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Nevertheless in that correspondence between herself and Mr. Horne on her system of rhyming, which forms perhaps the most valuable part of the work that Mr. Horne has dedicated to her memory, there can be no doubt that Mr. Horne gets the best of the argument. He maintained that the fact was, 'whether the poetess intended it or not, that she was introducing a system of rhyming the first syllables and leaving the rest to a question of euphonious quantity.' His criticism was particularly directed against the rhymes in the Dead Pan, which the authoress as energetically defended. Miss Mitford, who was always candid in her judgment of her friend, supported Mr. Horne's view.

It will of course be understood that we are not complaining of that occasional violation of exact rhyme which only adds to the general harmony. No one with an ear would think of complaining of such a stanza as this from the Vision of Poets

'Cleaving the incense clouds that rise
With winking unaccustomed eyes,
And lovelocks smelling sweet of spice.'

But what of this from The Lost Bower?—

'Face to face with the true mountains

I stood silently and still,

Drawing strength from fancy's dauntings,
From the air about the hill,

And from Nature's open mercies a most debonair good will.'

or this from The Dead Pan?—

'Christ hath sent us down the angels;

And the whole earth and the skies

Are illumed by altar-candles

Lit for blessed mysteries.'

There

Take, again, the sonnet called Patience taught by Nature. are only two rhymes in the octave, and one set of four is thus made up-birds, herds, girds, swards. 'Birds' is an almost impracticable rhyme for the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet, and obviously the poetess has not solved the difficulty implied in starting upon it. But licence in rhyming is not the only licence she permits herself. Her use of words is often capricious and extravagant. She turns substantives into adjectives, she adds andverbial terinination to an adverb, she invents outright does words, i'

she is hard pressed for a rhyme. Here for instance she secures an admirable effect by a wrong use of a Chaucerian adjective:

'And Keats the real

Adonis with the hymeneal

Fresh vernal buds half sunk between

His youthful curls, kissed straight and sheen

In his Rome-grave by Venus queen.'

(Vision of Poets.)

In an exquisite stanza she finds a rhyme for 'morning' in 'many a mist's inurning.' In another place we have―

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That 'oftly' is terrible. This kind of catalogue could be extended indefinitely. Such words as 'fantasque,' 'percipiency,' 'humiliant,' 'vatic,'' sentiency,' ' aspectable,' 'horrent' are current coin in her language, and often give it a fantastic air. She is a little spoilt by that 'over-effluence of music,' which she herself blamed in Barry Cornwall. The delight in beautifully sounding words is as great with her as it was with Keats; but Keats, though he allowed himself considerable latitude in his blank verse (Hyperion is full of coined and curious words), was most rigorous with himself in his rhymed verse. A poet who is enamoured of perfection will allow himself liberties anywhere and everywhere except for the sake of evading a difficulty. Now enamoured of perfection Mrs. Browning was not. The poems which, from what may be called a technical point of view, may be counted irreproachable, may, if we except the Sonnets, almost be reckoned on the fingers. Her Sonnets are among the very best work she has produced. Perhaps indeed her greatest poetic success is to be found in the Sonnets from the Portuguese,—sonnets, it need hardly be said, which are not from the Portuguese' at all, but are the faintly disguised presentment of the writer's most intimate experience. Into the 'sonnet's narrow room'she has poured the full flood of her profoundest thought, and yet the minuteness and exquisiteness of the mould has at the same time compelled a rigorous pruning

alike of superabundant imagery and of harmonious verbosity, which has had the happiest results. She is one of the greatest sonnet writers in our language, worthy for this at all events to be ranked side by side with Milton and with Wordsworth.

Our own generation is probably inclined to give the poetess less than her due, and for obvious reasons. The art of versemaking has been carried to a point of technical perfection that she hardly dreamt of, and her laxity offends. Moreover, her innocent and heartfelt enthusiasms fall a little dully on the ear of a perverse and critical generation. We should call her naive, almost silly, where she has merely been artless and confiding. Her enthusiasm for Bulwer Lytton's weaker work and the traces of his influence on her earlier poems we cannot easily away with. There are passages in Aurora Leigh, particularly the passages describing the bad people, which might make an unkindly critic describe the authoress as a hysterical school-girl; and indeed it would not be easy to confute the critic, except by putting passage against passage, and showing how, with her, a lapse is always followed by a rise. What valuable and original elements her thought possesses have for the most part been absorbed long ago, have become common property, and are no longer recognisable as hers. The great struggle for Italian unity has inspired some of her best verses, and that struggle has already become very much a matter of ancient history. Yet in spite of all deductions that can be made-deductions, be it remembered, which are sometimes to be counted against the reader, and only sometimes against the poetess-she remains an attractive and delightful personage, and she has stamped enough of herself upon her poetry to give it an enduring charm. Her deep tenderness and genuineness of feeling, showing themselves in such poems as the Cry of the Children or Cowper's Grave, will never fail of their rightful power. She has touched all the chief human relationships, that of friend and friend, that of husband and wife, that of mother and child, with an exquisite insight and sensitiveness and delicacy, and her style, when she touches them, attains almost always that noble and severe simplicity which is so greatly to be preferred to her most luscious and copious versification. She has added a charm to motherhood only less than that added by Raffaelle himself, and the pleasant fate will be hers of being faithfully read by many a generation of youthful lovers.

WILLIAM T. ARNOLD.

IRREPARABLENESS.

I have been in the meadows all the day,
And gathered there the nosegay that you see,
Singing within myself as bird or bee

When such do field-work on a morn of May.
But, now I look upon my flowers, decay
Has met them in my hands more fatally
Because more warmly clasped,-and sobs are free
To come instead of songs.
What you say,

Sweet counsellors, dear friends? that I should go
Back straightway to the fields and gather more?
Another, sooth, may do it, but not I!

My heart is very tired, my strength is low,
My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
Held dead within them till myself shall die.

GRIEF.

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death

Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe,
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.
I.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,—
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove,-

'Guess now who holds thee?'-' Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang-'Not Death, but Love.'

IV.

Thou hast thy calling to some palace floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems! where
The dancers will break footing from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch too poor
For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware

In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush! call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps as thou must sing-alone, aloof

VI.

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand

Serenely in the sunshine as before,

Without the sense of that which I forbore,-
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine

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