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems: 1876.) If we accept Shakespeare’s Sonnets in their natural sense, as the best authorities say we must, they open up to the public gaze passages in the life of the great poet which those who love an ideal Shakespeare would rather have not known. If, says Mr. Browning in the poem, Shakespeare unlocked his heart with a sonnet-key, the less Shakespeare he! For his own part, he will do nothing of the sort; and, though probably few men led purer and holier lives from youth to manhood than Mr. Browning, he declines to admit the vulgar gaze of the public into the secret chambers of his soul. In earthquakes, indeed, the fronts of houses often fall, and expose the private arrangements of the home to the impertinent observation of the passer-by. In earthquakes this cannot be helped; but a writer may keep his secrets to himself till an imprudent biographer gets hold of them to make “copy” of. As a fact, all that the world is really concerned with in Mr. Browning’s life and opinions can be gathered “by the spirit-sense” from his works. The main idea of the poem is very similar to that of At the Mermaid.

Householder, The. (Fifine at the Fair.) The Epilogue to the poem, telling how Don Juan is at last united to his wife Elvire by death.

How it strikes a Contemporary. (Men and Women: 1855.) The faculty of observation is essential both to the poet and the spy. Lavater said that “he alone is an acute observer who can observe minutely without being observed.” The poet of Valladolid was mistaken by the vulgar mob for an agent of the Government, because they were always catching him taking “such cognisance of men and things.” His picture is sketched in a very few lines; but these are sufficient to show us the very man, in his scrutinising hat, crossing the Plaza Mayor of the dull and deserted city, in which there was—one would think—as little life to interest a poet as to employ a spy. We soon get to feel that the poet-evidences in the man’s behaviour should have been sufficiently strong to save him from the reproaches of his neighbours. The dog at his heels, the note he took of any cruelty towards animals or cursing of a woman, the interest in men’s simple trades, the poring over bookstalls, reveal to us the image of his soul. However, his fellow-citizens in all these things thought they had evidence of a chief inquisitor; and in the land of Spain, which for many centuries cowered under the shadow of the most terrible weapon ever forged against the liberties of man, inquisition and espionage were in the air. Men were better judges of spies than of poets; they were more familiar with them. So it was set down in their minds that all their doings were sent by this recording prowler to the king. All the mysteries of the town were traced to his influence: A’s surprising fate, B’s disappearing, C’s mistress, all were traced to this “man about the streets.” But it was not true, says the contemporary, that if you tracked the inquisitor home you would find him revelling in luxury. On the contrary, his habits were simple and abstemious; at ten he went to bed, after a modest repast and a quiet game of cribbage with his maid. And when the poor, mysterious man came to die in the clean garret, whose sides were lined by an invisible guard who came to relieve him, there was no more need for that old coat which had seen so much service. How suddenly the angels change the fashion of our dress—and how much better they understand us than do our neighbours!

How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, 1845.) There is no actual basis in history for the incidents of this poem, though there is no doubt that in the war in the Netherlands such an adventure was likely enough. Three men go off on horseback at their hardest, at moonset, from the city of Ghent, to save their town—through Boom, and Düffeld, Mecheln, Aerschot, Hasselt, Looz, Tongres, and Dalhem, to the ancient city of Aix. The hero of the work was the good horse Roland, who was voted the last measure of wine the city had left. Two of the horses dropped dead on the road, and the noble Roland, bearing “the whole weight of the news,” with blind, distended eyes and nostrils, fell just as he reached the market-place of Aix, resting his head between the knees of his master.

Humility. (Asolando, 1889.) A flower-laden girl drops a careless bud without troubling to pick it up. She has “enough for home.” “So give your lover,” says the poet, “heaps of love,” he thinking himself happy in picking up a stray bud, “and not the worst,” which she has gladdened him by letting fall.

“I am a Painter who cannot Paint.” (Pippa Passes.) Lutwyche’s speech begins with these words.

“I go to prove my Soul.” (Paracelsus.) The words of the hero of the poem when he starts on his career.

Ibn-Ezra == the historical person who forms the subject of the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra (q.v.)

Imperante Augusto Natus Est. (Asolando, 1889.) In the reign of Augustus Octavianus Cæsar, second emperor of Rome, two Romans are entering the public bath together, and while the bath is being heated they converse in the vestibule about the great services which Octavianus has rendered to the city and the empire, and one of them refers to the panegyric on the Emperor read out in public on the previous day by Lucius Varius Rufus. He had praised the Emperor as a god, and the speaker goes on to say how he once met Octavianus as he was going about the city disguised as a beggar. At the end of the poem is the story told by Suidas, the author of a Greek lexicon, who lived before the twelfth century, and who was probably a Christian, as his work deals with Scriptural as well as pagan subjects. This myth narrates the visit of Augustus Cæsar to the oracle at Delphos. “When Augustus had sacrificed,” said Suidas, “he demanded of the Pythia who should succeed him, and the oracle replied:—

“‘A Hebrew slave, holding control over the blessed gods,
Orders me to leave this home and return to the underworld.
Depart in silence, therefore, from our altars.’”

Nicephorus relates that when Augustus returned to Rome after receiving this reply, he erected an altar in the Capitol with the inscription “Ara Primogeniti Dei.” On this spot now stands the Church of S. Maria in Aracœli, a very ancient building, mentioned in the ninth century as S. Maria de Capitolio. The present altar also incloses an ancient altar bearing the inscription Ara Primogeniti Dei, which is said to have been the one erected here by Augustus. According to the legend of the twelfth century, this was the spot where the Sibyl of Tibur appeared to the Emperor, whom the Senate proposed to elevate to the rank of a god, and revealed to him a vision of the Virgin and her Son. This was the origin of the name “Church of the Altar of Heaven.” It is historical that Augustus used to go about Rome disguised as a beggar. Jeremy Taylor’s account of events in the Roman world, as recorded in his Life of Christ, sec. iv., will serve as a good introduction to the historical matters referred to in the poem:—“For when all the world did expect that in Judæa should be born their prince, and that the incredulous world had in their observation slipped by their true prince, because He came not in pompous and secular illustrations; upon that very stock Vespasian (Sueton. In Vitâ Vesp. 4; Vide etiam Cic., De Divin.) was nursed up in hope of the Roman empire, and that hope made him great in designs; and they being prosperous, made his fortunes correspond to his hopes, and he was endeared and engaged upon that future by the prophecy which was never intended him by the prophet. But the future of the Roman monarchy was not great enough for this prince designed by the old prophets. And therefore it was not without the influence of a Divinity that his predecessor Augustus, about the time of Christ’s nativity, refused to be called “lord” (Oros. vi. 22). Possibly it was to entertain the people with some hopes of restitution of their liberties, till he had griped the monarchy with a stricter and faster hold; but the Christians were apt to believe that it was upon the prophecy of a sibyl foretelling the birth of a greater prince, to whom all the world should pay adoration; and that prince was about that time born in Judæa. (Suidas In histor. verb. “Augustus.”) The oracle, which was dumb to Augustus’ question, told him unasked, the devil having no tongue permitted him but one to proclaim that ‘an Hebrew child was his lord and enemy.’” Octavianus chose the title of Augustus on religious grounds, having assumed the exalted position of Chief Pontiff. The epithet Augustus was one which no man had borne before—a name only applied to sacred things. The rites of the gods were termed august, their temples were august, and the word itself was derived from the auguries. The cult of the Cæsar began to assume a ritual and a priesthood at the very time when the approaching birth of Christ was to destroy the empire and its religious belief. Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Madonna, p. 197, says: “According to an ancient legend, the Emperor Augustus Cæsar repaired to the sibyl Tiburtina, to inquire whether he should consent to allow himself to be worshipped with divine honours, which the Senate had decreed to him. The Sibyl, after some days of meditation, took the Emperor apart and showed him an altar; and above the altar, in the opening heavens, and in a glory of light, he beheld a beautiful Virgin holding an infant in her arms, and at the same time a voice was heard saying, ‘This is the altar of the Son of the living God!’ whereupon Augustus caused an altar to be erected on the Capitoline Hill with this inscription, Ara Primogeniti Dei; and on the same spot, in later times, was built the church called the Ara Cœli—well known, with its flight of one hundred and twenty-four marble steps, to all who have visited Rome. This particular prophecy of the Tiburtine sybil to Augustus rests on some very antique traditions, pagan as well as Christian. It is supposed to have suggested the ‘Pollio’ of Virgil, which suggested the ‘Messiah’ of Pope. It is mentioned by writers of the third and fourth centuries. A very rude but curious bas-relief, preserved in the Church of the Ara Cœli, is perhaps the oldest representation extant. The Church legend assigns to it a fabulous antiquity; and it must be older than the twelfth century, as it is alluded to by writers of that period. Here the Emperor Augustus kneels before the Madonna and Child, and at his side is the sibyl Tiburtina pointing upwards.” Of course, such a subject became a favourite one with artists. There is a famous fresco on the subject by Baldassare Peruzzi at Siena, Fonte Giusta. There is also a picture dealing with it at Hampton Court, by Pietro da Cortona. St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, lib. xviii., cap. 23) describes the prophecy of Sibylla Erythrea concerning Christ:—“Flaccianus, a learned and eloquent man (one that had been Consul’s deputy), being in a conference with us concerning Christ, showed us a Greek book, saying they were this sibyl’s verses; wherein, in one place, he showed us a sort of verses so composed that, the first letter of every verse being taken, they all made these words: ᾽Ιησους Χριστος, Θεου υιος σωτὴρ (Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour).” Some think this was the Cumean Sibyl. Lactantius also has prophecies of Christ out of some sybilline books, but he does not give the reference. The Latin hymn sung in the Masses for the Dead, and well known as the Dies Iræ, has this verse:

“Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.”

Notes.—Publius: not historical. Lucius Varius Rufus was a tragic poet, the friend of Virgil and Horace. He wrote a panegyric on the Emperor Augustus, to which Mr. Browning refers in the opening lines of the poem. Little Flaccus was Horace, who declared that Varius was the only poet capable of singing the praises of M. Agrippa. His tragedy Thyestes is warmly praised by Quintillian. Epos: heroic poem. Etruscan kings. The Rasena or Etrusci inhabited Etruria, in that part of Italy north of Rome. The kings were elected for life. Roman families were proud to trace back their ancestry to the Etruscan kings. Mæcenas: patron of letters and learned men, the adviser of Augustus. He was descended from the ancient kings of Etruria. Quadrans: a Roman coin, worth about half a farthing of our money. The price of a bath, paid to the keeper of the public bagnio. Thermæ, the baths. Suburra: a street in Rome, where the dissolute Romans resorted. Quæstor, the office of Quæstor, under the empire, was the first step to higher positions. Ædiles, magistrates. The baths were under their superintendence. Censores, officials whose duty it was to take the place of the consuls in superintending the five-yearly census. Pol! an oath. By Pollux! Quarter-as: in Cicero’s time, the as was equal to rather less than a halfpenny. Strigil, a flesh brush. Oil-drippers, used after bathing.

In a Balcony. (Published in Men and Women: 1855.) A drama which is incomplete. Concentrated into an hour, we have the crises of three lives, which, passing through the fire, reveal a tragedy which has for its scene the balcony of a palace. A Queen has arrived at the age of fifty with her strong craving for love still unsatisfied. Constance, a cousin of the Queen and a lady of her court, is loved by Norbert, who is in the Queen’s service. He has served the State well and successfully, and the Queen has set her heart upon him. Norbert is advised by Constance to act diplomatically, and pretend that he has served the Queen only for her sake. He must not permit her to see the love which he has for the woman to whom he has pledged himself. The Queen, who is already married in form, though not in heart, offers to dissolve the union, in an interview which she has with Constance, and shows how eagerly she grasps at the prospect of a new life which opens up before her. Constance is prepared to sacrifice herself for Norbert and the Queen. She seeks Norbert, and reveals to him the real state of affairs. The Queen discovers the lovers, and hears Norbert declare his love for Constance, which she tries to divert to the Queen. At once the Queen sees all her hopes dashed to the ground. She says nothing; but having left the balcony, the music of the ball, which is proceeding within, suddenly ceases, the footsteps of the guard approach, the lovers feel their impending doom; but one passionate moment unites them in heart for ever, and they are led away to death.

In a Gondola. (Dramatic Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, No. III.: 1842.) In the fourth book of Forster’s Life of Dickens is a letter which Dickens wrote to Maclise, from which we learn that Browning wrote the first verse of this poem, beginning, “I send my heart up to thee,” to express Maclise’s subject in the Academy catalogue. Dickens says, in a letter to the artist: “In a certain picture called the ‘Serenade,’ for which Browning wrote that verse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you, O Mac, painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let it be exactly of that colour.” In the poem a lover and his mistress are singing in a gondola—conscious of their danger, for the interview is a stolen one, and the three who are referred to are perhaps husband, father, and brother, or assassins hired by one of them. The chills of approaching death avail not to cool the ardour of their passion in this precious hour in the gondola. They feel they have lived, let death come when it will; and as they glide past church and palace, reality is concentrated in their boat, the shams and illusions of life are on the banks. The lover is stabbed as he hands the lady ashore. He craves one more kiss, and dies. He scorns not his murderers, for they have never lived:

“But I
Have lived indeed, and so—can die!”

Notes.—Castelfranco (born 1478) is Giorgione, one of the greatest Italian painters. His father belonged to the family of the Barbarella, of Castelfranco in the Trevisan. For his Life see Vasari. Schidone was an Italian painter of the sixteenth century. Haste-thee-Luke is the English of Luca-fà-presto (“Luke work-fast”), nickname of Luca Giordano (1632—1705), a Neapolitan painter. His nickname was given to him, not on account of his rapid method of working, but in consequence of his poor and greedy father urging him to increased exertions by constantly exclaiming “Luca, fà presto.” The youth obeyed his father, and would actually not leave off work for his meals, but was fed by his father’s hand while he laboured on with the brush. Giudecca: a great canal of Venice. “Lido’s wet, accursed graves.” Byron desired to be buried at Lido. Ancient Jewish tombs are there, moss-grown and half covered with sand. The place is desolate and very gloomy. Lory: a species of parrot.

Inapprehensiveness. (Asolando.) The ruin referred to in the fourth line is that of the old palace of Queen Cornaro, who, having been driven out of her kingdom of Cyprus, kept up a shadow of royalty here, with Cardinal Bembo as her secretary. It was he who told the story, in his Asolani. Mr. Browning thought that there was no view in all Italy to compare with that from the tower of the old palace. Two friends stand side by side contemplating the scene. The lady’s attention is attracted to a chance-rooted wind-sown tree on a turret, and to certain weed-growths on a wall. She is inapprehensive that by her side stands an incarnation of dormant passion, needing nothing but a look from her to burst into immense life. So little does one soul know of another. The Vernon Lee in the last line is a well-known authoress, Violet Paget, best known perhaps by her work entitled Euphorion.

In a Year. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) Finely contrasts the constancy of a woman’s love with the inconstancy of man’s. Love is not love unless it be “an ever fixed mark.” In exchange for the man’s love, the woman gave health, ease, beauty, and youth, and was content to give “more life and more” till all were gone, and think the sacrifice too little. That was the woman’s “ever fixed mark.” The man asks calmly: “Can’t we touch these bubbles, then, but they break?”

Incident of the French Camp. (Dramatic Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, III.: 1842.) Ratisbon (German Regensburg) is an ancient and famous city of Bavaria, on the right bank of the Danube. It has endured no less than seventeen sieges since the tenth century, accompanied by bombardments, the last of which took place in 1809, when Napoleon stormed the town, which was obstinately defended by the Austrians. Some two hundred houses and much of the suburbs were destroyed. As the Emperor was watching the storming, a rider flew from the city full gallop, saluting the Emperor. He told him they had taken the city. The chief’s eye flashed, but presently saddened as he looked on the brave youth who had brought the news. “You are wounded!” “Nay, I’m killed, sire!” and the lad fell dead.

Inn Album, The. (1875.) The chief features of this tragedy, “where every character is either mean, or weak, or vile,” are taken from real life. It is “the story of the wrecked life of a girl who loved her base seducer as a god.” This curious study in mental pathology opens with a description of the visitors’ book of a country inn, filled with the usual idiotic entries which are found in such books. The shabby-genteel parlour of the inn is occupied by two men playing at cards—a young and a middle-aged man. The elder, a cultivated and accomplished roué, has just lost to the younger man ten thousand pounds at play. The loser has hitherto been pretty uniformly the winner; but his companion, who has succeeded in plucking the pigeon, has not deceived him. He has seen through his pretences, and is fully aware that he is accompanied on this trip to the village where the inn in which they are staying is situated, purely for the chance it offered of winning money from him for the last time before his approaching marriage. The polished snob who has won is inclined to be satirical at his companion’s expense, and loftily desires him to consider the debt as cancelled: he is a millionaire, and can afford to do without it. This the elder man, with perfect politeness, declines, and assures him that it shall be paid. They leave the inn. The young man is to visit his intended bride; but he dare not introduce his companion, as his reputation has made it impossible to do so. As they walk towards the station the young man inquires how it is that his friend, with all his advantages in life, is in every way a failure. He then learns that his chances were missed four years ago, when he should have married a woman with whom he had certain relations, and who could have saved him from his aimless and wayward life. He had won the heart of a lofty-minded girl, had seduced her, and, though he had not intended marriage at first, had offered it. When she discovered that he had betrayed her without thinking of marrying her, she rejected his proposal, which had come too late to appease her wounded pride, and had settled down as the wife of an obscure country parson, old and poor. Weakly, she had neglected to secure her safety by telling her husband the story of her past, and in consequence was liable at any moment to be the victim of her seducer for the second time. The scoundrel had led the life of a woman-wrecker, and his love for his victim had turned to hate, as he told his companion, because she had disdained to save him from himself. When the elder man has unburdened himself, then the younger tells his story too. He has loved a peerless woman, who refused him, as she was vowed to another. There are points in his story which suggest to him that they have both loved the same woman, though he says that could not be, as he has heard that she married the man of whom she spoke. The young man now parts from his companion, and bids him return to the inn, there to await him for an hour, while he tries to induce his aunt to receive him as her guest. In the third part of the poem we are introduced to two women—an elder and a younger—who are talking in the parlour of the inn, just left vacant by the departure of the two card-players. The younger is the girl whom the young man of the story is to marry; and she has begged her old friend, the elder woman, to meet her, that she may see the man whom she is to marry. She has come by the train, has been met at the station by her young friend, and they adjourn to the little inn to talk matters over quietly. While the younger woman is absent from the parlour, and the elder is engaged in turning over the leaves of the visitors’ book, she is terror-stricken at seeing her old lover enter the room. The lady is the clergyman’s wife, and the man is the old roué who is waiting for his friend who has won his ten thousand pounds. She believes the whole affair is a scheme to entrap her, and bitterly reproaches the man who has ruined her life, and even now must drag her from her retirement for further persecution. He indulges in recriminations, pretending that it is his life which she has wrecked, and that she is inspired with hatred for him though he has not ceased to love her. She thanks God that she had grace to hurl contempt at the contemptible:

“Rent away
By treason from my rightful pride of place,
I was not destined to the shame below.
A cleft had caught me.”

Revealing to him the bitterness of her position, hanging, as it were, over the brink of a yawning precipice, his old love for her is reawakened, and he kneels to the injured woman. He entreats her to fly with him to

“A certain refuge, solitary home
To hide in.
······
Come with me, love, loved once, loved only, come,
Blend loves there!”

But the woman sees through him, and says:

“Your smiles, your tears, prayers, curses move alike
My crowned contempt.”

And while he is kneeling there, in bursts the young man, who has returned to say that his aunt declines to meet him. He is startled to see the lady to whom he had vainly offered his heart four years ago, and rushes to the conclusion that he too has been entrapped for some purpose. The fifth section of the poem opens with a scornful denunciation of the trick which he considers stands confessed in the scene which he beholds. “O you two base ones, male and female! Sir!” he exclaims; “half an hour ago I held your master for my best of friends, and four years since you seemed my heart’s one love!” The woman explains to him that she has been sent for simply to counsel his cousin on the question of her proposed marriage. She finds him innocent save in folly, and will so report. The elder man she bids to leave the youth, and leave unsullied the heart she rescues and would lay beside another’s. While she speaks the devil is tempting him to one more crime. He will turn affairs to his own advantage. He writes some lines in the album before him, closes the book, hands it to the indignant woman, and begs her to leave him alone with his friend while he discusses the situation. In the book which she receives he has written a note to her telling her that her young lover is still faithful to her, and threatening her that if she does not receive him on familiar terms the story of her past shame shall be exposed to her husband. Left alone with the young man, he opens out a scheme of infernal ingenuity, whereby at once he will pay his gambling debt and avenge himself for the contempt and scorn with which his unhappy victim has once more received the offer of his affection. He proposes to barter the woman who has unwittingly put herself into his power—to compel her to yield herself up to the man in exchange for the ten thousand pounds he cannot otherwise pay. He explains to him that she has deluded her parson husband—would have yielded to himself had he not determined to substitute his friend. “Make love to her; pick no phrase; prevent all misconception: there’s the fruit to pluck or let alone at pleasure!” He leaves the room, and in superb composure the intended victim enters. Captive of wickedness, she warns him: “Back, in God’s name!” “Sin no more!” she cries: “I am past sin now.” She implores him to break the fetters which have bound him to the evil influence which has destroyed her life. Her noble bearing under the terrible circumstances assures him of her innocence of any complicity in a trick. He tells her the man has told heaps of lies about her, which he had not believed. Blushing and stumbling in his speech, he contrives to let her know the use that was to be made of her. Not knowing if there were truth in what was told him of her marriage, he offers her his hand if she is free to accept it,—any way, to take him as her friend. She gives him her hand. At that moment the adversary returns. “You accept him?” he asks. “Till death us do part!” she answers. “But before death parts, read here the marriage licence which makes us one.” He then displays the awful words addressed to her in the fatal page she holds in her hand. She reads, and when she comes to the last line—

“Consent—you stop my mouth, the only way”—

turning to the young man, she pitifully asks, “How could mortal ‘stop it’?” “So!” he cries. “A tiger-flash, and death’s out and on him!” In the closing scene the wretched, hunted woman dies. She has secured her vindicator’s acquittal on the charge of murder by writing in the album that he has saved her from the villain, righteously slain, who would have outraged her. As she dies the young girl who was to have married the defender of the dead woman appears on the scene, and the tragedy closes. In Notes and Queries for March 25th, 1876, Dr. F. J. Furnivall thus mentions the incidents on which the poem is based: “The story told by Mr. Browning in this poem is, in its main outlines, a real one—that of Lord De Ros, once a friend of the great Duke of Wellington, and about whom there is much in the Greville Memoirs. The original story was, of course, too repulsive to be adhered to in all its details—of, first, the gambling lord producing the portrait of the lady he had seduced and abandoned, and offering his expected dupe, but real beater, an introduction to the lady as a bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; secondly, the eager acceptance of the bribe by the younger gambler, and the suicide of the lady from horror at the base proposal of her old seducer. The story made a great sensation in London over thirty years ago. Readers of The Inn Album know how grandly Mr. Browning has lifted the base young gambler, through the renewal of that old love, which the poet has invented, into one of the most pathetic creations of modern time, and has spared the base old roué the degradation of the attempt to sell the love which was once his delight, and which, in the poem, he seeks to regain, with feelings one must hope are real, as the most prized possession of his life. As to the lady, the poet has covered her with no false glory or claim on our sympathy. From the first she was a law unto herself; she gratified her own impulses, and she reaped the fruit of this. Her seducer has made his confession of his punishment, and has attributed, instead of misery, comfort and ease to her. She has to tell him, and the young man who has given her his whole heart, that the supposed comfort and ease have been to her simply hell; and tell, too, why she cannot accept the true love that, under other conditions, would have been her way back to heaven and life. What, then, can be her end? No higher power has she ever sought. Self-contained, she has sinned and suffered. She can do no more. By her own hand she ends her life; and the curtain falls on the most profoundly touching and most powerful poem of modern times.” The young girl of the poem is the invention of the poet; the other characters took part in the actual tragedy. In his Memoirs, first series, Greville mentions Lord De Ros from time to time, and they travelled together in Italy. Under date of “Newmarket, March 29th, 1839,” Greville makes the following entry in the first volume of the second series of his Memoirs, concerning the death of his friend: “Poor De Ros expired last night soon after twelve, after a confinement of two or three months from the time he returned to England. His end was enviably tranquil, and he bore his protracted sufferings with astonishing fortitude and composure. Nothing ruffled his temper or disturbed his serenity. His faculties were unclouded, his memory retentive, his perceptions clear to the last; no murmur of impatience ever escaped him, no querulous word, no ebullition of anger or peevishness; he was uniformly patient, mild, indulgent, deeply sensible of kindness and attention, exacting nothing, considerate of others and apparently regardless of self, overflowing with affection and kindness of manner and language to all around him, and exerting all his moral and intellectual energies with a spirit and resolution that never flagged till within a few hours of his dissolution, when nature gave way, and he sank into a tranquil unconsciousness, in which life gently ebbed away. Whatever may have been the error of his life, he closed the scene with a philosophical dignity not unworthy of a sage, and with a serenity and sweetness of disposition of which Christianity itself could afford no more shining or delightful example. In him I have lost, ‘half lost before,’ the last and greatest of the friends of my youth; and I am left a more solitary and a sadder man.”

Instans Tyrannus == The Threatening Tyrant. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) The title of this poem was suggested by Horace’s Ode on the Just Man (Od. iii. 3. 1):—

“Justum et tenacem propositi virum,
Non civium ardor prava jubentium,
Non vultus instantis tyranni,” etc.

(‘The just man, firm to his purpose, is not to be shaken from his fixed resolve by the fury of a mob laying upon him their impious behests, nor by the frown of a threatening tyrant, etc.’) These lines are said to have been repeated by the celebrated De Witte while he was subject to torture. When men or causes are suppressed by tyranny, the tyrant knows well in his heart that force alone, and not justice, enables him to crush opposition to his will; and he is the first to see, even if he do not acknowledge, the Divine Arm thrust forth from the heavens to protect his victims and avenge their wrongs. From some undefined cause a poor, contemptible man was the object of a tyrant’s hate: he struck him, tried to bribe him, tempted his blood and his flesh. Having tried every way to extinguish the man, he contrived thunder above and mine below him to destroy, as a rat in a hole, this friendless wretch, when suddenly the man saw God’s arm across the sky. The man

—“caught at God’s skirts, and prayed!
So, I was afraid!”

[Archdeacon Farrar refers the incidents of this poem to the persecution of the early Christians.—Browning Society Papers, Pt VII., p. 22*.]

In Three Days. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A lover anticipates that in three days he shall see his lady. He is aware that three days may change his future, as has often been changed the history of the world in the time. He knows, too, that though three days may cast no shadow in his way, still the years to follow may bring changes and chances of unimagined end. He reiterates that in three days he shall see her, and fear of all that the future may have in store is absorbed in the blissful anticipation.

Italian in England, The. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, No. VII., 1845.) The incident is not historical, though something of the kind might well have happened to any of the Italian patriots in their revolt against the Austrian domination. A prominent Italian patriot is hiding from the Austrian oppressors of his country after an unsuccessful rising. He has taken refuge in England, and the poem tells how the Austrians pursued him everywhere, and how he would have been taken if a peasant girl, to whom he confessed his identity, had not preferred humanity and the love of her country to the gold she might have earned by delivering him to his pursuers. [Mazzini must have gone through many such experiences, and the poem was one which he very highly appreciated.] Hunted by the Austrian bloodhounds, hiding in an old aqueduct, up to the neck in ferns for three days, the pangs of hunger induced him to attract the attention of a peasant girl going to her work with her companions: he threw his glove, to strike her as she passed. Without giving any sign that could acquaint her friends with her object, she glanced round and saw him beckon; breaking a branch from a tree, so as to recognise the spot, she picked up the glove and rejoined her party. In an hour she returned alone. He had not intended to confide in the woman, but her noble face led him to confess he was the man on whose head a great price was set. He felt sure he would not be betrayed. He bade her bring paper, pen and ink, and carry his letter to Padua, to the cathedral; then proceed to a certain confessional which he mentions, and whisper his password. If it was answered in the terms he named, then she was to give the letter to the priest. She promised to do as he desired. In three days more she appeared again at his hiding-place. She told him she had a lover who could do much to aid him. She brought him drink and food. In four days the scouts gave up the search, and went in another direction. At last help arrived from his friends at Padua. He kissed the maiden’s hand, and laid his own in blessing on her head. When he took the boat from the seashore, on the night of his escape, she followed him to the vessel. He left, and never saw her more. And now that he is safe in England, he reflects that it is long since he had a thought for aught but Italy. Those whom he had trusted, those to whom he had looked for help, had made terms with the oppressors of his country; his presence in his own land would be awkward for his brethren. But there is one “in that dear, lost land” whose calm smile he would like to see; he would like to know of her future, her children’s ages and their names, to kiss once more the hand that saved him, and once again to lay his own in blessing on her head, and go his way. “But to business!”

Notes.—Metternich: the great Austrian diplomatist, and enemy of Italian independence. Charles: Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia. He resorted to severe measures against the party known as “Young Italy,” founded by Mazzini. He died in 1849. Duomo, the cathedral. Tenebræ == darkness: the office of matins and lauds, for the three last days in Holy Week. Fifteen lighted candles are placed on a triangular stand, and at the conclusion of each psalm one is put out, till a single candle is left at the top of the triangle. The extinction of the other candles is said to figure the growing darkness of the world at the time of the Crucifixion. The last candle (which is not extinguished, but hidden behind the altar for a few moments) represents Christ over whom Death could not prevail.

Ivàn Ivànovitch. (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Ivàn Ivànovitch, or John Jackson, as his name would be in English, was skilled in the use of the axe, as the Russian workman is. Employed one day in his yard, in the village where he lived, suddenly over the snow-covered landscape came a burst of sledge bells, the sound of horse’s hoofs galloping; then a sledge appeared drawn by a horse, which fell down as it reached the place. What seemed a frozen corpse lay in the vehicle: it was Dmitri’s wife, without Dmitri and the children, who left the village a month ago. They restore the woman, who utters a loud and long scream, followed by sobs and gasps, as, with returning life, she takes in the fact that she is safe. “But yesterday!” she cries. “Oh, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, cannot You bring again my blessed yesterday? I had a child on either knee, and, dearer than the two, a babe close to my heart. Intercede, sweet Mother, with thy Son Almighty—undo all done last night!” Then she reminds them how, a month ago, she and her children had accompanied her husband, who had gone to work at a church many a league away: five of them in that sledge—Ivàn, herself, and three children. The work finished, they were about to return, when the village caught fire. Then Ivàn hurried his family into the sledge, and bade them hasten home while he remained to combat the flames. He bade them wrap round them every rug, and leave Droug, the old horse, to find his way home. They start; soon the night comes on; the moon rises. They pass a pine forest: a noise startles the horse—his ears go back, he snuffs, snorts, then plunges madly. Pad, pad, behind them are the wolves in pursuit—an army of them; every pine tree they pass adds a fiend to the pack; the eldest lead the way, their eyes green-glowing brass. The horse does his best; but the first of the band—that Satan-face—draws so near, his white teeth gleam, he is on the sledge—“perhaps her hands relaxed her grasp of her boy,” she says; “for he was gone.” The cursed crew fight for their share; they are too busy to pursue. She urges the horse to increased exertion. Alas! the pack is after them again; “Satan-face” is first, as before, and ravening for more. The mother fights with the monster, but the next boy is gone—plucked from the arms she clasped round him for protection. Another respite, while the fiends dispute for their share; but, as they fly over the snow, the leader of the pack tells his companions that their food is escaping; he leaves them to pick the bones, and—pad, pad!—is after the sledge again. All fight’s in vain: the green brass points, the dread fiend’s eyes, pierce to the woman’s brain—she falls on her back in the sledge; but, wedging in and in, past her neck, her breasts, her heart, Satan-face is away with her last, her baby boy. She remembered no more. And now she is at home—childless, but with her life. And Ivàn the woodsman sternly looks; the woman kneels. Solemnly he raises his axe, and one blow falls—headless she kneels on still—

“It had to be.
I could no other: God it was bade ‘Act for Me!’”

He wipes his axe on a strip of bark, and returns silently to his work. The Jews, the gipsies, the whole crew, seethe and simmer, but say no word. Then comes the village priest, and with him the commune’s head, Stàrosta, wielder of life and death; they survey the corpse, they hear the story. The priest proclaimed

“Ivàn Ivànovitch God’s servant!”

“Amen!” murmured the crowd, and “left acquittal plain adjudged.” They told Ivàn he was free. “How otherwise?” he asked.

Notes.—Ivàn Ivànovitch is “an imaginary personage, who is the embodiment of the peculiarities of the Russian people, in the same way as John Bull represents the English and Johnny Crapaud the French character. He is described as a lazy, good-natured person.” (Webster’s Dict.) A verst is equal to about two-thirds of an English mile. Droug: the horse’s name means friend, and is pronounced “drook.” Pope should not be spelled with a capital; it is merely the Russian term for priest—papa, father. Pomeschìk means a landed proprietor. Stàrosta, the old man of the village, the overseer.

This is a variant of a Russian wolf-story which, in one form or another, we all heard in our childhood. The poet visited Russia in the course of his great tour in Europe in 1833, and he has told the familiar tale of the unhappy mother who saved her own life by throwing one after another of her children to the pursuing wolves, with all the local colouring and fidelity to the facts to which we are accustomed in the poet’s work. Not merely as a tale dramatically told are we to consider the poem; but—as might be expected—we must look upon it as a problem in mental pathology. The superficial observer, looking upon the mere facts, and not troubling very much about the psychology of the case, will at once condemn the unhappy mother, and execute her as promptly in his own mind as did Ivàn Ivànovitch with his axe. But rough and ready judgments, however necessary in the conduct of our daily life, are frequently unsound; and the voice of the people is about the last voice that should be listened to in such a case as this. If a man who is usually considered a sane and decent member of society suddenly does some abnormal and outrageous thing, we at once ask ourselves, “Is he mad?” If a mother, any mother, suddenly violates the maternal instinct in a flagrant manner, we immediately suspect her of mental derangement. The maternal instinct is the strongest thing in nature; the ties which bind a woman to her offspring are stronger, in the ordinary healthy mother, than the ties which bind a man to decent and ordinary observance of the laws of society. Old Bailey judgments are not to be employed in such a case as this; it is one for a specialist. And we apprehend there is not a competent authority in brain troubles living who would not acquit Louscha on the ground of insanity.

Ixion. (Jocoseria, 1883.) Ixion, in Greek mythology, was the son of Phlegyas and king of the Lapithæ. He married Dia, daughter of Deioneus, and promised to make his father-in-law certain bridal presents. To avoid the fulfilment of his promise, he invited him to a banquet, and when Deioneus came to the feast he cruelly murdered him. No one would purify him for the murder, and he was consequently shunned by all mankind. Zeus, however, took pity on him, and took him up to heaven and there purified him. At the table of the gods he fell in love with Hera (Juno), and afterwards attempted to seduce her. Ixion was banished from heaven, and by the command of Zeus was tied by Mercury to a wheel which perpetually revolved in the air. Ixion, condemned to eternal punishment, is in the poem described as defying Zeus after the manner of Prometheus. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Browning intends to represent the popular idea of God and his own attitude towards the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is, however, only the caricature of God created by popular misconception at which the poet aims, whatever may have to be said of his opinions concerning eschatology. As Caliban thought there was a Quiet above Setebos, so Ixion appeals to the Potency over Zeus. The truth is intended that both unsophisticated man in the savage state and the highest type of cultured man agree in their theological beliefs so far as to acknowledge a Supreme Being of a higher character than the anthropomorphic God of popular worship. Of course both Caliban and Ixion talk Browningese. Ixion is represented as comparing himself with his torturer:—

“Behold us!
Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man”—

a man with bodily powers constantly renewed, to enable him to suffer. Above the torment is a rainbow of hope, built of the vapour, pain-wrung, which the light of heaven, in passing tinges with the colour of hope. Endowed with bodily powers intended to be God’s ministers, Ixion has been betrayed by them. But he was but man foiled by sense; he has endured enough suffering to teach him his error and his folly. “Why make the agony perpetual?” “To punish thee,” Zeus may reply. Ixion says he once was king of Thessaly: he had to punish crime. Had he been able to read the hearts of the criminals whom he sent to their doom, and had plainly seen repentance there, would he not have given them

“Life to retraverse the past, light to retrieve the misdeed?”

Zeus made man, with flaw or faultless: it was his work. Ixion had been admitted, all human as he was, to the company of the gods as their equal. He had faith in the good faith and the love of Zeus, and for acting upon it was cast from Olympus to Erebus. Man conceived Zeus as possessing his own virtues: he trusted, loved him because Zeus aspired to be equal in goodness to man. Ixion defies him, tells him he apes the man who made him; it is Zeus who is hollowness. The iris, born of Ixion’s tears, sweat and blood, bursting to vapour above, arching his torment, glorifies his pain; and man, even from hell’s triumph, may look up and rejoice. He rises from the wreck, past Zeus to the Potency above him—

“Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus, keep the godship and sink!”

The Zeus of the poem bears no relation whatever to the Christian’s God. The Potency over all is the All-Father, the God of Love, who yet, in Infinite Love, may punish rebellious man, who conceivably may reject His love, may never feel a touch of the repentance which Ixion declared he felt, who suffering and still sinning, hating and still rebelling, may conceivably be left to the consequences of the rebellion which knows no cessation, as the suffering no respite.

Notes.—Sisuphos, “the crafty”: son of Æolus, punished in the other world by being forced for ever to keep on rolling a block of stone to the top of a steep hill, only to see it roll again to the valley, and to start the toilsome task again. Tantalos, a wealthy king of Sipylus in Phrygia. He was a favourite of the gods, and allowed to share their meals; but he insulted them, and was thrown into Tartarus. He suffered from hunger and thirst, immersed in water up to the chin; when he opened his mouth the water dried up and the fruits suspended before him vanished into the air. Heré, in Greek mythology the same as Juno, queen of heaven and wife of Zeus or Jupiter. Thessaly, a country of Greece, bounded on the south by the southern parts of Greece, on the east by the Ægean, on the north by Macedonia and Mygdonia, and on the west by Illyricum and Epirus. Olumpos, a mountain in Thessaly. On the highest peak is the throne of Zeus, and it is there that he summons the assemblies of the gods. Erebos, in Greek mythology “the primeval darkness.” The word is usually applied to the lower regions, filled with impenetrable darkness. Tartaros-doomed == hell-doomed.

Jacopo (Luria) was the faithful secretary of the Moorish mercenary who led the army of Florence.

Jacynth. (Flight of the Duchess.) The maid of the Duchess, who went to sleep while the gipsy woman held the interview with her mistress, and induced her to leave her husband’s home.

James Lee’s Wife. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864; originally entitled James Lee.) This is a story of an unfortunate marriage, told in a series of meditations by the wife. Mr. Symons describes the psychological processes detailed in the poem as “the development of disillusion, change, alienation, severance and parting.” The key-notes of the nine divisions of the work are: I. Anxiety; II. Apprehension; III. Expostulation; IV. Despair; V. Reflection; VI. Change; VII. Self-denial; VIII. Resignation; IX. Self-Sacrifice.

I. At the Window.—The wife reflects that summer has departed. The chill, which settles upon the earth as the sun’s warm rays are withheld, falls heavily on her heart. Her husband has been absent but a day, and as she thinks of the changing year, she asks, with apprehension, “Will he change too?”

II. By the Fireside.—He has returned, but not the sun to her heart. As they sit by the fire in their seaside home, she reflects that the fire is built of “shipwreck wood.” Are her hopes to be shipwrecked too? Sailors on the stormy waters may envy their security as they behold the ruddy light from their fire over the sea, and “gnash their teeth for hate” as they reflect on their warm safe home; but ships rot and rust and get worm-eaten in port, as well as break up on rocks. She wonders who lived in that home before them. Did a woman watch the man with whom she began a happy voyage—see the planks start, and hell yawn beneath her?

III. In the Doorway.—The steps of coming winter hasten; the trees are bare; soon the swallows will forsake them. The wind, with its infinite wail, sings the dirge of the departed summer. Her heart shrivels, her spirit shrinks; yet, as she stands in the doorway, she reflects that they have every material comfort. They have neither cold nor want to fear in any shape, only the heart-chill, only the soul-hunger for the love that is gone. God meant that love should warm the human heart when material things without were cold and drear. She will

“live and love worthily, bear and be bold.”

IV. Along the Beach.—The storm has burst; it is no longer misgiving, fear, apprehension: it is certainty. She meditates, as she watches him, that he wanted her love; she gave him all her heart He has it still: she had taken him “for a world and more.” For love turns dull earth to the glow of God. She had taken the weak earth with many weeds, but with “a little good grain too.” She had watched for flowers and longed for harvest, but all was dead earth still, and the glow of God had never transfigured his soul to her. But she did love, did watch, did wait and weary and wear, was fault in his eyes. Her love had become irksome to him.

V. On the Cliff.—It is summer, and she is leaning on the dead burnt turf, looking at a rock left dry by the retiring waters. The deadness of the one and the barrenness of the other suit her melancholy; they are symbols of her position, and as she muses, a gay, blithe grasshopper springs on the turf, and a wonderful blue-and-red butterfly settles on the rock. So love settles on minds dead and bare; so love brightens all! So could her love brighten even his dead soul.

VI. Reading a Book, under the Cliff.—She is reading the poetry of “some young man” (Mr. Browning himself, who published these “Lines to the Wind” when twenty-six years old). The poet asks if the ailing wind is a dumb winged thing, entrusting its cause to him; and as she reads on she grows angry at the young man’s inexperience of the mystery of life. He knows nothing of the meaning of the moaning wind: it is not suffering, not distress; it is change. That is what the wind is trying to say, and trying above all to teach: we are to