“O Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird.”

The first line of the invocation to the spirit of Mrs. Browning in Book I. of The Ring and the Book . Some stupid readers have thought this poem an invocation to our Lord, catching at the words “to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer, or to die.” They thought they detected some familiar words heard in church; and one incompetent critic went so far as to write, “Though Lyric Love is here a quality personified, it seems to be so interchangeably with Christ.... This is the interpretation we attach to the lines, though we have heard that some interpreters have actually considered them to be addre ed to his wife!” ( The Religion of our Literature , by George McCrie, p. 87.) There is really no difficulty about the lines until we come to parse them. Dr. Furnivall has done this in his grammatical analysis of the poem ( Browning Society’s Papers , No. IX., p. 165). An old lady who had read and profited by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progre was advised to read Dr. Cheever’s Lectures in explanation of the allegory; asked how she liked the latter work, she said she understood the Pilgrim’s Progre , and hoped, before she died, to understand Dr. Cheever’s interpretation. I think I understand ‘O Lyric Love’: I can never hope to understand Dr. Furnivall’s analysis. It was called, at the time he wrote it, “Furnivall’s Jubilee Puzzle.”