lover who has staked his all to win 'Pauline.' He may fail, he knows, perhaps he has already failed, but, if so, he will utter no reproachful nor repining words, but feelingly felicitate another man who succeeds. Another Way of Love (Vol. VI.) is a girl's warning speech, in semi-allegoric form, to a 'spoilt ' lover. She depicts a selfish man carelessly asking his betrothed if she would 'greatly care' if their engagement were broken off. For reply, she dismisses him with novel asperity, remarking that she is able to live without him, and perhaps choose a better lover, or, should this 'spider' try to weave his web round her again, be careful to speedily demolish it.

"Transcendentalism.

دو

The

A Poem in Twelve Books (Vol. IV.) is addressed by an older poet to a beginner who is producing a work the title names. experienced man's advice is that beauty and emotion should be a poet's care, rather than the bald, tough expression of metaphysical truth, better suited to prose. The poem's last eight lines are peculiarly

fine.

Misconceptions (Vol. VI.) contains a touching little story, preceded by its apologue.

One Word More (Vol. IV.) is the most perfect poetic love-token ever laid at the feet of wife or poet. Like all the words Browning addresses to his 'moon of poets,' this 'word' seems spoken amid a sacred hush. The idea of the artist's longing to have a unique art language whereby to address his beloved is exquisitely dwelt on. Well might Browning regard this poem

as separate from his other work, and so classible with Dante's picture, Rafael's sonnets.

Dramatis Personæ, 1864 (Vol. VII.), Browning's next volume, was published after a nine years' interval. We trace in it the deeper thoughtfulness and rarer flashes of ardent fancy that distinguish the bulk of his later from his earlier work. The contents are as follows . . .

James Lee's Wife (originally called James Lee) is a wife's chronicle of her husband's estrangement. Mrs. Lee is a similarly charactered wife to those in A Woman's Last Word, Any Wife to any Husband, In a Year, and Fifine at the Fair. She is a good, highly strung, but morbid and worrying woman, married to a man of shallow soul, whom she loves deeply. Finding him tired of her, bored by her womanly demands for responsiveness, and probably ruffled by her clear-sighted discernment of his shortcomings, she judges it necessary to his happiness for her to leave him. To her, the companionship of marriage means all or nothing. The poem's nine sections record mood, not action. In I., the wife first detects and dreads the change she dares hardly face. In II., she charges her husband with it. Bitterly, from the depth of her anguished love, she contrasts the apparent warmth and happiness of their life with its inner unsoundness. III. records a deepening of her shuddering sense of change, with a determination to live it down silently. IV. gives the secret of her failure to retain her husband's fancy.

V. is her own noble conception of love, one which, we feel, would be meaningless and irritating to a James Lee. In VI., she criticises a young poet's untested idea of pain. She moans over the pathos of loss and change and the limitation of all achievement, though she can imagine their value. VII. records, by a similitude which the rocks inspire, her resolution to sink all thought of herself in seeking the best course for her husband. VIII. A coarse real hand, beside a beautiful cast from a hand, tells her that duty and labour can survive and transcend the happiness of being loved. In IX., doubt and indecision over, she is leaving James Lee, grievingly, as regards her own feelings, but in the belief that her presence was only an incumbrance and obstacle to his happiness. Her love remains more yearning than ever.

Gold Hair illustrates Browning's love of an eccentricity, a love thinly veiled, in the case of this unpleasing story, under an assumed moralising intention.

The Worst of It is the speech of a man whose wife has deceived and deserted him. His only feeling is self-blame, and intense, pitying regret for her. He wishes he had sinned in her stead, if that might have saved her from her sin and its consequences. He believes God must forgive her, as he does. He would gladly efface himself to efface the silent accusation he knows he is. She has now turned his good to evil, but this evil he regards as self-originating, and his own life as consequently more blamable

than hers. 'The worst of it' is that he can do nothing for her who formerly gave him all. He implores her to be good, though not for his sake.

Dis Aliter Visum represents a woman who recalls to a man the occasion, ten years ago, when he almost proposed to her. She describes the sea-side walk and the man's one moment of sincerity to his ennobling impulse, followed by considerations-of incompatibilities, his age and her youth, and fears of future reproaches and disgust. The considerations choked the impulse, and life's inestimable opportunity was rejected. Two lives, nay, four, have been spoiled. The man measured earthly congruity only, but, in the words of the title, 'it seemed otherwise to the gods.'

Too Late is a man's lament over a dead woman. He never declared his love, and she became the wife of a pitiful rhymer. It was comparatively easy to do without her while she lived. Now she is dead, he feels entirely desolate, and blames himself for his earlier silence. He seeks a shadowy solace from fancying her alive and entirely his, since she is no longer another's.

Abt Vogler is a glorious ascent on the wings of music into a triumphant expression of faith in immortal personality and in heaven's compensation and completion. Abbé Vogler begins with sorrow that his beautiful improvisation is gone, but this is succeeded by the thought that nothing good is ever lost. Through that he rises to the conviction that earth's

imperfect will be eternity's perfect. Browning's works hardly contain such another piece of simple perfectness as the definition of a common chord in Stanza vii.

Rabbi Ben Ezra is a poem in which the thinker is subordinated to the thought. It is consequently personal rather than dramatic, and represents Browning's Theism, though not, of course, his Christianity, through an imaginary utterance of the great Rabbi. The leading ideas are (1) The value of age in that it consummates life, and is a peak whence youth may be reviewed, understood, and harmonised. (2) The uses of strife and trial in that they attest our higher nature and our kinship with the Father of spirits. (3) The absolute solitariness of each soul in relation to God, and its independence of earthly estimates. Allied with this is the enduringness of the soul amid the perpetual flux of circumstances. Man must take his means from the Present, but his aim (man being figured by a 'cup'), is solely to slake God's thirst.

A Death in the Desert is the imaginary last scene in the life of the disciple whom Jesus loved. The poem's fictitious setting (the 'parchment' 'supposed of Pamphylax') is exquisitely faithful in its artless simplicity of word and circumstance. Reflecting that with his death the last witness to Christ's life passes away, the dying John recalls his labours and success in making men believe. Death's inspiration upon him, he foresees down the centuries a more fundamental disbelief than his life-time has known. His