the proud thundershod Eschylean family, all conceived in the "eclipse" of that most powerful of Grecian spirits. Then follows Lucretius

"Who cast his plummet down the broad

Deep universe, and said, No God;
Finding no bottom, he denied

Divinely the divine, and died,

Chief poet upon Tiber side.”—(Mrs. Browning.)

There stalk forward, next in the procession, the kings, priests, popes, prelates, and the yet guiltier and mightier shapes of Dante's Hell. Next, the Satan of Milton advances, champing the curb, and regarding even Prometheus as no mate for his proud and lonely misery. Then comes, cowering and shivering on, the timid Castaway of Cowper. He is followed by Byron's heroes, a haughty yet melancholy troop, with conscious madness animating their gestures and glaring in their eyes. The Anciente Marinere succeeds, now fearfully reverting his looks, and now fixing his glittering eye forward on a peopled and terrible vacancy. And, lastly, a frail shadowy and shifting shape, looking now Laon, now like Lionel, and now like Prometheus, proclaims that Alastor himself is here, the Benjamin in this family of tears.

"Whither shall I wander," seems Mrs. Browning to have said to herself, "to-day to escape from my own sad thoughts, and to lose, to noble purpose, the sense of my own identity? I will go eastward to Eden, where perfection and happiness once dwelt. I will pass, secure in virtue, the far-flashing sword of the cherubim; I will knock at the door and enter. I will lie down in the forsaken garden; I will pillow my head where Milton pillowed his, on the grass cool with the shadow of the Tree of Life; and I will dream a vision of my own, of what this place once was, and of what it was to leave it for the wilderness." And she has passed the waving sword, and she has entered the awful garden, and she has dreamed a dream, and she has, awaking, told it as a “Drama of Exile." It were vain to deny that the dream is one full of genius-that it is entirely original; and that it never once, except by antithesis, suggests a thought of Milton's more passive and palpable vision. Her Paradise is not a garden, it is a flush on a summer evening sky. Her Adam is not the

fair large-fronted man, with all manlike qualities meeting unconsciously in his full clear nature-he is a German metaphysician. Her Eve is herself, an amiable and gifted bluestocking, not the mere meek motherly woman, with what Aird beautifully calls the "broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love about her." Her spirits are neither cherubim nor seraphim-neither knowing nor burning ones— they are fairies, not, however, of the Puck or Ariel species, but of a new metaphysical breed; they do not ride on, but split hairs; they do not dance, but reason; or if they dance, it is on the point of a needle, in cycles and epicycles of mys tic and mazy motion. There is much beauty and power in passages of the poem, and a sweet inarticulate melody, like the fabled cry of mandrakes, in the lyrics. Still we do not see the taste of turning the sweet open garden of Eden into a maze—we do not approve of the daring precedent of trying conclusions with Milton on his own high field of victoryand we are, we must say, jealous of all encroachments upon that fair Paradise which has so long painted itself upon our imaginations—where all the luxuries of earth mingled in the feast with all the dainties of the heavens-where celestial plants grew under the same sun with terrestrial blossoms, and where the cadences of seraphic music filled up the pauses in the voice of God. Far different, indeed, is Mrs. Browning's from Dryden's disgusting inroad into Eden-as different, almost, as the advent of Raphael from the encroachment of Satan. But the poem professed to stand in the lustre of the fiery sword, and this should have burnt up some of its conceits, and silenced some of its meaner minstrelsies. And all such attempts we regard precisely as we do the beauties of the Apocrypha, when compared to the beauties of the Bible. They are as certainly beauties, but beauties of an inferior order-they are flowers, but not the roses which grew along the banks of the Four Rivers, or caught in their crimson cups the "first sad drops wept at committing of the mortal sin." "One blossom of Eden outblooms them all."

Having accepted from Mrs. Browning's own hand sadness, or at least seriousness, as the key to her nature and genius, let us continue to apply it in our future remarks. This at once impels her to, and fits her for, the high position she has assumed, uttering the "Cry of the Human." And

whom would the human race prefer as their earthly advocate, to a high-souled and gifted woman? What voice but the female voice could so softly and strongly, so eloquently and meltingly, interpret to the ear of him whose name is Love, the deep woes and deeper wants of "poor humanity's afflicted will, struggling in vain with ruthless destiny?" Some may quarrel with the title, "The Human," as an affectation; but, in the first place, if so, it is a very small one, and a small affectation can never furnish matter for a great quarrel; secondly, we are not disposed to make a man, and still less a woman, an offender for a word, and thirdly, we fancy we can discern a good reason for her use of the term. What is it that is crying aloud through her voice to Heaven? It is not the feral or fiendish element in human nature? That has found an organ in Byron-an echo in his bellowing verse. It is the human element in man--bruised, bleeding, all but dead under the pressure of evil circumstances, under the ten thousand tyrannies, mistakes, and delusions of the world, that has here ceased any longer to be silent, and is speaking in a sister's voice to Time and to Eternity-to Earth and Heaven. The poem may truly be called a prayer for the times, and no collect in the English liturgy surpasses it in truth and tenderness, though some may think its tone daring to the brink of blasphemy, and piercing almost to anguish.

Gracefully from this proud and giddy pinnacle, where she has stood as the conscious and commissioned representative of the human race, she descends to the door of the factory, and pleads for the children inclosed in that crowded and busy hell. The "Cry of the Factory Children" moves you, because it is no poem at all-it is just a long sob, veiled and stifled as it ascends through the hoarse voices of the poor beings themselves. Since we read it we can scarcely pass a factory without seeming to hear this psalm issuing from the machinery, as if it were protesting against its own abused powers. But to use the language of a writer quoted a little before, "The Fairy Queen is dead, shrouded in a yard of cotton stuff made by the spinning-jenny, and by that other piece of new improved machinery, the souls and bodies of British children, for which death alone holds the patent." From Mrs. Browning, perhaps the most imaginative and intellectual of British females, down to a pale-faced,

thick-voiced, degraded, hardly human, factory girl, what a long and precipitous descent! But though hardly, she is human; and availing herself of the small, trembling, but eternally indestructible link of connection implied in a common nature, our author can identify herself with the cause, and incarnate her genius in the person of the poor perishing child. How unspeakably more affecting is the pleading in behalf of a particular portion of the race, than in behalf of the entire family! Mrs. Browning might have uttered a hundred "cries of the human," and proved herself only a sentimental artist, and awakened little save an echo dying away in distant elfin laughter; but the cry of a factory child, coming through a woman's, has gone to a nation's heart.

Although occupied thus with the sterner wants and sorrows of society, she is not devoid of interest in its minor miseries and disappointments. She can sit down beside little Ella (the miniature of Alnaschar) and watch the history of her day dream beside the swan's nest among the reeds, and see in her disappointment a type of human hopes in general, even when towering and radiant as summer clouds. Ella's dream among the reeds! What else was Godwin's Political Justice? What else was St. Simonianism? What else is Young Englandism. And what else are the hopes built by many now upon certain perfected schemes of education, which, freely translated, just mean the farther sharpening and furnishing of knaves and fools; and now upon a "Coming Man," who is to supply every deficiency, reconcile every contradiction, and right every wrong. Yes, he will come mounted on the red-roan horse of sweet Ella's vision!

Shadowed by the same uniform seriousness are the only two poems of her which we shall farther at present mention -we mean her "Vision of Poets," and her "Geraldine's Courtship." The aim of the first is to present, in short compass, and almost in single lines, the characteristics of the greater poets of past and present times. This undertaking involved in it very considerable difficulties. For, in the first place, most great poets possess more than one distinguishing peculiarity. To select a single differential point is always hazardous, and often deceptive. 2dly, After you have

selected the prominent characteristic of your author, it is no easy task to express it in a word, or in a line. To compress thus an Iliad in a nutshell, to imprison a giant geni in an iron pot, is more a feat of magic than an act of criticism. 3dly, It is especially difficult to express the differentia of a writer in a manner at once easy and natural, picturesque and poetical. In the very terms of such an attempt as Mrs. Browning makes, it is implied that she not only defines, but describes the particular writer. But to curdle up a character into one noble word, to describe Shakspeare, for instance, in such compass, what sun-syllable shall suffice; or must we renew Byron's wish ?—

"Could I unbosom and embody now

That which is most within me; could I wreak

My thought upon expression!

*

And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."

Accordingly, this style of portraiture (shall we call it, as generally pursued, the thumb-nail style?) bas seldom been prosecuted with much success. Ebenezer Elliot has a copy of verses after this fashion, not quite worthy of him. What, for example, does the following line tell us of Shelley?

"Ill-fated Shelley, vainly great and brave."

The same words might have been used about Sir John Moore, or Pompey. Mrs. Browning's verses are far superior. Sometimes, indeed, we see her clipping at a character, in order to fit it better into the place she has prepared for it. Sometimes she crams the half of an author into a verse, and has to leave out the rest for want of room. Sometimes over a familiar face she throws a veil of words and darkness. But often her one glance sees, and her one word shows, the very heart of an author's genius and character. Our readers may recur to the lines already quoted in reference to Lucretius, as one of her best portraitures. Altogether this style, as generally prosecuted, is a small one, not much better than anagrams and acrostics-ranks, indeed, not much higher than the ingenuity of the persons who transcribe the "Pleasures of Hope" on the breadth of a crown-piece, and should