Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."
FOOTNOTES:
Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The book referred to in it is his principal work, Conciliator differentiarum quæ inter philosophos et medicos versantur. Mantua, 1472.
29. JOCOSERIA.
[Published in March, 1883 (Poetical Works, 1889, pp. 165-266).]
The name Jocoseria (mentioned by Browning in its original connection, Melander's "Jocoseria," in the notes to Paracelsus) expresses very cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and fusion of grave and gay. The book is not, as a whole, so intense or so brilliant as the first and second series of Dramatic Idyls, but one or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by anything in either volume.