The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (1889) - Tapa blanda

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WITH BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE. Ay, this same midnight, by this chair of mine, Come and review thy counsels: art thou still Staunch to their teaching?—not as fools opine Its purport might be, but as subtler skill Could, through turbidity, the loaded line Of logic casting, sound deep, deeper, till It touched a quietude and reached a shrine And recognized harmoniously combine Evil with good, and hailed truth's triumph—thine, Sage dead long since, Bernard de Mandeville! Only, 't is no fresh knowledge that I crave, Fuller truth yet, new gainings from the grave; Here we alive must needs deal fairly, turn To what account Man may Man's portion, learn Man's proper play with truth in part, before Entrusted with the whole, I ask no more Than smiling witness that I do my best With doubtful doctrine : afterward the rest! So, silent face me while I think and speak! A full disclosure ? Such would outrage law. Law deals the same with soul and body: seek Full truth my soul may, when some babe, I saw A new-born weakling, starts up strong—not weak— Man every whit, absolved from earning awe, Pride, rapture, if the soul attains to wreak Its will on flesh, at last can thrust, lift, draw, As mind bids muscle—mind which long has striven, Painfully urging body's impotence To effort whereby—once law's barrier riven, Life's rule abolished — body might dispense With infancy's probation, straight be given —Not by foiled darings, fond attempts back-driven, Fine faults of growth, brave sins which saint when shriven— To stand full-statured in magnificence. No : as with body so deals law with soul That's stung to strength through weakness, strives for good Through evil,—earth its race-ground, heaven its goal, Presumably: so far I understood...