idyll

Browning's later work is, full of intellect, alive with excellent passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls [50] perhaps more powerful than in any earlier work); notwithstanding all that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret.

(She had advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken.

But, as certain tenacities are stronger than others, Athos was forced to hear Planchet recite his idyls of felicity, translated into a language more chaste than that of Longus.

The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts.

In summary catalogue may be named: lyrics, both delicate and stirring; ballads; romantic dreams and fancies; descriptive poems; sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems, long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions.

"I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more-- never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you: but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathise with him in his decay." As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disk was blood- red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud.

Their life in its own way was an idyl, and it managed to achieve a singular beauty.

May I relate the idyl of your tragic passion, dear Dubois, as an object lesson?"

He made a delicate idyl of it: the sunshine and the sea gave it passion and magic, and the stars added poetry, and the old vicarage garden was a fit and exquisite setting.

It is worth noting, just by way of conclusion, that despite modern scholarship's preference for Browning's nondramatic writings, it is for good reason that it is commonplace to view his oeuvre through the lens of his "dramatic imagination." (38) Of course, he authored plays such as Strafford and Pippa Passes, but also the various titles that he gave to his collections of poetry push in precisely this direction, Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances, Dramatis Personae, and Dramatic Idyls all blurring the usual distinction drawn between dramatic and nondramatic verse.

Courtesy Paratext in Alfred Tennyson, Idyls of the King (Boston,