beautiful," the above lines are not poetry. They are

the mishaps of the poet, blots on her pages which we long to erase, and leave the poems clean as her own white soul.

For that fantastic strain of imagination which sometimes unwittingly grazes the absurd, the forced seclusion and introversion of Mrs. Browning's maidenhood is no. doubt answerable. Had her mind been shaped in the stir and bustle of human action, she would doubtless have spent less strength on the psychological and the mystical, and would have chosen her themes differently. Her errors of judgment are to be excused by her natural impulsiveness and that strength of will which led to her insistent use of forced rhymes of two syllables in the face of all remonstrance; as,

"You have done a

Consecrated little Una."

-

The frequent harshness of her more orthodox rhymes, and that grating use of the adjective, as "God's divine," "your human," are to be excused by her innate lack of "ear," as deplorable and as insurmountable as "colorblindness." She had no possible perception of these harsh prosaic lapses. In character she does not distinctly individualize. In depicting type she is far more successful. In "Aurora Leigh" we have, to start with, Mrs. Browning as Aurora. Then, all the good characters in the book are more or less repetitions of Aurora. Marian Erle, the daughter of a tramping poacher, talks and behaves as high-flown and properly as, in the same situation, Aurora would have talked and behaved. Lord Howe, Vincent Carrington, and even that ubiquitous person, Mr. Smith, have each a dash of Aurora; and Romney himself is but another Aurora in male attire, and with

other ends and purposes. Lady Waldemar, who misses being either a woman or a fiend, having been painted too cold-bloodedly diabolical for the one, and too contemptibly human for the other, is nevertheless often a mouth-piece for Aurora's own fine-spun sentences. Aurora's aunt who liked instructed piety" and

66

...

thanked God (and sighed) that

English women were models to the universe,"

being but the typical matter-of-fact English lady, though perhaps slightly exaggerated, is life-like and fine.

-

And now, with all these hindrances to her poetical perfection, no one can deny that Mrs. Browning has done more in poetry than any woman, living or dead. She has even surpassed, with one exception, English 'cotemporary poets of the other sex. Her best poems - in conception and spirit, if not always in execution are in the highest rank of art. They are marked by strength of passion, by intensity of feeling, and sometimes by felicity of expression. In her verse she often displays vigorous condensation of thought and forceful imagination. If she has in her style great faults, she has greater merits. If her figures are sometimes too bald and grotesque, we often forgive their singularity for the sake of their aptitude. In exquisite word-painting she is almost unrivalled; her metaphors are rich, pointed, and abundant. Nature, art, mythology, history, literature, holy writ, and every-day life furnish her illustrations. Her satire is keen, but, as has been happily remarked, "it is like wormwood, wholesomely bitter." She is the first poet of her sex,- the Milton among women!

Mrs. Browning has been designated as embodying more intensely than any of her compeers the Spirit of the

Present. May we not rather say of the Future? Was she not ever

"Stretching past the known and seen, to reach
The archetypal beauty out of sight"?

Her verse throbs with "the still, sad music of humanity."
The suffering and the happy, the sinning and aspiring,
share alike her sympathy. Her theology was not learned
in the schools. Though nominally of the (so-called)
evangelical faith, in spirit she belonged only to that
mystic Church which has no head but the Infinite God.
With her there was always "open vision;" and seeing
God face to face, she needed not the meagre go-betweens
of form and creed to put her at one with him.
To rs. Browning poetry was the grand business of
life, a religion. "As serious a thing to me as life," were
her own words: thus she confesses,

"... If heads

That hold a rhythmic thought must ache perforce,
For my part, I choose headaches."

Every poem is wrought to an intense white heat in the glowing forge of her soul. Her verses ache with thought,

"swept as angels do their wings, with cadence up the blue." She realizes her own description of a poet:

"... Broadly spreading

The golden immortalities of his soul

On natures lorn and poor of such."

No wonder that the frail body refused at last to bear the burden of the great brain! And now, on earth, her singing is "all done."

"She has seen the mystery hid

Under Egypt's pyramid

By those eyelids pale and close

Now she knows what Rhamses knows."

"Aurora Leigh," faulty as it is, is richly studded with gems. Here is a fragment that in its way is perfect :

"Nor would you find within a rosier flushed
Pomegranate...

There he lay upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples, - to the ends

Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much

To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose

The shepherd's heart ebbed away into

The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant in the pretty baby-mouth,

He saw his mother's face, accepting it

In change for heaven itself with such a smile

As might have well been learned there, never moved

But smiled on in a drowse of ecstasy,

So happy (half with her, and half with heaven)

He could not have the trouble to be stirred,

But smiled and lay there. Like a rose I said?

As red and still indeed as any rose,

That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life."

And here is another passage fine and true enough to be set beside some of Shakespeare's:

"... "Tis too easy to go mad

And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws :

The thing 's too common.

Many fervent souls

Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel,

If steel had offered, in a restless heat

Of doing something. Many tender souls

Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread

As children cowslips: the more pains they take
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,

Before they sit down under their own vine,
And live for use. Alas! near all the birds
Will sing at dawn; and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark."

Of Mrs. Browning's shorter poems, apart from the "Sonnets," the verses on Cowper's grave are the most perfect. They were written before the poetess had ventured on her later bold departure from established critical rules; and the diction is, consequently, in beautiful accord with the sentiment. A few stanzas of this admirable piece are subjoined:

"It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying.
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying.
Yet let the grief and humbleness as low as silence languish ;
Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

"O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing! O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless soul was clinging! O men, this man, in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling, Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

"And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,

How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,

And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights

departed,

He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted.