VII

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:

If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?

VIII

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

IX

Or, there's Satan!—one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Him …
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!

Everybody loves Browning's Ghent to Aix poem. Even those who can not abide the poet make an exception here; and your thorough-going Browningite never outgrows this piece. It is the greatest horseback poem in the literature of the world: compared to this, Paul Revere's Ride is the amble of a splayfooted nag. It sounds as though it had been written in the saddle: but it was really composed during a hot day on the deck of a vessel in the Mediterranean, and written off on the flyleaf of a printed book that the poet held in his hand. Poets are always most present with the distant, as Mrs. Browning said; and Browning, while at sea, thought with irresistible longing of his good horse eating his head off in the stable at home. Everything about this poem is imaginary; there never had been any such good news brought, and it is probable that no horse could cover the distance in that time.

But the magnificent gallop of the verse: the change from moonset to sunrise: the scenery rushing by: the splendid spirit of horse and man: and the almost insane joy of the rider as he enters Aix—these are more true than history itself. Browning is one of our greatest poets of motion—whether it be the glide of a gondola, the swift running of the Marathon professional Pheidippides, the steady advance of the galleys over the sea in Paracelsus, the sharp staccato strokes of the horse's hoofs through the Metidja, or the swinging stride of the students as they carry the dead grammarian up the mountain. Not only do the words themselves express the sound of movement; but the thought, in all these great poems of motion, travels steadily and naturally with the advance. It is interesting to compare a madly-rushing poem like Ghent to Aix with the absolute calm of Andrea del Sarto. It gives one an appreciation of Browning's purely technical skill.

No one has ever, so far as I know, criticised Ghent to Aix adversely except Owen Wister's Virginian; and his strictures are hypercritical. As Roland threw his head back fiercely to scatter the spume-flakes, it would be easy enough for the rider to see the eye-sockets and the bloodfull nostrils. Every one has noticed how a horse will do the ear-shift, putting one ear forward and one back at the same moment. Browning has an imaginative reason for it. One ear is pushed forward to listen for danger ahead; the other bent back, to catch his master's voice. Was there ever a greater study in passionate cooperation between man and beast than this splendid poem?