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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Complete in One Volume from the Last London Edition Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Complete in One Volume from the Last London Edition Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Complete in One Volume from the Last London Edition
• Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
  The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Complete in One Volume from the Last London Edition
  James Miller, Publisher, 779 Broadway, New York, 1870, Decorative Cloth, , Reprint in One volume of first American , Very Good /No Jacket
  
  

  533 pp. Brown cloth stamped in black and gold. Lovely floral design. AEG. A reprint of the 1862 edition, 'Complete in One Volume.' There is some fraying beginning at top and bottom of spine. Three corners are bent but barely rubbed. The brown endpapers have split at the hinges, but the cloth hinges are still intact. 'Experience, like a pale musician, holds / A dulcimer of patience in his hand / Whence harmonies we cannot understand, Of God's will in His worlds, the strain unfolds / In sad perplexed minors.'

  

A Musical Instrument

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,       	 	
    Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
    With the dragon-fly on the river.
 	
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
    From the deep cool bed of the river;	 	
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
    Ere he brought it out of the river.
 	
High on the shore sat the great god Pan,	 	
    While turbidly flow’d the river;
And hack’d and hew’d as a great god can	
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed 	
    To prove it fresh from the river.
 	
He cut it short, did the great god Pan
    (How tall it stood in the river!),
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,	 	
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notch’d the poor dry empty thing 	
    In holes, as he sat by the river.
 	
‘This is the way,’ laugh’d the great god Pan	
    (Laugh’d while he sat by the river),
‘The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’	 	
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, 	
    He blew in power by the river.
 	
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
    Piercing sweet by the river! 
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! 	
The sun on the hill forgot to die,	 	
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly	
    Came back to dream on the river.
 	
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
    To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
    As a reed with the reeds of the river.