tive mind, which,
like Boehme's, has the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to
discover the unincarnate absolute essence of things. The maturer
mind craves the vitalizing method of the artist who, like the
magician of Halberstadt, recreates things bodily in all their
beautiful vivid wholeness. Yet the poet who sincerely holds so
fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to the poet who
holds the larger view. His boy-face singing to God above his
ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic
transcendentalism.

[It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme
method in presenting this embodiment of his subject. The
supposition of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing
his own artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his
characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]

22. Boehme: Jacob, an "inspired" German shoemaker (1575-1624), who
wrote "Aurora," "The Three Principles," etc., mystical commentaries
on Biblical events. When twenty-five years old, says Hotham in
"Mysterium Magnum," 1653, "he was surrounded by a divine Light and
replenished with heavenly Knowledge . . . going abroad into the
Fieldes to a Greene before Neys-Gate at Gorlitz and viewing the
Herbes and Grass of the Fielde, in his inward light he saw into
their Essences . . . and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote <De
Signatura Rerum>," on the signatures of things, the "tough book" to
which Browning refers.

37. Halberstadt: Johann Semeca, called Teutonicus, a canon of
Halberstadt in Germany, who was interested in the unchurchly study
of mediaeval science and reputed to be a magician, possessing the
vegetable stone supposed to make plants grow at will, having the
same power over organic life that the philosopher's stone of the
alchemists had over minerals, so that, like Albertus Magnus, another
such mage of the Middle Ages, he could cause flowers to spring up in
the midst of winter.

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

1855

I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was his way.

You saw go up and down Valladolid,
A man of mark, to know next time you saw.
His very serviceable suit of black
Was courtly once and conscientious still,
And many might have worn it, though none did:
The cloak, that somewhat shone and showed the threads,
Had purpose, and the ruff, significance.
He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane,