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length. The Cry of the Children, The Lay of the Brown Rosary and The Rhyme of the Duchess May would all be better if they were shorter. Lady Geraldine's Courtship—"a sort of Lord of Burleigh from the other side"-cries aloud for condensation. In the sonnet, with its rigid limit to fourteen lines, there was no choice: concentration was imperative. And hence we have such faultless pieces as A Soul's Expression, where there is not a word too much nor a word wrong. As a rule in Mrs Browning's works we have to pardon the faults in consideration of the beauties.

Casa Guidi Windows (1851) followed the Sonnets from the Portuguese, and this in turn was followed by Aurora Leigh (1857). Poems before Congress (1860) was the last volume published during Mrs Browning's life; and the posthumous Last Poems (1862) gathered up the remaining fragments of her verse.

Two of these volumes, Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress, are inspired by Italy. Her residence in that country naturally gave her an interest in its condition and prospects, which was deepened by the influence of her husband. But the choice of subject was for Mrs Browning unfortunate. Casa Guidi Windows is long and diffuse. The writer speaks disparagingly of Byron as "not the best kind of second" in the grades of poets; but the passages in his poems which were inspired by Italy have a far clearer and more sonorous ring than Mrs Browning's.

The ambitious metrical romance of Aurora Leigh suffers, like much of Mrs Browning's poetry besides, from excessive length. He who has read it once shrinks from travelling again through its many flats of commonplace. As a poem which dealt with questions of the day, as the work of one of the most prominent writers of the time, it was read when it was new. But it is one of that class of poems which after times are content to talk about and take as read. Its length saves it from complete oblivion; but that same length hinders it from reaching the heart. And yet there are beautiful oases of poetry in Aurora Leigh, lively descriptions, wise maxims, clear-cut phrases, telling sarcasms. Few have dealt more justly and appreciatively than Mrs Browning with English

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Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;

The hills are crumpled plains, the plains parterres,

The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped,

And if you seek for any wilderness

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl."

But on the other hand the passage which immediately follows corrects the injustice which this, if it stood alone, would do, and proves the writer to have been equally sensible of the extreme beauty of English scenery.

In spite of its frequent flatness probably none of Mrs Browning's longer poems contains so great a proportion of memorable phrases as Aurora Leigh. There are striking images and comparisons:

"Those hot fire seeds of creation held

In Jove's clenched palm before the worlds were sown";
"Life, struck sharp on death,

Makes awful lightning";

66 Young

As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face."

There are paradoxes conveying truth: fathers love "not as wisely, since less foolishly" than mothers. There are pungent and witty sayings:

"We are of one flesh, after all,

And need one flannel (with a proper sense

Of difference in the quality)."

It is worth dwelling upon such lines and phrases in Mrs Browning's case more than in the case of most poets, for they represent that in which she is weakest. She has both fervid emotion and intellectual abundance, but she is deficient in art. She is far too expansive. She will not restrain herself, select or

condense. She was prone to this error from the first; and unfortunately the influence of Browning tended to foster rather than to check it. He too suffers from the same mistake. Most

of his long poems are too long. But his intellectual vigour is sufficient, not to make the fault a merit, but to make it comparatively unimportant. It is not so in Mrs Browning's case. Though she is vigorous, she is far less vigorous than her husband; though she is no mere imitator, she has not his unsurpassed originality. Some of Browning's thoughts are to be found nowhere except in him; many more are nowhere else so powerfully expressed. Mrs Browning's were the thoughts of her own time, and people will be increasingly prone to turn from her diffuse expression of them to some more concentrated presentation. Her memory is safe by reason of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, such a beautiful piece of pathos as A Child's Grave at Florence, and such a spirited romance as The Rhyme of the Duchess May. But her poems will be severely weeded, and her ultimate place will probably be less lofty than that which her contemporaries were disposed to claim for her.

There remains to notice one other female writer who, though best known for her prose, had the capacity to win very high distinction in poetry. Emily Brontë rarely misses the poetic note, and her verse, if sometimes rough, is nearly always inspired. In the little volume of Poems: by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), only the pieces by Ellis were, as Charlotte Brontë frankly admitted, worthy of that notice which neither they nor the others received. But, neglected as they were, the poems of Emily Brontë bear the stamp of genius even more unmistakably than Wuthering Heights, and the best of them are far more satisfying than it. Emily Brontë has a strength, a reach of thought and an austerity of imagination which lift her very near the level of the greatest of her contemporaries. She has not volume and she sometimes-not alwayslacks polish; but nothing else is wanting. Such pieces as "The linnet in the rocky dells," Often Rebuked, Remembrance and The Old Stoic are great poetry. The noble Last Lines may be quoted; for they are the best memorial we possess of the dauntless spirit of their author:

"No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:

I see Heaven's glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,

Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life-that in me has rest,

As I undying Life-have power in thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts: unalterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thine infinity;

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above,

Charges, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,

And stars and universes cease to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou-THOU art Being and Breath,

And what THOU art may never be destroyed."

CHAPTER IV

TENNYSON

THE career of Tennyson has already been traced down to the issue of the two volumes of poetry in 1842. His subsequent life was altogether uneventful; for he devoted himself with unswerving persistence and industry to the art of poetry, and he found no disturbing circumstances to turn him from his task. He lived retired and solitary; but yet it would be a profound mistake to regard him as a mere recluse, pursuing art for art's sake alone, and indifferent to the life of the world around him, of his own nation, or of those among whom his lot was cast. In respect of his own immediate neighbours, he was in later life something of a hermit. He rarely sought their society, and his gruff manner did not encourage familiarity. The very distinction of his air and appearance kept men aloof even while it attracted them. The man who might have written the Iliad was a person too awe-inspiring to be approached without encouragement; and from Tennyson the encouragement did not come. Nevertheless, Tennyson's poems are the work of a man keenly alive to every human interest. In no other poet is the thought of the age more faithfully mirrored; and the poems in dialect are sufficient proof of interest in the humbler aspects and phases of life. It is evident that in youth Tennyson had listened with an acute ear to the speech of the plain men around him, and had observed their manners and character with a penetrating eye. If he did not add much in later years to such stores of knowledge, he at least preserved with a tenacious memory what he had before accumulated.

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