noble things, not dream them, all day long . . ." such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the first of the moderns, and he wrote:
Not on the vulgar mass
Called "work," must sentence pass.
And again:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
And again:
He fixed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
The way of Martha had given place to the way of Mary. My elders read Rabbi Ben Ezra to comfort one another:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made;
and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those I loved; I carried it with me
