he can serve the world by serving his own interests first. Twice, in Paracelsus and in The Return of the Druses, he has taken impostors for his heroes, and shown them to have been so largely because they were men of finer mould than the most honest of their dupes. From first to last he feels a passionate interest in 'the story of a soul.' Now the simple soul, like the knife-grinder, has got no story. The simple heart, however, may have story enough, and it is the Pippa of all his work. It is, above all, truth of which he is in search, whether he paints the sixteenth-century bishop ordering his tomb, or the nineteenth-century bishop chatting over his wine. His aim is to keep poetry in touch not merely with the life of the imagination, but with life in general. It is of course where it touches this modern life of ours that the real poetic crux Occurs. There will always be the stuff of poetry in the world, so long as there are hearts and souls in it, and so long as the earth moves on through starry space, clothed in her beautiful vesture of air. But either the surface of our life has really grown prosaic, or we think it has, which comes to the same thing. It requires tact as well as boldness and power to harmonise it with the imaginative atmosphere that we expect in poetry. Browning sometimes failed in tact; at other times, as in Waring and the brief poem called Confessions, his touch was sure. But this realism of his, at its best as well as its worst, inevitably repelled readers who were only just beginning to relish realism in prose. Besides, he had a language of his own, with a strange new flavour about it, which made him seem much more obscure than he really was. So here a little ahead of his contemporaries and there a great way, most of Robert Browning's road was something solitary. The pleasanter for him when one fine day he found a troop of followers marching behind him; young folk, full of sympathy and enthusiasm.

He had other things in common with them, besides realistic and psychological tendencies. His poems from Sordello onwards bear witness to his love and knowledge of Italian Art. This he had gained for himself as he travelled through Italy, looking round him with a painter's eye. But Ruskin taught a younger generation to share it with him. Then, though from first to last a sturdy lover of England, he was something of a cosmopolitan in his sympathies; and cosmopolitanism is strongly characteristic of the literature of to-day, and even mildly characteristic of the literary man. It used not to be so. The novelists of Browning's date can never quite repress their chuckles at the idea of any one being

ridiculous enough to be born a Frenchman or a German. The other poets travelled and even made their homes in Italy, but they were interested only in its scenery and romance. Browning not only travelled much, but formed intimate friendships outside his own country, and when he and his wife lived in Florence it was not as strangers and sojourners. Their poems reflect their sympathy with the national life about them. For this freedom from provincialism, as well as for some other kindred qualities, he doubtless owed much thanks to his education, which was remarkable for its appropriateness to his genius. He was not machine made.

In yet another and a more important characteristic he was in harmony with the most modern developments. His dramatic bent was unseasonable in the middle years of this century. English literature had turned its back on the theatre, in spite of Macreadys and Kembles. Not only so, but its tendencies were non-dramatic. Scenes may of course be found in the works of the great novelists, of the period which stand in contradiction to this. But all the same the tendency was towards a gentle development of plot and character, an absence of central situations, of crucial moments in the affairs and minds of men: that is, towards the non-dramatic. Browning instinctively turned towards the stage. He did not succeed there, yet one cannot but think that had circumstances encouraged the clever young man to go on writing stage-plays, he would eventually have learned the business. There is nothing to regret in the fact that he did not. His genius found for itself the most full and fitting expression. Through the plays, the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, it swept on to that Dramatic Epic of The Ring and the Book, which perhaps most perfectly embodied it. The plan of The Ring and the Book grew so naturally out of the documents on which it was founded and his own habitual manner of writing, that probably he himself was hardly conscious of its originality-of its excellence as a device for breaking the monotony of a long poem. The brilliant Introduction tells the facts of the story with a lucidity to which he did not always attain. By thus on the threshold revealing his whole plot, he at once asserts and vindicates his old belief in the interest of the story of souls; for no one would wish it otherwise. Then at the touch of the magician's wand arise out of their dust the 'hearts that beat hard,' the brains that ticked two centuries since.' All Rome is there, Arezzo too, yet the plan of the poem permits the principal figures to stand out clear against that

crowded background. They re-act dramatically upon each other, yet they are more complete than they could be in a play, where much must be left to conjecture. Long as it is, it is seldom longwinded. When it is, the remedy is plainly in the reader's own hands; another virtue of the plan. General practice has long suppressed Doctor Bottinius, and many persons think they can do without Tertium Quid; but this is not universal. At any rate it is possible without these to realise the rest; the pathetic figure of Pompilia, the wise great Pope, the philoprogenitive Dominus Hyacinthus, and Guido couched in his dungeon like a wolf at bay.

This great poem, which touches the high-water mark of Browning's genius, received at once its meed of praise. He had been ignored, he had been ridiculed, and now a reaction set in. The little band of Browning enthusiasts rapidly increased to a multitude, till at length he became a fashion. His very faults were glorified, and too much attention bestowed on such tentative and immature work as Sordello. There were many people to whom an obscure passage in Browning gave the amusement of an acrostic, plus the pleasures of intellectuality. Thus his obscurity was as much exaggerated by his admirers as by his opponents. Sometimes that obscurity may be justified by his own belief-a belief on which he did not always act-that poetry should suggest trains of thought rather than carry them out. At others it results from a real failure to crystallise a thought, or again from a kind of overwhelming of his powers of expression by the hurrying crowd of his ideas. But modern life is crowded and hurrying too. Already what may be called the acrostic interest in Browning is on the wane. As a fashion it needs must go. But besides the literary modists, there are in every generation the lovers of literature. To these we may leave in all confidence the works of Robert Browning, sure that they cannot miss seeing the treasure of true if alloyed gold that lies there; sure too that they will understand, as we cannot understand, how to send

a spirt

O'the proper fiery acid o'er its face;

And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume,
While, self-sufficient now, the shape remains,
The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,

Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore.

MARGARET L. WOODS.

HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX.

I.

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three; 'Good speed!' cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew; 'Speed!' echoed the wall to us galloping through; Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

II.

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place:
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.

III.

'Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew, and twilight dawned clear;
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be;

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half chime,
So, Joris broke silence with, 'Yet there is time!'

IV.

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare thro' the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray ;

V.

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye's black intelligence,-ever that glance
O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance !
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon
His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on.

VI.

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, 'Stay spur!
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her,
We'll remember at Aix'-for one heard the quick wheeze
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.

VII.

So, we were left galloping, Joris and I,

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,

'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;

Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,

6

And Gallop,' gasped Joris, 'for Aix is in sight!'

VIII.

'How they'll greet us!'-and all in a moment his roan
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim.

IX.

Then I cast loose my buff-coat, each holster let fall,
Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,

Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;

Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,

Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.