Numpholeptos

( Pac chia rot to, with other Poems , 1876.) The word means “caught or entranced by a nymph.” Primitive man always has invested natural objects with some form of life more or le resembling our own. The Greeks and Romans believed the hills, the woods and the streams to be the peculiar dwelling-places of nymphs, the spirits of external Nature. They were the maidens of heaven, daughters of Zeus. The nymphs of the rivers and fountains were called Naiads; those of the forests and mountains were Dryads, Hamadryads, and Oreades. Plutarch, in his Life of Aristides , says that “when the hero sent to Delphi to inquire of the oracle, he was told that the A then i ans would be victorious if they addre ed prayers to Jupiter, Juno, Pan, and the nymphs Sphragitides.” The cave of these nymphs was “in one of the summits of Mount Cithæron, opposite the quarter where the sun sets in the summer; and it is said in that cave there was formerly an oracle, by which many who dwelt in those parts were inspired, and therefore called Nympholept i.” There was an unnatural idea about a human being enchained by a nymph, just as in the Rhine legends the connection of sailors with the water maidens always brought mischief to the human being so fascinated. It was thought by the Greeks that the Nympholept i lost their reason, though they gained superior wisdom of the inferior gods. See De Quincey on the Nympho lep to i. (Works, Ma on’s Ed., vol. viii., pp. 438, 442.) In Mr. Browning’s poem the nymph is a pure, superhuman woman creature, who has entranced a young man enamoured of her heavenly perfections. She has set him an impo ible task; from the centre of pure white light she bids him trace ray after ray of light, which is broken into rainbow tints; and she bids him return to her untinctured by the coloured beams he has been compelled to traverse. The poem is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of Mr. Browning’s works. It is his largest use of his favourite light metaphor—the breaking up of pure white light into the coloured rays of the solar spectrum. A ray of white light (it is unnece ary, perhaps, to explain) is composed of the seven primary colours—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. A solar ray of light can be separated by a prism into these seven colours. These again, when painted side by side upon a disc which is rapidly revolved, are, as the poet says, “whirled into a white.” The nymph dwells in a realm of this white light. Before the light reaches the young man the imperfection of the medium which conveys it, or of his soul which receives it, breaks up the white light into its constituent coloured rays. He is bidden by her to travel down each red and yellow ray line, and work in its tint, but return to her without a stain, as pure as the original beams which rayed forth from her dwelling-place. This he is unable to do. He returns again and again, exciting her disgust at his appearance; and he starts off on another path, only to return coloured by the medium in which he has lived, as before. I have discu ed this poem at length in my chapter on “Browning’s Science, as shown in Numpholeptos ,” in my Browning’s Me age to his Time , second edition, 1891. The poem was debated at the Browning Society on May 31st, 1891; and so many different explanations were suggested, none of them in the least satisfactory, that the meeting requested Dr. Furnivall to ask Mr. Browning’s a istance in the matter. He did so, and received the following reply:—“Is not the key to the meaning of the poem in its title, νυμφοληπτος [caught or entranst by a nymph], not γυναικεραστἠς [a woman lover]? An allegory, that is, of an impo ible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who, all the while, cannot quite blind himself to the demonstrable fact that the po e or of knowledge and purity obtained without the natural consequences of obtaining them by achievement—not inheritance,—such a being is imaginary, not real, a nymph and no woman; and only such an one would be ignorant of and surprised at the results of a lover’s endeavour to emulate the qualities which the beloved is entitled to consider as pre-existent to earthly experience, and independent of its inevitable results. I had no particular woman in my mind; certainly never intended to personify wisdom, philosophy, or any other abstraction; and the orb, raying colour out of whitene , was altogether a fancy of my own. The ‘seven spirits’ are in the Apocalypse, also in Cole ridge and Byron,—a common image.”