her own long hand-to-hand conflict with death, doubtless served to increase her natural, human desire for certainty as to the future of the soul. This partly accounts for her morbid interest in Spiritualism and its manifestations. She was one of the many intelligent people who fell victims to the tricks of Hume (afterwards known as Home), the American medium. Mr. Browning never shared her views on the matter, and Hume was the subject of his bitterly satirical poem called, "Sludge the Medium."

In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had a severe attack of bronchitis. She had frequently rallied from such attacks, but this time her strength was unequal to the task. She had been excited and worn to the verge of exhaustion by the events of the two previous years. The war of 1859, the intense feeling aroused for and against Louis Napoleon by his policy in relation to Italy, and finally the death of her idolized sister, Henrietta, had all had their share in lowering her vitality. On the 29th of June, 1861, she died peacefully in her husband's arms. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Florence in a sarcophagus designed by her warm friend, Sir Frederic Leighton. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the city of Florence placed a tablet bearing this inscription:

QUI SCRISSE E MORI

ELISABETTA BARRETT BROWNING

CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA
SCIENZA DI DOTTO E SPIRITO DI POETA
E FECE DEL SUO VERSO AUREO ANELLO

FRA ITALIA E INGHILTERRA

PARCE QUESTA LAPIDE
FIRENZA GRATA

"Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who united to a woman's heart the learning of a scholar and the inspiration of a poet, and made her verse a golden link between Italy and England. This tablet was set by grateful Florence in 1861.”

MRS. BROWNING AS A POET

MRS. BROWNING herself wrote of her work: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet." This simple statement holds the key to much that is perplexing in her work. As the reader runs through even these brief pages of selections, he will not fail to be struck with the intensity of the poems. They lack lightness. Every emotion is treated with a passionate attention. Love, grief, patriotism, each fills the whole horizon of the poet. She often displays a want of reserve surprising to our modern taste. Each poem is a complete self-revelation of its author from that especial point of view. All this is explained by her sense of the seriousness of her work. No priest at an altar was ever more rapt in his ministrations than this fragile woman, over whom the experiences of life swept with tremendous force, each bringing with it, by virtue of her imaginative nature, the necessity for poetic expression.

Close on the serious and sentimental note of the poems comes the discovery that they contain many and amazing violations of the accepted laws of poetic form. For example, the rhymes which she permits herself are often bad and sometimes vulgar. How can a scholar and

a poet allow herself to rhyme "Hellas" and "Tell us," "Palace" and "Chalice," "Linen" and "Winning," "Hushing" and "Cushion," "Unto" and "View," "Flowing" and "Slow in," and worst of all, "Ethiopia" and "Mandragora"?

But she writes gravely to Mr. Home in reply to some gentle criticisms of these glaring faults:

"A great deal of attention-far more than it would take to rhyme with conventional accuracy - have I given to the subject of rhymes, and have determined in cold blood to hazard some experiments."

So even here we find that what looked like carelessness was really only another manifestation of the seriousness with which she always invested her work. We may be glad that her experiments were not repeated by others. We may be convinced that her ear was really unsensitive to bad rhymes. But we cannot take her to task for a lack of careful painstaking.

She would have been saved from many of the defects of her poetry by a keener sense of humor. No one with a humorous view of life would permit a dying heroine at the end of a pathetic farewell to earth to exclaim, "I aspire while I expire!" The line suggests first a poor pun, and second, an equally poor lesson in English etymology. As poetry it is a ludicrous failure.

With these unfavorable criticisms upon the form of the verse, we may turn to the substance of it with unstinted praise. Such depth of feeling, such wealth of imagery, such intuition, such lavish spending of the poet's treasure, such marvellous self-deliverance, such wingèd fancies, such quick human sympathy, we may go far to find.

As intensity of feeling and expression is the most striking characteristic of Mrs, Browning's work, we may

expect that it will be at its best in the sonnets and other short poems. It is hardly possible to sustain her lofty tone throughout a long poem. Her most ambitious work, "Aurora Leigh," is little more than a metrical novel of socialistic tendencies. But the sonnet form gives just the repression and restraint that her genius needed. "The Sonnets from the Portuguese" reach the climax of her achievement, and are, indeed, the most beautiful love-poems ever written by woman to man.

The Italian poems throb with fervor. Some of their power is lost to us because of their abundance of local allusion, but they still show how deeply a woman may love a country and a people, even though she is but their foster-child. Her unbounded devotion to Napoleon III. is proof of her glorious and uncalculating idealism. She regarded Napoleon I. as having a divine mission, but as executing it with cruel and bloody hands. Napoleon III. was from the first, in her imagination, destined to as great a career and unstained by crime. In her eyes, he could do no wrong. She was almost ready to disown her native England because its people would not share her roseate estimate of his character.

Mrs. Browning is a poet whose work it is not easy to characterize in a phrase. Every circumstance of her life conspired to separate her from the healthy commonplace. She had, it is true, the joy of an ideally happy marriage, but except for that her experiences were all unique. She was a scholar in a day when scholarship for women was rare. She knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, besides French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Yet she was for much of her life cut off from those social pleasures that make scholarship for a woman both sound and ripe. She was born a patriot, and she lived an exile from her native land. She was highly strung and super

sensitive, and she met many of life's most torturing pains. She had that intense vision of ordinary human life and its tragedy that needed to find sanity and repose by communion with the calmer world of mountain, meadow, forest, and ocean; but she was shut up to a sick-room with its distorted fancies. When we consider all these facts, the wonder is that her poetry is so sound and true as we find it to be.

Her poetry reveals her own nature; but, conversely, what we know of her as woman as daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend — throws a radiant light upon her poetry. In the two volumes of her letters to various friends, and in the two volumes of the love-letters that passed between her and Robert Browning, there is not a jarring note. Her very faults of judgment were the result of too implicit trust in others. Sweetness, highmindedness, unselfishness, idealism, truthfulness, optimism, an unwavering belief in the goodness of human nature, constancy, spirituality these went to make up a nature good to know and to love, both as woman and as poet.