And trust me while I turn'd the page,

And track'd you still on classic ground,

I grew in gladness till I found

My spirits in the golden age.

For me the torrent ever pour'd

And glisten'd-here and there alone

The broad-limb'd Gods at random thrown
By fountain-urns ;-and Naiads oar'd

A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom

From him, that on the mountain lea
By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea.

WILL.

O well for him whose will is strong!

He suffers, but he will not suffer long;

He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:

For him nor moves the loud world's random mock,

Nor all Calamity's hugest waves confound,

Who seems a promontory of rock,

That, compass'd round with turbulent sound,

In middle ocean meets the surging shock,

Tempest-buffeted, citadel crown'd.

But ill for him who, bettering not with time, Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,

And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime,

Or seeming-genial venial fault,

Recurring and suggesting still!

He seems as one whose footsteps halt,

Toiling in immeasurable sand,

And o'er a weary sultry land,

Far beneath a blazing vault,

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.

FROM "MAUD."

Is that enchanted moan only the swell

Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay?
And hark the clock within, the silver knell

Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white,

And died to live, long as my pulses play ;

But now by this my love has closed her sight

And given false death her hand, and stol'n away
To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell
Among the fragments of the golden day.

May nothing there her maiden grace affright!
Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell.
My bride to be, my evermore delight,

My own heart's heart, my ownest own, farewell;
It is but for a little space I go,

And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell

Beat to the noiseless music of the night!

Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow

Of your soft splendours that you look so bright?
I have climb'd nearer out of lonely Hell.
Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,
Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe

That seems to draw-but it shall not be so :
Let all be well, be well.

FROM "IN MEMORIAM."

When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls :

Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away;

From off my bed the moonlight dies;

And closing eaves of wearied eyes

I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray :

And then I know the mist is drawn

A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

ST. AGNES' EVE.

Deep on the convent roof the snows

Are sparkling to the moon :

My breath to heaven like vapour goes:

May my soul follow soon!

The shadows of the convent-towers

Slant down the snowy sward,

Still creeping with the creeping hours

That lead me to my Lord :

Make Thou my spirit pure and clear

As are the frosty skies,

Or this first snowdrop of the year

That in my bosom lies.

As these white robes are soil'd and dark,

To yonder shining ground:

As this pale taper's earthly spark,

To yonder argent round;

Mrs.
Browning

So shows my soul before the Lamb,

My spirit before Thee;

So in mine earthly house I am,

To that I hope to be.

Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,

Thro' all yon starlight keen,

Draw me, Thy bride, a glittering star,

In raiment white and clean.

He lifts me to the golden doors;
The flashes come and go;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,

And strows her lights below,

And deepens on and up! the gates

Roll back, and far within

For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,

To make me pure of sin.

The sabbaths of Eternity,

One sabbath deep and wide

A light upon the shining sea

The Bridegroom with his bride!

ELIZABETH BARRETT, also, pleased a wide and influential circle. Although

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

After the Portrait by Gordigiani

(Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)

her work was less pure than Tennyson's, and has proved to be less perennial, there were many readers of deliberate judgment who preferred it to his. Their nerves were pleasurably excited by the choral tumult of Miss Barrett's verse, by her generous and humane enthusiasm, and by the spontaneous impulsiveness of her emotion. They easily forgave the slipshod execution, the hysterical violence, the Pythian vagueness and the Pythian shriek. More critical readers were astonished that one who approached t'he composition of poetry with an almost religious sense of responsibility, whose whole life was dedicated to the highest aims of verse, who studied with

eclectic passion the first classics of every age, should miss the initial charm,

and should, fresh from Sophocles and Dante, convey her thoughts in a stream which was seldom translucent and never calm. In some of her lyrics, however, and more rarely in her sonnets, she rose to heights of passionate humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country.

About the year 1850, when, as Mrs. Browning, she was writing at her best, all but a few were to be excused if they considered her the typical vates, the inspired poet of

human suffering and human aspiration. But her art, from this point onward, declined, and much of her late work was formless, spasmodic, singularly tuneless and harsh, nor is it probable that what seemed her premature death, in 1861, was a serious deprivation to English literature. Mrs. Browning, with great afflatus and vigour, considerable beauty of diction, and not a little capacity of tender felicity of fanciful thought, had the radical fault of mistaking convulsion for strength, and believing that sublimity involved a disordered and fitful frenzy. She was injured by the humanitarian sentimentality which was just coming into vogue,

Miss Mitford

and by a misconception of the uses of language somewhat analogous to that to which Carlyle had resigned himself. She suffered from contortions produced by the fumes of what she oddly called

"The lighted altar booming o'er

The clouds of incense dim and hoar;"

and if "the art of poetry had been a less earnest object to" her, if she had taken it more quietly, she might have done greater justice to her own superb ambition.

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), afterwards Mrs. Robert Browning, was the eldest of the eleven children of Edward Moulton-Barrett and Mary GrahamClarke, his wife; she was born at Coxhoe Hall, the residence of her father's brother,

Samuel Moulton, on the 6th of March 1806. Her father had lately assumed the name of Barrett, on inheriting his grandfather's estates in Jamaica. In 1809 the family moved to Hope End, close to the Malvern Hills, where the next twenty-two years of Elizabeth's life were spent. She began to write verses before she was eight years old. In 1819 her father printed an "epic" of his daughter's, The Battle of Marathon. More important, but still immature, was An Essay on Mind published in 1826. She was by this time in weak health; in 1821 she had strained herself while tightening her pony's girths, and injured her spine, and from this time forth she was often "for years upon her back." She read with the greatest avidity, and, even as a child, "ate and drank Greek, and made her head ache with it." In 1828 her mother, of whom little is known, died at Hope End, which was sold in 1832, and the home of the Barretts broken up. They removed to Sidmouth, where Elizabeth wrote her version of the Prometheus Bound, which saw the light, with other verses, in 1833. In 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth and settled in London, at 74 Gloucester Place. Elizabeth's friendships at this time were few, but they already included the blind Hellenist, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and her cousin, John Kenyon (1784-1856), and were soon to be extended to Miss Mary Mitford (1787-1855), and R. H. Horne. She now began to contribute to the magazines of the day, and in 1838 she published her first important volume, The Seraphim. In this year the Barretts moved to 50 Wimpole Street, which remained their home for the rest of her life. The winters of 1838 and 1839 she had to spend at Torquay for the benefit of her health, and she was staying on there when, on the 11th of July 1840, her favourite brother Edward was drowned, by the foundering of his boat, in Babbicombe Bay. The shock was so severe that her own life was long despaired of, and it was not until September of the following year that she could even be removed from Torquay to London. She was now a confirmed invalid, excluded from all but a few privileged visitors, and with no relaxation but the incessant pursuit of literature She now (1842) wrote the essays on The Greek Christian Poets, which were not published in book-form until after her death (1863), and, what was more important, she was closely occupied in original composition. The result was her Poems of 1844, in two volumes, which placed her for the first time among the foremost living poets. An allusion to Robert Browning in one of the pieces in this collection-" Geraldine's Courtship"-is believed to have led him to write Miss Barrett a letter (in January 1845), which opened an acquaintance between her and "the king of the mystics," as she called him. In May of the same year he was permitted to visit her, and "we are growing," she wrote, "to be the truest of friends." She was considered a hopeless invalid, and never left the house; there can be no question that her delicacy was fostered by the artificial nature of her treatment. Her father was a man of strong, selfish feeling, who had the almost maniacal determination that none of his children should marry, since he needed the personal services of all of them. That a daughter of his should wish to marry, Mr. Barrett considered "unfilial treachery." The doctors, meanwhile, determined that to winter abroad might be of great service to Elizabeth Barrett, but her father bluntly refused his permission. At the same time the friendship between her and Robert Browning had developed into a passion of love freely expressed on both sides. Her health, meanwhile, under this excitement revived, and in the spring of 1846 she was stronger than she had been since the shock at Torquay in 1840. With the consent of two of her sisters, but without even their knowledge of the details, the