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the Muse to receive any such baneful boon. Poetry beautified her life, blunted and perfumed the thorns of her anguish, softened the pillow of her sickness, and combined with her firm and most feminine faith to shed a gleam of soft and tearful glory upon her death.

Thus lived, wrote, suffered, and died "Egeria." Without farther seeking to weigh the worth, or settle the future place of her works, let us be thankful to have had her among us, and that she did what she could, in her bright, sorelytried, yet triumphant passage. She grew in beauty; was blasted where she grew; rained around her poetry, like bright tears from her eyes; learned in suffering what she taught in song; died, and all hearts to which she ever ministered delight, have obeyed the call of Wordsworth, to

"Mourn rather for that holy spirit,

Mild as the spring, as ocean deep ;-
For her who, ere her summer faded,
Has sunk into a dreamless sleep."

MRS. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

IN selecting Mrs. Hemans as our first specimen of Female Authors, we did so avowedly, because she seemed to us the most feminine writer of the day. We now select Mrs. Browning for the opposite reason, that she is, or at least is said by many to be, the most masculine of our female writers.

To settle the respective spheres and calibres of the male and the female mind, is one of the most difficult of philosophical problems. To argue, merely, that because the mind of woman has never hitherto produced a "Paradise Lost," or a "Principia," it is therefore for ever incapable of producing similar masterpieces, seems to us unfair, for various reasons. In the first place, how many ages elapsed ere the male mind realized such prodigies of intellectual achievement? And do not they still stand unparalleled and almost unapproached? And were it not as reasonable to

assert that man as that woman can renew them no more? Secondly, because the premise is granted-that woman has not-does the conclusion follow, that woman cannot excogitate an argument as great as the " Principia," or build up a rhyme as lofty as the "Paradise Lost?" Would it not have been as wise for one who knew Milton only as the Milton of "Lycidas" and "Arcades," to have contended that he was incapable of a great epic poem? And is there nothing in Madame De Stael, in Rahel the Germaness, in Mary Somerville, and even in Mary Wollstonecraft, to suggest the idea of heights, fronting the very peaks of the Principia and the Paradise, to which woman may yet attain? Thirdly, has not woman understood and appreciated the greatest works of genius as fully as man? Then may she in time equal them; for what is true appreciation but the sowing of a germ in the mind, which shall ultimately bear similar fruit? There is nothing, says Godwin, which the human mind can conceive, which it cannot execute; we may add, there is nothing the human mind can understand which it cannot equal. Fourthly, let us never forget that woman, as to intellectual progress, is in a state of infancy. Changed as by malignant magic, now into an article. of furniture, and now into a toy of pleasure, she is only as yet undergoing a better transmigration, and "timidly expanding into life."

Almost all that is valuable in female authorship has been produced within the last half-century, that is, since the female was generally recognized to be an intellectual creature; and if she has in such a short period, so progressed, what demi-Mahometan shall venture to set bounds to her future advancement? Even though we should grant that woman, more from her bodily constitution than her mental, is inferior to man, and that man, having got, shall probably keep, his start of centuries, we see nothing to prevent woman overtaking, and outstripping with ease, his present farthest point of intellectual progress. We do not look on such productions as 66 Lear," and the "Prometheus Vinetus," with the despair wherewith the boy who has leaped in vain to seize, regards ever after the moon and the stars; they are, after all, the masonry of men, and not the architecture of the gods;

and if man may surpass, why may not woman, "taken out of his side," equal them?

Of woman, we may say, at least, that there are already provinces where her power is incontested and supreme. And in proportion as civilization advances, and as the darker and fiercer passions which constitute the fera natura subside, in the lull of that milder day, the voice of woman will become more audible, exert a wider magic, and be as the voice of spring to the opening year. We stay not to prove that the sex of genius is feminine, and that those poets who are most profoundly impressing our young British minds, are those who, in tenderness and sensibility-in peculiar power, and peculiar weakness, are all but females. And whatever may be said of the effects of culture, in deadening the genius of man, we are mistaken if it has not always had the contrary effect upon that of woman, (where do we find a female Bloomfield or Burns?) so that, on entering on the far more highly civilized periods which are manifestly approaching, she will but be breathing the atmosphere calculated to nourish and invigorate, instead of weakening and chilling, her mental life. Our admirable friend, Mr. De Quincey, has, we think, conceded even more than we require, in granting that woman can die more nobly than man." For whether is the writing or the doing of great tragedy the higher achievement? Poor the attitude even of Shakspeare, penning the fire-syllables of Macbeth, to that of Joan of Arc, entering into the flames as into her wedding suit. comparison between the face inflamed of a Mirabeau or a Chalmers, as they thundered; and the blush on the cheek of Charlotte Corday, still extant, as her head was presented to the people? And who shall name the depicter of the death of Beatrice Cenci with that heroine herself; or with Madame Roland, whose conduct on the scaffold might make one in "love with death?" If to die nobly demand the highest concentration of the moral, intellectual, and even artistic powers-and if woman has par excellence exemplified such a concentration, there follows a conclusion to which we should be irresistibly led, were it not that we question the minor proposition in the argument—we hold that man has often as

*See in "Tait" a paper on Joan of Arc.

*

What

fully as woman risen to the dignity of death, and met him not as a vassal, but as a superior.

To say that Mrs. Browning has more of the man than any female writer of the period, may appear rather an equivocal compliment; and its truth even may be questioned. We may, however, be permitted to say, that she has more of the heroine than her compeers. Hers is a high, heroic nature, which adopts for the motto at once of its life and of its poetry, "Perfect through suffering." Shelley says:

"Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong;

They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

But wrong is not always the stern schoolmistress of song. There are sufferings springing from other sources-from intense sensibility-from bodily ailment--from the loss of cherished objects, which also find in poetry their natural vent. And we do think that such poetry, if not so powerful, is infinitely more pleasing and more instructive than that which is inspired by real or imaginary grievance. The turbid torrent is not the proper mirror for reflecting the face of nature; and none but the moody and the discontented will seek to see in it an aggravated and distorted edition of their own gloomy brows. The poetry of wrong is not the best and most permanent. It was not wrong alone that excited, though it unquestionably directed, the course of Dante's and Milton's vein. The poetry of Shakspeare's wrong is condensed in his sonnets--the poetry of his forbearance and forgiveness, of his gratitude and his happiness, is in his dramas. The poetry of Pope's wrong (a scratch from a thorn hedge) is in his "Dunciad," not in his "Rape of the Lock." The poetry of Wordsworth's wrong is in his Prefaces," not in his "Excursion." The poetry of Byron's wrong is in those deep curses which sometimes disturb the harmony of his poems; and that of Shelley's in the maniacal scream which occasionally interrupts the pæans of his song.

6.

But

all these had probably been as great, or greater poets, had no wrong befallen them, or had it taught them another lesson, than either peevishly to proclaim or furiously to resent it.

Mrs. Browning has suffered, so far as we are aware, no

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wrong from the age. She might, indeed, for some time have spoken of neglect. But people of genius should now learn the truth, that neglect is not wrong; or if it be, it is a wrong in which they often set the example. Neglecting the tastes of the majority, the majority avenges itself by neglecting them. Standing and singing in a congregation of the deaf, they are senseless enough to complain that they are not heard. Or should they address the multitude, and should the multitude not listen, it never strikes them that the fault is their own; they ought to have compelled attention. Orpheus was listened to: the thunder is: even the gentlest spring shower commands its audience. If neglect means wilful winking at claims which are felt, it is indeed a wrong; but a wrong seldom if ever committed, and which complaint will not cure-if it means, merely, ignorance of claims which have never been presented or enforced, where and whose is the criminality?

To do Mrs. Browning justice, she has not complained of neglect nor injury at all. But she has acknowledged herself inspired by the genius of suffering. And this seems to have exerted divers influences upon her poetry. It has, in the first place, taught her to rear for herself a spot of transcendental retreat, a city of refuge in the clouds. Scared away from her own heart, she has soared upwards, and found a rest elsewhere. To those flights of idealism in which she indulges, to those distant and daring themes which she selects, she is urged less, we think, through native tendency of mind, than to fill the vacuity of a sick and craving spirit. This is not peculiar to her. It may be called, indeed, the "Retreat of the Ten Thousand;" though strong and daring must be those that can successfully accomplish it. Only the steps of sorrow we had almost said only the steps of despair-can climb such dizzy heights. The healthy and the happy mind selects subjects of a healthy and a happy sort, and which lie within the sphere of every-day life and everyday thought. But for minds which have been wrung and riven, there is a similar attraction in gloomy themes, as that which leads them to the side of dark rivers, to the heart of deep forests, or into the centre of waste glens. Step forth, ye giant children of Sorrow and Genius, that we may tell your names, and compute your multitudes. First, there is

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