Explore "Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I
Ah, but -- because you were struck blind, could bless / Your sense no longer with the actual view / Of man and woman, those fair forms you drew / In happier days so duteously and true, -- / Must I account my Gerard de Lairesse / All sorrow-smitten? He was hindered too / -- Was this no hardship? -- from producing, plain / To us who still have eyes, the pageantry / Which passed and passed before his busy brain / And, captured on his canvas, showed our sky / Traversed by flying shapes, earth stocked with brood / Of monsters, -- centaurs bestial, satyrs lewd, -- / Not without much Olympian glory, shapes / Of god and goddess in their gay escapes / From the severe serene: or haply paced / The antique ways, god-counselled, nymph-embraced, / Some early human kingly personage. / Such wonders of the teeming poet's-age / Were still to be: nay, these indeed began -- / Are not the pictures extant? -- till the ban / Of blindness struck both palette from his thumb / And pencil from his finger.