in many respects lags behind 'latest developments,' here heads the van of progress and gives the finest poetic expression it has yet received to the essentially modern passion for nature unendowed with any factitious attributes. The poem, every word of which is poetry, comes from the old, hopeful poet as an inspiring cry of ‘forward.'

With Charles Avison reads like a continuation of the thoughts on music in Fifine at the Fair. Avison was an eighteenth century composer, of whom, as of de Lairesse, Browning speaks as an early friend. We may probably accept as a certainty that most of the old-world characters whose names are borrowed for these 'parleyings' belong to memories of the poet's boyish reading. Browning evidently shares in the touching instinct of life's decline to return to its earliest associations. Every art, says Browning, strives to arrest the evanescence of feeling, to 'shoot liquidity into a mould,' and none fails like music, feeling's most direct language, because no other art is so susceptible of change and superannuation. Yet the truths which music strives to register are undying. Each composer is good, and best in that he represents a link in music's chain, not an independent ring, final and complete for ever. These ideas about music, its pathos and its glory, ruled Abt Vogler, only there they were transmuted into sensation, while here they are merely thought.

Fust and his Friends is a playful glimpse at the infancy of printing. Besides this, it is, more im

plicitly, a comment, in the spirit of the entire volume, on the fleeting nature of our knowledge, its liability to abuse, and withal its capacity of begetting new knowledge, which shall be in advance of it, just as Luther was in advance of Huss.

Asolando: Fancies and Facts, 1890, is invested with a pathetic interest from the circumstances of its publication. It was published on the day on which Browning died, and his last words, "how gratifying!" were in acknowledgment of the telegraphed news of its anticipatory welcome. Thus the book has come to have a sacredness, a personal association of memory which, at all events at present, render an impartial appreciation of it almost impossible. One prefers to dwell upon its unmistakable gems, such as Poetics and Summum Bonum, rather than criticise its tenuous reveries and tales wherein we catch little more than the echo of more vigorous achievement. It is clear that the general date of 1889 cannot be assigned to each poem, though we cannot say how many may be referred to earlier periods of production. Some, as Dubiety, Poetics, Inapprehensiveness, Development, seem more specially sheafed than others by the binding threads of the Prologue and Epilogue, and these may probably be taken as the indubitable 'Asolani.' Their peculiar note is one which could only emanate from a poet who is reviewing life from its further end. It is that truth surpasses fiction as fact surpasses fancy, while, at the same time, that fiction, far from being worthless, is the sole

ladder up to truth. Browning's readers remember in Sordello and Pippa Passes the introduction of Asolo, the small white city of the Trevisan, mountains behind and Lombard plain before, which, roughly speaking, lies, for the traveller, between Bassano and Vicenza. After Venice, Asolo was the first place in Italy that Browning visited (1838), and it is the last (1889) with which he is poetically associated. He was as faithful to his love for Asolo as he was to all his loves. And here, on the threshold of Browning's last work, we may reiterate what has been at all events held in solution by every page of these comments, viz. that Browning's 'genius' was the expressive side of his whole nature. The more we ponder what we learn from Browning's poetry, and then compare it with the little we need to learn of his life, the more we are struck by the unity of the impression which as a personality, compounded of genius and man, he makes upon us, lovable in foibles and weakness as in nobleness and strength.

Prologue is the lyric. counterpart of Gerard de Lairesse. To a poet of Browning's sage, sweet temperament and development, years and disillusionment' bring, not despondency, but gladness at seeing truth drop the wraps that bound her.

Rosny, with its dramatic characterisation and abrupt, perhaps bewildering, plunge into the centre of the situation, belongs to the same class as Cristina and Monaldeschi. It is spoken by a woman, armed at all points against her unsuccessful rival, the 'Clara'

addressed. Rosny is away in the war, but whether he returns safely or falls, Clara shall have no share in his victory or sacrifice, shall not even know that her rival can feel anything besides the calmness of perpetual superiority. There is something soulless and eerie about the speaker which is indeterminately heightened by the refrain of names.

Dubiety records an hour of mild, autumnal gladness. Whence and whereby did it come? Not on the wings of sleep or day-dream. It was a memory of love.

'Truth ever, truth only the excellent!'

Now is a poem of fourteen lines upon such a moment of love as eternalises time, or rather annihilates the conception of it.

Humility is the poet's lovely thought concerning the ungrudged crumbs which fall from the banquet of one who makes love rich.

Poetics is the name by which Browning designates the metaphors of lovers. 'Rose,'" swan,' 'moon,' to these the adored one is compared, while all the time she surpasses them by being a beautiful human

creature.

Summum Bonum ranks among the perfect short love-poems of the English language. The manliness and restraint of Browning are upon a poem the melody and words of which sound more like a lyric of Mr. Swinburne's. Let us bear in mind that this exquisite piece, as full of freshness as it is simple, was put forth by a poet of seventy-seven.

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A Pearl, a Girl is hardly less delightful than Summum Bonum.

Speculative might well be a lyric from Ferishtah's Fancies. It is similar in idea to the conclusion of the one that follows Two Camels.

White Witchcraft dallies with the innocence of love and the playful mutual mockery in which tenderness can securely indulge.

Bad Dreams. I. is a remarkable instance of how much a great poet can condense into a couple of quatrains of the simplest words.

Bad Dreams. II. is a curious piece of delicately suggested horror. Its phantasmagoria recalls Tennyson's Vision of Sin. A lover sees in his dream the girl he worships involved in a grisly and bestial cult. He charges her with it, and she retorts upon him with a dream of her own, probably similar in origin, but ludicrously dispersive of his troubled sensations regarding her.

Bad Dreams. III. is a nightmare on the grand scale of upheaval and topsy-turveydom.

Bad Dreams. IV. records, in a particularly striking way, a man's bitter regret and remorse for the death of the girl who loved and was affianced to him. He had systematically snubbed her for her deficient mental culture, and chilled her heart by his cold scorn of her frivolous ways. Love had been disguised as blame and criticism. Now she is dead through his unkindness, and he would thankfully humble himself to the dust to have her alive and forgiving him.