And if any poet knew her,

He would sing of her with falls
Used in lovely madrigals.

And if any painter drew her,

He would paint her unaware

With a halo round the hair.6

For her, in requital of her pity, flowers from the grave of Cowper a recantation of his despair :

Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses,— That turns his fevered eyes around-‘My mother! where's my mother!'.

As if such tender words and deeds could come from any other ! The fever gone, with leaps of heart he sees her bending o'er him, Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him! Thus woke the poet from the dream his life's long fever gave him, Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes which closed in death to save him." Happily the light of the tomb was not needed to teach herself that joy may be neighbour to affliction :

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair:

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—

6

'Guess now who holds thee? 'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang,— Not Death, but Love.' 8

If she ever wearied of life, it was rest to the body that she craved, not to the soul:

Not, after all, that repose and acquiescence of any sort were the special qualities of her predilection. On the contrary, her favourite mental attitude is one of something she feigns to be wrath and bitterness. 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 lying phrase, 'Loved Once,' as a truth:

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:

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?'

But she shrunk and said,

'God over my head

Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-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 followed their example, and is nothing if not poetical. If the impression her heroes and heroines produce is often distasteful, it is that she endeavoured to lodge beings of solid flesh and blood in her unsubstantial structures. Shelley and Keats created inhabitants to occupy, without overcrowding, 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 refer it to 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 lodge her corporeal creatures in them as conveniently. In Aurora Leigh, which has always, I confess, left a taste, as of soot, on my mental palate, all her womanly mistakes are accumulated and exaggerated. The circumstances, there especially, were too many, too modern, and too actual. But when elsewhere she indulges in analogous, though less trying, experiments, the effect is to me similarly unpleasant.

Fortunately the characters and incidents frequently are as airy as the habitations 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 when Austria was sealing

her tomb! An aerial concert; and not the less exquisite for readers with a taste for such strains that, having no basis of common, companionable earth, they are as little likely to win, or keep, the popular 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.

1 Insufficiency, vol. iii, p. 187.

? A Denial, st. 2, vol. iii, p. 179.

To Flush, my Dog, st. 2, vol. ii, p. 233.

• Wine of Cyprus, stanzas 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 4, vol. iii, pp. 25–30. 5 A Drama of Exile, vol. i, p. 16.

• A Portrait, stanzas 1-6 and 13-14, vol. iii, pp. 57-9.

7 Cowper's Grave, stanzas 9-10, vol. iii, p. 119.

› Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet i, vol. iii, p. 188.

The Sleep, st. 9, vol. iii, p. 113.

10 Crowned and Buried, st. 13, vol. ii, p. 224.

11 Loved Once, st. 8, vol. iii, p. 68.

12 Confessions, st. 9, vol. iii, pp. 64-5.

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.