R640612A. Dramatis Personæ.
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 12 June 1864, p. 8.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 340.
When Mr. Robert Browning announces an addition to the noble monument of poetry he has already set up before the English people, all the reading world is astir. When the new poem appears, the reading world falls out. For, his genius is of that peculiar and fine quality which provokes intensest love and intensest hate. His admirers are upon their knees before him. The scoffers wear their tongue insolently in their cheek. “See! there are sentences,” these cry; “the words are tumbled together, as though they had been shot from the tail of a cart. Is this the language Shakspere spake and Milton wrote? Do we want a Carlyle in verse?” The admirers boldly make answer:—“These tumbled words—these coined words—are shrines wherein glorious poesy is hid. They must be taken up and examined by a poetic and reverent mind. Fall on your knees—and then take up Browning.”
The poet who inspires this battle of tongues is a master of the divine art. He never invites his readers until he has a bountiful feast of beauty to set before them. Then bid we welcome to “Dramatis Personæ.” It is a new gathering from the ripe harvest of Browning’s genius—with here and there rough and acrid fruit, it seems to us—but, on the whole, most acceptable. That volume must be precious which contains the following:—
Prospice.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light: then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
This is the noble utterance of a loving, Christian heart.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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