"Passed through glory's morning gate To walk in Paradise!" Her going home was but six days of suffering, bravely borne; and now, "listening down the heart of things," we hear her singing still, and Glory to God—to God! she saith, And life is perfected by Death!" By high authority Mrs. Browning has been termed the greatest of English "female poets," and some have even boldly placed her side by side with the laureate. Whatever may be the justness of these claims, we must admit her to be the great genius, if not the great poet. Her inspiration is almost painfully intense; and if she has not attained to highest excellence in poetic art, it is rather to be imputed to her odd views in regard to the technicalities of verse, and to the one-sided development of her nature, than to the paucity of her genius. The artist who would create for all time should cultivate form no less than spirit, and should touch life at every point, and thus be enabled to give to the world healthy out-door growth rather than hot-bed miracles. A poet's song, while it may accord with the subtlest harmonies of the seraphim, should still be sweet as the singing of birds with earth-born cadences. Mrs. Browning was born in 1809; she became a writer in 1819, and a publisher in 1826. Her first volume, an "Essay on Mind," written in the style of Pope's "Essay on Man," she afterward withdrew from print. Her next work, "Prometheus Bound," translated from Eschylus, shared a like fate with her first venture in authorship. Her subjects were various; and she seldom reproduces her thought, as Mrs. Hemans too often does. "The Lay 66 of the Brown Rosary," "Isobel's Child," and "Bertha in the Lane," are perhaps the most widely popular of her poems. The Rhyme of Duchess May" may be considered one of her very best. Ruskin considers her Duchess "the finest female character brought into literature since Shakespeare's day." "The Cry of the Children," "The Ragged School," and "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" are the most humanitarian and the most pathetic of her poems. "The Vision of Poets" is eminently characteristic, and deserves a high place in the catalogue of her verse. "Lady Geraldine," a poem covering thirty printed pages, is remarkable for the rapidity of its production, having, it is said, been written in the almost incredibly short space of twelve hours! Some of its characters are not quite truthfully conceived; and Geraldine, at the conclusion, poses too long "twixt the purple latticecurtains," and "smiles in slow silence" until she becomes quite trying, as she approaches her lover at a pace altogether too measured and ghostly for a mere mortal. The poem is but little marred by Mrs. Browning's peculiar infelicities of taste, and is interesting in narrative, and altogether one of her most pleasing productions. "The Lost Bower" is full of life, perfume, and color. "Casa Guidi Windows" is one of her more vigorous works. It is neither romantic nor idyllic, but teeming with earnest matter, and instinct with marvellous clearness of logical insight in its treatment of the political problems of the day. Some of Mrs. Browning's sonnets have scarcely been equalled since Milton's; and her Eve in the "Drama of Exile," has been pronounced "superior to the Eve in 'Paradise Lost."" This, however, is exaggerated praise. Fancy the first woman talking in this fashion, "By my percipiency of sin and fall In melancholy of humiliant thoughts,❞— or discoursing of the "precedence of earth's adjusted uses, ," "the visionary stairs of time," the "steep generations," and "supernatural thunders!" The later poems of Mrs. Browning, though they exhibit an increase of power, are by no means her best. "Aurora Leigh," a modern novel in blank verse, discussing many of the social questions of the day, and revealing the writer's experience of life, has a particular application to the questions which have been started in regard to the nature and position of woman. It expresses the complete development of the life of a woman and an artist, and illustrates the theory that the largest mental culture does not unfit woman for the tenderest relations of life; that the highest possible intellectual development results in the highest possible social happiness. Aurora, though true artist, is not the less true woman, and “ very womanly" at last. She lays the poet's crown from off her brow, and chooses the love that is sweeter than fame. "Aurora Leigh" as far as perfection of internal structure goes-is Mrs. Browning's greatest poem. It abounds in striking and graphic description, in trenchant portraiture of persons, and evinces throughout that strength of thought and terseness of expression which have sometimes been thought peculiar to man. Yet, great poem as it is, "Aurora Leigh" is notoriously rife with the blemishes to which allusion has already been made. Taste is barbarously sacrificed to truth of description. The figures are often taken from objects which excite our loathing. Lady Waldemar is a ghoul-like exaggeration. The story of Marian Erle-more improbable than anything out of Munchausen-is so thoroughly heart-sickening that even the fair, skyey poet-thought cannot make it presentable. As an artistic work the poem is a failure. The story abounds in contradictions. The figures are sometimes absurd and are often repeated, especially those which are repugnant. The style is frequently diffuse and occasionally stilted, as in this passage: Her figures too are often bad and far-fetched; as here: "The goats whose beards grow sprouting down towards There is in the poem a shockingly inartistic mixture of the prosaic and poetic, as comparing a disappointed lover devoting his life to purposes of philanthropy to "a man drowning a dog." Verbal finish, though far less important than internal structure, is one of the acknowledged conditions of immortal verse; and "Aurora Leigh" has been happily compared to "the century plant, — beautiful for the thought that the entire age has been needed for its production, and no less enjoyable for the certainty that it yet will very shortly wither before our eyes!" In these four lines there is a world of suggestion to the roughhanded reformist: "Disturb our nature never, for our work, Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs. Another though far less considerable blemish in Mrs. Browning's poetry is the frequent recurrence in her diction of obsolete words. The English of the nineteenth century is in many respects a different language from that of the fourteenth, or even of the sixteenth century; and no writer, however much he may lean toward the olden-time, should use a vocabulary that, having ceased to fall from our lips, is not obvious to ordinary readers. Old poet-words there be, that, though by common consent they have dropped out of prose, should never “leave off singing." Yet" geste," "blee," "eke," "certes," "natheless," and "wis," are but musty old words, and let us leave them where they belong, in the cobwebbed garret of the Past. One can afford to read Chaucer and Spenser with a glossary; but let nineteenth-century thought be dressed in nineteenth-century costume. Admiring Mrs. Browning as a woman, and glorying in her genius, fidelity to art still demands of us a protest against her inelegances. By no means insisting upon that fastidious nicety which weakens poetic diction by rejecting every word or expression that is not powdered and perfumed to suit the "curled darlings" of literary and critical "upper-ten-dom," we cannot hold that poetry gains enough in force to balance its loss in propriety, by such passages as these from "Aurora Leigh": "I'd rather take the wind-side of the stews "... She lied and stole And spat into my love's pure pyx The rank saliva of her soul." "Cheek to cheek with him Who stinks since Friday." "That's coarse you'll say If, as Dr. Holmes asserts, "Poetry is the description of the beautiful in language which harmonizes with the |
