"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope, Means recognizing fear; the keener sense Of all comprised within our actual scope Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense. Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence Just as indubitably: stars abound O'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground!
So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"
The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:--
"Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born!
Sky--what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!
World--how it walled about Life with disgrace Till God's own smile came out: That was thy face!"
[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp. 1-80).]
In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Léon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plébéiennes_. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:--