alluding to the series of poems by that author, then issued, or in course of issue, and entitled "Bells and Pomegranates."

To testify his appreciation of this praise, Browning called upon her. A new servant, still unused to the customs of the house, conducted him into that darkened room where only friends were allowed to enter; and, once admitted, he could hardly be expelled. So pleasant, however, was the interview, that he solicited, and obtained, permission to renew his visit. The acquaintance, begun thus by chance, ripened into friendship, and friendship between two such natures glided quietly, but surely, into love. It was natural that these two should be drawn together. The truest love between man and woman comes only when each has looked into the very depths of the other's heart, into those depths from which speech rarely rises, only signified to us by a radiance of the face or a holy gleam of the eyes. The struggling utterance of these inmost feelings is the essence of the highest poetry. What wonder, then, that these two should look at once into each other's hearts, and should sympathize deeply and love strongly?

They were married in November, 1846, and from this time the health of the wife amended. Shortly after the marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Browning made Florence their home; and there they have since resided. In 1849 she gave birth to a son, adding to her wifely estate the full glory of motherhood.

With the Italian air she breathed in a large sympathy for the cause of Italian freedom. Her next work—if we except a second edition of her collected poems, published in 1850- was a poem suggested by the Florentine popular movement of 1848. It was entitled "Casa Guidi Windows," and appeared in 1851. "Aurora Leigh," her longest and highest achievement, was published in 1856. "Poems before Congress," and contributions to different periodicals, chiefly relating to Italian matters, complete the catalogue of her works.

The later convulsions of Italy deeply affected Mrs. Browning, whose life had almost become incorporate with that of her adopted country. She followed the different movements of 1859 with a more eager eye than had watched the outbursts of 1848. That ten years of intervening life with the Florentines had drawn her nearer to them, and that ten years spent as the poet-wife of a poet had opened yet wider that tender heart which the distant griefs of dead heroes had so touched in early childhood. From the charming

article on Mrs. Browning in the September Atlantic, we gather, that disappointment in her high hopes for Italy, and sorrow occasioned by the loss of a dear sister, joined issue with a severe cold to break down her physical strength; and after a feeble half-illness of three or four months, on the morning of the 28th of June, 1861, she died. We of America mourn her loss no less than her own English countrymen, or the Italian countrymen of her adoption.

The picture which Miss Mitford — who was a close friend of Mrs. Browning-gives of our authoress in girlhood is this: "Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of curls falling on either side a most expressive face, large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam," and a look of entire youthfulness. The article in the Atlantic gives us a later picture, thus: "To those who loved Mrs. Browning (and to know her was to love her) she was singularly attractive. Hers was not the beauty of feature; it was the loftier beauty of expression. Her slight figure seemed hardly large enough to contain the great heart that beat so fervently within, and the soul that expanded more and more as one year gave place to another. But it was Mrs. Browning's face upon which one loved to gaze, - that face and head which almost lost themselves in the thick curls of her dark brown hair. That jealous hair could not hide the broad, fair forehead, 'royal with the truth,' as smooth as any girl's, and

'Too large for wreath of modern wont.'

Her large brown eyes were beautiful, and were in truth the windows of her soul. They combined the confidingness of a child with the poet-passion of heart and of intellect; and in gazing into them, it was easy to read why Mrs. Browning wrote."

Mrs. Browning has been justly accused of frequent mannerisms and obscurities of style. She has some pet expressions which jar on the ear; such as "past compare," to "fine down her beauty"; — a few Greek terms, of which "nympholeptic" and "chrism" are her favorites; and the use of the adjective as an abstract noun; as, "looking down from my Human,” and like phrases.

The Miltonic subjects of "The Seraphim" and the "Drama of Exile" have brought her under the charge of imitating Milton; but, whatever opinion the reader may hold as to the success of these dramas, he will absolve them from any fault or merit of such an imitation. But although her learning and her art may be exhibited in these poems, and in the "Prometheus Bound," it is not here we

are to look for proof of her poetic power. As a scholar and an authoress she wrote these; "Aurora Leigh," and the "Sonnets from the Portuguese " especially, came from a woman's warm heart. Over them we linger fondly, as over the simple, burning, shorter poems scattered here and there through her works.

Critics accused Mrs. Browning, moreover, of imitation of Tennyson, and there are some who hint at plagiarism upon Poe! If we grant a certain resemblance to Tennyson, it will still be in question whether the age in which both live has not affected both alike, more than one of them has influenced the other. As to Poe, we are at a loss to see how his blindest admirers could trace his ideas in Mrs. Browning's works, except in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," where this stanza is suggestive of the "Raven":

"Eyes,' he said, 'now throbbing through me! are ye eyes that did undo me? Shining eyes, like antique jewels, set in Parian statue-stone!

Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid

O'er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone ?""

These are all the charges laid against her, except the absurd accusation of impiety in treating sacred subjects: - one reviewer considers her more worthy than Shelley of poor Shelley's persecution.

Mrs. Browning has written, as no other woman has, a record of her deepest experiences. We can follow her life in her poems, especially from the time when she first fully awoke to the vitality of life, and loved. As we read, we chance rarely on an allusion to her childhood; oftener she speaks of the long years of her sickness, with its attendant despondence, and its consolations. The first burning poetry she has written is in the Sonnets, veiling under the name "From the Portuguese" the deep emotions of her heart in its doubting, yearning, hoping, trusting love for the talented poet, three years her junior, who had come to rescue her from the grave for a vigorous and useful life of many years. These Sonnets alone would crown her poetess. Again, we meet passages instinct with maternal affection, witness this exquisite picture, from "Aurora Leigh," of a sleeping babe:

"There he lay, upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life

To the bottom of his dimples, -to the end

Of the long, 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

Could this have been so pictured unless from life?

The devoted attachment she felt towards beautiful Italy did not affect her love for England. The two are mingled in her prayers. See how she paints a rural scene in the country from which she has so long been exiled:

"A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky

Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheat-fields climb.
Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, -
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade, -

at intervals

I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being my Shakespeare's."

if so

"Aurora Leigh,” of her more sustained efforts, is the work by which she will chiefly live. In it is recorded the ideal experience we may name it of her life. She has knit herself into her heroine, and breathes along every page. Aurora, the Italian child of an English father and an Italian mother, is early orphaned, and taken from her Italy to England, there to live under the cold guardianship of her father's sister. Her cousin, Romney Leigh, a Fourierite, Socialist, Agrarian, is drawn towards the warm southern heart of the young poetess, - for such she promises to grow, and loves her. She refuses him, and, although unconscious love struggles in her then, and grows in her for years, for years she is kept from him by misconceptions and mischances, until, after long separation, he comes to her, now in Italy, - comes to her, in the dark; when, as he sadly turns to go, after a long, bitter conversation of cross purposes, she finds him to be blind. Her love, so long checked and denied, bursts forth, and her woman's nature pours itself out in a flood of sympathy and affection. We involuntarily think of Jane Eyre and Rochester.

Among her shorter poems there are many of great beauty; such as the "Lay of the Brown Rosary," with its fiendish

"Forbear that dream! forbear that dream!"

the "Romaunt of the Swan's Nest," the strong "Rhyme of the Duchess May," a ballad-tale into which the refrain, "Toll slowly!" is woven like the boom of a tolling bell. It would be pleasant to quote at length from these, and from such poems as "The Cry of the Human and " Cowper's Grave," but we must refer readers to the volumes themselves, which they can peruse at will.

We will quote one or two passages which have struck us in reading, and then have done. In "Casa Guidi Windows" Mrs. Browning speaks of Italy as

and after describing the Florentine procession of thanksgiving to the Grand Duke for some trifling liberty granted the people, she thus paints the throng of spectators : —

"Rude men, unconscious of the tears that kept

Their beards moist, shouted; some few laughed aloud,
And none asked any why they laughed and wept.

Friends kissed each other's cheeks, and foes long vowed
More warmly did it, two-months' babies leapt

Wide, glittering eyes looked elsewhere; lovers pressed
Each before either, neither glancing back;

And peasant maidens, smoothly 'tired and tressed,
Forgot to finger on their necks the slack

Great pearl-strings; while old blind men would not rest,
But pattered with their staves, and slid their shoes
Along the stones, and smiled as if they saw."

Here are a few strong sentences:

Whose wasted right hand gambled 'gainst his left

With an old brass button, in a blot of sun."

We lay these volumes of hers upon the shelf more carefully, now that the authoress is dead. Let her own words appeal against such few critics as have condemned her: —

"Deal with us nobly, women though we be,

And honor us with truth, if not with praise."