“‘What stops my despair? This:--‘tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!’ (‘Saul’, 18). “‘What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me; A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.’” (‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, 7).--Rev. Prof. Westcott on Browning’s View of Life (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, iv., 405, 406). 12. Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes, And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep. “Touch him ne’er so lightly.” {Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls. Second Series.} -- * See ‘Pages from an Album’, in ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’ (Scribner’s), for November 1882, pp. 159, 160, where is given a fac-simile of the poet’s Ms. of these verses and of the ten verses he afterwards added, in response, it seems, to a carping critic. -- “Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!” Indeed? Rock’s the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation’s heritage. Memorabilia. 1. Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you, And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new! 2. But you were living before that, And also you are living after; And the memory I started at-- My starting moves your laughter! 3. I crossed a moor, with a name of its own And a certain use in the world, no doubt, Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone ‘Mid the blank miles round about: 4. For there I picked up on the heather And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather! Well, I forget the rest. How it strikes a Contemporary. I only knew one poet in my life: And this, or something like it, was his way.