Flower-I never fancied, jewel-I profess you! You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love a jewel- From 'La Saisiaz.' Weakness never needs be falseness: truth is truth in each degree -Thunder-pealed by God to Nature, whispered by my soul to me. Nay, the weakness turns to strength and triumphs in a truth beyond: Mine is but man's truest answer-how were it did God respond?'. . . Can I make my eye an eagle's, sharpen ear to recognize Sound o'er league and league of silence? Can I know, who but surmise? . I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught This there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, If (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!) If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place, And life, time, with all their chances, changes,—just probation-space, Mine, for me. ... Only grant my soul may carry high through death her cup unspilled, Brimming though it be with knowledge, life's loss drop by drop distilled, I shall boast it mine-the balsam, bless each kindly wrench that wrung From life's tree its inmost virtue, tapped the root whence pleasures sprung, Barked the bole, and broke the bough, and bruised the berry, left all grace Ashes in death's stern alembic, loosed elixir in its place! (1878.) Epilogue to 'Ferishtah's Fancies.' Oh, Love-no, Love! All the noise below, Love, Groanings all and moanings-none of Life I lose! All of Life's a cry just of weariness and woe, Love'Hear at least, thou happy one!' How can I, Love, but choose? Only, when I do hear, sudden circle round me -Much as when the moon's might frees a space from cloud Iridescent splendours: gloom-would else confound meBarriered off and banished far-bright-edged the blackest shroud! Thronging through the cloud-rift, whose are they, the faces Faint revealed yet sure divined, the famous ones of old? 'What-they smile-'our names, our deeds so soon erases Time upon his tablet where Life's glory lies enrolled? 'Was it for mere fool's-play, make-believe and mumming, So we battled it like men, not boylike sulked or whined? Each of us heard clang God's 'Come!' and each was coming: Soldiers all, to forward face, not sneaks to lag behind! 'How of the field's fortune? That concerned our Leader! Led, we struck our stroke nor cared for doings left and right: Each as on his sole head, failer or succeeder, Lay the blame or lit the praise: no care for cowards: fight!' Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under, Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success : All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, All the late enchantment! What if all be error- Epilogue to 'Asolando.' [Published 12th December 1889, the day Robert Browning died at Venice.] At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, From The Two Poets of Croisic.' Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn. Blue ran the flash across : Violets were born! Sky-what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud : Splendid, a star! Will they pass to where-by death, fools think, imprisoned Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, -Pity me? Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? -Being-who? One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake. No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, A uniform edition of Robert Browning's works appeared in seventeen volumes in 1888-90; and Mr Furnivall published a Browning Bibliography in 1883. A Life of him was written by Mrs Sutherland Orr (1891), who also prepared a Handbook to Browning (1885). There are books on Browning and his work by Symons (1887), Fotheringham (1887), Gosse (1890), and Sharp (1890). An Introduction to the study of his poetry was written by Professor Hiram Corson (4th ed., Boston, U.S., 1892); in 1902 Mr Stopford Brooke published his work on The Poetry of Robert Browning : Mr Chesterton's book on Browning in the Men of Letters' series appeared in 1903. An Outline Analysis of Sordello was published by the present writer in 1889, and Of Fifine at the Fair, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and other Poems in 1892. M. Joseph Milsand's appreciation in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1851 should be named, as also Mme. Duclaux's Grands Ecrivains d'Outre-manche (1901). See also the Browning Society's Papers (1881-95), Berdoe's Browning Cyclopædia (1892), and Professor Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). Two volumes of letters by Browning were privately printed in 1895-96 by Mr Wise, who also compiled a bibliography of Browning's writings (published in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, by Dr Robertson Nicoll and Mr T. J. Wise, 1895). The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett were published in 1899. Mrs Browning's Letters to R. H. Horne had appeared in 1876, and a collection of her letters was edited by Mr Kenyon in 1897. There is a short Life of Mrs Browning by Mr J. H. Ingram (1889), and she is discussed in Mr Bayne's Five Great Englishwomen (1880). JEANIE MORISON. John Westland Marston (1820–90), born the son of a Baptist minister at Boston, gave up law for literature; and in 1842 his Patrician's Daughter was brought out at Drury Lane by Macready. It was the most successful of more than a dozen plays-Strathmore, Philip of France, A Hard Struggle (in prose), Donna Diana, Life for Life, and the rest, collected, with his poems, in 1876 somewhat Sheridan - Knowlesian, and lacking in true dramatic life. He wrote a novel (1860), a good book on Our Recent Actors (1888), and a mass of poetic criticism, mostly in the columns of the Athenæum. His plays are all all-but forgotten, but he deserves to be remembered as a true representative of poetical drama. His son, Philip Bourke Marston (1850-87), the blind poet, was born, lived, and died in London. His life was a series of losses-of eyesight at three, and afterwards of his sister, his promised bride, and his two dear friends, Oliver Madox Brown and Rossetti. His memory will survive through his friendships with Rossetti, with Mr WattsDunton, and with Mr Swinburne rather than through his sonnets and lyrics - delicate and melodious most of them, exquisite some of them, but all too sad for a world that sees. Song-tide, All in All, and Wind Voices were the three volumes of poetry he published between 1870 and 1883; to a posthumous collection of his stories (1887), mostly published in America, is prefixed a Memoir by Mr William Sharp. He was Dr Gordon Hake's 'Blind Boy;' Mr Swinburne dedicated a sonnet to his memory. Mrs Chandler Moulton collected his poems in 1892. Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (182288) was in his own time probably the most conspicuous, popular, and influential writer on social science, on the usages and proprietary ideas of primitive society as forming the basis of laws still in force. From Christ's Hospital he passed to Cambridge, where, having greatly distinguished himself, he was in his twenty-fifth year elected Regius Professor of Civil Law. He was called to the Bar in 1850, and in 1862 went to India as Legal Member of the Government. On his return he was in 1870 appointed Professor of Comparative Jurisprudence at Oxford, a post he resigned on being elected to the Mastership of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1878. In 1871 he had become a Member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India and K.C.S.I.; and in 1887 he was appointed Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge. As was admitted by those most hostile to his fundamental views, his Roman Law and Legal Education (1856), followed in 1861 by Ancient Law, its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas, for more than twenty years profoundly influenced the teaching of jurisprudence in England. In Village Communities in the East and West (1871), delivered as a series of lectures at Oxford, the author traced the similarity that exists between the primitive communal societies of India and those of the ancient Germanic races. In 1875 appeared Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, principally an investigation of the ancient laws of Ireland, called the Brehon Laws, interesting not merely as one of the best-preserved systems of primitive law, but because of its complete independence of Roman law. Early Law and Custom (1883) further illustrated his favourite theses; and International Law (1888) was based on his professorial work. In Popular Government (1885) he illustrated, not for the first time, his strong anti-democratic bias. His fundamental idea, urged against M'Lennan and all supporters of the view that matriarchy was a germinal stage of primitive civilisation, was that the germ of society was the patriarchal power, the family centring round the father (not the mother), while from the family came the gens, from the gens the tribe, and from the tribe the nation. The opponents of Maine's view multiplied amongst anthropologists and sociologists, and produced detailed evidence from savage life and ancient records; and his contentions were criticised as showing a tendency to make a portable village community which we might take about with us from one quarter of the globe to another.' There is a Memoir of Maine by Sir M. E. Grant Duff (1892). John Ruskin, one of the great teachers of art and life to the modern world, was the only son of John James Ruskin, a London wine-merchant, by his marriage with his first cousin, Margaret Cox. The family was of Scottish origin. The father had been born and educated in Edinburgh; and from both parents Ruskin inherited the simple piety, the strenuous morality, and the inflexible rectitude which are characteristic of their race and religion. Born on the 8th February 1819, he was brought up in the austere but bracing atmosphere of a Puritan home, without the common toys or amusements of childhood and with but scanty childish companionship. The picture of his early life has been drawn over and over again by his own hand; most fully, with complete fidelity and unsurpassable charm, in the chapters of autobiography which were the last work of his advanced age. When he was four years old, his parents removed from London to what was then the rural suburb of Herne Hill, which remained their home, and his, for nearly fifty years. His education was received chiefly at home, first from his mother and then from private tutors; except for a short time when he went to a day-school in Peckham, he hardly ever passed outside the narrow home circle until he went to Oxford. But this narrow life was enlarged and varied by his accompanying his father on the summer travels through all parts of England which he regularly undertook in the course of business, and occasionally in more prolonged excursions on the Continent of a less professional nature. connection with these latter travels he made the acquaintance, between the age of thirteen and fifteen, with three books which are keynotes to the whole of his mental development-Rogers's Italy, with the Turner engravings, in 1832; Prout's Sketches in Flanders and Germany, in 1833; and Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes, in 1834. They kindled in him the love of art, the reverence for antiquity, and the minute study of nature. In He was In 1839, In 1837 he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner. already then contributing articles to the Architectural Magazine and other journals. after two unsuccessful attempts, he won the Newdigate prize for an English poem, neither better nor worse than other prize poems, on Salsette and Elephanta. His juvenile poems have in recent years been collected and published by the misplaced industry of his friends and biographers. The Anglo-Catholic movement, which was so profoundly to alter the whole outward aspect and inner life of England, was then in the full tide of its early struggles and successes. Oxford was its centre; but it passed Ruskin by without producing the least effect on him. For his teacher he took, now and throughout life, not Newman but Carlyle (q.v.). The two lifelong friendships he formed at Oxford were with men who had a turn for art but none for theology-one an accomplished scholar, and the other eminent in the promotion and endowment of science-Liddell (afterwards Dean of Christ Church) and Henry Acland. In the spring of 1840 Ruskin had a serious illness which practically brought his Oxford life to an end. The following winter and spring were spent in Italy with his parents. On his return he took a pass degree, and then set to work on a defence and vindication of the painter Turner, whose acquaintance he had recently made, and whose pictures he had even before then begun to buy and to treasure. This work gradually grew far beyond its first scope. The five bulky volumes into which it expanded, and which appeared successively during the next twenty years, range in their progress more and more widely over the whole field of art in its relation to life and nature. The title at first projected, Turner and the Ancients, was replaced by another at once clumsy and contentiousModern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A. The first volume was published under this title in April 1843. It was the year of Mill's Logic, of Carlyle's Past and Present, of Gioberti's Primato Civile e Morale degli Italiani. The period was that of the great triumphs of Liberalism, in its widest sense, throughout Europe; and all four works are epoch-making in the history of the development of the modern or liberal spirit. In Great Britain, popular attention was at the moment largely engrossed with the ecclesiastical controversies which were raging furiously in both kingdoms; but Ruskin's first volume nevertheless made an impression which was both immediate and deep. A new voice had made itself heard; the critics only spread its influence more widely by their protests and condemnations. The next few years were for Ruskin a period of growing fame and widening influence. A second volume of Modern Painters was published in 1846. In the interval between the two he had discovered (for it was no less than a discovery) the great Christian art of medieval Italy. He had also discovered his own powers in prose, and used them with immense effect both in attack and defence, in the exposition of theories and the inculcation of principles. This second volume of Modern Painters is indeed a treatise of philosophy, far transcending the scope of a comparative criticism of art. The language moulded to the purposes of philosophic inquiry by Locke reappears in it, draped in the more voluminous rhetoric of an earlier age, yet so freshly handled as to be a new style the style which, in the history of English literature, will be known as that of Ruskin, and of which no one else has fully mastered the secret. His next work of importance followed two years later. This was The Seven Lamps of Architecture, written in London during the winter of 1848-49, inspects the antithesis of that which Ruskin saw in the early months of a brief and disastrous marriage which need only be mentioned in passing, for it did not, in the six years for which it lasted, deeply affect his life as a thinker and artist. The Seven Lamps, the most popular among all Ruskin's earlier works, is really an interlude in the vast and complex inquiry which he was pursuing in Modern Painters; it is a study of the principles he had begun to discover and lay down for art, in their application to the mistress - art of all the arts which men exercise. What gave occasion and urgency to the interlude was the opening of Ruskin's eyes to the tragic fate doomed, and in part already executed, on all the monuments of the past by the calculated and merciless ravages of restoration. The Gothic -Revival, a general name that may be given to that great reversion of feeling towards the Middle Ages which played so profound a part in the history of the earlier nineteenth century, had first touched Ruskin, as it touched the whole of the English-speaking world, through Walter Scott. On its theological and mystical side it never touched him at all; he remained through the modern world around him a life which walked simply and austerely in the conscious sight of God and guided by God's immediate hand. That such a life had existed in the so-called Ages of Faith was to his mind demonstrable from the memorials which those ages had left. He still hoped or fancied that the world might be led back through the study of these silent witnesses to the spirit of the men who had reared them; and he felt it a primary JOHN RUSKIN. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. life as he had been brought up in childhood, essentially a Protestant, though his Protestantism became less and less orthodox. The Bible, which he had read through over and over again with his mother as a child at home, and which was one of the strongest formative influences on his own literary style, was to him the voice of God speaking directly to the individual. The Church and the Sacraments bore as little part in his religion as they bear in the Gospels; but just on this account, the Gothic revival in the sphere of the arts affected him with an intenser force. These discourses on architecture as the crowning embodiment of life itself and of the virtues that make life excellent-ranged by him here under the six heads or 'lamps' of sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, memory, and obedience-are at the same time the inculcation of a scheme of human life in all re duty to call men back to the old path by exciting their enthusiasm and renewing their reverence for a period when life was in the full sense sacred and art kindled by a living fire from heaven. It was in this spirit that he wrote, during the years immediately following, the greatest of his works, The Stones of Venice. The first volume appeared in 1851, the other two in 1853. It is his greatest work both because his style had now reached maturity, and because in this one instance he completed fully an œuvre de longue haleine, a work the mere mass and structure of which give it a weight denied to briefer or more fragmentary writings. That concentration which he had in full measure as regards each immediate object of his interest, he lacked as regards the continuous attention required to elaborate great masterpieces: his mind suffered from its very alertness and impetuous responsiveness. Again and again it happened that one train of suggestion or study led him on to another until he became distracted in the multiplicity of his thoughts; and so it is that so much of his writing is fragmentary and fugitive, and that his mind at last gave way, not merely under the pressure of the evil tongues and evil days on which he fell, but under the burden of a message that became inarticulate through over-haste and over-copiousness of utterance. As the Stones of Venice is Ruskin's greatest work, so one chapter in it, the sixth of the second volume, entitled 'On the Nature of Gothic,' is the central point of his whole teaching. With the twentieth chapter of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, it is a confession of faith and a call to the higher life which may be called the most momentous utterance of their half-century of continuous authorship. In both cases the appeal is not to despair, but to labour and hope; in both cases the voice of God speaking through the man was greater than the man himself, and the works of later years took on them the sombre splendours of a great tragedy, when the prophets outlived faith in their own prophecies. A sort of appendix to the Stones of Venice is a work which followed immediately on its completion, the small but exquisite volume of Lectures on Architecture and Painting given at Edinburgh at the end of 1853. In 1851 had appeared another minor work of great interest, his pamphlet in defence of the Pre-Raphaelite School. With that school Ruskin was indeed neither then nor afterwards in full sympathy. The rough justice of the popular belief which identified his teaching with their practice lies merely in this, that both placed before them truth to nature' as the object of art; their definition of truth and their conception of nature were, in fact, widely different. After the Stones of Venice was completed, Ruskin returned to what he still regarded as his main work, the completion of Modern Painters. Two more volumes, the third and fourth, appeared in 1856. The ten years that had passed between the second and third volumes were a period of immense moment in European history, and on Ruskin's own mind they had wrought the beginnings of a great change. The chapters on Idealism and Sentiment in the third volume gave what may be called a wholly new grammar of the psychology of art. But the meaning of art itself was being insensibly changed in his mind. His work at Venice had led him away from the study of science to that of history; he was coming to see more clearly what history forced on him, that art is not a representation of nature but a function of life. The fluctuation between these two views of art is what gives uncertainty and some degree of inconsistency to his practical teaching thereafter. Some of his least satisfactory work is the result of an attempt to reduce prematurely under a single idea the ethical laws of human life with the laws which govern irrational or inanimate nature; with the life of the Roman poet's bruta tellus et vaga flumina, the growth not merely of birds or plants, but of clouds and crystals. Yet here he was on the edge of an ultimate truth to which both Platonism and Christianity bear witness, and which the most recent scientific thought is beginning imperfectly to realise. But short of such a final reconciliation, the art which is a mere record of 'objective truth' is not art at all; and no real art is possible which is not the unforced imaginative outcome of a civic or national life lived in accordance with the laws of God. The Political Economy of Art, the title of an address given by Ruskin at the Manchester ArtTreasures Exhibition of 1857, shows this shifting of his axis of thought. It is still more evident in The Two Paths of 1859, a collection of lectures and addresses given in the two or three preceding years. In that volume the intricacy of the problems dealt with leads to a confusion of argument that would be almost ludicrous if it were not full at once of pathos and of promise. His old principles-the instinctive happy principles of youth-are giving way everywhere under him, like the instinctive or traditional dogma on which they had their moral basis. The cry makes itself heard of the man who has drifted from his moorings. He was destined never to recover them, never to be able again to rest in a complete belief. It was little wonder, then, that the fifth and last volume of Modern Painters, published in 1860, showed some inconsistency and even incoherence of thought, or that it failed to awake the same enthusiasm as its predecessors. Ruskin had had his period of growing popularity and widening acceptance. He had now, with whatever reluctance, to lay down the singing-robe of the artist and take on himself the sackcloth of the prophet. What the public desired was to be amused; they were ready to make an idol of him while he talked smooth things to them; but now the task before him was to break down his own popularity, to be regarded by the world with a mixture of pity and contempt, to see even his friends fail him and fall away from him. The strain brought out all the petulance and irritability inherent in his highly-strung temper; he finally gave way under it. But the years following the great change in his moral axis are those in which his work, though not his greatest, has the highest value and significance. The lecture On the Work of Iron,' given at Tunbridge Wells in 1858 and published in The Two Paths, shows the change in its full extent and gravity. His teaching-though he himself would not have admitted it has there become express Socialism. His delight in rhetoric and sentiment still clung to him. He still was able, as in the celebrated comparison of modern Rochdale with medieval Pisa in the Bradford lecture of 1859 (published in the same volume), to let himself loose in a torrent of gorgeous language with no more distinctly ethical content than one of those later landscapes of Turner's with which Ruskin's earlier writing has so much in common, and in the arrangement of which at the National Gallery, from 1856 onwards, he found an occupation and an anodyne. But sentiment and rhetoric could no longer satisfy him, nor could he find relief from the actual world in the pathos and splendour of the past. To instruct, to startle, to save if it might be--though of that the hope grew ever fainter-a world lying in wickedness, became to him a primary and absorbing duty. When the Cornhill Magazine was founded in 1860 under the editorship of Thackeray, Ruskin, as |