Tokay. See [Nationality in Drinks]. (Dramatic Lyrics, III.)
Too Late. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) A man addressing a dead woman whom he has loved and lost, tells how he feels that she needs help in her grave and finds none; wants warmth from a heart which longs to send it. She married another who did not love her “nor any one else in the world.” This great sorrow was the rock which stopped the even flow of his life current. Some devil must have hurled it into the stream, and so thwarted God, who had made these two souls for each other. Just a thread of water escaped from the obstacle, and that wandered “through the evening country” down to the great sea which absorbs all our life streams. He has hoped at times that some convulsion of nature might roll the stone from its place and let the stream flow undisturbed. But all is past hope now: Edith is dead that should have been his. What should he have done that he omitted? Had he not taken her “No” too readily? Men do more for trifling reasons than he had done for his life’s whole peace. Perhaps he was proud—perhaps helpless as a man paralysed by a great blow; anyway, she was gone from his life, and he was desolate henceforth. She was not handsome,—nobody said that. She had features which no artist would select for a model; but she was his life, and even now that she is dead he will be her slave while his soul endures. The poem is full of concentrated emotion, and is the expression of a strong man’s life passion for a woman’s soul; a passion unalloyed by any gross affection; such a love of one soul for another congenial soul as proves that man is more than matter.
Transcendentalism: a Poem in Twelve Books. (Men and Women, 1855.) This poem is probably intended by Mr. Browning as an answer to his critics. It has been said of Mr. Browning’s poetry by a hundred competent writers that he does not sing, but philosophises instead; that he gives the world his naked thoughts, his analyses of souls not draped in the beauty of the poet’s art, but in the form of “stark-naked thought.” There is no objection, says his interviewer, if he will but cast aside the harp which he does not play but only tunes and adjusts, and speak his prose to Europe through “the six-foot Swiss tube which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp.” The fault is, that he utters thoughts to men thinking they care little for form or melody, as boys do. It is quite otherwise he should interpret nature—which is full of mystery—to the soul of man: as Jacob Boehme heard the plants speak, and told men what they said; or as John of Halberstadt, the magician, who by his will-power could create the flowers Boehme thought about. The true poet is a poem himself, whatever be his utterance. Take back the harp again, and “pour heaven into this short home of life.” Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) was a German mystical writer, who began life as a shoemaker and developed into a “seer” of the highest order. He was a follower of the school of Paracelsus, and professed to know all mysteries by actually beholding them. He saw the origin of love and sorrow, heaven and hell. Nature lay unveiled to him; he saw into the being of God, and into the heart of things. Mr. Browning refers to this in the line of the poem, “He noticed all at once that plants could speak.” “William Law (1686-1761) was a follower of Boehme’s system of philosophy. The Quakers have been much influenced by the Boehmenists. The old magicians thought they had discovered in the ashes of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in Nature; all is but a continuation or a revival. The germina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of men; the ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted. The process of the Palingenesis—this picture of immortality—is described. These philosophers, having burnt a flower by calcination, disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive form; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes.” (Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, art. “Dreams at the Dawn of Philosophy.”) John of Halberstadt was the magician who made the flowers on some such principles as is fabled above. He was an ecclesiastic, and had probably some knowledge of alchemy, often considered in those days as more or less a diabolical kind of learning. Transcendentalism is thus described by Webster: “Transcendental, Empirical.—These terms, with the corresponding nouns transcendentalism and empiricism, are of comparatively recent origin. Empirical refers to knowledge which is gained by the experience of actual phenomena, without reference to the principles or laws to which they are to be referred, or by which they are to be explained. Transcendental has reference to those beliefs or principles which are not derived from experience, and yet are absolutely necessary to make experience possible or useful. Such, in the better sense of the term, is the transcendental philosophy, or transcendentalism. The term has been applied to a kind of investigation, or a use of language which is vague, obscure, fantastic, or extravagant.” The reference in the title of the poem is purely imaginary: there is no such work.
Tray. (Dramatic Idyls, 1879.) Three bards sing each a song of a hero; but the bard who sings of Olaf the Dane, and he who tells of the hero standing unflinching on the precipice, have not their song rewarded here: the place of honour is reserved by the poet for a dog story. Tray was the poet’s hero of the three. A beggar child fell into the Seine in Paris. The bystanders prudently bethought themselves of their families ere risking their lives to save her. While the people were wondering how the child was to be extricated, “a mere instinctive dog” jumped over the balustrade and brought her to land. The people applauded the dog, who had no sooner deposited his burden on the shore than he was off again, apparently to save another child whom nobody had seen fall. The dog was so long under the water that he was thought to have been carried away by the current; but in a few minutes he was seen swimming to land with the child’s doll in his mouth. The people began to pride themselves on man’s possession of reason, and to vaunt the superiority of our race over that of the dog. Meanwhile Tray trotted off; till one of the crowd, with a larger share of “reason” than the rest, bade his servant go and catch the animal for him, that, by expenditure “of half an hour and eighteen-pence,” he might vivisect it at the physiological laboratory and see “how brain secretes dog’s soul.” This was poor Tray’s reward at the hands of humanity, endowed with the “reason” which had been denied to the brave and faithful little brain of the “lower animal.” (See [Vivisection].)
Twins, The. (Originally published in a little volume with a poem of Mrs. Browning’s, on behalf of the Ragged Schools of London, 1854; then in Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) In Martin Luther’s Table Talk there is a story which is the foundation of this poem. In the talk “On Justification” (No. 316), he says: “Give, and it shall be given unto you: this is a fine maxim, and makes people poor and rich.... There is in Austria a monastery which, in former times, was very rich, and remained rich so long as it was charitable to the poor; but when it ceased to give, then it became indigent, and is so to this day. Not long since, a poor man went there and solicited alms, which were denied him; he demanded the cause why they refused to give for God’s sake? The porter of the monastery answered, ‘We are become poor’; whereupon the mendicant said, ‘The cause of your poverty is this: ye had formerly in this monastery two brethren—the one named Date (give), and the other Dabitur (it shall be given to you): the former ye thrust out, and the other went away of himself.’... Beloved, he that desires to have anything must also give: a liberal hand was never in want or empty.” (Mr. Browning’s poem is simply the above narrative in verse.)
Two Camels. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 8: “Self-mortification.”) Is self-mortification necessary for the attainment of wisdom? Two camels started on a long journey with their loads of merchandise. One, desiring to please his master, refused to eat the food which was provided for him: he died of exhaustion on the road, and thieves secured his burden. The other ate his provender thankfully, and safely reached his destination with his load. Which beast pleased his master? We are here to do our day’s work: help refused is hindrance sought. We are to desire joy and thank God for it. The Creator wills that we should recognise our creatureship and call upon Him in our need. As we are God’s sons, He cannot be indifferent to our needs and sorrows. Neither work nor the spirit of self-dependence are antagonistic to prayer. The “ear, hungry for music,” is a more intelligible phrase when we know that the organ of Corti in the human ear has three thousand arches, with keys ranged like those of a piano, marvellously adapted for the appreciation of every tone-shade. The “seven-stringed instrument” refers to light and the seven colours of the spectrum.—In the lyric, the chemical combination of two harmless substances produces an effect which either by itself would have been powerless to produce. How know we what God intends to work in us by the influences by which we are surrounded? We are not to reject the joys of earth, the bliss produced by slight and transient mental stimuli; they suffice to move the heart. There is earth-bliss which heaven itself cannot improve, but may make permanent: why despise it?
Two in the Campagna. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) The Campagna di Roma is that portion of the area almost coinciding with the ancient Latium, which lies round the city of Rome. Gregorovius says we might mark its circumference “by a series of well-known points: Civita Vecchia, Tolfa, Ronciglione, Soracte, Tivoli, Palestrina, Albano, and Ostia.” Anciently it was the seat of numerous cities, and is now dotted with ruins in its whole extent. In summer its vast expanse is little better than an arid steppe, and is very dangerous on account of the malaria almost everywhere prevalent. In winter and spring it is safer, and affords abundant pasture for sheep and cattle. There is a solemnity and beauty about the Campagna entirely its own. To the reflective mind, this ghost of old Rome is full of suggestion: its vast, almost limitless extent, as it seems to the traveller; its abundant herbage and floral wealth in early spring; its desolation, its crumbling monuments, and its evidences of a vanished civilisation, fill the mind with a sweet sadness, which readily awakens the longing for the infinite spoken of in the poem, the key-note of which is undoubtedly found in the lines—
“Only I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.”
Says Pascal: “This desire and this weakness cry aloud to us that there was once in man a true happiness, of which there now remains to him but the mark and the empty trace, which he vainly tries to fill from all that surround him; seeking from things absent the succour he finds not in things present; and these are all inadequate, because this infinite void can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object—that is to say, only by God Himself.” The speaker in the poem says to the woman, “I would that you were all to me.” As pleasure, learning, wealth, have failed to satisfy the soul of man, so not even Love, the holiest passion of the soul, can satisfy the human heart, which can rest in God alone. Dr. Martineau says that “all finite loves are only half-born, wandering in a poor twilight, unknowing of their peace and power, till they lie within the encompassing and glorifying love of God.” The restful music, the anodyne for the pain of yearning hearts, comes from no earth-born love, however pure.