192 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS the rescue, and presented the young poet with the cost of printing the lit- tle book, j30. It was published at the price of a few shillings, and of course did not sell ; but the author had the curious satisfaction of seeing a copy of this original edition bring twenty-five guineas under the hammer a few years ago. "Pauline" was not reprinted till the issue of the six -volume edition of Mr. Browning's works, in 1869. It was followed by the more ambitious " Paracelsus," a striking attempt to fill a mediaeval outline with a compact body of modern thought ; but in spite of the lovely lyric, " Over the sea our galleys went," and in spite of other beauties, the public did not heed the book, and it had no success except with a very small circle. It must be remembered that those days were days of poetic exhaustion. Shelley, Byron, and Scott were dead ; the year before, Coleridge had followed them to the grave ; Wordsworth was old, and his muse no longer spoke with her accents of an earlier day. Amid a mass of " keepsake " literature, affectations, and mediocrity, the still, small voice of the " Poems by Two Brothers " was heard by few, and that of " Paracelsus " was heard by fewer still. Two years later the young poet came forward with the historical play of " Strafford," which was produced at Covent Garden with Macready in the title- part. It was not* exactly a failure, but though the play itself and Macready's acting attracted the admiration of the critics, it was at once seen that the drama contained too much psychology and too little movement for a popular success. Mr. Browning, however, did not, for a long time to come, cease to be a "writer of plays," though it was not till eleven years after that another drama of his, " A Blot on the Scutcheon," was performed on the stage. The interval, how- ever, was full of poetic activity. The energetic search of the members of the Browning Society, and especially of its founder, Mr. Furnivall, has succeeded in putting on record the place of first publication of several scattered poems of about this date. Four of them, including " Porphyria," and " Johannes Agric- ola," appeared in the Monthly Repository, edited by W. J. Fox, the Unita- rian minister who was afterward so well known for his 'eloquent speeches against the Corn Laws. In 1840 came a small volume, bound, after the fashion of the time, in gray paper boards, and called " Sordello," after the Provencal poet mentioned in the " Purgatory " of Dante. The book appeared without preface or dedication, but in the collected edition of 1863 it bears a note addressed by Mr. Browning to his friend Monsieur Milsand, of Dijon, which contains the characteristic expressions, " I wrote it twenty-five years ago for only a few. . . . My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul ; little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so." " Sordello" in its original form is very rare and valuable now, as all the early editions of Mr. Browning's poetry have become ; but on its first appearance nobody cared for it it was regarded as noth- ing but a hopeless puzzle by a bewildered and defeated public. Even now, when Mr. Browning has long since formed his own public, " Sordello " is probably less read than any other work of his ; it is too obscure and confused both in plot and in thought. But all the same, there are many interesting things in " Sordello,"
