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|---|---|---|---|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Death of Harold ; his poems, written when twelve years old, shown to Miss Flower; the Rev. W.J. Fox's criticisms on them; he comes across Shelley's"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Dæmon of the World ; Mrs. Browning procures Shelley's poems, also those of Keats, for her son; the perusal of these volumes proves an important event in his poetic development; he leaves school when fourteen years old, and studies at home under a tutor; attends a few lectures at University College, 1829-30; chooses his career, at the age of twenty; earliest record of his utterances concerning his youthful life printed in _Century Magazine_, 1881; he plans a series of monodramatic epics; Browning's life-work, collectively one monodramatic"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "; Shakspere's and Browning's methods compared; Browning writes"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline in 1832; his own criticism on it; his parents' opinions; his aunt's generous gift; the poem published in January 1833; description of the poem; written under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley; its autopsychical significance; its importance to the student of the poet's works; quotations from"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline ; criticisms thereupon; Mr. Fox's notice in the _Monthly Repository_, and its results; Dante Gabriel Rossetti reads"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline and writes to the author; Browning's reference to Tennyson's reading of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Maud in 1855; Browning frequents literary society; reads at the British Museum; makes the acquaintance of Charles Dickens and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ion Talfourd; a volume of poems by Tennyson published simultaneously with"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline ; in 1833 he commences his travels; goes to Russia; the sole record of his experiences there to be found in the poem"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ivàn Ivànovitch, published in _Dramatic Idyls_, 1879; his acquaintance with Mazzini; Browning goes to Italy; visits Asolo, whence he drew hints for"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes ; in 1834 he returns to Camberwell; in autumn of 1834 and winter of 1835 commences"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello, writes"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, and one or two short poems; his love for Venice; a new voice audible in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Johannes Agricola and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Porphyria ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus, published in 1835; his own explanation of it; his love of walking in the dark; some of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus and of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford composed in a wood near Dulwich; concerning"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, important one written by John Forster; Browning meets Macready at the house of Mr. Fox; personal description of the poet; Macready's opinion of the poem; Browning spends New Year's Day, 1836, at the house of the tragedian and meets John Forster; Macready urges him to write a play; his subsequent interview with the tragedian; he plans a drama to be entitled"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Narses ; meets Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor at a supper party, when the young poet is toasted, and Macready again proposes that Browning should write a play, from which arose the idea of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford ; his acquaintance with Wordsworth and Landor; MS. of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford accepted; its performance at Covent Garden Theatre on the 26th May 1837; runs for five nights; the author's comments; the drama issued by Messrs. Longman & Co.; the performance in 1886; estimate of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford ; Browning's dramas; comparison between the Elizabethan and Victorian dramatic eras; Browning's soul-depictive faculty; his dramatic method; estimate of his dramas; Landor's acknowledgment of the dedication to him of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Luria"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Profundity and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Simplicity ; the faculty of wonder; Browning's first conception of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes ; his residence in London; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes a drama? estimate of the poem; Browning's rambles on Wimbledon Common and in Dulwich Wood, where he composed his lines upon Shelley; asserts there is romance in Camberwell as well as in Italy;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello ; the charge of obscurity against"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello ; the nature and intention of the poem; quotations therefrom; anecdote about Douglas Jerrold; Tennyson's, Carlyle's, and M. Odysse Barot's opinions on"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "poetry; in 1863 Browning contemplated the re-writing of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book his finest work; its uniqueness; Carlyle's criticism of it; Poetry _versus_ Tour-de-Force;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book begun in 1866; analysis of the poem; kinship of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Aurora Leigh ; explanation of title; the idea taken from a parchment volume Browning picked up in Florence; the poem planned at Casa Guidi;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "O Lyric Love, etc.; description and analysis of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book, with quotations; compared as a poem with"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Inn Album,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Asolando,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Men and Women, etc.; imaginary volumes, to be entitled"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Transcripts from Life and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Flowers o' the Vine"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Cry of the Children and its origin; Miss Barrett's friends; effect on her of Browning's poetry; she makes Browning's acquaintance in 1846; her early belief in him as a poet; her physical delicacy and her sensitiveness of feeling; personal appearance of Robert Browning; his"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "hand; Elizabeth Barrett discerns his personal worth, and is susceptible to the strong humanity of Browning's song; Mr. Barrett's jealousy; their engagement; Miss Barrett's acquaintance with Mrs. Jameson; quiet marriage in 1846; Mr. Barrett's resentment; the Brownings go to Paris; thence to Italy with Mrs. Jameson; Wordsworth's comments; residence in Pisa;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sonnets from the Portuguese ; in the spring they go to Florence, thence to Ancona, where"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Guardian Angel"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Christmas Eve and Easter Day ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Casa Guidi Windows commenced; 1850, they go to Rome;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two in the Campagna ; proposal to confer poet-laureateship on Mrs. Browning; return to London; winter in Paris; summer in London; Kenyon's friendship; return in autumn to Casa Guidi; Browning's Essay on Shelley for the twenty-five spurious Shelley letters; midsummer at Baths of Lucca, where"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "In a Balcony was in part written; winter of 1853-4 in Rome; record of work;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pen's illness;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ben Karshook's Wisdom ; return to Florence; (1856)"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Men and Women published; the Brownings go to London; in summer"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Aurora Leigh issued; 1858, Mrs. Browning's waning health; 1855-64 comparatively, unproductive period with R. Browning; record of work; July 1855, they travel to Normandy;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Legend of Pornic ; Mrs. Browning's ardent interest in the Italian struggle of 1859; winter in Rome;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Poems before Congress ; her last poem,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "North and South"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book published in November 1866;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Hervé Riel written; Browning's growing popularity; Tauchnitz editions of his poems in 1872; also first book of selections; dedication to Lord Tennyson; 1877, he goes to La Saisiaz, near Geneva;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "La Saisiaz and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Two Poets of Croisic"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Browning's Ancestors"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ashamed of having been born in the greatest city of the world! he exclaimed on one occasion;"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "What of the Scottish Brownings? I had it long ago from one of the name that the Brownings came originally from Ayrshire, and that several families of them emigrated to the North of Ireland during the times of the Covenanters. There is, moreover, a small town or village in the North of Ireland called Browningstown. Might not the poet be related to these Scottish Brownings?"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in mediæval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon in the original, to a favourite old tune of his,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Cottage in a Wood. Readers of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Asolando will remember the allusions in that volume to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A week or two before his death Browning told an American friend, Mrs. Corson, in reply to a statement of hers that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "It would have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievements. My good father sacrificed a fortune to his convictions. He could not bear with slavery, and left India and accepted a humble bank-office in London. He secured for me all the ease and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have been shameful if I had not done my best to realise his expectations of me."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The old trees Which grew by our youth's home--the waving mass Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew-- The morning swallows with their songs like words-- All these seem clear.... ...most distinct amid The fever and the stir of after years."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "God's in His Heaven, All's right with the world!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "or, it may be,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Play! play!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Andromeda! And she is with me--years roll, I shall change, But change can touch her not--so beautiful With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze; And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven, Resting upon her eyes and face and hair, As she awaits the snake on the wet beach, By the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking At her feet; quite naked and alone,--a thing You doubt not, nor fear for, secure that God Will come in thunder from the stars to save her."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Instans Tyrannus. It has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when, one Guy Fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O! This refrain haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Flight of the Duchess,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I shall never, in the years remaining, Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, Make you music that should all-express me: ... verse alone, one life allows me."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Death of Harold as the theme of one. Long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Over the sea our galleys went, and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies. Mrs. Browning was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out and carefully stitched MSS., she lost no opportunity--when Mr. Browning was absent--to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she showed them was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them, discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams), copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev. William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts. Mr. Fox agreed with Miss Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. The originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new thing for him: from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning, transformed to a dominating reality. Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem: very scarce. He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Dæmon of the World,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline : we might have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley's writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Cenci : in addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pisa at the foot of the title-page, entitled"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Adonais. What an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it was a May night, and that in a laburnum,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden, two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment it is a pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Epipsychidion or"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Prometheus Unbound,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Alastor or"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Endymion,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke As from a dream."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Epipsychidion, haunted him above all others: and again and again in his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "--as, for example, in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline, and the"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath Was a vague sense of powers folded up-- A sense that though those shadowy times were past, Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long (wrote a friend, in the _Times_, Dec. 14:'89),"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit: he was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having published"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Orion at a farthing:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically, the other with life as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art. Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence. His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas. He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Return of the Druses thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, _Hakeem!_--or, once more, in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book, where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ... Pompilia, will you let them murder me? Thus we can imagine Browning, with his characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Macbeth, or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect, the word 'wrought' towards the close of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Othello, when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "But being wrought, perplext in the extreme : we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even the author of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline in his"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Poetical Works with reluctance, and in a note explained the reason of his decision--namely, to forestall piratical reprints abroad."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,' which I have since written according to a scheme less extravagant, and scale less impracticable, than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship, however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time. These be hard words. No critic will ever adventure upon so severe a censure of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Richmond having been added to the date at the end of the preface to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline, have arisen the frequent misstatements as to the Browning family having moved west from Camberwell in or shortly before 1832. Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me that his father"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Written in pursuance of a foolish plan I forget, or have no wish to remember; the world was never to guess that such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same notable person.... Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in my fool's Paradise. It was in conformity with this plan that he not only issued"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline has a unique significance because of its autopsychical hints. The Browning whom we all know, as well as the youthful dreamer, is here revealed; here too, as well as the disciple of Shelley, we have the author of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book. In it the long series culminating in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Asolando"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. I do not know, moreover, whether in striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend--that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (_genre_) which it can merely indicate. This unpretending opening, this stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations almost impossible. The reasons which he elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent, have secured my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise I should have advised him to throw into the fire. I believe none the less in the great principle of all composition--in that principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, and of Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than to their execution; I have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and I much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. It would be best to burn this, but what can I do?"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sun-treader, and invokes in strains of lofty emotion--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sun-treader--life and light be thine for ever. The music of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Alastor, indeed, is audible ever and again throughout"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thou wilt remember one warm morn, when Winter Crept aged from the earth, and Spring's first breath Blew soft from the moist hills--the black-thorn boughs, So dark in the bare wood, when glistening In the sunshine were white with coming buds, Like the bright side of a sorrow--and the banks Had violets opening from sleep like eyes."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt A strange delight in causing my decay; I was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever Within some ocean-wave:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "So I will sing on--fast as fancies come Rudely--the verse being as the mood it paints. * * * * * I am made up of an intensest life,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": ""
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline's lover incorporated himself in whatsoever he read--was the god wandering after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos--his second-self cries,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives. Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea: The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves-- And nothing ever will surprise me now-- Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline, written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Twas in my plan to look on real life, which was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I pondered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, an end comprising every joy. Again:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to turn my mind against itself ... at length I was restored, yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me thus far back to peace. No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical. It would seem as though, from the first, Browning's ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse. Some flaw there was, somewhere. His heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the o'er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far perspectives of the brain,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline will remember the passage where the poet, with that pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk and through its rustling foliage"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "or, again, can live the life of the bird,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "or be a fish, breathing the morning air in the misty sun-warm water. Close following this is another memorable passage, that beginning"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting Of thy soft breasts -----"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes, where, on a sinister night of July, a night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, Ottima and Sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan picture of morning, over"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree Stir themselves from the stupor of the night, And every strangled branch resumes its right To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge, While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, Each grass-blade's glory-glitter,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline will forget the masterful poetry descriptive of the lover's wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines beginning"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old and green"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters, Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head, And old grey stones lie making eddies there; The wild mice cross them dry-shod"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and _lips which bleed like a mountain berry_"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sun-treader, I believe in God, and truth, And love; ... ... but chiefly when I die ... All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me, Know my last state is happy--free from doubt, Or touch of fear."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "And I had dimly shaped my first attempt, And many a thought did I build up on thought, As the wild bee hangs cell to cell--in vain; For I must still go on: my mind rests not."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus. Shelley, as far above Browning in poetic music as the author of so many parleyings with other people's souls is the superior in psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life not one such review of praiseful welcome as the Rev. W.J. Fox wrote on the publication of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham's equally kindly but less able review in the _Athenæum_), or as John Forster wrote in _The Examiner_ concerning"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus, and later in the _New Monthly Magazine_, where he had the courage to say of the young and quite unknown poet,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "His plays even (which are commonly said to have"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "It lives, If precious be the soul of man to man."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline : the very favourable article by Mr. Fox in the _Monthly Repository_, the kindly paper by Allan Cunningham in the _Athenæum_, and, in _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, the succinctly expressed impression of either an indolent or an incapable reviewer:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline; a Fragment of a Confession; a piece of pure bewilderment --a"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline forgot to speak about it: the poet himself never alluded to it: and in a year or two it was almost as though it had never been written. Many years after, when articles upon Robert Browning were as numerous as they once had been scarce, never a word betrayed that their authors knew of the existence of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline could be by none other than the author of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus. He himself informed me that he had never heard this authorship suggested, though some one had spoken to him of a poem of remarkable promise, called"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline, which he ought to read. If I remember aright, Rossetti told me that it was on the forenoon of the day when the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Burden of Nineveh was begun, conceived rather, that he read this story of a soul by the soul's ablest historian. So delighted was he with it, and so strong his opinion it was by Browning, that he wrote to the poet, then in Florence, for confirmation, stating at the same time that his admiration for"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Rossetti's 'Pauline' letter was addressed to me at Florence more than thirty years ago. I have preserved it, but, even were I at home, should be unable to find it without troublesome searching. It was to the effect that the writer, personally and altogether unknown to me, had come upon a poem in the British Museum, which he copied the whole of, from its being not otherwise procurable--that he judged it to be mine, but could not be sure, and wished me to pronounce in the matter--which I did. A year or two after, I had a visit in London from Mr. (William) Allingham and a friend--who proved to be Rossetti. When I heard he was a painter I insisted on calling on him, though he declared he had nothing to show me--which was far enough from the case. Subsequently, on another of my returns to London, he painted my portrait, not, I fancy, in oils, but water-colours, and finished it in Paris shortly after. This must have been in the year when Tennyson published 'Maud,' for I remember Tennyson reading the poem one evening while Rossetti made a rapid pen-and-ink sketch of him, very good, from one obscure corner of vantage, which I still possess, and duly value. This was before Rossetti's marriage."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline that Browning began to see something of the literary and artistic life for which he had such an inborn taste. For a brief period he went often to the British Museum, particularly the Library, and to the National Gallery. At the British Museum Reading Room he perused with great industry and research those works in philosophy and medical history which are the bases of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus, and those Italian Records bearing upon the story of Sordello. Residence in Camberwell, in 1833, rendered night engagements often impracticable: but nevertheless he managed to mix a good deal in congenial society. It is not commonly known that he was familiar to these early associates as a musician and artist rather than as a poet. Among them, and they comprised many well-known workers in the several arts, were Charles Dickens and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ion Talfourd. Mr. Fox, whom Browning had met once or twice in his early youth, after the former had been shown the Byronic verses which had in one way gratified and in another way perturbed the poet's father, saw something more of his young friend after the publication of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline appeared another small volume, containing the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Palace of Art,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Oenone,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Mariana, etc. Those early books of Tennyson and Browning have frequently, and somewhat uncritically, been contrasted. Unquestionably, however, the elder poet showed a consummate and continuous mastery of his art altogether beyond the intermittent expressional power of Browning in his most rhythmic emotion at any time of his life. To affirm that there is more intellectual fibre, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, in the product of the younger poet, would be beside the mark. The insistence on the supremacy of Browning over all poets since Shakspere because he has the highest"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "to deliver, because his intellect is the most subtle and comprehensive, because his poems have this or that dynamic effect upon dormant or sluggish or other active minds, is to be seriously and energetically deprecated. It is with presentment that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself. If he cannot _present_ poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet, though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer. Browning's eminence is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thoughts swarming thro' the myriad-chambered brain Like multitudes of bees i' the innumerous cells, Each staggering 'neath the undelivered freight--"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Italy was my University."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ivàn Ivànovitch (the fourth of the _Dramatic Idyls_, 1879). Of a truth, after his own race and country--readers will at once think of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Home Thoughts from the Sea, or the thrilling lines in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Home Thoughts from Abroad,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Oh, to be in England, Now that April's there!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I cherish most My love of England--how, her name, a word Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! How do I long after the roses of Schiraz! As for Italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her: but who has worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal a love, as Browning? One alone indeed may be mated with him here, she who had his heart of hearts, and who lies at rest in the old Florentine cemetery within sound of the loved waters of Arno. Who can forget his lines in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "De Gustibus,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it, Italy."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Italian in England,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello, and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes, and whither he returned in the last year of his life, as with unconscious significance he himself said,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello he had in some fashion begun, but had set aside for a poem which occupied him throughout the autumn of 1834 and winter of 1835,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes, beginning"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A King lived long ago, was one of these; and the lyric,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Still ailing, wind? Wilt be appeased or no? afterwards revised and incorporated in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "James Lee, was another. But the two which are much the most noteworthy are"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Johannes Agricola and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Porphyria. Even more distinctively than in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline, in their novel sentiment, new method, and generally unique quality, is a new voice audible in these two poems. They are very remarkable as the work of so young a poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Johannes Agricola is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. In its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Porphyria"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, begun about the close of October or early in November 1834, was published in the summer of the following year. It is a poem in blank verse, about four times the length of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline, with interspersed songs. The author divided it into five sections of unequal length, of which the third is the most extensive:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus Aspires ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus Attains ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus Aspires ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus Attains. In an interesting note, which was not reprinted in later editions of his first acknowledged poem, the author dissuades the reader from mistaking his performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common, from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded, and from subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. He then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem, and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced. Instead of this, he remarks,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency, by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama. A little further, he states that a work like"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus depends, for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation--a Lyre or a Crown."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus will not"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "From this it might fairly be inferred that Browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method: that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear: and that he was alert to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines similar to those of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus. Nor would this inference be wrong: for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, but several scenes in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello into prose--a superfluous task, some scoffers may exclaim. Personally, I cannot but think this craze for the exposition of poetry, this passion for"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "the forerunner of Mesmer and even of Darwin and Wallace, who began life with the sounding appellation"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohenheim,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I ever did believe,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "One old populous green wall Tenanted by the ever-busy flies, Grey crickets and shy lizards and quick spiders, Each family of the silver-threaded moss-- Which, look through near, this way, and it appears A stubble-field or a cane-brake, a marsh Of bulrush whitening in the sun...."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Past the high rocks the haunts of doves, the mounds Of red earth from whose sides strange trees grow out, Past tracks of milk-white minute blinding sand."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, And the earth changes like a human face; The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask-- God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, When in the solitary waste, strange groups Of young volcanoes come up, cyclops-like, Staring together with their eyes on flame-- God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: But Spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between The withered tree-rests and the cracks of frost, Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows, ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews His ancient rapture."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Hints and previsions of which faculties Are strewn confusedly everywhere about The inferior natures, and all lead up higher, All shape out dimly the superior race, The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, And man appears at last."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Scientific Poet"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Whose memories were a solace to me oft, As mountain-baths to wild fowls in their flight."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I go to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send His hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, His good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus in the least way derivative. Because Shakspere is the greatest genius evolved from our race, it does not follow that every lofty intellect, every great objective poet, should be labelled"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Shaksperian. But there is a certain quality in poetic expression which we so specify, because the intense humanity throbbing in it finds highest utterance in the greatest of our poets: and there is at least one instance of such poignant speech in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Festus, strange secrets are let out by death Who blabs so oft the follies of this world: And I am death's familiar, as you know. I helped a man to die, some few weeks since, Warped even from his go-cart to one end-- The living on princes' smiles, reflected from A mighty herd of favourites. No mean trick He left untried, and truly well-nigh wormed All traces of God's finger out of him: Then died, grown old. And just an hour before, Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes, He sat up suddenly, and with natural voice Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors God told him it was June; and he knew well Without such telling, harebells grew in June; And all that kings could ever give or take Would not be precious as those blooms to him."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes, which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a 'play' nor exactly a 'poem' in the conventional usage of the terms. Artistically,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus is disproportionate, and has faults, obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear: but in the main it has a beauty without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous pressure of ideas or stammering. It has not, in like degree, the intense human insight of, say,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Inn Album, but it has that charm of sequent excellence too rarely to be found in many of Browning's later writings. It glides onward like a steadfast stream, the thought moving with the current it animates and controls, and throbbing eagerly beneath. When we read certain portions of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, and the lovely lyrics interspersed in it, it is difficult not to think of the poet as sometimes, in later life, stooping like the mariner in Roscoe's beautiful sonnet, striving to reclaim"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "But it is the fleeting shore of exquisite art, not of the far-reaching shadowy capes and promontories of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Over the sea our galleys went:"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "We shouted, every man of us, And steered right into the harbour thus, With pomp and pæan glorious."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "And strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, long dead, was young."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus --some of those lapses from rhythmic energy to which the poet became less and less sensitive, till he could be so deaf to the vanishing"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "as to sink to the level of doggerel such as that which closes the poem called"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Popularity."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The sunrise Well warranted our faith in this full noon!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus with a half contemptuous line or two. On the other hand, the _Examiner_ acknowledged it to be a work of unequivocal power, and predicted for its author a brilliant career. The same critic who wrote this review contributed an article of about twenty pages upon"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus to the _New Monthly Magazine_, under the heading,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Evidences of a New Dramatic Poetry. This article is ably written, and remarkable for its sympathetic insight."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Mr. Browning, the critic writes,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Read 'Paracelsus,' a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, and diction, but occasionally obscure: the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is said to have been an impromptu performance, and to have been so little valued by the author that he hesitated about its inclusion in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Bells and Pomegranates. It was inserted at the last moment, in the third number, which was short of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Some one (anonymous, but whom I take to be Mr. Nettleship) has publicly alluded to his possession of a rival poem (entitled, simply,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Hamelin ) by Robert Browning the elder, and of a letter which he had sent to a friend along with the verses, in which he writes:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Before I knew that Robert had begun the story of the 'Rats' I had contemplated a tale on the same subject, and proceeded with it as far as you see, but, on hearing that Robert had a similar one on hand, I desisted. This must have been in 1842, for it was in that year that the third part of _Bells and Pomegranates_ was published. In 1843, however, he finished it. Browning's"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pied Piper"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Othello, and how this had deflected his intention from a modern and European to an Oriental and ancient theme."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Browning said that I had _bit_ him by my performance of 'Othello,' and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. The"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "had come in the guise of a drama-motive based on the crucial period in the career of Narses, the eunuch-general of Justinian. Macready liked the suggestion, though he demurred to one or two points in the outline: and before Browning left he eagerly pressed him to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "But whether Browning mistrusted his own interest in the theme, or was dubious as to the success with which Macready would realise his conception, or as to the reception a play of such a nature would win from an auditory no longer reverent of high dramatic ideals, he gave up the idea. Some three months later (May 26th) he enjoyed another eventful evening. It was the night of the first performance of Talfourd's"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ion, and he was among the personal friends of Macready who were invited to the supper at Talfourd's rooms. After the fall of the curtain, Browning, Forster, and other friends sought the tragedian and congratulated him upon the success both of the play and of his impersonation of the chief character. They then adjourned to the house of the author of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ion. To his surprise and gratification Browning found himself placed next but one to his host, and immediately opposite Macready, who sat between two gentlemen, one calm as a summer evening, and the other with a tempestuous youth dominating his sixty years, whom the young poet at once recognised as Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor. Every one was in good spirits: the host perhaps most of all, who was celebrating his birthday as well as the success of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ion. Possibly Macready was the only person who felt at all bored--unless it was Landor--for Wordsworth was not, at such a function, an entertaining conversationalist. There is much significance in the succinct entry in Macready's journal concerning the Lake-poet--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Wordsworth, who pinned me. ... When Talfourd rose to propose the toast of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Poets of England every one probably expected that Wordsworth would be named to respond. But with a kindly grace the host, after flattering remarks upon the two great men then honouring him by sitting at his table, coupled his toast with the name of the youngest of the poets of England--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Mr. Robert Browning, the author of 'Paracelsus.' It was a very proud moment for Browning, singled out among that brilliant company: and it is pleasant to know, on the authority of Miss Mitford, who was present, that"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "looking, the amiable lady adds, even younger than he was. Perhaps, however, he was prouder still when Wordsworth leaned across the table, and with stately affability said,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I am proud to drink your health, Mr. Browning:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, for whom he had a sincere admiration, to meet the great man. It was not in the nature of things that the two poets could become friends, but though the younger was sometimes annoyed by the elder's pooh-poohing his republican sympathies, and contemptuously waiving aside as a mere nobody no less an individual than Shelley, he never failed of respect and even reverence. With what tenderness and dignity he has commemorated the great poet's falling away from his early ideals, may be seen in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Lost Leader,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford, and probably"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon. Just as the young poet, flushed with the triumphant pleasure of the evening, was about to leave, Macready arrested him by a friendly grip of the arm. In unmistakable earnestness he asked Browning to write him a play. With a simplicity equal to the occasion, the poet contented himself with replying,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Shall it be historical and English? What do you say to a drama on Strafford?"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello ), called upon Macready with the manuscript of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford. The latter hoped much from it. In March the MS. was ready. About the end of the month Macready took it to Covent Garden Theatre, and read it to Mr. Osbaldiston,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford, already significant of a novel movement, and destined, it seems to me, to be still more significant in that great dramatic period towards which we are fast converging, was not less important to the Drama in England, as a new departure in method and radically indicative of a fresh standpoint, than"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Hernani was in France. But in literary history the day itself is doubly memorable, for in the forenoon Carlyle gave the first of his lectures in London. The play was a success, despite the shamefully inadequate acting of some of those entrusted with important parts. There was once, perhaps there were more occasions than one, where success poised like the soul of a Mohammedan on the invisible thread leading to Paradise, but on either side of which lies perdition. There was none to cry _Timbul_ save Macready, except Miss Helen Faucit, who gained a brilliant triumph as Lady Carlisle. The part of Charles I. was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again within measurable distance."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Younger Vane ranted so that a hiss, like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house. There was not even any extraneous aid to a fortunate impression. The house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "commonplace and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories almost sordid. But in the face of all this, a triumph was secured. For a brief while Macready believed that the star of regeneration had arisen. Unfortunately 'twas, in the words of a contemporary dramatic poet,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Bells and Pomegranates ):"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two or three years ago I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is, that a pitful of good-natured people applauded it. Ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. But, except in so far as its abrupt declension from the stage hurt its author in the eyes of the critics, and possibly in those of theatrical managers,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford was certainly no failure. It has the elements of a great acting play. Everything, even the language (and here was a stumbling-block with most of the critics and criticasters), was subordinated to dramatic exigencies: though the subordination was in conformity with a novel shaping method."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "It is time to deny a statement that has been repeated _ad nauseam_ in every notice that professes to give an account of Mr. Browning's career. Whatever is said or not said, it is always that his plays have 'failed' on the stage. In point of fact, the three plays which he has brought out have all succeeded, and have owed it to fortuitous circumstances that their tenure on the boards has been comparatively short."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strafford given in 1886, under the auspices of the Browning Society, were surprised as well as impressed: for few, apparently, had realised from perusal the power of the play as made manifest when acted. The secret of this is that the drama, when privily read, seems hard if not heavy in its diction, and to be so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple, as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of Shakspere out of the question. But when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed. Its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught with the utmost it can convey. The outlines which disturbed us by their vagueness become more clear: in a word, we all see in enactment what only a few of us can discern in perusal. The play has its faults, but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic, because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops. But there are dramatic faults--primarily, in the extreme economy of the author in the presentment of his _dramatis personæ_, who are embodied abstractions--monomaniacs of ideas, as some one has said of Hugo's personages--rather than men as we are, with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion. One cardinal fault is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection to its popular acceptance. Another, is the misproportionate length of some of the speeches. Once again, there is, as in the greater portion of Browning's longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis. The conception of Charles I. is not only obviously weak, but strangely prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as Browning. For what a fellow-dramatist calls this"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sunset Shadow of a King,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Stay, sir, do not promise, do not swear!"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Voices from Within --"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "--in the terrible scene where Strafford learns his doom, is only to be paralleled by the song of Mariana in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Measure for Measure,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford, partly because (certainly without more than one exception,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Venus and Adonis, and the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Rape of Lucrece, we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Hamlet,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Othello, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Macbeth"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "His stage is not the visible phenomenal England (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle, as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this. No doubt there is"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "not only in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Blot on the 'Scutchcon,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Luria,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "In a Balcony, is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense. Above all, indeed--as Mr. Walter Pater has said--his is the poetry of situations. In each of the _dramatis personæ_, one of the leading characteristics is loyalty to a dominant ideal. In Strafford's case it is that of unswerving devotion to the King: in Mildred's and in Thorold's, in the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Blot on the 'Scutcheon, it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added, is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all Browning's"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "): in Valence's, in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Colombe's Birthday, to chivalric love: in Charles, in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "King Victor and King Charles, to kingly and filial duty: in Anael's and Djabal's, in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Return of the Druses, respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism: in Chiappino's, in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Soul's Tragedy, to purely sordid ambition: in Luria's, to noble steadfastness: and in Constance's, in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In a Balcony, to self-denial. Of these plays,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Return of the Druses seems to me the most picturesque,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Luria the most noble and dignified, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "In a Balcony the most potentially a great dramatic success. The last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the Funeral March in Beethoven's _Eroica_ Symphony. The"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Blot on the 'Scutcheon has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "by syncope and suicide. Another is the juvenility of Mildred:--a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer, she, like the typical young _Miss Anglaise_ of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon? Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I _think_ I do. Thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest, is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama as"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In the instance of Luria, that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution: the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold's suicide is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred's broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Colombe's Birthday has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader's more or less acute perception of the radical divergence, for all Valence's greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity. Though"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Soul's Tragedy"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Return of the Druses, where the Prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated; and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails Djabal as _Hakeem_--as Divine--and therewith falls dead at his feet. Nor will he forget that where, in the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Blot on the 'Scutcheon,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I--I--was so young! Besides I loved him, Thorold--and I had No mother; God forgot me: so I fell----"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Strange! This is all I brought from my own land To help me."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Strafford, 1837;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "King Victor and King Charles, 1842;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Return of the Druses, and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, 1843;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Colombe's Birthday, 1844;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Luria, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Soul's Tragedy,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes, and to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello, that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should like--out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details--to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present theme. One is that the song in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "There's a woman like a dew-drop, written several years before the author's meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Lady Geraldine's Courtship,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Luria,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's, Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale No man has walked along our roads with step So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. But warmer climes Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where The Siren waits thee, singing song for song."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes, towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Piping down the valleys wild, or in Wordsworth's line,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, or in Keats' single verse,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "There is a budding morrow in midnight,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "She comes like the husht beauty of the night, But sees too deep for laughter; Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "in any of these than in libraries of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sludge the Medium literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. _De profundis,_ indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "to a living rhythmic joy. In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. He may learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul there can be no"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "for him. Here it seems apt to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?--there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "He who, having no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art--he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Witch of Atlas. But he was the earnest student for the most part, and, above all, the poet. His other pleasure, in his happy vagrant days, was to join company with any tramps, gipsies, or other wayfarers, and in good fellowship gain much knowledge of life that was useful at a later time. Rustic entertainments, particularly peripatetic"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Theatres Royal, had a singular fascination for him, as for that matter had rustic oratory, whether of the alehouse or the pulpit. At one period he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds: and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother because of his nomad propensities in search of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "There was even a time when he seriously deliberated whether he should not combine literature and religious ministry, as Faraday combined evangelical fervour with scientific enthusiasm."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The image flashed upon him, writes his intimate friend, Mrs. Sutherland Orr,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "where Pippa, the little silk-winder from the mills at Asolo, springs from bed, on her New Year's Day _festa_, and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true as it is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere: but how could it succeed on the stage? It is not merely that the monologue is too long: it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its purpose. It is the poet, not Pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music, this strain of the"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "All service ranks the same with God,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Say not 'a small event!' Why 'small'? Costs it more pain than this, ye call A 'great event,' should come to pass, Than that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "There's a woman like a dewdrop,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes. Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Inn Album can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald, there is a note of tragic power which is almost overwhelming. Who has not known what Jakob Boehme calls"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "though here, it may be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more culminative cry of Othello,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima, daring her lover to the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "says, with affected lightsomeness,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass, and simultaneously exclaims, as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Three, four--four grey hairs!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Is it so you said A plait of hair should wave across my neck? No--this way."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "All service ranks the same with God-- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "God's in his heaven-- All's right with the world!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "With God there is no lust of Godhood, says Rossetti in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Hand and Soul : _Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewölk darin, und dauerhafter dazu_, meditates Jean Paul:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "He never forgot the bygone"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "he saw in those days of his fervid youth. Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one's vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell! Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights-- Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the _symmetria prisca_ of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I should do it justice,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello, that of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Its interest may be found remote, its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared with the"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "of the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Divina Commedia."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Essay on Chapman."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello will be as little read as"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Faerie Queene, and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land--a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Shepherd's Calendar, they will there oftentimes"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello, and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations, and, particularly, in Mrs. Ball's most circumspect and able historical essay. It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of the Italian and Provençal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by Dante set forth in leonine guise--_a guisa di leon quando si posa_--in the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Purgatorio ), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles. Sordello is a far more profound study than Aprile in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus, in whom, however, he is obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature is that indicated by Goethe of Heine, that"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "That autumn eve was stilled: A last remains of sunset dimly burned O'er the far forests,--like a torch-flame turned By the wind back upon its bearer's hand In one long flare of crimson; as a brand, The woods beneath lay black."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Few fine locks Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks Sun-blanched the livelong summer,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose----"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A touch divine-- And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod; Visibly through his garden walketh God----"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Dante, pacer of the shore Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume, Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope Into a darkness quieted by hope; Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye In gracious twilights where his chosen lie----"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello. Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the episode. A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. At last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "O God, I _am_ an idiot! A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Sordello into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish, her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thank God, I am _not_ an idiot!"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, '_Who will may hear Sordello's story told_,' and '_Who would has heard Sordello's story told!_' Carlyle was equally candid:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "My wife, he writes,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "God gave man two faculties --and adds,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I wish while He was about it (_pendant qu'il était en train_) God had supplied another--viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Golden Butterfly : how, after"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Fifine at the Fair, frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. And then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. 'I wish,' he said, 'that I could put the poet there too.' One other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet. On his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello as a work of art is not disputable. In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the advisability of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello, one thing pertinent to it shall survive: the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface--"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Vast as night,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Inn Album,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book is unique. Even Goethe's masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe's"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Faustus, and its ambitious offspring, as in Bailey's"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Festus."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book is, in point of art, nothing. One day, after the publication of this poem, Carlyle hailed the author with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony:"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "What a wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of 'books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph! Here, Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that, notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of hers,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Tour-de-force."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes is, for its ten Books (the first and twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "But poetry is not mental gymnastics. All this insistence upon"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book must depend even less upon its subject, its motive, than upon its being"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Aurora Leigh are metrical novels. The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to, say,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Moonstone"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It was too _hard_. It was 'pure crude fact,' secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise in what he set before them unadulterated human truth."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Beneath I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud, Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes, The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked, Drinking the blackness in default of air-- A busy human sense beneath my feet: While in and out the terrace-plants, and round One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "is--interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close--the passionate, out-welling lines to"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "O lyric Love, half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,-- Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory--to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! Never may I commence my song, my due To God who best taught song by gift of thee, Except, with bent head and beseeching hand-- That still, despite the distance and the dark, What was, again may be; some interchange Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, Some benediction anciently thy smile: --Never conclude, but raising hand and head Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Other Half Rome, the description of Pompilia,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "with flower-like body, in white hospital array--a child with eyes of infinite pathos,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "impartial because superciliously indifferent, though sufficiently interested to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ring,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead! That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)-- That vision of the pale electric sword Angels go armed with--that was not the last O' the lady. Come, I see through it, you find, Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false? Let me see for myself if it be so!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pompilia, there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakspere's Arthur. It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "O great, just, good God! miserable me!"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I am just seventeen years and five months old, And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks; 'Tis writ so in the church's register, Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names At length, so many names for one poor child, --Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pompilia. The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ordeal of Richard Feveral,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pompilia"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Oh, how good God is that my babe was born, --Better than born, baptised and hid away Before this happened, safe from being hurt! That had been sin God could not well forgive: _He was too young to smile and save himself_----"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naïveté, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "So, carefuller, perhaps, To guard a namesake than those old saints grow, Tired out by this time,--see my own five saints!"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Thus, all my life, I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades. --Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born, Something began for once that would not end, Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay For evermore, eternally quite mine----"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "One cannot judge Of what has been the ill or well of life The day that one is dying.... Now it is over, and no danger more ... To me at least was never evening yet But seemed far beautifuller than its day, For past is past----"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. All women are not mothers of a boy.... I never realised God's birth before-- How he grew likest God in being born. This time I felt like Mary, had my babe Lying a little on my breast like hers."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise----"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections--the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Caponsacchi and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pompilia. In the next"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "For the main criminal I have no hope Except in such a suddenness of fate. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: But the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, Through her whole length of mountain visible: There lay the city thick and plain with spires, And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ... Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book free of all the manifold and complex considerations which confuse our judgment. Meanwhile, each can only speak for himself. To me it seems that"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book is, regarded as an artistic whole, the most magnificent failure in our literature. It enshrines poetry which no other than our greatest could have written; it has depths to which many of far inferior power have not descended. Surely the poem must be judged by the balance of its success and failure? It is in no presumptuous spirit, but out of my profound admiration of this long-loved and often-read, this superb poem, that I, for one, wish it comprised but the Prologue, the Plea of Guido,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Caponsacchi,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pompilia,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Pope,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Inn Album, a dramatic poem of extraordinary power, has so much more markedly the defects of his qualities that I take it to be, at the utmost, the poise of the first gradual refluence. This analogy of the tidal ebb and flow may be observed with singular aptness in Browning's life-work--the tide that first moved shoreward in the loveliness of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pauline, and, with"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "ebbed in slow, just perceptible lapse to the poet's penultimate volume. As for"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Asolando,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Inn Album as the first hesitant swing of the tide. I seem to hear the resilient undertone all through the long slow poise of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Ring and the Book."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Men and Women ; and by"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Men and Women I mean not merely the poems comprised in the collection so entitled, but all in the"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Dramatic Romances,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Lyrics, and the"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Dramatis Personæ, all the short pieces of a certain intensity of note and quality of power, to be found in the later volumes, from"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pacchiarotto to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Asolando."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "--an achievement, even on its secondary level, so high, that around its imperfect proportions,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Men and Women ? How better--certainly it would be impossible to be more succinct--than by the enumeration of the contents of an imagined volume, to be called, say"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Transcripts from Life"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "My Last Duchess. Then would follow"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In a Gondola, that haunting lyrical drama _in petto_, where the lover is stabbed to death as his heart is beating against that of his mistress;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Cristina, with its keen introspection; those delightfully stirring pieces, the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Cavalier-Tunes,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr, and"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Pied Piper of Hamelin ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Flower's Name ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Flight of the Duchess ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Tomb at St. Praxed's, the poem which educed Ruskin's enthusiastic praise for its marvellous apprehension of the spirit of the Middle Ages;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pictor Ignotus, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Lost Leader. But as there is not space for individual detail, and as many of the more important are spoken of elsewhere in this volume, I must take the reader's acquaintance with the poems for granted. So, following those first mentioned, there would come"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Home Thoughts from Abroad ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Home Thoughts from the Sea ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Confessional ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Heretic's Tragedy ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Earth's Immortalities ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Saul ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Karshish ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Death in the Desert ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Rabbi Ben Ezra ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Grammarian's Funeral ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Love Among the Ruins ; _Song_,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Nay but you ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Lover's Quarrel ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Evelyn Hope ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Woman's Last Word ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Fra Lippo Lippi ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "By the Fireside ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Any Wife to Any Husband ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Serenade at the Villa ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "My Star ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Pretty Woman ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Light Woman ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Love in a Life ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Life in a Love ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Last Ride Together ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Toccata of Galuppi's ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Abt Vogler ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Memorabilia ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Andrea Del Sarto ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Before ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "After ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "In Three Days ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In a Year ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Old Pictures in Florence ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "De Gustibus ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Women and Roses ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Guardian Angel ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Cleon ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two in the Campagna ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "One Way of Love ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Another Way of Love ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Misconceptions ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "May and Death ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "James Lee's Wife ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Dîs Aliter Visum ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Too Late ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Confessions ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Prospice ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Youth and Art ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Face ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Likeness ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Apparent Failure. Epilogue to Part I.--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "O Lyric Voice, etc., from end of First Part of"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book. Part II.--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Hervé Riel ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Amphibian ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Epilogue to Fifine ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pisgah Sights ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Natural Magic ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Magical Nature ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Bifurcation ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Numpholeptos ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Appearances ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "St. Martin's Summer ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A Forgiveness ; Epilogue to Pacchiarotto volume; Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "La Saisiaz ; Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two Poets of Croisic ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Epilogue ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pheidippides ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Halbert and Hob ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ivàn Ivànovitch ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Echetlos ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Muléykeh ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pan and Luna ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Touch him ne'er so lightly ; Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Jocoseria ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Cristina and Monaldeschi ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ixion ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Never the Time and the Place ; _Song_,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Round us the wild creatures ; _Song_,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Wish no word unspoken ; _Song_,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "You groped your way ; _Song_:,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Man I am ; _Song_,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Once I saw ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Verse-making ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Not with my Soul Love ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ask not one least word of praise ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Why from the world ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Round of Day (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12 of Gérard de Lairesse); Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Asolando ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Rosny ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Now ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Poetics ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Summum Bonum ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A Pearl ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Speculative ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Inapprehensiveness ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Lady and the Painter;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Beatrice Signorini ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Imperante Augusto ;"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Rephan ;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Reverie ; Epilogue to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Asolando"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Man's thoughts and loves and hates! Earth is my vineyard, these grew there--"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pauline [16]--i."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever! 2. The Dawn of Beauty; 3. Andromeda; 4. Morning. II."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Heap Cassia, Sandal-buds, etc. (song from"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus ). III."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Over the Sea our Galleys went (song from"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Paracelsus ). IV. The Joy of the World ("
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Paracelsus ).[17] V. From"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sordello --1. Sunset;[18] 2. The Fugitive Ethiop;[19] 3. Dante.[20] VI. Ottima and Sebald (Pt. i.,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Pippa Passes ). VII. Jules and Phene (Pt. ii.,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Pippa Passes ). VIII. My Last Duchess. IX. In a Gondola. X. Home Thoughts from Abroad (i. and ii.). XI. Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning. XII. A Grammarian's Funeral. XIII. Saul. XIV. Rabbi Ben Ezra. XV. Love among the Ruins. XVI. Evelyn Hope. XVII. My Star. XVIII. A Toccata of Galuppi's. XIX. Abt Vogler. XX. Memorabilia. XXI. Andrea del Sarto. XXI. Two in the Campagna. XXII. James Lee's Wife. XXIII. Prospice. XXIV. From"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Ring and the Book --1. O Lyric Love (The Invocation: 26 lines); 2. Caponsacchi (ll. 2069 to 2103); 3. Pompilia (ll. 181 to 205); 4. Pompilia (ll. 1771 to 1845); 5. The Pope (ll. 2017 to 2228); 6. Count Guido (Book XI., ll. 2407 to 2427). XXV. Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "La Saisiaz. XXVI. Prologue to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Two Poets of Croisic. XXVII. Epilogue to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two Poets of Croisic. XXVIII. Never the Time and Place. XXIX."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Round us the Wild Creatures, etc. (song from"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Ferishtah's Fancies ). XXX."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Walk (Pts. ix., x., xi., xii., of"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Gérard de Lairesse. ) XXXI."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "One word more"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "To see thee for a moment as thou art. No. 2 consists of the xviii ll. beginning,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "They came to me in my first dawn of life. No. 3, the xi ll. of the Andromeda picture. No. 4, the lix ll. beginning,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path (to"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The centre fire heaves underneath the earth, down to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "That autumn ere has stilled."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "As, shall I say, some Ethiop."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "For he,--for he."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Now,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Summum Bonum,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Reverie and the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Epilogue, from"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Asolando."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Transcripts from Life --it is here, in the worthiest poems of Browning's most poetic period, that, it seems to me, his highest greatness is to be sought. In these"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Men and Women"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Men and Women"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I lived with visions for my company, instead of men and women ... nor thought to know a sweeter music than they played to me."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "in various"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "At this time, she tells us, the Greeks were her demi-gods, and she dreamt much of Agamemnon. In the same year, in suburban Camberwell, a little boy was often wont to listen eagerly to his father's narrative of the same hero, and to all the moving tale of Troy. It is significant that these two children, so far apart, both with the light of the future upon their brows, grew up in familiarity with something of the antique beauty. It was a lifelong joy to both, that"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Many an hour of gloom was charmed away by it for the poetess who translated the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, and wrote"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The Dead Pan : many a happy day and memorable night were spent in that"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "by the poet who wrote"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Balaustion's Adventure and translated the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Agamemnon."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Cry of the Children rang like a clarion throughout the country. The poem was founded upon an official report by Richard Hengist Horne, the friend whom some years previously she had won in correspondence, and with whom she had become so intimate, though without personal acquaintance, that she had agreed to write a drama in collaboration with him, to be called"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Psyche Apocalypté, and to be modelled on"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Greek instead of modern tragedy."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "John Kenyon--a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man, who acted the part of Providence to many troubled souls, and, in particular, was"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "to Elizabeth Barrett and to"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "as he used to call Browning. It was to Mr. Kenyon--"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Kenyon, with the face of a Bendectine monk, but the most jovial of good fellows, as a friend has recorded of him;"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Kenyon the Magnificent,"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Bells and Pomegranates, among which she then and always cared most for the penultimate volume, the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Two years before she met the author she had written, in"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Lady Geraldine's Courtship"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "She gave Horne much aid in the preparation of his"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "New Spirit of the Age, and he has himself told us"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "We artists--how well praise agrees with us,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Love quivered, an invisible flame. Elizabeth Barrett was indeed, in her own words,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "She, too, was always, as she wrote of Harriet Martineau, in a hopeless anguish of body and serene triumph of spirit. As George Sand says, of one of her fictitious personages, she was an"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "To this too keen intensity of feeling must be attributed something of that longing for repose, that deep craving for rest from what is too exciting from within, which made her affirm the exquisite appeal to her of such Biblical passages as"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Lord of peace Himself give you peace, and"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "He giveth His Beloved Sleep, which, as she says in one of her numerous letters to Miss Mitford,"
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "rose hurriedly and, in reply to her hostess' inquiry as to her motive, explained that she could not sit any longer beside the elderly gentleman who was talking to Mrs. So-and-so, as his near presence made her quiver all over,"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "as she phrased it. She was chagrined to learn that she had been discomposed not by 'a too exuberant financier,' as she had surmised, but by, as"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Waring called Browning, the"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Browning was manly enough to laugh at all ghoulish cries of any kind whatsoever. Once in a way the lion would look round and by a raised breath make the jackals wriggle; as when the poet wrote to a correspondent, who had drawn his attention to certain abusive personalities in some review or newspaper:"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Dear Sir--I am sure you mean very kindly, but I have had too long an experience of the inability of the human goose to do other than cackle when benevolent and hiss when malicious, and no amount of goose criticism shall make me lift a heel against what waddles behind it."
}
]
|
14476 | Unknown Title | Unknown Author | [
{
"from": "human",
"value": "We, who believe life's bases rest Beyond the probe of chemic test."
}
]
|
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