R450600A. Dramatic Lyrics (1842); Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).
The Knickerbocker, June 1845, pp. 545–546.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 393–394.
[Reviewed in this article were works by Tennyson, EBB (see page 390), Patmore and Horne. We include only the comments pertaining to RB.] [p. 545→]
Robert Browning is an odd character; much cleverness dashed with more conceit. His plays are as good as any mere closet plays can be, his shorter poems very lively and spirited, his longer ones quite unintelligible. “Sordello,” for instance, beats Sycophron hollow. It is a perpetual riddle throughout. “Paracelsus” is nearly as bad, but is saved by some glorious lyrics interspersed through it. Browning ought clearly to confine himself to fugitive pieces. His Cavalier Ballads are very dashing; in reading them we forget our Puritan prejudices, and wish to be among the jolly loyalists:
Marching along ten thousand strong
Great-hearted gentlemen singing this song.
His humor is rich and racy. Bluphocks, the English vagabond, might almost be a character in one of the Elizabethan dramatists. As a sample of rollicking fun we know few things better than the following “Garden Fancy.” “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,” whose pedantry provoked an interment too good for him, was we suppose some schoolman: we have often fancied ourselves disposing in a similar way of a Cambridge mathematical treatise:
I.
Plague take all pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to lumber the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime,
Just when the birds sang all together,
II.
Into the garden I brought it to read,
And under these arbutes and laurustine,
Read it, so help me Grace in my need!
From title-page to closing line;
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal amount,
And then proceeded to my revenge. [p. 546→]
III.
Yonder’s a plum tree with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage,
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
In a castle of the middle age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he’d be private there he might spend
Hours alone in his lady’s chamber;
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
IV.
Splash he went, as under he ducked,
(I knew at the bottom rain-drippings stagnate,)
Next a handful of blossoms I plucked,
To bury him with my book-shelf’s magnate;
Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,
Half a cheese and a bottle of Chablis,
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
V.
Now this morning betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
And sat in the midst with arms akimbo;
So I took pity for learning’s sake,
And de profundis accentibus lætis,
Cantate, quoth I as I took up a rake,
And up I fished his delectable treatise.
VI.
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O’er the page so beautifully yellow;
Oh, the droppings have played their tricks!
Did he guess how toad-stools grow, this fellow?
Here’s one stuck in his chapter six!
VII.
How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and broused him all over,
And worm-slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in each one for his right of trover;
When the water beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black-wife’s closet.
VIII.
All that life and fun and romping,
All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friends leaves were swamping,
Clasps cracking and covers suppling,
As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play at Paris, Vienna or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the ballet in trousers and tunic.
IX.
Come, old martyr! what, torment enough is it?
Back to my room you shall take your sweet self:
Good bye, mother-beetle, husband-elf sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf.
A’s book shall prop you up, B’s shall cover you,
Here’s C to be grave with or D to be gay,
And with E on each side, and F right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the judgment day!
And with this bonne-bouche at parting, we take our leave of English contemporary poets.
C[harles]. A. B[risted].
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. III. Dramatic Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1842.
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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