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All my new cultivators are young men, Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour,
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The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,--less than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years. But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his
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and was ultimately known as _The Ring and the Book_. As a whole, the _Dramatis Personæ_ stands yet more clearly apart from _Men and Women_ than that does from all that had gone 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
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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
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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
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Lee or
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Lamb or
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Brown, not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous
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Gigadibs.
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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
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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
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brought by love
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upon minds
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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.
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This is a wild little place in Brittany, he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863;
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The wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of _Men and Women_ we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _Dramatis Personæ_, the processes of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate. Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by
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and the way to it lay through moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own, was how to live when the answering love was gone. His
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like hers, was made
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,[40] and her words
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Ah, Love! but a day And the world has changed! The sun's away, And the bird estranged; The wind has dropped, And the sky's deranged: Summer has stopped.