845. I have seen my little lady. It is not clear where or when he saw her. Possibly he refers only to his revived memory of her.
852. And ... floats me. This construction is what is known as the "ethical dative." The old servant merely says in jocose fashion that telling his story has made his blood course more rapidly and freely.
[A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL]
The Revival of Learning. The Revival of Learning, or the Renaissance, began as early as the tenth century. Its period of most rapid progress was from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. One phase of the interest in the revival of learning was the effort to restore Latin to its ancient purity. The word "grammarian" was more widely inclusive than now, meaning one who devoted himself to general learning. Of this poem Dr. Burton in "Renaissance Pictures in Browning" (Poet-Lore, Vol. x, pp. 60-76, No. 1, 1898) says: "I know of no lyric of the poet's more representative of his peculiar and virile strength than this, in that it makes vibrant and thoroughly emotional an apparently unemotional theme. In relation to the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the moral is the higher inspiration derived from the new wine of the classics, so that what in later times has cooled down too often to a dry-as-dust study of the husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the start, a veritable reveling in the delights of the fruit."
Mr. Stopford Brooke in The Poetry of Browning, p. 155, says, "This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the Renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very center of the universe."
3. Leave we the common crofts. As the procession starts up the hill they leave behind them the small farms and little villages of the plain.
8. Rock-row. Day is just breaking over the rocky summits of the mountains.
9. There, man's thought. The smoking crater of a volcano, described as a censer from which rise the fumes of incense, portends an outbreak of subterranean fire. The speaker fancifully considers this an appropriate spot in which to bury the scholar whose passionate eagerness of thought chafed continually against the bounds of custom and ignorance and human weakness.
14. Sepulture. Pronounced here, sepúlture. A burial place or tomb.
25. Step to a tune. Here and in various other places, as lines 41, 73, 76, etc., are directions to the pallbearers.