KILLED AT THE FORD.

He is dead, the beautiful youth,
The heart of honour, the tongue of truth,
He, the life and light of us all,

Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,

Whom all eyes followed with one consent,

The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,
Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

Only last night, as we rode along
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,

He was humming the words of some old song:
"Two red roses he had on his cap,

And another he bore at the point of his sword.”

Sudden and swift a whistling ball

Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.

We lifted him up to his saddle again,
And through the mire and the mist and the rain
Carried him back to the silent camp,

And laid him as if asleep on his bed;

And I saw by the light of the surgeon's lamp

Two white roses upon his cheeks,

And one, just over his heart, blood-red!

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,

Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry;

And a bell was tolled in that far-off town,
For one who had passed from cross to crown,
And the neighbours wondered that she should die.

It would be hard, I think, to convey better the strange contrast between the gay and picturesque courage of youth, and the sudden sentence which absolutely ended the story of life and love, than it is conveyed in these few stanzas; their simplicity has no nakedness in it; it is the simplicity which avoids detail, because detail only obscures the effect, not the simplicity which says a thing crudely or poorly. Longfellow, like all poets who had not any great originality of initiative, was singularly dependent on his subjects for his success; but when his subject suits him, he presents it with the simplicity of a really great classic, with all its points in relief, and with nothing of the self-conscious or artificial tone of one who wants to draw attention to the admirable insight with which he has grasped the situation. He can be very conventional when the subject is conventional. When it is not, but is intrinsically poetical, no one gives us its poetry more free from the impertinences of subjective ecstasy than he. He was not a great poet, but he was a singularly restful, singularly simple-minded, andwhenever his subject suited him, as in one very considerable and remarkable instance it certainly did—a singularly classical poet, who knew how to prune away every excrescence of irrelevant emotion.

ROBERT BROWNING

THERE is hardly any English poet who has had a greater power of delivering an electric shock than Mr. Browning. His is the verse which flashes,—as a galvanic battery,-flashes that make the nerves tingle and the eyes involuntarily close. Whatever else he fails in, he never fails to be an awakening poet when he is understood at all. Of course, in his impatience to wake us up, he sometimes fails to make us understand his highly compressed and often merely hinted drift; and then, in spite of the vigorous jolts which he administers to the imagination, we may doze off, as a man wearied by a very rough cart will doze off, through sheer intellectual fatigue. But this never happens in Mr. Browning's greatest works. His own mind was never obscure. It was his shorthand style that obscured it, not any obscureness in his own perceptions or his own conceptions. He was as vigorous and keen-sighted as a weather-beaten sailor, and as rough in his tenderness, when he was tender, as in his boldness, when he was bold. Mr. Buchanan, in his earlier days, hit him off most skilfully when he said :

With eye like a skipper's cocked up at the weather, Sat the vice-chairman Browning, thinking in Greek.

Nothing is more remarkable than his love for Italy, its mellow atmosphere, and its soft, rich landscape, when we think of the weather-beaten brusquerie of his thought and speech. He was shrewd with the shrewdness of a man of business, plain with the plainness of an old sailor, and yet, above all, he was idealist, deeply convinced that the realities of the spiritual world are the most real of all realities, and also the most significant of human destiny. He loved spiritual power better than spiritual grace, the sublime better than the beautiful, the picturesque and the grotesque better than the harmonious. But in his idealism he was never shadowy or unreal. He could not bear to evade a difficulty, to ignore a dread, or to shut his eyes to a peril. His great imaginative impulse was to grasp the nettle that threatened to sting him, and he often grasped it so forcibly as to destroy not merely its stinging power, but its very tissue, and wake up to wonder whether he had ever been in danger of a sting at all. His genius has been miscalled dramatic. That is, I think, a mistake. His insight into character was very keen, but he never lost himself in the characters he depicted. He translated them all into

Browningese forms. Bishop Blongram is Browning posing as a worldly Bishop. The Bishop who

orders his tomb at St. Praxed's Church is Browning posing as a sensual, superstitious Italian Bishop. Ogniben, the Papal Legate in "A Soul's Tragedy," is Browning posing as ecclesiastical diplomatist. You never lose the Browningite manner of deliverance. You never forget that the artist is telling you what he sees in the picture he is painting, and that he himself is the interpreter, though a very acute interpreter, of what he sees. Even the

malignant monk who soliloquises in the Spanish cloister, soliloquises with the abrupt manner, and with the darting, forked-lightning tongue of a Spanish Browning. You see his piercing, critical eye in every delineation, however objective it may seem to be, of woman's passion or man's meditation. The Arab physician, Karshish, gives his diagnosis of the case of Lazarus in the keen, abrupt, zigzag of Browning's thought. Even the free-living artist, Fra Lippo Lippi, talks in Browning's sudden, impatient, up-and-down style :

A fine way to paint Soul by painting body
So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further
And can't fare worse! Thus yellow does for white
When what you pick for yellow's simply black,
And any sort of meaning looks intense

When all beside itself means and looks naught.
Why can't a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like
Both in their order?
The Prior's niece . . . Patron saint-is it so pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,

Take the prettiest face,

Sorrow, or joy! Won't beauty go with these?
Suppose I've made her eyes all right and blue,
Can't I take breath and try to add life's flash,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say there's beauty with no soul at all

(I never saw it-put the case the same),
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents,—

That's somewhat.

Surely a more remarkable reproduction of Browning's dialectic method by a medieval Italian painter can hardly be imagined.