the wife of the learned and accomplished Sir William StirlingMaxwell, was forced to write systematically and with serious purpose; for she won by her pen the means of life. Under this stimulus she poured out a copious stream both of prose and of verse; but it is possible that, in the long run, her name will be remembered not so much for anything she wrote herself as for the fact that part of her unhappy story forms the ground-work of George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways. Her novels are of little merit, and her verse is variable. Her longer works are all beaten out rather thin, and the earlier ones especially are tainted with the sentimentality which appealed to the taste of that time. At a later date she turned to those social problems which were then becoming popular. But she is at her best in ballads and occasional poems, where her high spirit and chivalrous feeling tell. Bingen on the Rhine is not unworthy of its popularity. In an article in The Quarterly Review for September, 1840, there were grouped together a number of poetesses, including among others Elizabeth Barrett, Mrs Norton and Sara Coleridge. Along with their poems the writer noticed a slim anonymous volume entitled IX Poems by V, which he greeted with the emphatic compliment, βαιὰ μέν, ἀλλὰ ῥόδα. This praise was echoed a few years afterwards by one of the finest and most sensitive of critics, Dr John Brown. The writer of the poems was Mrs Archer Clive (1801-1873). She gradually added to her small handful of poems, but the whole volume of her verse is very slender. Like so many other female writers, she also essayed prose fiction; and in Paul Ferroll (1855) did work which is scarcely surpassed by more than three or four of them. In poetry too she deserved the praises of the reviewers; and, though she has never become popular, she is much superior to not a few of the poets and poetesses whose names are still familiar. There is masculine force and a rare dignity of thought and expression in The Grave and in Heart's Ease and in The Queen's Ball. Possibly there is also something morbid. Mrs Clive is at least habitually gloomy; but then she is never commonplace, and there is always meaning in her gloom. She is said to have been personally the very reverse of her poems: "There is no resisting," says Miss Mitford, "the contagious laughter of those dancing eyes." It is the other side of the familiar story of the melancholy clown. These female writers have been grouped together partly by reason of their sex. The emergence of woman into literature is practically an occurrence of the nineteenth century, and it is sufficiently important to demand special recognition. But besides, it is a fact that all of them, with the possible exception of Mrs Hemans and L. E. Landon, who died early in the period, illustrate the transition. On the one hand they point to the past: as a rule they are more Byronic than the poets. On the other hand, perhaps because of their sex, they show a remarkable sensitiveness to new influences. The only male writer who does so in equal or greater degree is Lytton. Accomplished as these women were, pleasant as much of their verse and thoughtful as some of it is, the view taken of the work of women in poetry must depend mainly upon the opinion which may be formed with respect to two poetesses of a larger growth, namely, Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, the latter of whom belongs to the later part of our period. The life of Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was uneventful,"a bird in a cage," she said, "would have as good a story.” After the injury to her spine which crippled her at fifteen, for many years she never left her couch, and for the whole of her life she was to the last degree fragile and delicate. Her marriage with Robert Browning in 1846, their settlement at Florence for the sake of Mrs Browning's health, the birth of a son, and her death in 1861, are all there is to record. But the very absence of incident is instructive here. The young poet of The Battle of Marathon, which was printed for private circulation before she had left the schoolroom, and of An Essay on Mind, which was published in 1826, was precocious. She had read widely for her years, and at the age of eight had acquired some knowledge of Homer in the original. At a later time she read Plato in the original and all the Greek poets, as well as the whole Bible in Hebrew. Her translation of Prometheus Bound attests her scholarship. But she was a recluse who saw nobody beyond the domestic circle, except one or two very intimate friends; and the sole influence in the formation of her mind, outside the family, was that of the blind scholar to whom she owed her knowledge of Greek. A person so situated a girl too-was not likely to initiate any new movement; she was rather likely to look farther back than most of her contemporaries. And this is just what Elizabeth Barrett did. One influence upon her, as we should expect, is that of Byron. The volume named from the Essay on Mind contained stanzas on his death, and certain other stanzas "occasioned by a passage in Mr Emerson's journal," which related to him. It also contained a poem entitled The Dream, which was modelled with a child-like naivety on a greater and more famous Dream. But notwithstanding this, there is really nothing of the Byronic spirit here. Far more significant is the title-poem, An Essay on Mind, the very name of which is an imitation of Pope. So too, as far as the author's power went, is the treatment; and she long retained Pope's fondness for antitheses, though she had not his skill in framing them. This discipleship serves to remind us of the fact that the controversy as to the merits of Pope, in which Bowles was the protagonist on one side and Byron on the other, was but newly ended, and that there were still here and there a few, like Miss Barrett, secluded by fortune or by inclination, who looked back for their models to the eighteenth century. Another small group of poems appeared in 1833, and then two more important publications, The Seraphim and other Poems (1838) and Poems (1844). The last-named volume brings us to the point where the influence of Robert Browning begins. The Seraphim is correctly described by the author as "a dramatic lyric rather than a lyrical drama." The subject, a dialogue between two seraphs hovering over Calvary at the crucifixion, is chosen with more daring than wisdom. The poem, rather more than a thousand lines long, is in a variety of lyrical metres, some of them of an exceedingly trying and difficult kind. It was a sort of work for which Miss Barrett was ill suited, for she was always prone to lapse into faults of rhyme and rhythm, and always apt, even in simple poems, to be lengthy. Such faults are - still present in the more ambitious and far more successful Drama of Exile, the first and longest of the poems of 1844. Here there are passages of powerful thought, intense feeling and vivid conception, and yet in the very opening song of Lucifer, where a glaring fault is least pardonable, we meet with the intolerable rhyme of "strangles " and "angels," and a little further on with its fellow in vileness, "raiment" and "lament." So it is always in Mrs Browning. She is one of the most irregular of writers. Side by side with beautiful poetry we find commonplace thought, verbose diction, inharmonious verse. Such unhappy conjunctions are illustrated even in the shorter poems of those early volumes. In The Poet's Vow we have beautiful things like and "His changing love-with stars above, His pride-with graves below," "The old eyes searching, dim with life, The young ones dim with death." And along with these we have, again conspicuously placed at the end, "Hold it in thy constant ken And that his everlastingness is The bond which is not loosed by any." Most of the characteristics of Mrs Browning are present in those early volumes. Her religious feeling is manifest everywhere, and especially in the very subjects of the two most ambitious poems. Some of the class who consider such a thing as religion too good for use except on Sundays, even thought that this feeling was made too prominent. The romantic spirit inspires The Romaunt of Margret, The Romaunt of the Page, The Lay of the Brown Rosary, Lady Geraldine's Courtship and Bertha in the Lane. Her deep social sympathies find voice in The Cry of the Children and The Cry of the Human; and the special emotions of her own art are in The Poet's Vow, A Vision of Poets and Lady Geraldine's Courtship,-the last noteworthy as containing her first published praise of Robert Browning. But perhaps the most perfect piece those two volumes contained was Cowper's Grave. No student of Mrs Browning, remembering the Sonnets from the Portuguese, can doubt that the influence which Browning brought into her life was on the whole good; but probably few who carefully compare her earlier with her later work will question that along with the good there was an element of evil. Mrs Browning never excelled in long compositions of complex structure; but her ambition disposed her from the first to make the attempt, and Browning strengthened the inclination. She was thoroughly feminine; but under the impulse from him she unconsciously adopted a more masculine tone. She imagined herself a thinker; in reality she felt, and in the attempt to translate her feeling into thought she fell into numerous mistakes. She is at her best when she gives free play to her emotions, and it is only then that she attains felicity of style. She does so in the pathetic Cowper's Grave; she does it sometimes in the uneven but still beautiful Cry of the Children; she does it again in Bertha in the Lane. Mrs Browning's first publication after her marriage was the wonderful Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), her greatest work and her best title to the rank of premier English poetess. They are not only a great but a unique collection of poems. "Good as they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness and subtlety of thought on the one hand, nor melody and charm on the other, sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest poetry. But they are the genuine utterance of a woman's heart, at once humbled and exalted by love; and in this respect they are unique. The woman's passion, from the woman's point of view, has seldom found expression at all in literature, and this particular aspect of it never. Hence, while it would be too much to say that these sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to question whether their removal would not leave a more irreparable gap in literature." The sonnet suited Mrs Browning's genius well, for the same reason that it suited Wordsworth's. Her besetting sin was diffuseness, and the sonnet forced upon her concentration and selection. Even her best pieces in freer forms are marred by excessive |