e before.
Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is
full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and
poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all
its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the
dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible
strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal
convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. _Rabbi
ben Ezra_ and _Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert_, are as noble poetry
as _Andrea del Sarto_ or _The Grammarian's Funeral_; but it is a poetry
less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and,
on the other hand, _Dis Aliter Visum_ and _Youth and Art_, and others,
effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose
than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief
glories of _Men and Women_. The world which is neither thrillingly
beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum,
finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered
too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned
upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife,
with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in _Too Late_, with her
thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _Dis Aliter Visum_;
and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not
gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous
"Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is
dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired
maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard
in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice. If we may
by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet
its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not
theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low,
burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert
scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of
the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of
the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a
wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863;
"close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may
wa