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Friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let One, most loving of you all,

Say, 'Not a tear must o'er her fall!

"He giveth His beloved, sleep!"'9

Not, after all, that repose and acquiescence of any sort were the qualities of her predilection. On the contrary, her favourite mental attitude is one of something she feigns to be rebellious wrath. She is incensed with her fatherland for its treatment of the Captive Napoleon, who, trusting to his noblest foes,

When earth was all too grey for chivalry,
Died of their mercies 'mid the desert sea; 10

with the world for its acceptance of the phrase, 'Loved Once,' as if it were possible to have loved, and cease to love :

Love strikes but one hour-Love! Those never loved
Who dream that they loved Once; 11

with the mad folly, as well as guilt, of sinners of her own sex, in expecting from their partners in evil-commonly tempters the least fidelity to the love they have tainted. 'Go!' she cries to the poor wretch she is confessing:

6

Thou hast chosen the Human, and left the Divine !

Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild berrywine ?

Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached thee with blame,

Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee the same?'

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Must sweep in the wrath of His judgement-seas,

If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these.' 12

Poetry would not be the admirable thing it is, were it not in its essence different from all else. Masters of the art, in general, while recognizing this, mix, like Assayers of the Mint, a goodly proportion of rougher and more ordinary metal with their poetic bullion. A minority, like Shelley and Keats, compact their edifices out of sunbeams, and rainbows, and driving mists. Mrs. Browning also, in the fabrics she builds, trusts to fancy. If the impression her heroes and heroines produce is often repellent, it is that she has endeavoured to lodge beings of flesh and blood in her very unsubstantial structures. Shelley and Keats created inhabitants to occupy, without overweighting, the tenements. Should an explanation of that radical error which led to her failures as contrasted with their successes be required, I am compelled to seek it in the simple facts that she was a woman, and a recluse who had spent most of her life in the clouds. She imagined that she could settle her corporeal creatures on them as conveniently. In Aurora Leigh, which has always, I confess, left a bitter taste on my mental palate, all her literary idiosyncrasies are accumulated and exaggerated. The circumstances, there especially, were too many, too modern, and too actual. But even when elsewhere she indulges in analogous, though less trying, experiments, the effect is to me similarly unpleasant.

Fortunately her characters and incidents frequently are fitted to the habitations she has provided for them. The effect then is delightful. In its highest form her verse positively sings. How it lifts the heart in Wine of Cyprus, rocks to rest in Sleep and Cowper's Grave, sets on fire in Confessions, gathers a whole nosegay of love in Sonnets from the Portuguese, illuminates Parnassus in A Vision of Poets, and heralded a risen Italy while Austria seemed to be

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sealing her tomb! An aerial concert; and not the less fascinating for readers with a taste for strains purely spiritual that they are as little bound to satisfy the popular male ear as when, an undergraduate of Oxford, I heard one destined to rule it rouse the Union to frantic applause by jeering at the loveliest of the lovely whole.

Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Three vols. Chapman and Hall, 1864.

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4 Wine of Cyprus, stanzas 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 4.

5 A Drama of Exile.

6 A Portrait, stanzas 1-6 and 13-14.

7 Cowper's Grave, stanzas 9-10.

8 Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet i.

The Sleep, st. 9.

10 Crowned and Buried, st. 13.

11 Loved Once, st. 8.

12 Confessions, st. 9.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

1819-1875

ANOTHER example, among many, of the conflict for existence of faculties fitted for analogous pursuits. Nature equipped Charles Kingsley with the raw material, in varying proportions, of the forces which make a poet, a novelist, a social reformer, a student of science, a theologian, a historian. From the first they competed for possession of him. With the powerful aid of youth poetry seized on the leadership. Later on, with its own consent, monarchy was abolished. A commonwealth, in which each did what seemed good in its own eyes, took its place. The man being such as he was, and his poetical gift what it was, I do not suppose that literature, even poetry itself, has lost greatly by the revolution. His character was that of a combatant. He had a certain number of songs in him to sing; so many arrows of verse in his quiver. Forth he shot, hitting the mark now and again. When the archer found his quiver empty, he drew sword or dagger-romance, essay, lecture, sermon- -and battled as manfully as ever. I see no ground for belief that, like some, he ceased versifying by compulsion of a more masterful passion of his soul, or out of indolence, satiety, or incapacity, mental or moral. Simply the one special weapon had done its work; and he exchanged it for another. I am grateful in the circumstances for the fact. He does not call up in me an idea of incalculable possibilities of poetical inspiration. It is well that he should not have deluded himself into imagining descents of the spirit when there were none.

The outset of his poetical career was at once disappointing and promising. His Saint's Tragedy is strong in the wrong places. I myself am sensible of anger rather than sympathy. I keep wondering how much more of passionate reasonableness Robert Browning, for instance, might not have instilled into the hapless slave of her own and her teacher's fanaticism. It is a failure, if a brilliant one. Such too, I must, on the same ground of a neglect of proportion, judge Andromeda to be. The picture of the girl, when her mother leaves her on the rock-as no mother conceivably could have left a child—makes the heart ache, as the poet intended it should:

Watching the pulse of the oars die down, as her own died with them, Tearless, dumb with amaze she stood,

helpless and hopeless,

Wide-eyed, downward gazing in vain at the black blank darkness.1 But she almost disappears in an assemblage of fine scenes described in rolling, musical hexameters. The background is too engrossing for the action and the characters. The accessories, dawn-lit highlands, gambolling sea-nymphs, the charms of the golden-haired, ivory-limbed Deliverer, Athene's gracious wisdom, are fully and melodiously set forth; only the fateful combat itself, with the rescue, is dismissed in three casual lines. As an osprey on a dolphin : Thus fell the boy on the beast; thus rolled up the beast in his horror, Once, as the dead eyes glared into his; then his sides, deathsharpened,

Stiffened and stood, brown rock, in the wash of the wandering water.2

Neither of the two works was the fruit of raw youth. They are their author's only poems of length; and neither has life in it. At the same time each has abundance of thought and fancy; and each gives token of something better.

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