bringing the antique spirit within the range of modern thought and sympathy, are seen in the Heroic Idyls, which are Latin poems, and their English version,-the Hellenics. He was always at ease in either language. The famous shell-passage in Gebir an early poetical romance - is said to have been written first in Latin, and to have been more musical than its translation: 'But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polished lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

On the whole, however, to the multitude he will ever be a sealed book, because radically deficient in geniality of feeling. His imagery seems to us cold and statuesque. This may be due partly or mainly to his habit of first composing in a foreign tongue. We may be surprised that he often shed tears in the passion of his work. His affection for nature was instinctive and sincere. He desired,

'To let all flowers live freely, and all die,

Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart,
Among their kindred in their native place.
I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank,
And not reproached me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands

Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.'

To read Landor one must exert himself, and the exertion is to some purpose. The same is true, in even a higher degree, of Browning (1812- ), subtle and penetrating, eminently a thinker, exercising our thought rather than our emotion; concrete in presentation, and, when most felicitous, dramatic, but capricious in expression, and greatly deficient in warmth and music; original and unequal; an eclectic, not to be restricted in his themes, with a prosaic regard for details, and a barbaric sense of color and form.

The poem of his youth - Paracelsus — is a metaphysical dialogue, the history of a thwarted soul that would know and enjoy, that would drink deep at the fountains both of knowledge and of pleasure. The following passage is characteristic:

Another world!

And why this world, this common world, to be

A make-shift, a mere foil, how fair soever,

To some fine life to come? Man must be fed
With angels' food, forsooth; and some few traces
Of a diviner nature, which look out

Through his corporeal baseness, warrant him
In a supreme contempt for all provision
For his inferior tastes-some straggling marks
Which constitute his essence, just as truly
As here and there a gem would constitute
The rock, their barren bed, a diamond.
But were it so were man all mind- he gains

A station little enviable. From God

Down to the lowest spirit ministrant,
Intelligence exists which casts our mind

Into immeasurable shade. No, no:

Love, hope, fear, faith-these make humanity,

These are its sign, and note, and character;

And these I have lost!-gone, shut from me forever.'

This has the simplicity and truth of the old drama:

'Festus, strange secrets are let out by Death,

Who blabs so oft the follies of this world:
And I am Death's familiar, as you know.
I helped a man to die some few weeks since.
No mean trick

He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old; and just an hour before-
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes-
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors,
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take

Would not be precious as those blooms to him.'

Observe now the magical effect of high passion:

'O lyric Love, half angel and half bird,

And all a wonder and a wild desire!'

Such the self-forgetful cadences in which he addresses his dead wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861); a rhymer at ten, an author at seventeen; an omnivorous reader, a loving student of philosophy and the classics; in style, original from the beginning, remarkable alike for defects and for beauties; often rugged and unfinished, from subordination of taste to excess of feeling; always intense, rarely sportive; worshipful and sympathetic, tremulously sensitive to the sorrows and mysteries of existence; the most fragile of beings, yet essaying to reach the infinite; all ethereal, yet all human, the idol of her kindred, the most beloved of minstrels and of women.

Her poetry as a whole is an uneven production, full of prosaic

episodes, with much that is forced and unnatural, a chaos from which rare lustres break out.

Also:

And this:

Thus:

The essence of all beauty I call love.
The attribute, the evidence, and end,
The consummation, to the inward sense,
Of beauty apprehended from without,

I still call love. As form, when colourless,

Is nothing to the eye-that pine-tree there,
Without its black and green, being all a blank-
So, without love, is beauty undiscerned

In man or angel. Angel! rather ask

What love is in thee, what love moves to thee,
And what collateral love moves on with thee,
Then shalt thou know if thou art beautiful.'1

'O sorrowful great gift

Conferred on poets, of a two-fold life,

When one life has been found enough for pain.
We staggering 'neath our burden as mere men,
Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,
Support the intolerable strain and stress

Of the universal, and send clearly up

With voices broken by the human sob,

Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!'s

Of a mother gazing on her fatherless child, just waking from sleep, and perplexed between a mortal presence and the angelhood it had been away to visit:

'She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)

In that extremity of love 'twill pass

For agony or rapture, seeing that love

Includes the whole of nature, rounding it

To love, no more,- since more can never be

Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,

And drowning in the transport of the sight,

Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,
One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,

She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,

And drawing from his countenance to hers

A fainter red, as if she watched a flame
And stood in it aglow.'4

1A Drama of Exile.

2 Sonnet.

3 Aurora Leigh.

4Ibid.

Aurora Leigh is essentially an autobiography, withal a mirror of modern life and issues, almost a handbook of literature and the arts; superior in power to any similar contemporary structure, yet incongruous in the parts, unsatisfactory in the aggregate, and the most idiosyncratic of its author's poems. One feels that life was to her a very serious thing, that she wrought reverently, that she struggled painfully to render the music that was in her, the dream was so far beyond the symbol,-the mount of vision was so high, time and opportunity all so narrow and so brief:

'The winds sound only in opposing straits;

The sea, beside the shore; man's spirit rends
Its quiet only up against the ends

Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,
Where, worked and worn by passionate debates,
And losing by the loss it apprehends,

The flesh rocks round, and every breath it sends
Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states
Suppose a straitened place. Jehovah Lord,
Make room for rest around me! out of sight
Now float me of the vexing land abhorred,

Till in deep calms of space, my soul may right
Her nature- -shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the Infinite.'

Another elaborate novel in verse, less profound, less imaginative, but more graceful, more musical, and far more readable, is Lucile, by Robert Lytton,' to whom friends once looked for signs of a new poetical dawn. In this his masterpiece we must admire the noble features which distinguish all that he has written, the generous reach of thought, the disposition to look inward to the duties, onward to the destinies of man, and the doctrine of the gradual education of the race by struggle against evil. The reader may find an indication of the author's spirit and manner, as well as somewhat that may be useful in pleasure or suggestive in reflection, in sentences like these. Of concentration:

'The man who seeks one thing in life, and but one,

May hope to achieve it before life be done;

But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes,

Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows
A harvest of barren regrets.'

Of courage and self-respect:

'Let any man once show the world that he feels
Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels:
Let him fearlessly face it, 'twill leave him alone:
But 'twill fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone.'

1 'Owen Meredith,' born 1831, son of Edward Lytton Bulwer.

What need to remind us that we cannot subsist on visions?

'We may live without poetry, music, and art;

We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.'

Of the beauty and beatitude which we conceive and pursue:

'We but catch at the skirts of the thing we would be,

And fall back on the lap of a false destiny.

So it will be, so has been since this world began!

And the happiest, noblest, and best part of man

Is the part which he never hath fully play'd out:
For the first and last word in life's volume is-Doubt.
The face the most fair to our vision allow'd

Is the face we encounter and lose in the crowd.

The thought that most thrills our existence is one
Which, before we can frame it in language, is gone.'

Of the price of excellence:

'Not a truth has to art or to science been given,

But brows have ached for it, and souls toil'd and striven.'

Of the principle of concord, or the law of friendship:

There are loves in man's life for which time can renew

All that time may destroy. Lives there are, though, in love,
Which cling to one faith, and die with it; nor move
Though earthquakes may shatter the shrine.'

Of influence:

'No life

Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife
And all life not be purer and stronger thereby.'

Of the divine significance of life and the reward of the faithful:

'Honest love, honest sorrow,

Honest work for the day, honest hope for the morrow,

Are these worth nothing more than the hand they make weary.
The heart they have sadden'd, the life they leave dreary?'

Matthew Arnold (1822- ) is the poet of cultured intellect. The qualities of his verse are simplicity, clearness, music, calm. Uniting great mental activity to great moral earnestness, he is one of those who represent the unsatisfied aspirations of their age. His characteristic mood is sadness. Man is a wanderer from his birth, adrift on the river of Time:

'Vainly does each, as he glides,

Fable and dream

Of the lands where the river of Time

Had left ere he woke on its breast,

Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed.

Only the tract where he sails

He wots of; only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his. . . .