Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.


The first ten lines that follow were printed as epilogue to the second series of Dramatic Idyls; the second ten were added to them by Browning in the album of a young American girl in Venice, October, 1880. See The Century for November, 1882.

"Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:

Soil so quick-receptive,—not one feather-seed,

Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke

Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed

Sudden as spontaneous—prove a poet-soul!"

Indeed?

Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: