"What a name! Was it love or praise? Speech half-asleep or song half-awake? I must learn Spanish, one of these days, Only for that slow sweet name's sake."
The two perfect little pieces on "Fame" and "Love," _Earth's Immortalities_, are remarkable, even in Browning's work, for their concentrated felicity, and, the second especially, for swift suggestiveness of haunting music. Not less exquisite in its fresh melody and subtle simplicity is the following _Song_:--
"Nay but you, who do not love her, Is she not pure gold, my mistress? Holds earth aught--speak truth--above her? Aught like this tress, see, and this tress, And this last fairest tress of all, So fair, see, ere I let it fall?
Because, you spend your lives in praising; To praise, you search the wide world over: Then why not witness, calmly gazing, If earth holds aught--speak truth--above her? Above this tress, and this, I touch But cannot praise, I love so much!"
In two tiny pictures, _Night and Morning_, one of four lines, the other of twelve, we have, besides the picture, two moments which sum up a lifetime, and "on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion is balanced!"
The gray sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me."
But the largest, if not the greatest work in the volume must be sought for, not in the romances, properly speaking, nor in the lyrics, but in the dramatic monologues. _Pictor Ignotus_ (Florence, 15--) is the first of those poems about painting, into which Browning has put so much of his finest art. It is a sort of first faint hint or foreshadowing of _Andrea del Sarto_, perfectly individual and distinct though it is. _Pictor Ignotus_ expresses the subdued sadness of a too timid or too sensitive nature, an "unknown painter" who has dreamed of painting great pictures and winning great fame, but who shrinks equally from the attempt and the reward: an attempt which he is too self-distrustful to make, a reward which he is too painfully discriminating to enjoy.