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 discoursing,”—­her wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning’s poetry—­

     “Some ‘Pomegranate,’ which, if cut deep down the middle,
      Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”

The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25] and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was finally to draw them together.  A few years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in France, and she laughingly accepted the omen.  The omen was fulfilled; Elizabeth Browning’s poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.