Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 33

My hair is fallen now: knot it again! 205

_Sebald._ I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!

This way? Will you forgive me--be once more My great queen?

_Ottima._ Bind it thrice about my brow; Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, Magnificent in sin. Say that!

_Sebald._ I crown you 210 My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, Magnificent--

[_From without is heard the voice of_ PIPPA _singing_--

_The year's at the spring_ _And day's at the morn;_ _Morning's at seven;_ 215 _The hillside's dew-pearled;_ _The lark's on the wing;_ _The snail's on the thorn:_ _G.o.d's in his heaven--_ _All's right with the world!_ 220

[PIPPA _pa.s.ses_.

_Sebald._ G.o.d's in his heaven! Do you hear that?

Who spoke?

You, you spoke!

_Ottima._ Oh--that little ragged girl!

She must have rested on the step: we give them But this one holiday the whole year round.

Did you ever see our silk-mills--their inside? 225 There are ten silk-mills now belong to you.

She stoops to pick my double heartsease--s.h.!.+

She does not hear: call you out louder!

_Sebald._ Leave me!

Go, get your clothes on--dress, those shoulders!

_Ottima._ Sebald?

_Sebald._ Wipe off that paint! I hate you. 230

_Ottima._ Miserable!

_Sebald._ My G.o.d, and she is emptied of it now!

Outright now!--how miraculously gone All of the grace--had she not strange grace once?

Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, No purpose holds the features up together, 235 Only the cloven brow and puckered chin Stay in their places; and the very hair, That seemed to have a sort of life in it, Drops, a dead web!

_Ottima._ Speak to me--not of me.

_Sebald._ That round great full-orbed face, where not an 240 angle Broke the delicious indolence--all broken!

_Ottima._ To me--not of me! Ungrateful, perjured cheat!

A coward, too: but ingrate's worse than all!

Beggar--my slave--a fawning, cringing lie!

Leave me! Betray me! I can see your drift! 245 A lie that walks and eats and drinks!

_Sebald._ My G.o.d!

Those morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades-- I should have known there was no blood beneath!

_Ottima._ You hate me then? You hate me then?

_Sebald._ To think She would succeed in her absurd attempt, 250 And fascinate by sinning, show herself Superior--guilt from its excess superior To innocence! That little peasant's voice Has righted all again. Though I be lost, I know which is the better, never fear, 255 Of vice or virtue, purity or l.u.s.t, Nature or trick! I see what I have done, Entirely now! Oh, I am proud to feel Such torments--let the world take credit thence-- I, having done my deed, pay too its price! 260 I hate, hate--curse you! G.o.d's in his heaven!

_Ottima._ --Me!

Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me!

Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak I always meant to kill myself--wait, you! 265 Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me The more because you lean on me, my own Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently!

_Sebald._ My brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all I feel Is ... is, at swift-recurring intervals, 270 A hurry-down within me, as of waters Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit: There they go--whirls from a black, fiery sea!

_Ottima._ Not me--to him, O G.o.d, be merciful!

_Talk by the way, while_ PIPPA _is pa.s.sing from the hillside to Orcana.

Foreign Students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, a.s.sembled opposite the house of_ JULES, _a young French statuary, at Possagno_.

_1st Student._ Attention! My own post is beneath this window, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide three or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and his pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five--who's a defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be 5 suffered to hurt his bride when the jest's found out.

_2nd Student._ All here! Only our poet's away--never having much meant to be present, moonstrike him! The airs of that fellow, that Giovacchino! He was in violent love with himself, and had a fair prospect of thriving in 10 his suit, so unmolested was it--when suddenly a woman falls in love with him, too; and out of pure jealousy he takes himself off to Trieste, immortal poem and all--whereto is this prophetical epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks a.s.sures me--"_Here a mammoth-poem lies, 15 Fouled to death by b.u.t.terflies._" His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both cla.s.sically and intelligibly.--_aesculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaister--One strip Cools_ 20 _your lip. Phoebus's emulsion--One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's bolus--One box Cures--_

_3rd Student._ Subside, my fine fellow! If the marriage was over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute with his bride. 25

_2nd Student._ Good!--Only, so should the poet's muse have been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, _et canibus nostris_--and Delia not better known to our literary dogs than the boy Giovacchino!

_1st Student._ To the point now. Where's Gottlieb, 30 the new-comer? Oh--listen, Gottlieb, to what has called down this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which we now a.s.semble to witness the winding-up. We are all agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesman--the verses 35 that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche--but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who came alone from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day or two alone again--oh, alone 40 indubitably!--to Rome and Florence. He, forsooth, take up his portion with these dissolute, brutalized, heartless bunglers!--so he was heard to call us all: now, is Schramm brutalized, I should like to know? Am I heartless?

_Gottlieb._ Why, somewhat heartless; for, suppose Jules 45 a c.o.xcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere c.o.xcombry, you will have brushed off--what do folks style it?--the bloom of his life.

Is it too late to alter? These love-letters now, you call his--I can't laugh at them. 50

_4th Student._ Because you never read the sham letters of our inditing which drew forth these.

_Gottlieb._ His discovery of the truth will be frightful.

_4th Student._ That's the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning; there's no doubt he loves the 55 girl--loves a model he might hire by the hour!

_Gottlieb._ See here! "He has been accustomed," he writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone, and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspiration; 60 but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.

_1st Student._ Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? 65

_Schramm._ Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossom--it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom's place could it continue?

As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, 70 because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with--as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course.

Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the 75 mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?--there's G.o.d to wonder at; and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with 80 respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus--

_1st Student._ Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again!

There you see! Well, this Jules--a wretched fribble --oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other 85 day! Canova's gallery--you know: there he marches first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye; all at once he stops full at the _Psiche-fanciulla_--cannot pa.s.s that old acquaintance without a nod of encouragement--"In your new place, beauty? 90 Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich--I see you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished _Pieta_ for half an hour without moving, till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose into--I say, into--the group; by which gesture you are informed that 95 precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill in the articulation of the knee-joint--and that, likewise, has he mastered at length! Good-by, therefore, to poor Canova--whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor 100 Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble!

_5th Student._ Tell him about the women; go on to the women!

_1st Student._ Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) 105 than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the _Psiche-fanciulla_. Now, I happened to hear of a young Greek--real Greek girl at 110 Malamocco; a true Islander, do you see, with Alciphron's "hair like sea-moss"--Schramm knows!--white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest--a daughter of Natalia, so she swears--that hag Natalia, who helps us to models at three _lire_ an hour. We selected 115 this girl for the heroine of our jest. So first, Jules received a scented letter--somebody had seen his Tydeus at the Academy, and my picture was nothing to it: a profound admirer bade him persevere--would make herself known to him ere long. (Paolina, my little friend of the _Fenice_, 120 transcribes divinely.) And in due time, the mysterious correspondent gave certain hints of her peculiar charms--the pale cheeks, the black hair--whatever, in short, had struck us in our Malamocco model: we retained her name, too--Phene, which is, by interpretation, sea-eagle. Now, 125 think of Jules finding himself distinguished from the herd of us by such a creature! In his very first answer he proposed marrying his monitress: and fancy us over these letters, two, three times a day, to receive and dispatch! I concocted the main of it: relations were in 130 the way--secrecy must be observed--in fine, would he wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united? St--st--Here they come!