ROBERT BROWNING
So, take and use Thy work,
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim:
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same.
—Rabbi Ben Ezra
ROBERT BROWNING
If there ever lived a poet to whom the best minds pour out libations, it is Robert Browning. We think of him as dwelling on high Olympus; we read his lines by the light of dim candles; we quote him in sonorous monotone at twilight when soft-sounding organ-chants come to us mellow and sweet. Browning's poems form a lover's litany to that elect few who hold that the true mating of a man and a woman is the marriage of the mind. And thrice blest was Browning, in that Fate allowed him to live his philosophy—to work his poetry up into life, and then again to transmute life and love into art. Fate was kind: success came his way so slowly that he was never subjected to the fierce, dazzling searchlight of publicity; his recognition in youth was limited to a few obscure friends and neighbors. And when distance divided him from these, they forgot him; so there seems a hiatus in his history, when for a score of years literary England dimly remembered some one by the name of Browning, but could not just place him.
About the year Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight the author of "Sordello" was induced to appear at an evening of "Uncut Leaves" at the house of a nobleman at the West End, London. James Russell Lowell was present and was congratulated by a lady, sitting next to him, on the fact that Browning was an American.
"But only by adoption!" answered the gracious Lowell.