Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/208

186 wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down, it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms, roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It was good b'ye to the old. It was a sight of one's own immortality and Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.

But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning. Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.

It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real Imitatio Christi when he made something with his hands and saw that it was good. Then we read Andrea del Sarto, despising

{{c|{fs90|This low-pulsed craftsman's hand of mine,}}

knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.

From Browning's day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming to Mary. The notebooks of those young ones who loved thoughts began to be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many of the elder ones to