sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour,
but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy
intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as
he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it
to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And
certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for
which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet
breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his
song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and
impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but
breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl
and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of
Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the
ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might
yet be, that

"boyhood of wonder and hope,
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,"

all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his
single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes
across the spiritual darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion
scattered the shadows of Saturnian night.

[Footnote 24: _E.B.B. to R.B._, Dec. 10, 1845.]

CHAPTER IV.

WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. _MEN AND WOMEN_.

This foot, once planted on the goal;
This glory-garland round my soul.
--_The Last Ride Together_.

Warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
--LANDOR.

I.

The _Bells and Pomegranates_ made no very great way with the public,
which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. But both the title
and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the
most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the
Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and
pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In
the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as Browning expected his
readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and disco