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?

[Illustration: John Keats

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

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 of 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 unbri