Browning's England: A Study in English Influences in Browning. Helen Archibald Clarke

day, the earth's feast-master's brow

       Shall clear, to God the chalice raising;

      9 "Others give best at first, but thou

       Forever set'st our table praising,

       Keep'st the good wine till now!"

      V

      Meantime, I'll draw you as you stand,

       With few or none to watch and wonder:

       I'll say—a fisher, on the sand

       By Tyre the old, with ocean-plunder,

       A netful, brought to land.

      VI

      Who has not heard how Tyrian shells

       Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes

       Whereof one drop worked miracles,

       And colored like Astarte's eyes

       Raw silk the merchant sells?

      VII

      And each bystander of them all

       Could criticise, and quote tradition

       How depths of blue sublimed some pall

       —To get which, pricked a king's ambition;

       Worth sceptre, crown and ball.

      VIII

      Yet there's the dye, in that rough mesh,

       The sea has only just o'er-whispered!

       Live whelks, each lip's beard dripping fresh

       As if they still the water's lisp heard

       Thro' foam the rock-weeds thresh.

      10

      IX

      Enough to furnish Solomon

       Such hangings for his cedar-house,

       That, when gold-robed he took the throne

       In that abyss of blue, the Spouse

       Might swear his presence shone

      X

      Most like the centre-spike of gold

       Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb,

       What time, with ardors manifold,

       The bee goes singing to her groom,

       Drunken and overbold.

      XI

      Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!

       Till cunning come to pound and squeeze

       And clarify—refine to proof

       The liquor filtered by degrees,

       While the world stands aloof.

      XII

      And there's the extract, flasked and fine,

       And priced and salable at last!

       And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine

       To paint the future from the past,

       Put blue into their line.

      XIII

      Hobbs hints blue—straight he turtle eats:

       Nobbs prints blue—claret crowns his cup:

       Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—

       Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?

       What porridge had John Keats?

      John Keats

"Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?"

      11 Wordsworth, it appears, was, so to speak, the inverse inspiration of the stirring lines "The Lost Leader." Browning's strong sympathies with the Liberal cause are here portrayed with an ardor which is fairly intoxicating poetically, but one feels it is scarcely just to the mild-eyed, exemplary Wordsworth, and perhaps exaggeratedly sure of Shakespeare's attitude on this point. It is only fair to Browning, to point out how he himself felt later that his artistic mood had here run away with him, whereupon he made amends honorable in a letter in reply to the question whether he had Wordsworth in mind: "I can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth in my mind—but simply as a model; you know an artist takes one or two striking traits in the features of his 'model,' and uses them to start his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman who happens to be sitting for nose and eye. I thought of the great Poet's abandonment of liberalism at an unlucky juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. But, once call my fancy-portrait Wordsworth—and how much more ought one to say!"

      The defection of Wordsworth from liberal sympathies is one of the commonplaces of12 literary history. There was a time when he figured in his poetry as a patriotic leader of the people, when in clarion tones he exhorted his countrymen to "arm and combine in defense of their common birthright." But this was in the enthusiasm of his youth when he and Southey and Coleridge were metaphorically waving their red caps for the principles of the French Revolution. The unbridled actions of the French Revolutionists, quickly cooled off their ardor, and as Taine cleverly puts it, "at the end of a few years, the three, brought back into the pale of State and Church, were, Coleridge, a Pittite journalist, Wordsworth, a distributor of stamps, and Southey, poet-laureate; all converted zealots, decided Anglicans, and intolerant conservatives." The "handful of silver" for which the patriot in the poem is supposed to have left the cause included besides the post of "distributor of stamps," given to him by Lord Lonsdale in 1813, a pension of three hundred pounds a year in 1842, and the poet-laureateship in 1843.

      The first of these offices was received so long after the cooling of Wordsworth's "Revolution" ardors which the events of 1793 had brought about that it can scarcely be said to have influenced his change of mind.

      13It was during Wordsworth's residence in France, from November 1791 to December 1792, that his enthusiasm for the French Revolution reached white heat. How the change was wrought in his feelings is shown with much penetration and sympathy by Edward Dowden in his "French Revolution and English Literature." "When war between France and England was declared Wordsworth's nature underwent the most violent strain it had ever experienced. He loved his native land yet he could wish for nothing but disaster to her arms. As the days passed he found it more and more difficult to sustain his faith in the Revolution. First, he abandoned belief in the leaders but he still trusted to the people, then the people seemed to have grown insane with the intoxication of blood. He was driven back from his defense of the Revolution, in its historical development, to a bare faith in the abstract idea. He clung to theories, the free and joyous movement of his sympathies ceased; opinions stifled the spontaneous life of the spirit, these opinions were tested and retested by the intellect, till, in the end, exhausted by inward debate, he yielded up moral questions in despair … by process of the understanding alone Wordsworth could attain no14 vital body of truth. Rather he felt that things of far more worth than political opinions—natural instincts, sympathies, passions, intuitions—were being disintegrated or denaturalized. Wordsworth began to suspect the analytic intellect as a source of moral wisdom. In place of humanitarian dreams came a deep interest in the joys and sorrows of individual men and women; through his interest in this he was led back to a study of the mind of man and those laws which connect the work of the creative imagination with the play of the passions. He had begun again to think nobly of the world and human life." He was, in fact, a more thorough Democrat socially