The Lost Leader
by Robert Browning

English poet and dramatist, whose most ambitious work was The Ring and the Book (1868-69): a verse narrative in ten parts based on a real murder trial conducted in Florence. He also wrote and published Pauline (1833), Paracelsus (1835), Sordello (1840) and Strafford (1837), a play that ran for only five nights. Two other plays A Blot in the Scutcheon (1843) and Colombe's Birthday (1843), were also performed briefly in 1843 and 1853, after which Browning wrote mainly dramatic poetry. He published a series of eight volumes of verse, under the title Bells and Pomegranates, between 1841 and 1846. After his marriage to the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1846, Browning's most important works, along with The Ring and the Book, were Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), an exploration of worship; a volume of fifty poems entitled Men and Women (1850) and Dramatis Personae (1854). The influence of his handling of diction and the monologue form is perhaps to be noted in such twentieth century poets as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

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The Lost Leader
by Robert Browning

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat -
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags -were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us, -they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

We shall march prospering, -not through his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, -not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done, -while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more triumph for devils and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part -the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him -strike gallantly,
Menace our heart ere we pierce through his own;
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

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The Lost Leader by Robert Browning