=Melander.= The author whose work "Joco-Seria" suggested the title of Mr. Browning's volume of poems _Jocoseria_ (_q.v._).
=Melon-Seller, The.= (_Ferishtah's Fancies_, II.) The second of the lessons learned by Ferishtah on his way to dervishhood. He sees a well-remembered face in a melon-seller near a bridge. He was once the Shah's Prime Minister: he peculated, and was disgraced. Shocked at the contrast between what the man was and has now become, Ferishtah asks him if he did not curse God for the twelve years' bliss he enjoyed only to end in misery like that? The beggar contemptuously asked his questioner if he were unwise enough to think him such a fool as to repine at God's just punishment on sin, and to reproach Him with the happiness he had tasted in the past? Job said: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and evil not receive?" This was just what the melon-seller said. "But great wits jump"; and Ferishtah, having learned the great lesson, went his way to dervishhood. The Lyric asks for a little severity from Love: so much undeserved bliss has been imparted, that a little injustice seems requisite to balance things.
=Memorabilia.= (_Men and Women_, 1855--when the title was _Memorabilia (on Seeing Shelley)_; _Lyrics_, 1863; _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1868.) A man with a soul crosses a vast moor, a blankness of miles, but on one hand-breadth spot he spies an eagle's feather, which he cherishes. An eagle's feather meant something to the man with the soul, the miles of blank moor had nothing to say to him; and so once he saw Shelley plain, and even spoke to him. The man had lived long before and had lived long after, but the sight of Shelley and the words he spoke made just that hand-breadth of his life something different from all the colourless remainder. [Some there are who love to say the same of Robert Browning!] Mr. Browning early in his youth (1825) fell under the influence of Shelley. Mr. Sharp, in his _Life of Browning_, says that, as he was one day passing a bookstall, "he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as 'Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem,--very scarce.' He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the _Dæmon of the World_ and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto constituted a literary piracy." He discovered that there was such a poet as Shelley; that he had written several volumes, and was dead. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, which she had some difficulty in doing, as several booksellers to whom she applied knew nothing of them. The books were ultimately purchased at Ollier's shop, in Vere Street. Shelley, as Mr. Sharp says, "enthralled" Browning. His first work, _Pauline_, was written under the dominance of the Shelley passion. He refers to Shelley in _Sordello_. _Memorabilia_ was composed in the Roman Campagna in the winter of 1853-54.