escape out of certain gloomy ideas which always possess me when I am in the immediate presence of physical ailment; and I did not care to write you that sort of letter which one is apt to send under such circumstances, since I gather from your letters that you have enough and to spare of these dismal down-weighings of the flesh's ponderous cancer upon suffering and thoughtful souls. I am glad, therefore, that I waited until this divine day. If the year were an Orchestra, to-day would be the Flutetone in it. A serene Hope, just on the verge of realising itself: a tender loneliness,-what some German calls Waldeinsamkeit, wood-loneliness, the ineffable withdrawal-feeling that comes over one when he hides himself in among the trees, and knows himself shut in by their purity, as by a fragile yet impregnable wall, from the suspicions and the trade-regulations of men; and an inward thrill, in the air, or in the sunshine, one knows not which, half like the thrill of the passion of love, and half like the thrill of the passion of friendship:-these, which make up the office of the flute-voice in those poems which the old masters wrote for the Orchestra, also prevail throughout to-day. Do you like as I do-on such a day to go out into the sunlight and stop thinking,-lie fallow, like a field, and absorb those certain liberal potentialities which will in after days reappear, duly formulated, duly grown, duly perfected, as poems? I have a curiosity to know if to you, as to me, there come such as this day-a day exquisitely satisfying with all the fulnesses of the Spring, and filling you as full of nameless tremors as a girl on a wedding-morn; and yet, withal, a day which utterly denies you the gift of speech, which puts its finger on the lip of your inspiration, which inexorably enforces upon your soul a silence that you infinitely long to break, a day, in short, which takes absolute possession of you, and says to you, in tones which command obedience, to-day you must forego expression and all outcome, you must remain a fallow field, for the sun and wind to fertilise, nor shall any corn or flowers sprout into visible green and red until to-morrow,-mandates, further, that you have learned after a little experience not only not to fight against, but to love and revere as the wise communication of the Unseen Powers. Have you seen Browning's "The Ring and the Book"? I am confident that, at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one-as in the old tale-crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist o' the neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a marvellous tortuous passage. Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't and can't come straight. A hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock. But what a shock it is! Did you ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? In a thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch him! This is the way Robert Browning catches you. The first sixty or seventy pages of "The Ring and the Book" are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the English language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, that of Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini, are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, me judice. You get lightning-glimpses-and, as one naturally expects from lightning, zig-zag glimpses-into the intense night of the passion of these souls. It is entirely wonderful and without precedent. The fitful play of Guido's lust, and scorn, and hate, and cowardice, closes with a master-stroke: Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" Pompilia, mark you, is dead, by Guido's own hand; deliberately stabbed, because he hated her purity, which all along he has reviled and mocked with the Devil's own malignant ingenuity of sarcasm. You spoke of a project you wished to tell me. Let me hear it. Your plans are always of interest to me. Can I help you? I've not put pen to paper, in the literary way, in a long time. How I thirst to do so, how I long to sing a thousand various songs that oppress me, unsung,—is inexpressible. Yet, the mere work that brings bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this is a sorrowful thing. Nobody likes my poems except two or three friends,who are themselves poets, and can supply themselves! Strictly upon Scriptural principle, I've written you (as you see) almost entirely about myself. This is doing unto you as I would you should do unto me. Go, and do likewise. Write me about yourself. Your friend, SIDNEY LANIER. |