‘Yours, my patron-friend,
Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,—
You who, Platæa and Salamis being scant,
Put up with Ætna for a stimulant.
I need not recall the legend of the Greek tragedian having fought at Marathon as well as at Salamis and Platæa (the ‘stimulants’ to his ‘Persæ’), but his ancient biographer further says: ‘Having arrived in Sicily, as Hiero was then engaged in founding the city of Ætna, he exhibited his “Women of Ætna” by way of predicting a prosperous life to those who contributed to colonise the city.’ After a perusal of pp. 52-53, we may imagine that Æschylus was one of Browning’s audience (‘few living, many dead’), and not unlikely, as coming from the realm where Browning says he had ‘many lovers’ (p. 53), to be designated a ‘patron-friend,’ while the ‘great verse’ that ‘blares unintermittent on,’ etc., is surely identical (pp. 53-4) with
‘The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown
Up out of memories of Marathon.
“I have not been able to discover any substantiating facts in the life, or passages in the works, of Landor; but possibly some correspondent of yours may be able to lay me under an obligation by pointing such out. A simple statement to the effect that ‘Browning said so’ could not, I think, in such a case as the one in question, be deemed satisfactory. Dr. Garnett writes to me on the matter as follows:—
“‘Could the poet alluded to in Sordello possibly be R. H. Horne? Horne was, I think, an intimate friend of Browning’s; he was more Æschylean than any other contemporary; he had served as soldier and sailor in the Mexican War; and, having given up arms for letters, might be said to have forsaken Marathon and Salamis for Ætna, although the introduction of Ætna would be quite incomprehensible but for the historical fact of Æschylus’s secession thither. I do not feel convinced that the identification of Horne with Browning’s “patron-friend” is the correct interpretation, but it seems to me to deserve attention.’
“While on the subject of Sordello, may I ask how (as I have seen it assumed in ‘Browning’ books) the ‘child barefoot and rosy’ of p. 288 can be Sordello himself? In the first place, are not the words he is singing taken from Sordello’s own ‘Goito lay’ (cf. pp. 97, 249, 289), with which he vanquished Eglamor, long after he had ceased to be, if he ever was, a rosy and barefoot child? And, in the second place, is there any indication in the whole poem that Sordello was ever ‘by sparkling Asolo,’ where the aforesaid child is described as being?
“Alfred Forman.”
Book VI., l. 614:—
“The old fable of the two eagles.” They—
“Went two ways
About the world: where, in the midst, they met,
Though on a shifting waste of sand, men set
Jove’s temple.”
The story is referred to in Pindar’s “Fourth Pythian Ode,” where he speaks of “Jove’s golden eagles.” These were placed near the Delphic tripod, and probably gave rise to the story of the two birds sent by Jupiter, one from the east and the other from the west, and which met at Pytho or Delphi. Mr. Browning seems to be in error here. Delphi was not “on a shifting waste of sand,” but on a mountain; and the temple was not that of Jove, but of Apollo. The poet appears to have sent the eagles to the oasis of Ammon, which was in the middle of a sandy desert and had a most famous oracle of Zeus.