Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,

And your mouth of your own geranium's redAnd what you would do with me, in fine,

In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,

Gained me the gains of various men,

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; Yet one thing, one in my soul's full scope, Either I missed or itself missed me : And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while.

My heart seemed full as it could hold?

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. So, hush-I will give you this leaf to keep :

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will wake, and remember, and understand!

(From Dramatic Lyrics.)

An Epistle-containing the Strange Medical Ex-
perience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs,
The not-incurious in God's handiwork
(This man's flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on earth a space
That puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul)
-To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain,
Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip

Back and rejoin its source before the term,

And aptest in contrivance (under God)

To baffle it by deftly stopping such :

The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home

Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snakestone-rarer still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,

(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)

And writeth now the twenty-second time.

My journeyings were brought to Jericho :
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art
Shall count a little labour unrepaid?

I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land.
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumours of a marching hitherward :
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree

Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel scrip
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields.

A viscid choler is observable

In tertians, I was nearly bold to say;

And falling-sickness hath a happier cure
Than our school wots of: there's a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;

Take five and drop them. . . but who knows his mind,
The Syrian run-a-gate I trust this to?

His service payeth me a sublimate
Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.
Best wait I reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,

Gather what most deserves, and give thee all-
Or I might add, Judæa's gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,
Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy-
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar-
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end.

Yet stay my Syrian blinketh gratefully,
Protesteth his devotion is my price-

Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal?
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a writing first of all.
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!

For, be it this town's barrenness-or else
The Man had something in the look of him-
His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth.
So, pardon if (lest presently I lose

In the great press of novelty at hand
The care and pains this somehow stole from me)
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind,
Almost in sight-for, wilt thou have the truth?
The very man is gone from me but now,
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse.
Thus then and let thy better wit help all!

'Tis but a case of mania-subinduced
By epilepsy, at the turning-point

Of trance prolonged unduly some three days
When, by the exhibition of some drug
Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art
Unknown to me and which 'twere well to know,
The evil thing out-breaking all at once

Left the man whole and sound in body indeed,-
But flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide,
Making a clear house of it too suddenly,
The first conceit that entered might inscribe
Whatever it was minded on the wall

So plainly at that vantage, as it were,
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls

The just-returned and new-established soul
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart
That henceforth she will read or these or none.
And first-the man's own firm conviction rests
That he was dead (in fact they buried him)
-That he was dead and then restored to life
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe :
-'Sayeth, the same bade 'Rise,' and he did rise.
'Such cases are diurnal,' thou wilt cry.
Not so this figment!-not, that such a fume,
Instead of giving way to time and health,
Should eat itself into the life of life,

As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all!

For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man-it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, The body's habit wholly laudable,

As much, indeed, beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.
Think, could we penetrate by any drug
And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,
And bring it clear and fair by three days sleep!
Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?
This grown man eyes the world now like a child.
Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,
Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep,
To bear my inquisition. While they spoke,
Now sharply, now with sorrow,-told the case,-
He listened not except I spoke to him,
But folded his two hands and let them talk,
Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool.
And that's a sample how his years must go.
Look if a beggar, in fixed middle life,
Should find a treasure-can he use the same
With straitened habits and with tastes starved small,
And take at once to his impoverished brain
The sudden element that changes things,
That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand,
And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust?
Is he not such an one as moves to mirth-
Warily parsimonious, when no need,
Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times?
All prudent counsel as to what befits
The golden mean, is lost on such an one :
The man's fantastic will is the man's law.
So here we call the treasure knowledge, say,
Increased beyond the fleshy faculty-
Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven:
The man is witless of the size, the sum,

The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,

And of the passing of a mule with gourds-
'Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact, he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness,
(Far as I see) as if in that indeed

He caught prodigious import, whole results:
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we too see not with his opened eyes.
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.

Should his child sicken unto death,-why, look
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,
Or pretermission of the daily craft!

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child
At play or in the school or laid asleep,
Will startle him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like. Demand
The reason why-'tis but a word,' object-
'A gesture'-he regards thee as our lord
Who lived there in the pyramid alone,

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,
We both would unadvisedly recite

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,
Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
Thou and the child have each a veil alike
Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both
Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match
Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!
He holds on firmly to some thread of life-
(It is the life to lead perforcedly)
Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplexed with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,

And not along, this black thread through the blaze-
'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'
And oft the man's soul springs into his face
As if he saw again and heard again

His sage that bade him 'Rise,' and he did rise.
Something, a word, a tick o' the blood within
Admonishes: then back he sinks at once
To ashes, who was very fine before,

In sedulous recurrence to his trade
Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;
And studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows
God's secret, while he holds the thread of life.
Indeed the especial marking of the man
Is prone submission to the heavenly will-
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.

'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last

For that same death which must restore his being
To equilibrium, body loosening soul

Divorced even now by premature full growth:
He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live

So long as God please, and just how God please.
He even seeketh not to please God more
(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.
Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach
The doctrine of his sect whate'er it be,
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do:
How can he give his neighbour the real ground,
His own conviction? Ardent as he is-
Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old
'Be it as God please' reassureth him.

I probed the sore as thy disciple should:
'How, beast,' said I, 'this stolid carelessness
Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march
To stamp out like a little spark thy town,
Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?'
He merely looked with his large eyes on me.
The man is apathetic, you deduce?

Contrariwise, he loves both old and young,
Able and weak, affects the very brutes
And birds-how say I? flowers of the field--
As a wise workman recognises tools

In a master's workshop, loving what they make.
Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb :
Only impatient, let him do his best,
At ignorance and carelessness and sin-
An indignation which is promptly curbed:
As when in certain travel I have feigned
To be an ignoramus in our art
According to some preconceived design,

And happed to hear the land's practitioners
Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance,
Prattle fantastically on disease,

Its cause and cure-and I must hold my peace!

Thou wilt object-Why have I not ere this
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,
Conferring with the frankness that befits?
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech
Perished in a tumult many years ago,
Accused,—our learning's fate,-of wizardry,
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule

And creed prodigious as described to me.

His death, which happened when the earthquake fell (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss

To occult learning in our lord the sage
Who lived there in the pyramid alone)

Was wrought by the mad people—that's their wont !
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,

To his tried virtue, for miraculous help

How could he stop the earthquake? That's their way!
The other imputations must be lies:

But take one, though I loathe to give it thee,
In mere respect for any good man's fame.
(And after all, our patient Lazarus

Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?
Perhaps not though in writing to a leech
'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)
This man so cured regards the curer, then,
As-God forgive me! who but God himself,
Creator and sustainer of the world,

That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile!
-Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself, in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus

Who saith-but why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange !

Thy pardon for this long and tedious case,
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem
Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!
Nor I myself discern in what is writ
Good cause for the peculiar interest

And awe indeed this man has touched me with.
Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness
Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus:
I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
In this old sleepy town at unaware,
The man and I. I send thee what is writ.
Regard it as a chance, a matter risked
To this ambiguous Syrian-he may lose,
Or steal, or give it thee with equal good.
Jerusalem's repose shall make amends

For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine;
Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too-
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!'
The madman saith He said so it is strange.

(From Men and Women, 1855.)

From 'The Ring and the Book.'
"On receipt of this command,
Acquaint Count Guido and his fellows four
They die to-morrow: could it be to-night,
The better.

For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark

I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze-
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible :
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant and be saved.
Enough, for I may die this very night:
And how should I dare die this man let live?
Carry this forthwith to the governor!"

The Householder.

(1868-69-)

Savage I was sitting in my house, late, lone :
Dreary, weary with the long day's work :
Head of me, heart of me, stupid as a stone:
Tongue-tied now, now blaspheming like a Turk;

When, in a moment, just a knock, call, cry,
Half a pang and all a rapture, there again were we !-
'What, and is it really you again?' quoth I:

'I again, what else did you expect?' quoth She.

'Never mind, hie away from this old house

Every crumbling brick embrowned with sin and shame! Quick, in its corners ere certain shapes arouse !

Let them every devil of the night-lay claim, Make and mend, or rap and rend, for me! Good-bye! God be their guard from disturbance at their glee, Till, crash, comes down the carcass in a heap!' quoth I: 'Nay, but there's a decency required!' quoth She. 'Ah, but if you knew how time has dragged, days, nights!

All the neighbour-talk with man and maid-such men! All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights: All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then,

All the fancies. . . . Who were they had leave, dared try Darker arts that almost struck despair in me?

If you knew but how I dwelt down here!' quoth I: 'And was I so better off up there?' quoth She.

'Help and get it over! Re-united to his wife

(How draw up the paper lets the parish-people know?)

Lies M., or N., departed from this life,

Day the this or that, month and year the so and so.

Flower-I never fancied, jewel-I profess you!
Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower.
Save for glow inside and--jewel, I should guess you,
Dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower.

You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love a jewel-
Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime !
Time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel,
Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!
(From Pacchiarotto, 1876.)

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.)

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

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?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel

-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
Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed,-fight on, fare ever
There as here!'

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).