"UP AT A VILLA—DOWN IN THE CITY" is a lively description of the amusements of the city, and the dulness of villa life, as contrasted by an Italian of quality, who is bored to death in his country residence, but cannot afford the town. His account of the former gives a genuine impression of dreariness and monotony, for the villa is stuck on a mountain edge, where the summer is scorching and the winter bleak, where a "lean cypress" is the most conspicuous object in the foreground, and hills "smoked over" with "faint grey olive trees" fill in the back; where on hot days the silence is only broken by the shrill chirp of the cicala, and the whining of bees around some adjacent firs. But the other side of the picture, though sympathetically drawn, is a perfect parody of what it is meant to convey. For the speaker's ideal "city" might be a big village, with its primitive customs, and its life all concentrated in the market-place or square; and it is precisely in the square that he is ambitious to live. There the church-bells sound, and the diligence rattles in, and the travelling doctor draws teeth or gives pills; there the punch-show or the church procession displays itself, and the last proclamation of duke or archbishop is posted up. It is never too hot, because of the fountain always plashing in the centre; and the bright white houses, and green blinds, and painted shop-signs are a perpetual diversion to the eye.... But alas! the price of food is prohibitive; and a man must live where he can.
"ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE" is the complement to "One Way of Love," and displays the opposite mood. The one lover patiently gathers June roses in case they may catch his lady's eye. The other grows tired of such patience even when devoted to himself; he tires of June roses, which are always red and sweet. His lady-love is bantering him on this frame of mind. It is true, she says, that such monotony is trying to a man's temper: there is no comfort in anything that can't be quarrelled with; and the person she addresses is free to "go." She reminds him, however, that June may repair her bower which his hand has rifled, and the next time "consider" which of two courses she prefers: to bestow her flowers on one who will accept their sweetness, or use her lightnings to kill the spider who is weaving his films about them.
"SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS" is apparently the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form the subject of the poem. Some wag relates how he read it a month ago, having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself by dropping it through a crevice in a tree, and enjoying a picnic lunch and a chapter of "Rabelais" on the grass close by. To-day, in a fit of compunction, he has raked the "treatise" out; but meanwhile it has blistered in the sun, and run all colours in the rain. Toadstools have grown in it; and all the creatures that creep have towzed it and browsed on it, and devoted bits of it to their different domestic use. It is altogether a melancholy sight. So the wag thinks his victim has sufficiently suffered, and carries it back to his book-shelf, to "dry-rot" there in all the comfort it deserves.
DESCRIPTIVE POEMS.
Mr. Browning's poems abound in descriptive passages, and his power of word-painting is very vivid, as well as frequently employed. But we have here another instance of a quality diffused throughout his work, yet scarcely ever asserting itself in a distinct form. The reason is, that he deals with men and women first—with nature afterwards; and that the details of a landscape have little meaning for him, except in reference to the mental or dramatic situation of which they form a part. This is very apparent in such lyrics or romances as: "By the Fire-side," "In a Gondola," and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." We find three poems only which might have been written for the sake of the picturesque impressions which they convey:
"De Gustibus—" ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)
"Home-Thoughts, from Abroad." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)
"The Englishman in Italy." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "England in Italy" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.) And even here we receive the picture with a lyric and dramatic colouring, which makes it much less one of facts than of associations. It is also to be remarked that, in these poems, the associations are of two opposite kinds, and Mr. Browning is in equal sympathy with both. He feels English scenery as an Englishman does: Italian, as an Italian might be supposed to, feel it.
"DE GUSTIBUS—" illustrates the difference of tastes by the respective attractions of these two kinds of scenery, and of the ideas and images connected with them. Some one is apostrophizing a friend, whose ghost he is convinced will be found haunting an English lane, with its adjoining corn-field and hazel coppice: where in the early summer the blackbird sings, and the bean-flower scents the air. And he declares at the same time that Italy is the land of his own love, whether his home there be a castle in the Apennine, or some house on its southern shore; among "wind-grieved" heights, or on the edge of an opaque blue sea: amidst a drought and stillness in which the very cicala dies, and the cypress seems to rust; and scorpions drop and crawl from the peeling walls ... and where "a bare-footed girl tumbles green melons on to the ground before you, as she gives news of the last attack on the Bourbon king."
"HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD" is a longing reminiscence of an English April and May, with their young leaves and their blossoms, their sunshine and their dew, their song of the chaffinch and their rapturous music of the thrush. Appreciation is heightened by contrast; and the buttercup—England's gift to her little children—is pronounced far brighter than the "gaudy melon-flower" which the exiled Englishman has at this moment before him.
"THE ENGLISHMAN IN ITALY" is a vivid picture of Italian peasant-life on the plain of Sorrento: the occasion being an outbreak of the well-known hot wind—the "scirocco"—which, in this case, has brought with it a storm of rain. A little frightened peasant girl has taken refuge by the side of the Englishman, who is apparently lodging in her mother's cottage. And he is diverting her attention by describing his impressions of the last twenty-four hours: how everything looked before the rain; how he knew while yet in bed that the rain had come, by the rattling down of the quail-nets,[[93]] which were to be tugged into shelter, while girls ran on to the housetops to fetch the drying figs; how the black churning waters forbade the fishermen to go to sea (what strange creatures they bring home when they do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet grass, which will appear with fried pumpkin at the labourer's supper; how, yesterday, he climbed Mount Calvano—that very brother of hers for his guide—his mule carrying him with dainty steps through the plain—past the woods—up a path ever wilder and stonier, where sorb and myrtle fall away, but lentisk and rosemary still cling to the face of the rock—the head and shoulders of some new mountain ever coming into view; how he emerged, at last, where there were mountains all around; below, the green sea; above, the crystal solitudes of heaven; and, down in that green sea, the slumbering Siren islands: the three which stand together, and the one which swam to meet them, but has always remained half-way. These, and other reminiscences, beguile the time till the storm has passed, and the sun breaks over the great mountain which the Englishman has just described. He and little "Fortú" can now go into the village, and see the preparations being made for to-morrow's feast—that of the Virgin of the Rosary—which primitive solemnity he also (by anticipation) describes. He concludes with a brief allusion to the political scirocco which is blackening the English sky, and will not vanish so quickly as this has done; and thus hints at a reason, if the reader desires one, for his temporary rustication in a foreign land.