"How sick to faintness grew the poetry of England! Anna Seward ' by 'r lady,' was the 'muse' of those days, and Mr. Hayley 'the bard,' and Hannah More wrote our dramas, and Helen Williams our odes, and Rosa Matilda our elegiacs, and Blacklock, blind from his birth, our descriptive poems, and Mr. Whalley our 'domestic epics,' and Darwin our poetical philosophy, and Lady Millar encouraged literature at Bath, with red taffeta and 'the vase.' But the immortal are threatened vainly. It was the sickness of renewal rather than of death."

Those transition days appear crude enough, seen through nineteenth-century spectacles, and the best that can be said of the women is, that they were not much worse than the men. From among many learned women who are cutting out a pathway, surely but silently, we select the one woman-poet, — Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We do not reverence her for scholarship; we reverence her for a true poet. But since the taunt of "no-learning" among women still proceeds from many mouths, it is proper to refute the falsehood with so noble a proof of the contrary. Surely no "reverend canon will rise up to declare that Mrs. Browning "transposed translations. Yet we remember almost as false a charge of superficiality, made by the London "Saturday Review." After reading that monstrous libel we passed into Casa Guidi, into the room made void forever, and saw the old Greek books that she had earnestly mastered, standing mournful and together; we were told by him who had sounded the depths of her learning, how little people knew of the woman who had gone from among men, and were shown the Hebrew Bible that had been in constant use, heavy, priceless with its marginal notes in Greek (not "lady's Greek without the accents"), - all the work of Mrs. Browning.

"Difficulties," says Cabanis, "repel women: their impatience bounds over them." We take up the "Essays on the Poets" to compare theory with fact. If there is one merit that transcends every other in this small book of large ideas, it is patience. Nothing but love could have inspired Mrs. Browning to roll off the cerements from those old Greek Christians and breathe a little of her own life into them.

Though her criticisms are concentrated in two comparatively short essays, yet she wears the ivy none the less rightly. VOL. LXXV. - 5TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. I.

3

Giotto's perfect circle proved the master, and the fingers of a Michel Angelo take but little time to squeeze the ideal out of a bit of shapeless, senseless clay. Mrs. Browning has but sketched her subject, yet we know that, had she not been a great poet, she would have been a great prose-writer and critic, for she has drawn her circle. How much better, how much stronger, these Essays would be, had they received the intended revision of their author, we can almost assert, from knowing how much greater Mrs. Browning was than Miss Barrett.

"Love, my child, love, love!"

said the dying father of "Aurora Leigh," and it was this wondrous flood-tide that bore the poet so far beyond her former self. Time will expand and strengthen all noble souls, but love is the noonday sun that steeps them in God's essence. And besides,

"Italy

Is one thing, England one."

The Essays are of England. The voice of humanity breathing out of that unrivalled prose preface to the "Poems before Congress is of Italy. Critical power increases in the exact ratio that insight into humanity is deepened. Italy does much for Northern souls. They need a warm, blue sky and a dreamy atmosphere to develop germs that a cold, frosty air keeps latent. The influence of Italy upon English poets has been great, and to Mrs. Browning it seemed almost a necessity, for there was an intensity in her nature not often the product of English soil and customs. Perhaps it is not mere speculation to trace her great heart-passion back to a tropical sun; for though English, her ancestors claimed the West Indies as a home, and so the South may have left its mark upon AngloSaxon characteristics. A fortunate union of Northern head with Southern heart often creates genius.

Turning in Mrs. Browning's poems to the "Wine of Cyprus," the aroma of which is as delightful as that of the grapes glistening with rich ripeness on the Coté d'Or, we find a sketch in words suggestive of a much larger picture. We see that one room in the country-house in Devonshire, with its pale, suffering poet, a poet not "through pain," as Byron was,

The lives of

but in spite of pain. The solitude begotten of suffering may have made Mrs. Browning more learned than she otherwise would have been, but it did not create the poet. men and women were necessary to her genius. Still-life and the daisy were not to her what they were to Wordsworth. Therefore we say that pain improved the scholar, but clipped the wings of the poet. It washed away the alloy inseparable almost from human health, and sanctified her by an unequalled mercy and charity; but it robbed her of worldly wisdom. Intuition is much, but experience is more. And this we say, well remembering what Mrs. Browning has written of Shakespeare in the Book of the Poets.

"He was wise in the world, having studied it in his heart; what is called 'the knowledge of the world' being just the knowledge of one heart and certain exterior symbols. What else? What otherwise could he, the young transgressor of Sir Thomas Lucy's fences, new from Stratford and the Avon, close in theatric London, have seen or touched or handled of the Hamlets and Lears and Othellos, that he should draw them? How can I take portraits,' said Marmontel, in a similar experience, 'before I have beheld faces?' Voltaire embraced him in reply. Well applauded Voltaire! It was a mot for Marmontel's utterance, and Voltaire's praise, - for Marmontel, not for Shakespeare, Every being is his own centre to the universe, and in himself must one foot of the compasses be fixed to attain to any measurement: nay, every being is his own mirror to the universe."

Knowledge of one heart is the key to all others; but sitting down with that key in our hands is not likely to unlock other hearts. Those hearts must be sought, and their locks found. Therefore we cannot believe that Shakespeare, marvellous genius as he was, could have conceived at Stratford what he conceived as an actor and a manager of a theatre. "All the world's a stage," soliloquizes the melancholy Jacques. It is as true that the stage is all the world, the epitome of every passion, every sentiment, every feeling of which humanity is capable. The theatre is a concentration of the world's good and evil. In no other profession can the social chromatic scale be played without the missing of a note. There is more of tragic, of dramatic, of comic, in a theatre by daylight, than was ever dreamed of by audiences that nightly congregate to

witness fictitious joys and sorrows. No genius can have Shakespeare's versatility that has not had his versatile experience. We believe that Miss Barrett could not have written "Aurora Leigh." We believe the composition of this noble poem required all the worldly knowledge of Mrs. Browning. Its fullest, truest character is the heroine; there Mrs. Browning could not fail: she had only to look into her own heart to find the finest possible specimen of womanhood. Romney follows next in naturalness, for Mrs. Browning could draw upon fact for such nobility. But had Mrs. Browning's personal knowledge of the different spheres on the earth been greater, Marian Earle would have been less wise, though not more womanly and generous; and Lady Waldemar would not have talked "garlic." These are spots on the sun, and we make mention of them solely to testify in favor of our theory: we cannot but think that experience meant more to Mrs. Browning in 1860 than in 1842.

We gladly return to drink of the Wine of Cyprus, that we may catch a glimpse of the country-house,

"When we two sat in the chamber,

And the poets poured us wine";

those two, the wise blind teacher, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and the double-sighted pupil, for she saw both earth and heaven, - Elizabeth Barrett. From the window of that study we see "the mountain spreading," hear the tinkling of the sheepbells as they slowly "pass the pane"; we turn from "hill and lea,

And the summer sun's green revel,"

to listen to that "girlish voice" reading "somewhat slow" the "rhythmic Greek." We approach those golden hours with feelings akin to such as may have been inspired by thought of the sacred mysteries, for those two who sat together and looked into the hearts of "those cup-bearers undying of the wine that's meant for souls," until

"The white vests of the chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air!'
The cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines;
And the rolling anapastic

Curled like vapor over shrines "

Devoutly do we approach the "Hades of a heart" filled with the memories of those who were best and greatest before Christ, and we see how the worship of those demigods opened the way to the "noble Christian bishops,"

"Who mouthed grandly the last Greek,"

loved dearly, and especially by that blind teacher,

and who gradually found a place in the affections of the pupil.

"Your Chrysostom, you praised him,

With his glorious mouth of gold;
And your Basil, you upraised him
To the height of speakers old;
And we both praised Heliodorus
For his secret of pure lies;
Who forged first his linked stories

In the heat of lady's eyes.

"And we both praised your Synesius,

For the fire shot up his odes;

Though the Church was scarce propitious,
As he whistled dogs and gods.
And we both praised Nazianzen,
For the fervid heart and speech;
Only I eschewed his glancing
At the lyre hung out of reach.

"Do you mind that deed of Até,
Which you bound me to so fast,
Reading 'De Virginitate,'
From the first line to the last?
How I said at ending, solemn,
As I turned and looked at you,
That St. Simeon on the column
Had had somewhat less to do."

Thus, from drinking this Cyprus wine, the power is given us to see how the light of the Greek Christians was absorbed by the girl-poet and grew brighter by absorption, and how, in gratitude for those golden hours of golden harvests, the just heart of Elizabeth Barrett resolved that these her teachers should not be "left to perish by the time-gauges as old men, innocent and decrepit, and worthy of no use or honor," if Eng