FOOTNOTES:
[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, Any Wife to any Husband—a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.
[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than this—nor more famous.
[289:1] In By the Fireside.
[290:1] Arthur Symons, Introduction to the Study of Browning, p. 198.
[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits' are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that Numpholeptos is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely: "Innocence—sin—virtue"—in the Hegelian chord of experience.
[301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned lyrics:—
"The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell,
In crazy dances they're leaping:
We two in the grave lie well, lie well,
And I in thine arms am sleeping.
The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day,
To Heaven or Hell they're hieing:
We two care nothing, we two will stay
Together quietly lying."