tainly
the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living,"
sung by the young harper David in that poem of _Saul_, which appeared as
a fragment in the _Bells and Pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years
later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture
of the senses.[34]

Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, was written in the
spirit of mere play and was included in _Bells and Pomegranates_ only to
make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. One or
two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and
Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the
fancy. One, _The Lost Lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of
Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling
attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly
detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses
Browning's liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately _Artemis
Prologuizes_, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama,
"Hippolytus and Aricia," composed in 1840, "much against my endeavour,"
wrote the poet,--a somewhat enigmatical phrase--"while in bed with a
fever." A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as
expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which
is the passion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly
handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen
in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. Nor is the
interpretation of religious emotion--though in a phase that may be
called abnormal--wholly forgotten.

With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self,
Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy.
The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the
bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the _Cavalier Tunes_, is
true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness.
The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in
his Emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is
in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by
the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining
the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in
presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of
generous