"JOHANNES AGRICOLA IN MEDITATION" is a glowing and fantastic description of the privileges of the "elect," cast in the form of a monologue, and illustrated in the person of the speaker. Johannes Agricola was a German reformer of the sixteenth century, and alleged founder of the sect of the Antinomians: a class of Christians who extended the Low Church doctrine of the insufficiency of good works, and declared the children of God to be exempt from the necessity of performing them; absolved from doing right, because unable to do wrong; because no sin would be accounted to them as such. Some authorities contend that he personally rejected only the Mosaic, not the moral law; but Mr. Browning has credited him with the full measure of Antinomian belief, and makes him specially exult in the Divine assurance that the concentrated venom of the worst committed sins can only work in him for salvation. He also comments wonderingly on the state of the virtuous man and woman, and of the blameless child, "undone," as he was saved, before the world began; whose very striving is turned to sin; whose life-long prayer and sacrifice can only end in damnation. But, as he declares, he praises God the more that he cannot understand Him; that His ways are inscrutable, that His love may not be bought.
"CONFESSIONS" is the answer of a dying man to the clergyman's question: does he "view the world as a vale of tears?" His fancy is living through a romance of past days, of which the scene comes back to him in the arrangement of physic-bottles on a table beside him, while the curtain, which may be green, but to his dying eyes is blue, makes the June weather about it all. He is seeing the girl he loved, as watching for him from a terrace near the stopper of that last and tallest bottle in the row; and he is retracing the path by which he could creep, unseen by any eyes but hers, to the "rose-wreathed" gate which was their trysting-place. "No, reverend sir," is the first and last word of his reply, "the world has been no vale of tears to me."
"MAY AND DEATH" expresses a mourner's wish, so natural to the egotism of a deep sorrow, that the season which robbed him of his friend's life should bury all its sweetness with him. The speaker retracts this wish, in justice to the many pairs of friends who have each their right to happiness. But there is, he says, one red-streaked plant which their May might spare, since one wood alone would miss it. For its leaf is dashed as with the blood of Spring; and whenever henceforth it grows in that same place, the drop will have been drawn from his heart.[[97]]
"YOUTH AND ART" is a humorous, but regretful reminiscence of "Bohemian" days, addressed by a great singer to a sculptor, also famous, who once worked in a garret opposite to her own. They were young then, as well as poor and obscure; and they watched and coquetted with each other, though they neither spoke nor met; and perhaps played with the idea of a more serious courtship. Caution and ambition, however, prevailed; and they have reached the summit of their respective professions, and accepted the social honours which the position insures. But she thinks of all that might have been, if they had listened to nature, and cast in their lot with each other; of the sighs and the laughter, the starvation and the feasting, the despairs and the joys of the struggling artist's career; and she feels that in its fullest and freest sense, their artist life has remained incomplete.
"A LIKENESS" describes the feelings which are inspired by the familiar or indifferent handling of any object sacred to our own mind. They are illustrated by the idea of a print or picture, bought for the sake of a resemblance; and which may be hanging against a wall, or stowed away in a portfolio: and, in either case, provoke comment, contemptuous or admiring, which will cause a secret and angry pain to its possessor.
"APPEARANCES," a little poem in two stanzas, illustrates the power of association. Its contents can only be given in its own words.
"ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER" represents a lover, with his beloved, striving to elude the memory of a former attachment, and finding himself cheated by it. As the fires of a departed summer will glow once more, in the countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. And when the ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask of love remains to him.
The poem would seem intended to deny that a second love can be genuine: were not its light tone and fantastic circumstance incompatible with serious intention.
PROLOGUE TO "LA SAISIAZ," reprinted as "Pisgah-Sights," III., is a fantastic little vision of the body and the soul, as disengaged from each other by death: the soul wandering at will through the realms of air; the body consigned to the
"Ferns of all feather,