SOURCE: Stapleton, Laurence. “Sir Thomas Browne and Meditative Prose.” In The Elected Circle: Studies in the Art of Prose, pp. 42-72. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Stapleton offers an evaluation of Browne's major prose works.]

Sir Thomas Browne is in one way the most original prose writer of the seventeenth century; not simply for the uniqueness of tone, the individual voice imparted to every sentence, but because he evolved a form of writing that contained the seed of growth. The sermon had no future, the Baconian essay was perfected by Bacon, never to be equalled. Browne's prose, in contrast, created an encounter of thought with observation available for new development long afterwards by writers as different as Dr. Johnson and De Quincey, Emerson and Melville.

In his lifetime Browne published four books (Religio Medici 1642, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 1646, the related pieces Urn Burial and Garden of Cyrus 1658). After his death another discourse appeared, Christian Morals (1716). Although he may not have finished working on it, its composition is deliberate and represents a further stage in Browne's development.

In the making of Religio Medici, Browne was fortunate in being at a remote place where he had little access to books. We need not doubt his statement that it was composed “at leisurable hours” for his own private exercise. As T. S. Eliot has suggested, what is usually called lyric and might preferably be called meditative poetry is written in the first voice, that of the poet speaking to himself or no one. And a consonant voice is the secret of Browne's Religio; unlike the sermon or the pamphlet or oration, it is not addressed to an audience, does not seek to convince, persuade, or change commitment. From the outset, there is a turning of thought in the light, an awareness of the dark from which it comes. The progress is not by heaping of proofs or logic, but by an undercurrent of association.

Like a bird circling before landing, Browne begins by reading the bearings he knows, his unbellicose acceptance of Christian faith as channelled through the Reformation and the Church of England. His refusal to judge “heretics” like Jews and Turks, his sympathy with Catholic ceremonies, set a mood for the discussion first of heresies that have appealed to him and then of the experience of belief. All this first part is to prepare for a wider peregrination. He calmly states: “Since I was of understanding to know we know nothing my reason hath beene more pliable to the will of faith; I am now content to understand a mystery without a rigid definition in an easie and Platonick description”¹ (i, 19). And thus he is ready to start his way into the great central themes of Religio. His manner of opening them is significant: “In my solitary and retired imaginations … I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate him and his attributes who is ever with mee, especially those two mighty ones, his wisedome and eternitie …” (i, 19-20). The whole first section of Religio, the fundament of Faith, exemplifies Whitehead's finding that religion is what man does with his solitariness. The result, for Browne, is the contemplation of Wisdom and Eternity in God.

After unravelling initially these two great skeins, Browne expands upon the theme of wisdom. Throughout his treatment of both themes, however, there is the recurrent testing of man's capacity for knowledge; if no man can attain wisdom in the final sense, yet the thought of it alone makes Browne content that he was “bred in the way of study” (i, 21). Man is unready for “Contemplations Metaphysicall” upon the nature of God's wisdom, he is called to study “those impressions hee hath left on his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature” (i, 22). By a great loop of meaning Browne expands his theme to encompass his reading of the Book of Nature. He reveals his delight in the study of minute things, his feeling that nothing is ugly except chaos, and he rises finally to his declaration that Nature is the Art of God. Throughout, he is sustained by his conviction of the unity between perceiver and perceived; as he says, in a sentence Emerson or Thoreau would find prophetic of their own beliefs, “Wee carry with us the wonders, wee seeke without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume” (i, 24).

In this entrance to the wisdom men may truly seek, Browne deals inimitably with themes which were, of course, known to, accessible to his potential readers. This is, I think, a reason why the great prose writers of the seventeenth century possess an advantage not shared by their successors of the nineteenth. Because the earlier ones could in a measure take for granted a greater share of assent, they avoid eccentricity, whim, or overemphasis.

The difference between the kind of self-portrait created by, say, Lamb or De Quincey, and Browne's, is the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness. Browne comes before us as a believer discovering to us only as he does to himself the perspectives of his mind and feelings, which he refuses to regard as fixed forever, yet relies upon. The features of his self-portrait are given at the outset of Religio. He tells us how his reverence is awakened, and how he refuses to divide himself from others on the grounds of opinion, and most of all of the nature of his will to believe;

Some beleeve the better for seeing Christ his Sepulchre, and when they have seene the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily I blesse my selfe, and am thankefull that I lived not in the dayes of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his Disciples; I would not have beene one of the Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christs Patients, on whom he wrought his wonders; then had my faith beene thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe & saw not.

(i, 18)

In Part I the incidental detail of behaviour (“At a solemne Procession I have wept abundantly,” i, 13) is rare. What we have is a pattern of positions from which the commitments of mind and feelings may be observed, in the “Cosmography of my selfe” (i, 24). What in a self-portrait by Rembrandt would be conveyed by the expression of the eyes and mouth, the disposition of the countenance, Browne gives to us by the lineaments of his convictions. The portrait deepens towards the end of Part i, as he contemplates death, resurrection, immortality. With a musical deftness, by transitions like breathing or walking, Browne leads his reader on a winding but not aimless path. He has, as a human being, taken his place on the Great Chain of Being to examine his relationship to angels or devils, spirit or matter. And as so often, the relationship of man to other forms of being is to Browne a kind of metaphor in existence itself; thus in his famous image man is an “amphibium” living in the two worlds of matter and spirit. In acknowledging death as inevitable to man, Browne's portrait becomes more distinctly that of an individual person. “I am naturally bashfull, nor hath conversation, age, or travell, beene able to effront, or enharden me; yet I have one part of modesty, which I have seldome discovered in another, … I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof …” (i, 51). Accepting death as part of his condition, he nevertheless takes a deep reckoning of his lineage in the world. As he was to do with more vaulting architecture in Urn Burial, he thinks of time's end and its beginning, and his participation in the whole of it:

Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ; yet it is true in some sense if I say it of my selfe, for I was not only before my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the Idea of God. … And in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv'd of Cain.

(i, 68)

In the first part of Religio, Browne has achieved a self-understanding that the sermon writer can only touch upon inferentially, and character writer tangentially. In his contemplation of the Wisdom and Eternity of God, Browne has placed himself upon the Chain of Being, and found his place in and throughout time. Throughout his discourse by his responsiveness to the mutual impact of belief and idea Browne has shown that the discovery of Faith and Hope is like an antiphon of the unity and diversity in nature itself.

In Part ii, devoted to the theme of Charity, Browne portrays the freedom of attention that comes from tolerance. His liking for variety in people, his being “framed and constellated to all climates,” his hatred of useless controversy, and of the hostility of nations to each other, disclose a willingness to measure life that is shadowed only by a dislike of the “Multitude.” Although Browne does not tell us as much about himself as Montaigne does, he writes in a similar spirit, with a humour divers et ondoyant. We learn of his interest in languages, astronomy, botany, and above all of his susceptibility to music. The dominant theme is that of man as the microcosm, but here, as he brings himself to our notice, he demonstrates that it is indeed the microcosm of his own frame that he casts his eye upon. In spite of the preparation for death and the expectation of an unknowable life thereafter, Religio Medici, with its love of mystery, and willingness to permit differences, is a young man's book, a harmony of convictions that are in youth if at all to be harmoniously combined—the portrait of the believer as a young man. Perhaps nowhere until we reach the less closely woven pattern of the early volumes of Thoreau's Journal is there a comparable book.

In Religio, Browne has made a true advance in the art of prose, developing a form in which an individual sensibility is active in the exploration of ideas, without didacticism. When this book was published, approximately seven years after its composition, Browne must have been preparing his next, much longer one, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. For the reader interested in the thought of the seventeenth century, this is an absorbing document. Written in the Baconian spirit, testing popular fallacies by “sense” (experiment) and reason, as well as by a comparison of authorities, Pseudodoxia shows some noticeable changes in Browne's thinking. He has developed a new and firm allegiance to “reason” that is quite different from the attitude expressed in Religio where he had maintained “this I think is no vulgar part of faith to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses” (i, 19). In Pseudodoxia, reason is “the very root of our natures, and the principles thereof common unto all” (ii, 49). And Christ himself is praised because his teaching appealed to the mind, and his life “as it was conformable unto His Doctrine, so was that unto the highest rules of Reason” (ii, 28).

Both Religio and Pseudodoxia show the workings of a mind sceptical in T. S. Eliot's sense of the word: “Scepticism—by which of course I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision.”² In Religio the scepticism is directed not against the willingness to believe, but against the arrogance of some believers toward others. In Pseudodoxia, scepticism is an exercise in discrimination—for observers, readers, and relayers of uncritically received opinions. But in casting his net so widely to catch popular and obstinate fallacies, Browne is overwhelmed by endless and unrelated particulars. Externally, Pseudodoxia has a planned structure. Browne begins with errors respecting the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, proceeds to deal with fallacies of opinion about man, and reserves to the last those attaching to wide branches of human activity, culture, and learning. But, if there is a formal pattern giving the order of books a seemingly ascending purpose in accord with the Chain of Being, there is no organic relationship of the separate inquiries or larger categories. The book is a collection of fragments, of details oddly assorted, having no unity in themselves, cast up together like the strange cargoes of wrecked ships. The freight is assembled by the driving force of a man's curiosity, which, lacking a central purpose, leaves it in curious heaps. Although in one of his memorable phrases Browne compares this book to a voyage into “the America and untravelled parts of Truth” (ii, 5), there is no headway. He provided what is perhaps the best comment on the whole: “although in this long journey we miss the intended end, yet are there many things of truth disclosed by the way; and the collateral verity may … requite the capital indiscovery” (ii, 481).

From Pseudodoxia we can expect no new accomplishment in the art of prose as it builds structure out of theme. The book has, however, a unique value, which may be savoured at random: its individual idiom. Opening the volumes almost anywhere the reader can hear the voice of Browne. I shall take only two examples, the first from a deliberately casual turning of the pages.

Wondrous things are promised from the Glow-worm; from thence perpetual lights are pretended, and waters said to be distilled which afford a lustre in the night; and this is asserted by Cardan, Albertus, Gaudentinus, Mizaldus, and many more. But hereto we cannot with reason assent: for the light made by this animal depends much upon its life. For when they are dead they shine not, nor alwaies while they live; but are obscure or light, according to the protrusion of their luminous parts, as observation will instruct us. For this flammeous light is not over all the body, but only visible on the inward side; in a small white part near the tail. Where this is full and seemeth protruded, there ariseth a flame of a circular figure and Emerald green colour; which is discernable in any dark place in the day; but when it falleth and seemeth contracted, the light disappeareth, and the colour of the part only remaineth. Now this light, as it appeareth and disappeareth in their life, so doth it go quite out at their death. As we have observed in some, which preserved in fresh grass have lived and thrived eighteen days; but as they declined, and the luminous humour dried, their light grew languid, and at last went out with their lives.

(ii, 262)

Not every part of Pseudodoxia has the animation and progress of this passage, but many have. Browne's eye and mind are upon the object, some of the finest strokes of phrasing result from the effort towards accuracy and compression—“obscure,” “flammeous,” “a small white part near the tail.” There is no effort to enhance the importance of what he is saying, but his grave and equable concentration on the whole phenomenon is reflected in the alliteration of “perpetual lights are pretended” or of the whole last clause. Even a writer as praiseworthy as Evelyn cannot, for example in his Sylva, rival Browne's ability to recapture the reader's attention after he has lost it.

Again, in a section marked by inherent humour, Browne begins his argument as follows:

Another mistake there may be in the Picture of our first Parents, who after the manner of their posterity are both delineated with a Navel. And this is observable not only in ordinary and stained pieces, but in the Authentic draughts of Urbin, Angelo and others. Which not withstanding cannot be allowed, except we impute that unto the first cause, which we impose not on the second; or what we deny unto nature, we impute into Naturity itself; that is, that in the first and most accomplished piece, the Creator affected superfluities, or ordained parts without use or office.

(ii, 345)

This is elegantly succinct; care of statement governs the central antithesis, the building for emphasis of a sentence on a dependent clause, the coined word “Naturity,” and triumphant expression “first and most accomplished piece.” No one but Browne could have written it.

The little essay on glowworms is based on observation, that on the lack of a navel in Adam and Eve rests upon reasoning from principles as well. In Pseudodoxia the one kind of writing rarely derives strength from the other. The errors Browne confutes no longer prevail, but it is the lack of pattern in what he is concerned with that has brought upon his book the decay of obsolescence. When Bacon is engaged in attacking a whole way of thought, to establish another, there is substantial meaning in the contest. But in Pseudodoxia Browne often, although not always, wars with trivia, and there is no progress in the campaign as a whole. What rewards the admirer of Browne who stays the course with this book, is the constant presence of a sensibility. Perhaps the shortcoming of Pseudodoxia Epidemica is that Browne failed to make his own persona a part of the structure itself. Whereas in Religio the light and shadows of the writer's moral portrait give the whole both design and intensity, in Pseudodoxia types of information govern the pattern. We read, when we do, because the texture of the language conveys an individual idiom, but it is accompaniment, not theme.

Differently planned and executed, Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus open new possibilities of structure, new difficulties, new solutions. Furthermore, there is a bridge of meaning between these two works that discloses a further chance for the writer of “linked analogies.”

If Browne had never written the fifth chapter of Urn Burial, only specialists would now read the first four. Why did he need to catalogue and survey burial customs to ascend to his meditations on memory, time, immortality? George Herbert once said, “Particulars ever touch, and waken more than generals.” But for certain prose writers and some poets the truth is that particulars are specially needed before the writer can approach “generals”—do not take the place, but initiate the larger sense of wonder.

Of all Browne's works, Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus have the clearest structure, and in these two also he finally develops a sustained rhythm of language that corroborates and confirms the central emotion. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the different stages of life from minerals through plants and animals to human beings provide a merely external framework, a means of classifying the many otherwise unrelated details. But in the prefatory epistles to both Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus Browne discloses themes that will unify the work as a whole, even though they may not achieve an equal presence or resonance in each chapter.

When, in the letter prefatory to Urn Burial, Browne tells his friend that “We were hinted by the occasion, not catched the opportunity to write of old things, or intrude upon the Antiquary” (i, 132), he shows that the discovery of the urns at Walsingham did not furnish the subject of his essay, but called upon his previous meditations. He indicates in the epistle the direction in which these meditations will lead. In the first paragraph he establishes the mood of wonder about the relativity of awareness of time, in pointing out that the first generations of men had no expectation of long futurity, and “having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations” (i, 131). The fact that, nevertheless, later men would dig up and study early relics prompts Browne's initial irony: the uncertainty not only of human expectations, but of most kinds of mortal knowledge, the questions “who knows,” “who hath” that will echo through his discourse.

In a way that is more true of Browne than of any other prose writer of the seventeenth century; he incorporates his own point of view toward the subject as at the heart of all he will say, his awareness of the discrepancies between time and human memory. What a difference it made to man's way of thinking, he suggests, when the number of living exceeded the dead!

The dedicatory epistle then informs the reader that death itself is not the subject of Urn Burial, but the customs relating to death as a clue to man's sense of his place in time, and of what lies beyond time, and is to be to him infinitely more valuable than fame.

In the chapters that intervene between the suggestive introduction and the sustained andante of chapter five, Browne seldom rises from his intricate patterns of fact to any larger reflection or principle. At the beginning of the first chapter, however, he embarks on a conception that speaks for the central experience of the Renaissance: discovery, the kinds, dimensions and newness of it. Some, he begins disarmingly, would neglect discoveries of the subterranean world, but in so doing they would abridge knowledge itself, for “Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another” (i, 135). He then links this idea with his underlying theme by announcing time as the mother of discoveries, which reveals old things in heaven, and new parts of the globe itself. This was indeed the startling conjunction for men of his period, the simultaneous acquisition of knowledge about eras of time previously unknown or little known, with that of new areas of the earth, and comparable societies of living creatures of all kinds. The newness of space and the deeper dimensions of the past come together, and more is yet to be learned of both, since “that great Antiquity America lay buried for thousands of years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us” (i, 135).

From this challenging beginning Browne passes rapidly to the tissue of facts about burial or its alternatives that fill up the first four chapters of his book. He deftly indicates reasons for the different customs in the possible attitudes of the ancients toward the elements themselves: earth, water, air, and fire. After exploring the curiosities as he sees them of kinds of cremation, interment, or exposure, he turns to a consideration of these particular Walsingham urns which have “hinted the occasion” of his whole discourse. His interest here, in explaining why he thinks them Roman, seems to lie in the past of his own land and particularly of Norwich. These puzzling urns contained no coins or medals, and a relic like the blue opal that brings a flicker of colour to Browne's somber pages, was no adequate clue to the time of their depositing.

Throughout this part there are many signs of the closeness of Browne's writing to his notebooks. Incomplete sentences or clauses show hardly any art in the transposition of a detail to the page: “Than the time of these Urnes deposited, or precise Antiquity of these Reliques, nothing of more uncertainty. … The Province of Brittain in so divided a distance from Rome, beholding the faces of many Imperiall persons. … A great obscurity herein, because, no medall or Emperours Coyne enclosed, which might denote the date of their enterrments; observable in many Urnes, and found in those of Spittle Fields by London, which contained the Coynes of Claudius, Vespasian, Commodus, Antonimus, attended with Lacrymatories, Lamps, Bottles of Liquor, and other appurtenances of affectionate superstition, which in these rurall enterrments were wanting” (i, 144). Many other examples of rapid jottings and hypothetical queries occur. Sentences end with admissions of uncertainty: “we hold no authentick account”; “we have no historical assertion or denial”; “there is no assured conclusion.” These convey not only the honest scepticism that runs through Pseudodoxia Epidemica, but also Browne's sense that it would be desirable to know more; he contrasts known with unknown customs throughout.

In his description of the Walsingham urns and his attempt to relate them to other British antiquities, there is a kind of observation similar to an archaeologist's. Browne's commonplace books must have been arranged by topics, or have been extraordinarily well-indexed. He seems fascinated by the particulars of the articles buried with the dead—whether bay leaves, cypress, or other kinds of wood are to be found with some remains—and in this context the blue opal is mentioned again.

Only once in chapter three (at the end) does Browne progress to his larger theme, that the hope of resurrection surpasses a survival of relics:

Severe contemplators observing these lasting reliques, may think them good monuments of persons past, little advantage to future beings. … And if according to learned conjecture, the bodies of men shall rise where their greatest Reliques remain, many are not like to erre in the Topography of their Resurrection, though their bones or bodies be after translated by Angels into the field of Ezechiel's vision, or as some will order it, into the Valley of Judgment, or Jehosaphat.

(i, 157)

Here, for almost the first time since the dedicatory epistle, Browne permits his thinking to rise from the mosaic of curiosities to a more inclusive idea. And in chapter four the ascent is continued. Urn Burial begins to be knit together as a whole, and chapter four is the keystone of the arch. For while allowing himself still to dwell curiously on varying customs of Christians, the ancient Gentiles (Greeks and Romans), the nub of Browne's questioning is what kind of expectation of futurity human beings have experienced. He strikes great sparks from his flint. The whole inquiry radiates from his comparison of two infants in the womb, debating the state of the world they are to be born into, with the uncertainties of both Christians and others concerning the state after death. “The particulars of future beings must need be dark unto ancient Theories, which Christian Philosophy yet determines in a Cloud of opinions” (i, 162). And he ponders the place of ancient philosophers, Plato, Socrates, and Epicurus, in Dante's fabulous hell. He leads to his conclusion that “Happy are they, which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say little for futurity, but from reason” (i, 163). The reader is thus prepared for the longer flight of the final chapter, with its search through layers of the past, offset by the “pious rapture of futurity.” From the curious and speculative mood of the opening chapters Browne has emerged into a tone primarily of wonder.

Browne never wrote anything so continuous, so thoroughly composed as the last chapter of Urn Burial. No one who has read it needs to be told that there is nothing like it in English prose, except a few sections of its companion piece, The Garden of Cyrus. Here are seventeen paragraphs in a sustained, continuous rhythm that rises to a crescendo in the farthest reaches of meaning, and ebbs to a contemplative close. Browne is now emancipated from his notes, perhaps because he has already set down the gist of his readings and explained the objects of his attention. Thought has preceded this writing: it brings us the outcome of thought in a unique sensibility. The grave spondees of the opening sentence announce the theme, anticipate the form of the whole chapter by means of an ironic question:

Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living ones of Methusaleh, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, out-worn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and trampling of three conquests; What Prince can promise such diuturnity unto his Reliques, or might not gladly say.

Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim (i, 164)

Here, two stretches of past time are contrasted—the life of the longest-lived man, as briefer than the survival of the dead bones in these urns, and the hope of some contemporary prince for future fame—an expectation to be refuted as mortally deceptive in all that follows. Different levels of history—known lives as against those that have disappeared from memory—lead to the puzzle of contemporary man's place in the whole time-scheme. For Browne, as for many in the seventeenth century, present time is late in history; even those solicitous of fame cannot expect as much of it, because they cannot expect as many generations to succeed them, as could men of Biblical days or the Greeks or Romans. Browne's is a weighty farewell to the value the Renaissance attached to fame, yet the appetite for fame and the accidental loss of it engage his curiosity. His words are moving because he ponders the ties binding generations of men to each other, and shows their frailty compared with the eventual contemporaneity of all in the resurrection that is the end point of his discourse. But he does not propose much about the state, or the content of immortality—very different his concerns, say, from those of Baxter in The Saints' Everlasting Rest. Nor does he exhort to belief; unlike Taylor in Holy Dying he refrains from adjuration or warning. He simply poses a mighty premise, in the light of which oblivion equals fame, and obscurity, recognition.

The relativity of human computations is minor, when even the heavens manifest change—a cosmic scale refutes the pretensions of the world scale. Thus we are confronted by the purity of a sheer concept; Browne does not create an image of individual survival, but reveals that “there is nothing strictly immortall but immortality” (i, 169). At the height of his discourse, affirming that the sufficiency of immortality frustrates earthly glory, Browne makes a climax with a surprising sentence—like a new instrument entering. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us” (i, 169). Affirmation of life, except tangentially and implicitly, is rare in Browne, rarer in the seventeenth-century sermon writers. Here his contrast is between the pure flame of life and “prodigall blazes” of extravagant obsequies. But the surprise, the climax, is real and essential—what is all this thirst for immortality but an admiration of life?

The essay as a whole does not deal with, but prepares for as its solution, “the Metaphysicks of true belief” (i, 171). Browne's vast range of examples, from history, literature, and travel as well as archaeological evidence, has to do with human activities. What he has written is not primarily religious, though it concludes with a revelation of religious feeling. “And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven …” (i, 170). No argument is here, only the mystery of steps of suggestion.

Because Browne is not trying to create belief or to reprove unbelievers, and because at the same time he could assume the presence of belief in his readers, he was able in the last section of Urn Burial to meditate fully on ideas that are difficult of access. He was able to speak of human quandaries that elude conversation in our time because we have no terms in which to discuss them. For him the route to this ascent was by observation of many particular habits and ways of men. In The Garden of Cyrus his procedure is similar, and in parts of the last two sections at least he reaches the same ease of meditation.

In some respects The Garden of Cyrus is the most carefully planned of Browne's works and is striking because he makes his procedure in thinking on the chosen theme an explicit part of the plan. In his autobiography Safe Conduct, Pasternak refers to “botany as his first passion in response to the five-petalled persistence of the plant.”³ This was a discovery Browne had made for himself, but it is not clear whether the genesis of The Garden of Cyrus lay in his experimental notes on actual observation or whether the fascination arose from his reading two old treatises, by Benoit Court and J. B. Della Porta, describing the “quincunx” or pattern of planting trees and gardens with one tree or plant in the center, the others in the corners of a parallelogram. Whether the printed sources, or his own discerning of patterns in growth and form of every kind, took precedence, is relatively unimportant. What matters is the effort that Browne made in The Garden of Cyrus to connect reading and seeing and to elicit from them truth of a contemplative order.

Professor Frank Huntley, whose work on Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus contributes more to our understanding of them than any other study, sees in the five chapters of the latter work an outward conformation of the quincuncial theme. However that may be, in designating the first two chapters as an “artificial” consideration of his theme, the next as “natural” and the last two as “mystical,” Browne shows the progress of thinking he likes to follow. The chapters in which the theme is “artificially” seen are to deal, he means us to understand, with the phenomena of art or artfulness—gardens, orchards, plantations, buildings, phalanxes of soldiers, crowns, jewels, textiles, and whatever else of man's contriving shows his indebtedness to this pattern. In a sense it might seem illogical that Browne's treatment of these examples of human craftsmanship should precede his demonstration of patterns of five occurring “naturally.” Yet the plan has the advantage of giving an ancient and even exotic history to the topic; it also shows that Browne's love of gardens (emphasized by the title) is symbolically at the heart of his discourse. And even at the outset the sequence is clearly announced to us, as Browne characteristically posits that, Paradise having been planted on the third day, “Gardens were before Gardiners” (i, 179).

If the Biblical overtones of the hanging or pensile gardens of Babylon and the evocation of ancient times enrich the first two chapters, there is on the other hand a more direct, excited kind of description when Browne draws upon his own seeing of “the elegant ordination of vegetables” (i, 192). In Pasternak's expression again of his interest in botany, he remembers “how names, sought out according to the classified text, brought peace to eyes of flowers.” It is much the same delight that leads Browne to draw the reader's attention to the “squamous heads” of various plants, the leaves of the artichoke or of “sea wracks” “overwrought with Net-work elegantly containing this order,” the head of the teazle, or of kinds of thistles (i, 193). Then the movement to connect and generalize that is carried to its height in the later chapters appears—plants are accompanied by characteristic insects; curious comparisons of relative size may be made, as between an oak and a whale; animal figurations such as the wings of flies, belly of the water beetle, eggs of some butterflies, “neatly declare how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things” (i, 203). Browne thus sets the mark for those whom he calls “signal discerners.”

Taking the bulk of Browne's writings, there can be no doubt that he often worked straightforwardly from the point of view of the natural historian: thus his collections of many kinds, his experiments and dissections. Even in The Garden of Cyrus his effort for accuracy impels him to concede the absence of the quincuncial pattern where he had expected it, for instance in “the woof of the neat Retiarie Spider” (i, 188). But his purpose is not ultimately the scientific one of classification or systematization, his purpose is the search for its own sake for what he rightly calls analogies, in the book of nature, and in the contemplation of these analogies as an incentive to moral or spiritual experience. From the point of view of the scientist, the assemblage of the families of facts that Browne ranges under the quincunx is often misleading, or trivial, or unimportant. But Browne resembles Thoreau—even more than Emerson—in needing to start from the ground of some fact, because as Emerson said of Thoreau, “Every fact lay in glory in his mind.”⁴

Yet, as I shall hope to show later, Thoreau had other means than Browne's to let the fact “ascend into a truth.” In The Garden of Cyrus there is the handicap that Browne leaves standing too much of the scaffolding. In the plan of the whole an attempted architecture is displayed by Browne's proceeding from the theme's being “artificially” and “naturally” to its being “mystically considered.” Our reading of these last two sections will determine our interpretation of the whole book and our opinion of its unity.

Before offering my own, I must summarize and pay tribute to Mr. Huntley's elucidation of The Garden of Cyrus and his masterly linking of it to Urn Burial. After having expounded Browne's central emblem, derived from Plato's Timaeus, in the circles bisecting each other in such a way as to symbolize life and death, Mr. Huntley continues:

As in a Platonic dichotomy, these twin essays are parts of a single whole … and there is a “rising” from the lower, or elemental, part, which is Urn Burial, to the “higher,” or celestial part, which is The Garden of Cyrus, the “numerical character” of reality. More particularly, the two discourses are related in at least three ways: (1) in their subject matter, as two parts of a whole, yet eternally opposed; (2) in their epistemologies, as they pass from ignorance to knowledge; and (3) in their images, which take us in circles from darkness to light to darkness again, from womb to urn to new birth, from the “sleep” of death to drowsiness when the “quincunx of heaven runs low” and “the huntsmen are up in America.”⁵

And in an even more inclusive statement Huntley concludes:

That Browne intended us to read the two essays in this manner and in the order he gave them is seen most obviously in the deliberateness of their opposition in subject matter. One concerns death, the other life; one the body, the other the soul; one passion, the other reason; one accident, the other design; one substance, the other form, … The first essay treats of time; the second, space. And together these two concepts delineate the character of God, in that time is an image of His Eternity, whereas number and geometrical figures in space are a key to His Wisdom.⁶

Mr. Huntley as well as Browne has meditated on the given theme. There can be no question of the brilliance of his analysis, or of its value. Only, he has done for Sir Thomas Browne what Browne could not, would not do for himself. Browne is no philosopher. T. S. Eliot's at first surprising statement on Henry James, that he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it, has a wider bearing. It is true of some essayists as well as novelists that the brook is crossed by stepping stones, not a bridge, and they are sometimes uneven, slippery, and not in a straight line.

“Mystically” in the seventeenth century could refer to a mode of spiritual allegory, or it could have the more tenuous and supple meaning of making out things of dark conceit. In his last two chapters, in which his theme is “mystically” considered, Browne is not really more systematic than in the preceding ones, but he is moving from further examples of his omnipresent quincunx, to mysteries discoverable in experience without it, although, for Browne, by means of its aid. Thus in chapter four after flying over the “delights” and “commodities” of this order, large figures such as how plants are affected by the effects of wind and water and whether they are “solisequious,” he progresses to the inherent pleasure of seeing afforded by plantations, and begins to rise to more general contemplations. His approach to the theme of light and darkness begins gradually. “Nor are only dark and green colours, but shades and shadows generally contrived throughout the great Volume of nature, and trees ordained not only to protect and shadow others, but by their shades and shadowing parts, to preserve and cherish themselves” (i, 217). Thus darkness is a source of life. Then, from the reflection that seeds lie in perpetual shades, Browne prepares for the climax of The Garden of Cyrus, in the great passage beginning “Darknesse and light hold interchangeable dominions, and alternately rule the seminal state of things” (i, 218). The sequence, rather than the circles and right lines of the quincunx, reveals the true meaning of Browne's treatise: interdependence of life and death, reciprocity of light and darkness.

The climax itself may now be given out in the paragraph that follows, which, familiar though it is, I must quote in full:

Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible: were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon, with the Sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest parts of Jewish Types, we finde the Cherubims shadowing the Mercy-seat: Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God.

(i, 218)

The central conceptual metaphor is that sounding in the word adumbration. Of sixteenth-century origin in English, it could mean, from shading in painting, “a sketch, outline, or shadowy figure.” But more suggestively it meant also in Browne's time “a symbolic representation typifying or prefiguring the reality.”⁷ Thus to Browne the shade, shadow, or darkness both came from light and revealed the otherwise invisible. As he moves from patterns of planting to the source of being and growth, Browne's largest and most suggestive term is adumbration. Now, this is both what he has progressed to, and the means of his progression. One thinks immediately of Donne's preoccupation in Songs and Sonnets with the shadow. That Browne concerns himself as much with the way of seeing as with the seen, is confirmed by the end of chapter four where the quincunx is described as the pattern of rays from object to retina, and as, in Plato, the motion of man's and the world's soul.

The theme of light and darkness is resumed at the end of chapter five and ends the whole discourse, as it is newly placed in relation to the revolution of day and night. Before Browne can develop this central motif, he ranges side by side phenomena having nothing in common but an association with five. Declining “unexcusable Pythagorisme,” he nevertheless has little else to justify an assortment of items including the number of fingers and the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as a symbol of generation, the number of acts in a play and the points of “sea-stars.” It is a marvel that the writer who could thus link so many discrepant facts retains at the last a hope worthy of the scientist, “to search out the … figured draughts of this nature, and … to erect generalities … not only in the vegetable shop, but the whole volume of nature; affording delightful Truths, confirmable by sense and ocular Observation …” (i, 226). The key to his procedure is in his combining the delight of truth with observation. His famous last paragraphs marking the time “when the quincunx of heaven runs low” at once affirm that night, and dreaming, are not dependable sources of knowledge because, however appealing their experience, they but anticipate the dawn and the reawakening of the senses. “The huntsmen are up in America” evokes the newness and discovery allied with regeneration and resurrection.

Opinions of The Garden of Cyrus have varied greatly. Dr. Johnson called it a “sport of fancy”; to such an enlightened and sensitive admirer of Browne as Mrs. Joan Bennett it is “the least important of the works published in Browne's lifetime.”⁸ In my discussion of it I have intended to stress that, while there is much in it that is dispensable by the way, the singular items serve to aid Browne's approach to his most original meditative strain. As early as Religio Medici he had made articulate the fascination for him of the minute, and the larger reading of God's wisdom in the wonders of the book of nature. These interests are given a new vitality and depth in The Garden of Cyrus. And, if Mr. Frank Huntley is perhaps almost too purposeful in his reading of the buried design uniting Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, I have no doubt that the design is there. My slight difference in emphasis is to suggest that Browne saw this conjunction, as Thoreau would put it, “with the side of his eye.” Browne in his preface made an important note on his method of composition. “In this multiplicity of writing,” he said, “bye and barren Themes are best fitted for invention. … Beside, such Discourses allow excursions, and venially admit of collaterall truths …” (i, 175-176). This is the born essayist speaking, who knows it is not from the center of the target that most other circles move. Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus do support each other in a unity of belief, each enhances the other. If the profounder rhythm is heard in Urn Burial, the novelty of knowing is released in The Garden of Cyrus.

Even without the later Christian Morals, Browne's writings showed range, variety, and development. In Christian Morals he produced something different from his other works. “These essays,” as Dr. Johnson accurately referred to the collection, have been, in comparison with Browne's other major writings, usually undervalued. To the generally admiring Mr. Huntley, for example, “Christian Morals is a sententious anticlimax,”⁹ although he does advocate further study of it. Probably the lack of attention (comparatively speaking) bestowed upon Christian Morals results from the assumption that it was the product of Browne's old age, an intended continuation of Religio Medici, culled from commonplace books, and unfinished. From the point of view of its place among Browne's other writings, however, two considerations alter this opinion of Christian Morals as late, essentially unfinished work. As has been widely recognized, the first part incorporates many paragraphs that appeared in Browne's Letter to a Friend. Now, Professor Huntley's convincing dating of the Letter as probably composed about 1656,¹⁰ makes it likely that these paragraphs at least of Christian Morals represent Browne's thinking in his middle life. Further, the fact that they were so expertly revised before their incorporation in Christian Morals shows the care Browne had bestowed upon the latter work.¹¹ In comparison with Religio, Urn Burial, or The Garden of Cyrus it may to some extent be unfinished, as not having the author's final touches and decisions before publication. But it is not fragmentary, not a tangential piece such as we find among Browne's Miscellanies, and it is by no means a rough draft.¹²

In fact, it possesses more structure, internal coherence, and unity than has ordinarily been acknowledged. In Part I, all the separate paragraphs of observation revolve about a single axis: the mood that is favourable to virtue. Now from this side, now from that, Browne shows the need for a positive generosity, flourish, freedom in the expression of what is good, rather than a narrow, inhibited, cautionary practise. The theme is gathered firmly in Section 9: “Persons lightly dipt, not grain'd in generous Honesty, are but pale in Goodness, and faint hued in Integrity. But be thou what thou vertuously art, and let not the Ocean wash away thy Tincture” (i, 246). This is developed through Browne's advice to every man to study his own economy, his acknowledgment that imperfect men may have valuable qualities, and that “'tis well, if a perfect Man can be made out of many Men” (i, 254). The final section sums up the whole. Here, fortitude is seen as the foundation of all loyalty, there is a condemnation of small and creeping things, and praise of “bright Thoughts, clear Deeds, Constancy, Fidelity, Bounty” as the gems of noble minds, wherein, says Browne, “the true Heroick English Gentleman hath no Peer” (i, 258).

In this first part of Christian Morals there is a deeper knowledge of what is human than in any previous writing of Browne's. True, of Religio Medici, that he is, as Emerson noted, “inward”—but he is creating a portrait of himself. In Christian Morals he is aware of many more qualities, kinds of human capacity and behaviour.

The second part of Christian Morals is a natural outgrowth of the first. Browne illuminates the value of plain willingness to learn, of modesty in learning, and of freedom from meanness of spirit in acknowledging the worth of others. “Bring candid Eyes unto the perusal of men's works, and let not Zoilism or Detraction blast well-intended labours” (i, 260). The need to be tentative in discourse, and at the same time not to be over-impressed by pretensions to learning on the part of others, is compatible with the ability to admit worth in younger spirits. There are many variations in the paragraphs that touch upon these related themes, but all circle about a willing response to merit, a refusal of closed-mindedness. Only in the last paragraph does Brown shift to a topic at first sight unrelated, the ways men have found to death. In his advice that “to learn to dye is better than to study the ways of dying” he prepares for the last part of Christian Morals (i, 269).

Part III has a closer affinity with Religio than any other. Browne now deals directly with man's relation to himself and to God, and as in Urn Burial, with his place in time. He starts from the characteristic thought that the longevity of men in the first ages of the world must have enhanced either their virtues or their vices. This caused him to think it difficult to find any whole age to imitate. He regrets our ignorance of the early ages obliterated by the flood that “so shut up the first Windows of Time, leaving no Histories of those longevous generations, when Men might have been properly Historians, when Adam might have read long Lectures unto Methuselah, and Methuselah unto Noah” (i, 271). Thus many possibilities of instruction from history are lacking, and we must elect the better course of self-knowledge. It is impossible to recreate the richness and essential unity of the related ways Browne celebrates the life of contemplation. The nucleus of the active whole is in Sections 14 and 15: “Let Intellectual Tubes give thee a glance of things, which visive Organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and Thoughts of things which Thoughts but tenderly touch. … Behold thy self by inward Opticks, and the Crystalline of the Soul” (i, 280-281). All in the tenor of living thought and devotion prepares for the “vivid eschatology,”¹³ as Mr. Huntley terms it, that provides the conclusion of Christian Morals, wherein “The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity” (i, 289). But this does not derogate from man's earthly existence, for “to palliate the shortness of our Lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this World, it's good to know as much as we can of it, and also so far as possibly in us lieth to hold such a Theory of times past, as though we had seen the same” (i, 290). And, as if to forge one further link of his meditations, Browne ends Christian Morals deliberately with a sentence from the end of Urn Burial.

In this piece of writing, which may well have been the fruit of his meditations over many years, even if composed, as we now have it, late, Browne achieved a compression and directness beyond any previous effort of his. Perhaps some readers find Christian Morals too compressed. But it is a mistake, I think, to regard the work as merely a collection of sententiae. To the extent that it may partly be characterized so, Christian Morals could be compared with Felltham's Resolves. But the sentences of Browne are freer, more articulate, as his exploration of potential human freedom in the thought of virtue is at once gentler, more profound, more generative. Almost every paragraph of Christian Morals is sufficiently well-knit to be an essay, but the company of these paragraphs with each other is intelligible, as I have tried to show, in larger shapes of purpose and idea. Perhaps there is nothing really to resemble Christian Morals until Emerson's Journals and his Natural History of Intellect. There are some readers who would prefer these nuggets melted to a seemingly more ductile quality, but the ductility is in the direct release of energy from one to the other, not in the expansiveness of ordinary logical persuasion.

Various forms of energy are captured and released, then, in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the most central one his rapt absorption in his own and man's capacities for life and knowledge. The forms in which these capacities appear and appeal to him have the characteristic religious cast of his time, in most of his writing; but as he deals with his themes, he sets free profound enjoyment in the art of contemplation. Throughout this discussion I have been concerned to point out that Browne's love of the way of seeing matches his fascination with the things seen. In an otherwise sensitive essay Mr. Peter Green states that Browne was “honestly indifferent to literary art as an end in itself.”¹⁴ His subjective point of view we cannot recover, but the delight of a deliberate art is incorporate in phrase, sentence, paragraph, and in the later works, architecture of design. He tried different subjects, discovered new rhythms, and, by his skill, imaginative prose first fully revealed its power.

Notes

1. All quotations from Browne in this chapter are from The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Chicago, 1964). The references given in my text are to the volume and page numbers of this edition.

2. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 29.

3. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct (New York, 1958), p. 15.

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau,” in Works, 14 vols., Standard Library Edition (Boston and New York, 1883-93), x, p. 439.

5. Frank L. Huntley, “The Relation of Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus,” SP liii (1956), 208. See also Margaret A. Heideman, “Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus: A Paradox and a Cosmic Vision,” UTQ xix (1950), 235-246.

6. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 209-210.

7. OED.

8. Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge, 1962), p. 208.

9. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 239.

10. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, ch. xii.

11. On these revisions, see the excellent discussion in Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 230-240. Material casting light on Browne's revision of passages in his notebooks is to be found in Jeremiah S. Finch, “Early Drafts of The Garden of Cyrus,” PMLA (1940), 742-747.

12. Professor N. J. Endicott's article, “Sir Thomas Browne, Montpellier, and the Tract of Languages” casts light on Browne's revisions. See TLS August 24, 1962.

13. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 227.

14. Peter Green, Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1959) (Published for the British Book Council and the National Book League), p. 28.