stand the "Queen Anne's men" in all their "glorified correctness" and their devotion to " cherry-stones." But there are "five eras of English poetry." Though Mrs. Browning tarries before the monuments of the great, and wanders in many a chosen by-way, she wavers not on the march; pausing to dig at "fossil remains," despite the belief that "nobody will thank her”; turning "for refreshment to Goldsmith, — that amiable genius, upon whose diadem we feel our hands laid ever and anon in familiar love"; advancing to the new era that "was alive in Cowper," upon whose grave her rhythmic tears have fallen; and where "Burns walked in glory on the Scottish mountain's side." In Wordsworth she recognizes the "poet-hero of a movement essential to the better being of poetry, the poet-prophet of utterances greater than those who first listened could comprehend, and of influences most vital and expansive." He found Nature among the Lakes, that the Tennysons and the Brownings might find Nature universal.

"Let a poet never write the words 'tree,' 'hill,' 'river,' and he may still be true to Nature. Most untrue, on the other hand, most narrow, is the poetical sectarianism, and essentially most unpoetical, which stands among the woods and fields announcing with didactic phlegm, 'Here only is Nature.' Nature is where God is. Poetry is where God is. Can you go up, or down, or around, and not find Him?"

It is because the Tennysons and the Brownings have written firm in the faith of God's and Nature's omnipresence, that they have left Wordsworth far behind.

It is pleasant to read Elizabeth Barrett's passing eulogy of Robert Browning, little dreaming, as she did at the time, how deep a meaning that name would have to her. This reference recalls to our memory a day at Casa Guidi, when we carried to the Brownings a letter of Edgar Poe's addressed to a friend, in which Poe had copied for his reading the warm praise that "the world's greatest poetess, Elizabeth Barrett," had awarded to him. "Did Poe write this of me?" exclaimed Mrs. Browning, looking up with glistening but unbelieving eyes; "he was kind." The tone of voice said further, "But I cannot believe, however friends may applaud." And then she bent her head to read her own words in Poe's nervous, clearly-cut handwriting.

.....

"This vivid writing! this power which is felt! 'The Raven' has produced a sensation — a 'fit horror' — here in England. . . . . . I hear of persons absolutely haunted by the Nevermore,' and one acquaintance of mine, who has the misfortune of possessing a 'bust of Pallas,' never can bear to look at it in the twilight. Our great poet, Mr. Browning, the author of 'Paracelsus,' 'The Pomegranates,' etc., is enthusiastic in his admiration of the rhythm."

"I am so glad I wrote that," said Mrs. Browning, with a beautiful smile; and Mr. Browning, having read, also expressed his gratitude for praise from such a source, - praise undeserved, he said, in words of true chivalric ring. It was a noble sight to us, this mutual homage, and we rejoiced that the curious accident of a letter should have made us witness to it. The bread cast upon the water had returned after the vicissitudes of fourteen years. And now we continue and conclude the quotation from this letter, for the sake of unhappy, gifted Edgar Poe.

"Then there is a tale of his which I do not find in this volume, but which is going the rounds of the newspapers, about Mesmerism [The Valdemar Case], throwing us all into 'most admired disorder,' or dreadful doubts as to whether it can be true.'. . . . . The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar."

6

.....

We can readily imagine the intense pleasure and gratification which prompted Poe, so often maliciously criticised, to share these kind words with his friends.

We have turned the last page of these Essays on the Poets, yet grieve to close the book. With it we feel as though we clasped the very spirit of all beauty since the beginning of the Christian era. From those exquisite translations of the Fathers the Greek soul embodied into English, word for word and thought for thought, the long, patient work of meditation, ay, and of prayer, - they are prayers- we learn the prayer,—they grand lesson of humility and self-sacrifice born of a religion of the heart. The Book of the Poets is to us an ideal rainbow, a blending in the heavens of the poets according to their true colors, a sign of promise for the future of poetry, no less than a reflection of its glory in the past.

In summing up in Wordsworth what the poet should be as a man, Mrs. Browning says:

“It is well . . . . . to count the cost of this life of a master in poetry, and learn from it what a true poet's crown is worth; to recall both the long life's work for its sake, the work of observation, of meditation, of reaching past models into nature, of reaching past nature unto God; and the early life's loss for its sake, the loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, and of the

money in the purse.'"

A real poet is a prophet. Was there ever prophet who did not suffer martyrdom? Many may not remember Mrs. Browning's beautiful poem, "A Musical Instrument," in which the "great God Pan" is represented cutting the reeds as he sits by the river,

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'Making a poet out of a man.”

"He cut it short did the great god Pan,

(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sat by the river.

"This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)

The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

"Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river."

"No," said one of the cleverest of Englishmen in reply to this poem, "I deny that the man must be sacrificed to make the poet." He was not a poet. But Mrs. Browning an

swers:

spoke a

that a

"When Milton said that a poet's life should be a poem, he high moral truth; if he had added a reversion of the saying, poet's poetry should be his life, — he would have spoken a critical truth, not low.”

To do this is no abnegation needed? Does not the poetic faculty bring with it a sensibility which, because of the evil in the world, more frequently leads to exquisite pain than to exquisite pleasure? Patience is genius, and what does this patience mean but the consecration of time to solitary study, while the echo of music and dancing, and the laugh of the multitude, sound seductively to the ear? He who lives for the good of the future must renounce many joys of the present. To be a true poet, the man must stand on a pinnacle far above the level of humanity; and is it no sacrifice to stand alone, when the sympathies are so wide and various?

"The moral of every great deed is

The virtue of slandering the doers."

The very absence of "money in the purse" is an unending trial. Yet the martyrdom is for Truth's sake. It is sweet and glorious. The pipe no longer sighed to be a reed in the river, when its piercing sweet music transfixed the sun on the hill, revived the lilies, and lured back the dragon-fly.

But with woman, is it not better that she should remain a reed in the river?

"No perfect artist is developed here
From an imperfect woman."

So Mrs. Browning has written, who was the almost perfect artist, because she was a perfect woman. Aspirations are as vital to women as to men: it is the absolute necessity for their expression, that the world must acknowledge whether the applause be great or not at all.

"But what if none? It cannot yet undo

The love I bear unto this holy skill;
This is the thing that I was born to do,

This is my scene, this part must I fulfil.”

So sang old Daniel in the "Musophilus." So bravely, beautifully terminates Mrs. Browning's Book of the Poets.

ART. III. ROME, REPUBLICAN AND IMPERIAL.

1. Römische Geschichte. Von THEODOR MOMMSEN. Zweite Auflage. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. 1856. 4 vols. 2. The History of Rome. By THEODOR MOMMSEN. Translated with the Author's Sanction and Additions, by the REV. WILLIAM P. DICKSON, Classical Examiner in the University of St. Andrews. With a Preface by DR. LEONHARD SCHMITZ. London: Richard Bentley, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty. 1862. 2 vols.

3. History of the Romans under the Empire. By CHARLES MERIVALE, B. D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Second Edition. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. 1852-1862. 7 vols.

THE origin and the growth of Rome, the obscure years of its infancy, and the vigorous period of its supremacy, present to us more difficult problems, instruct us by more vivid examples, than the dreary calm or the bloody tumult of its decline and fall. Yet the first half of the Roman history still remains to be written, the philosophy of the whole still remains to be explored. The cycle of Roman history, indeed, fullest of the wisdom and the sadness of earth, grand, single, complete, absorbing the civilization of the world it compassed, is at once the best known and the least understood. We find in it a lesson, or we construct of it a drama. It is an arsenal of facts, a reservoir of principles. Yet in regarding it as a whole we are too apt to forget, in the first place, that the Roman civilization was not an isolated phenomenon, a phase of national development, but the sum of all the forces of the ancient world, a great sea of history into which flowed all the currents of human progress, Aramæan, Egyptian, Greek; and in the second place, that its course was run upon a plane lower than that upon which the race now stands. History is a moral problem, a struggle between necessity and freedom, not a mechanical evolution, a determined course. Hence, though we may find resemblances, we nowhere find parallels. With some races, and for many ages, there is nothing altered, nothing gained. With other nations, on the contrary, as in