'He kept his own strange sweetness of soul to the end. . . . So passed away this good, unworldly, kind-hearted, religious man, whose powers, natural and acquired, would so easily have made him a notable man had he known what vanity, or ambition, or the love of money or social influence meant. As it is, he was known to half-a-dozen friends. He was worthy of being Ba's father-out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. My sister will come and live with me henceforth. You see what she loses. All her life has been spent in caring for my mother, and seventeen years after that, my father.' From this time to the end, the brother and sister were inseparable companions. Not the least unique in this unique family circle, in all rarest qualities of head and heart, was Sarianna Browning, and in that beloved sister's perfect companionship the poet found his best earthly solace for the great sorrow of his life. True as steel, brilliant in intellect yet simple and natural as a child, she combined with an almost shrinking modesty and diffidence an unselfishness absolutely selfless, an understanding sympathy that never failed, and all her father's 'strange sweetness of soul.' Her ministry of love, begun to her mother and continued to her father, came next as an unspeakable blessing to her poet brother, and, after his death, to his sontill, without one failing faculty, in her ninetieth year, at the dim dawn of a recent Italian April day, the quiet summons to the better country came, and she might not tarry.

The younger generation now began to recognise that a great poet had been long in their midst though they knew him not, and in June 1867 Oxford conferred upon Mr Browning its M.A. degree, and in the following October he was made an honorary Fellow of Balliol. The year after he declined to be nominated for the Lord Rectorship of St Andrews University. In June 1868 Miss Arabel Barrett died, like her sister, in Robert Browning's arms. This year the six-volume edition of his poems was published by Messrs Smith, Elder, & Co., and that winter the first two, and in spring the third and fourth volumes of The Ring and the Book, of which the Athenæum spoke as the 'opus magnum of the generation.' Robert Browning was now recognised as a great poet. London society sought eagerly for his company, and he was drawn much into its whirl of engagements. In March 1871 Hervé Riel appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for the benefit of the French sufferers by the war, Mr Smith paying one hundred guineas for the poem. Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau were published in August and December 1871; of the latter, fourteen hundred copies were sold during the first five days. I remember,' writes its author, 'that the year I made the little rough sketch in Rome (1860) my account for the last six months with Chapman was-nil, not one copy disposed of! . . . It (Hohenstiel-Schwangau) is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased,

say for himself.' In this year he was made one of the life-governors of London University. Fifine at the Fair appeared in the spring of 1872. About this time an acquaintance, begun long before at Florence, with Miss Egerton Smith ripened into an intimacy. They went much together to concerts in London, and, accompanied by Miss Browning, spent several summer holidays together, sharing the same house at Mers, at Villers, in the island of Arran, and lastly, in 1877, at La Saisiaz. In 1875 Mr Browning declined nomination for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University. Pacchiarotto appeared in 1876. During their stay at La Saisiaz in the summer of 1877 he was unusually depressed, and their visit there was brought to a sad and abrupt termination by the sudden death of Miss Egerton Smith, as they were preparing to start for a day's excursion on Salène. His poem La Saisiaz, recording the thoughts suggested by this sad event, on another life as an essential sequel to our present life, was published in 1878 along with The Two Poets of Croisic. In this year he returned to Italy with his sister, for the first time since his wife's death, travelling by the Splügen Pass, where in great excitement he wrote Ivan Ivanovitch, and thence by Como and Verona to Venice and Asolo. From Asolo, at last, dear friend! So do dreams come false, he writes. The little quaint hill-town had been his first love in Italy, and a dream had often haunted his sleep that he was struggling to reach 'The Rocca'-the ruined embattlement which crowns its hill-but

always in vain. Almost every summer holiday after, he and his sister returned to the land he loved for a dose of Italian air.' The first series of Dramatic Idylls was published in 1879, the second in 1880; and in 1881 the London Browning Society was started by Dr Furnivall and Miss E. H. Hickey. Jocoseria appeared in 1883, and Ferishtah's Fancies in 1884. At the tercentenary of the Edinburgh University in that year, its degree of LL.D. was given to him, and the following year he was elected president of its associated societies. In 1885 he entered into negotiations (which, however, eventually fell through) for the purchase of the old Manzoni Palace in Venice. In 1887 Parleyings appeared; and in June he removed from 19 Warwick Crescent to 29 De Vere Gardens, a larger house on the other side of the Park. In October his son, Mr Robert Barrett Browning, who had chosen the profession of an artist, and of whose early successes his father was far more proud than of any achievement of his own, married an American lady, Miss Fannie Coddington. About this time Mr Browning's wonderfully perfect health began somewhat to decline, and he was troubled by severe colds in winter; but he held on to his usual routine of life. In the spring of 1888 he began to revise his poems for a uniform edition. In August he went to Primiero, near Feltre. He was in London again in his new house in De Vere Gardens, in the decorating and

completing of which he took much interest, during the winter of 1888-89. He went to Oxford for Commemoration week, but was more than usually disinclined to leave home in the summer. For a

time Scotland was thought of, but his son's residence in his new home in the Palazzo Rezzonico at Venice finally decided him to take the journey to Italy; and, accompanied by his sister, he left England for the last time on 13th August 1889. Their friend Mrs Bronson, whose hospitality they had previously enjoyed in Venice, had now acquired a quaint little house built into the city wall of Mr Browning's beloved Asolo, and she procured apartments for him and his sister near herself there. Mr Browning seemed singularly happy this summer. Fortunately there is little changed here,' he writes; 'things are the same in the main. Shall I ever see them again, when -as I suppose we leave for Venice in a fortnight?' A great desire took possession of him to have a pied-à-terre of his own in the little town he loved, and he entered into negotiations for the purchase of an unfinished shell of a house from whence there is a magnificent view of the surrounding hills and plain, near the old Castle of Caterina Cornaro; which he proposed, with his son's efficient aid, to complete and to call after his little Asolan silk-winder, 'Pippa's Tower.' Whilst there he finished and sent off to the publishers his last volume of poems, Asolando, dedicated to their friend Mrs Bronson, whose kind hospitality had lent to this last visit much of its enjoyment. He also corrected the proofs for the uniform edition of his wife's poems, so winding up and completing, though he did not know it, the work of his life. By the end of October he went, accompanied by his sister, to his son's home in Venice, and there waited on for the completion of certain legal formalities in connection with his purchase at Asolo. On 29th November he wrote that he would wait no longer--he had caught a cold and felt sadly asthmatic, scarcely fit to travel; it was his nature to get into scrapes of this kind, he wrote the day after, but he always managed somehow or other to extricate himself from them. The bronchial affection, however, increased, and Dr Cini, who was called in, at once recognised the seriousness of the case. He was carried from the 'Pope's rooms' which he was occupying in the lower story of the Rezzonico, to the large, airy bedroom on the second floor occupied by his son and daughterin-law. The bronchial attack was overcome, but the heart was no longer able for its task, and surrounded by the tenderest care of those he most loved his sister, his son, and his daughter-in-law -he died as the clock of San Marco was chiming ten on the night of 12th December 1889. Asolando was published on the day of his death. The telegram announcing its favourable reception came in time to give him a moment's pleasure. 'How gratifying!' he said, when his son told him of it. His own wish was, if he died in Italy, to be laid

by her he so loved in Florence; but difficulties arose owing to the recent closing of the cemetery, and before they could be overcome England had claimed her poet-son, and on the 31st of December 1889 all that was mortal of Robert Browning was laid in the Poets' Corner' in Westminster Abbey. It was strongly felt that the great poet and poetess, who in life had been so united, in death should not be divided, and an offer was made to their son to lay his mother by her husband's side; but he preferred to leave her under the sod of the land she had loved so well. As Robert Browning was borne to his rest through the old Abbey, mid the bent heads of mourning thousands, the choir sang the words of his wife's beautiful poem, 'He giveth His beloved sleep.' A massive purple slab of Oriental porphyry, brought from a monastery in Rome, and said to have formed part of one of the great Roman temples, on which have been carved the English rose and the Florentine lily, has been placed by his son in the Abbey pavement over his father's grave.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is essentially a lyrical poet. Brilliant and suggestive, full of high and daring thought and noble feeling, often almost epigrammatic in happiness of expression, and with a haunting music all their own, her poems stand in the very foremost rank of English lyrical poetry. There is in them a passion of indignation at all that is base, or cruel, or unworthy; of love and admiration for all that is true, and good, and beautiful; and of tenderness for all who are wronged, or weak, or suffering. She is at her best in some of her shorter lyrics, her sonnets, and in brilliant verses and passages scattered through her longer poems. Her main faults are a tendency to lengthiness, which detracts from the perfection of many of her poems taken as wholes, and a somewhat loose use (which, however, she defended on principle) of imperfect rhymes, which sometimes mars their melody. Besides her lyrics, her most notable poems are the Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.

The exquisite series of love-sonnets, called 'From the Portuguese,' was written during the years 18451846, between the first declaration of Robert Browning's love and their marriage, and reflects as in a mirror the varying phases of that ideal courtship. No eye but the author's saw them, however, till after their marriage, when the poetwife gave this unique love-gift to her poet-husband. The title, which has puzzled many critics, is simply the substitution for her own of a pet name by which (in allusion to her poem Catarina to Camoens,' of which he was particularly fond) Robert Browning used to call his wife, 'my little Portuguese,' doubtless adopted in the title of the sonnets as a transparent veil womanly modesty sought to throw over their intense and passionate individuality.

Of Aurora Leigh Mrs Browning speaks in its Dedication as 'the most mature of my works,

and the one into which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered.' It is in reality a romance in blank verse. Many of the social problems with which it deals, though now familiar to us all, were looked upon forty years ago as startling novelties, and for a delicate and sensitive woman to treat them in the bold and outspoken way in which they are handled in Aurora Leigh was an act of true moral heroism. But refined and sensitive as Elizabeth Barrett Browning was, her husband sings of her truly as the 'boldest heart that ever braved the sun.' There were cruelties and injustices in the received relations of the sexes, and if words of hers could help to right them, the help should not be withheld. Aurora Leigh has often been spoken of as an autobiography; but whatever points of resemblance there may be between the heroine and the author, nothing can be more dissimilar than the story of their lives. Yet by their diverse roads they reach the same goal, and Aurora Leigh's final views of life and art may be accepted as essentially those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Robert Browning is as essentially a dramatic, as his wife is a lyrical, poet. Comparatively few of his poems are strictly dramatic in form, but all his thinking falls naturally into a dramatic mould. Even his philosophy and metaphysics, of which there is much in his poetry, take generally the form of the philosophy and speculations of some real or imaginary personality. The incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, have always thought so,' he says in the dedication of Sordello. Not that Robert Browning's mind is objective, as Shakespeare's is; there is nothing of the calm, placid, mirroring quality in it which in our great Elizabethan dramatist reflects all things outward to itself, as from the surface of a rippleless lake. Browning's mind, on the contrary, is intensely and passionately subjective and individual. One never loses sight of the creator's mind in the creatures of his genius; but the universality and depth of his sympathy enables him so to throw his own passionate soul into each varying phase of the human nature he depicts, that Robert Browning is, for the time being, each of his own creations. Hence the man Robert Browning comes far closer to his readers than the man William Shakespeare. It seems a hopeless task in the limited space available to give any adequate idea of the extraordinary richness and variety of Robert Browning's manysided genius. His intense sympathy and understanding of the point of view of everything living, from the lowest to the highest, from the basest to the best, is perhaps his most outstanding characteristic; but hardly less remarkable are his philosophical insight, his marvellous powers of observation, the power and beauty of his descriptions of nature, the combined manliness and sweetness of his views of life, and the cheery inspiriting ring of an optimism that ignores no shadow, yet ever pierces through the darkness to the light

above the cloud, built upon no shifting sands of sentiment but on the eternal Rock:

God's in His heaven,

All's right with the world.

The difficulties of his style, so often objected to, are very much the defects of his qualities. His much-abused obscurity is not a matter of mere style or expression, as can easily be proved by simply trying, after succeeding in mastering the poet's meaning in a difficult passage, to express the ideas it contains in clearer or simpler English, when it will be found that the words used are the very clearest words possible to convey its meaning. The real difficulty lies in gaining the poet's standpoint; that done, all is simple; and this difficulty arises mainly from the subtlety and the rapidity of his thought. There are many minds to whom Browning's poems must remain for ever a sealed book, because of a certain subtle quality in his mind and a faculty for fine-spun analogy which eludes their grasp; and there are many also who, though perhaps capable of understanding if once they attain to his standpoint, find the mental gymnastics necessary to follow the rapid transitions of his fancy too arduous a task. The association of ideas in Browning's mind is so swift and so delicate that it requires a mind in some degree constituted like his own to be able to follow him. To these essential difficulties of his poetry he sometimes adds (as in Sordello) a complex plot, begun in the middle, and relating to obscure episodes of unfamiliar history; and then the bewilderment of the ordinary casual reader is indeed complete ! Next to Sordello, perhaps, Fifine at the Fair is the most difficult, and certainly one of the most misunderstood of Browning's poems, as it is also (when understood aright) one of his very noblest. The difficulty here is of a different kind from that of Sordello—it lies in the essential motif of the poem itself, which is 'from a given point, evolve the infinite'-from an imaginary, commonplace, concrete example of a man apparently drawn away for a time from his nevertheless true allegiance to the high-souled wife he loves by the passing attractions of a pretty dancinggirl at an itinerant village show, to illustrate man's whole relations to the Passing and the Permanent. Another objection often brought against Browning, and sometimes not wholly without cause, is the alleged roughness of his versification. With him the sense always takes precedence of the sound. His exact meaning must be expressed—if melodiously, so much the better-but in any case meaning must take the pas of melody; that he can be most melodious many of his lyrics incontestably prove.

Robert Browning is essentially the poet of poets and of thinkers. Perhaps more than any other his mind influences the whole trend of the thought of our generation, but it is largely by influencing the influencers. Great as his direct influence undoubtedly is, his indirect and unacknowledged

power is wider still, through the whole tone of the teaching of leading minds, themselves permeated by his thought.

The greatest of his many great poems is unquestionably The Ring and the Book. It consists of twelve parts, originally in four volumes, in which the same tale of wrong and cruelty and murder is told from all imaginable different standpoints-of criminals, victims, counsel on either side, onlookers, and judge—with all Browning's own unapproachable insight into the character, motives, and point of view of each of his dramatis persona. Nothing in literature can be found finer than his delineation of the passionate purity of Pompilia. My rose I gather for the breast of God,' as her judge, the wise old Pope, calls her; or of 'the warrior-priest,' whose frivolous and unworthy past vanishes, shrivelled to nothingness at first touch of her pure flame, till he 'springs forth a hero,' loyal to the life's end;' or of the grand old Pope, facing his last judgment, 'The Pope for Christ,' and daring to

Send five souls more to just precede his own,
Stand him in stead and witness-if need were,
How he is wont to do God's work on earth.

The exquisite dedication to his wife, beginning 'Oh Lyric Love, half angel and half bird,' concludes this masterpiece of poetry.

Among his longer poems, after this extraordinary effort of genius, Paracelsus, Strafford, Pippa Passes, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, Balaustion's Adventure, Fifine at the Fair, and La Saisiaz take perhaps the highest place; and amid the unbounded wealth of his shorter poems may be specially mentioned 'The Lost Leader,' 'How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,' 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Evelyn Hope,' 'Old Pictures in Florence,' 'Garden Fancies,' 'A Toccata of Galuppi's,' 'Home Thoughts from Abroad,' 'Saul,' 'By the Fireside,' 'Any Wife to any Husband,' 'Two in the Campagna,' 'The Guardian Angel,' 'Mesmerism,' 'The Italian in England,' 'Waring,' 'The Last Ride Together,' 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin,' 'The Flight of the Duchess,' 'A Grammarian's Funeral,' 'How it Strikes a Contemporary,' 'An Epistle,' 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Andrea del Sarto,' 'The Bishop orders his Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church, Bishop Blougram's Apology,' 'Cleon,' 'One Word More,' 'The Worst of it,' 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' 'A Death in the Desert,' 'Caliban upon Setebos,' 'Prospice,' 'Mr Sludge the Medium,' 'Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ, ‘Ivàn Ivànovitch,' 'Clive,' the 'Epilogue to Ferishtah's Fancies,' and the 'Epilogue to Asolando.'

From Mrs Browning's Poems.
Cowper's Grave.

It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying;

It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying:

Yet let the grief and humbleness as low as silence languish :

Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing!

O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!

men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,

Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,

How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory, And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,

He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted. He shall be strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation, And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration;

Nor ever shall he be, in praise, of wise or good forsaken, Named softly as the household name of one whom God hath taken.

With quiet sadness and no gloom I learn to think upon him,

With meekness that is gratefulness to God whose heaven hath won him,

Who suffered once the madness-cloud to His own love to blind him,

But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him;

And wrought within his shattered brain such quick poetic

senses

As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences:

The pulse of dew upon the grass kept his within its number,

And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.

And timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home-caresses,

Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses; The very world, by God's constraint, from falsehood's ways removing,

Its women and its men became, beside him, true and loving.

And though, in blindness, he remained unconscious of that guiding,

And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,

He testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated, Nor man nor nature satisfies whom only God created.

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,

Peneath those deep pathetic Eyes which closed in death to save him.

Thus? Oh, not thus! No type of earth can image that awaking,

Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking,

Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted, But felt those eyes alone, and knew-My Saviour! not deserted!'..

Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather;

And Adam's sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father:

Yea, once, Immanuel's orphaned cry His universe hath shaken

It went up single, echoless, My God, I am forsaken!'

(From The Seraphim and other Poems, 1838.)

The Cry of the Children.

Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,

The young flowers are blowing toward the west-
But the young, young children, O my brothers
They are weeping bitterly!

They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free. .

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their looks are sad to see,

For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy;

'Your old earth,' they say, 'is very dreary,

Our young feet,' they say, 'are very weak; Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—

Our grave-rest is very far to seek :

Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children, For the outside earth is cold,

And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, And the graves are for the old.'

'For oh,' say the children, we are weary,

And we cannot run or leap;

If we cared for any meadows, it were merely

To drop down in them and sleep.

Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark, underground;
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron

In the factories, round and round.'. . .

Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,
To look up to Him and pray;

So the blessed One who blesseth all the others,
Will bless them another day.

They answer, 'Who is God that He should hear us,
While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?
When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us
Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word.
And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)
Strangers speaking at the door :

Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him,
Hears our weeping any more?'. . .

And well may the children weep before you!
They are weary ere they run;

They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.

They know the grief of man, without its wisdom; They sink in man's despair without its calm; Are slaves without the liberty in Christdom,

Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm: Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly

The harvest of its memories cannot reap,Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly. Let them weep! let them weep! . . .