be resigned to such praiseworthy personages. By far the best specimen of it we remember, is the very clever list involving a running commentary of the works of Lord Byron, by Dr. M Ginn; unless, indeed, it be Gay's "Catalogue Raisonné" of the portentous poems of Sir Richard Blackmore. Who shall embalm, in a similar way, the endless writings of James, Cooper, and Dickens?

"Lady Geraldine's Courtship," as a transcript from the "red-leaved tablets of the heart". -as a tale of love, set to the richest music-as a picture of the subtle workings, the stern reasonings, and the terrible bursts of passion-is above praise. How like a volcano does the poet's heart at length explode! How first all power is given him in the dreadful trance of silence, and then in the loosened tempest of speech! What a wild, fierce logic flows forth from his lips, in which, as in that of Lear's madness, the foundations of society seem to quiver like reeds, and the mountains of conventionalism are no longer found; and in the lull of that tempest, and in the returning sunshine, how beautiful, how almost superhuman, seem the figures of the two lovers seen now and magnified through the mist of the reader's fast-flowing tears. It is a tale of successful love, and yet it melts you like a tragedy, and most melts you in the crisis of the triumph. On Geraldine we had gazed as on a star, with dry-eyed and and distant admiration; but when that star dissolves in showers at the feet of her poet lover, we weep for very joy. Truly a tear is a sad yet beautiful thing; it constitutes a link connecting us with distant countries, nay, connecting us with distant worlds. Gravitation has, amid all her immensity, wrought no such lovely work as when she rounded

a tear.

From this beautiful poem alone, we might argue Mrs. Browning's capacity for producing a great domestic tragedy. We might argue it, also, from the various peculiarities of her genius-her far vision into the springs of human conduct into those viewless veins of fire, or of poison, which wind within the human heart-her sympathy with dark bosoms-the passion for truth, which pierces often the mist of her dimmer thought, like a flash of irrepressible lightning her fervid temperament, always glowing round her intellectual sight-and her queen-like dominion over im

agery and language. We think, meanwhile, that she has mistaken her sphere. In that rare atmosphere of transcendentalism which she has reached, she respires with difficulty, and with pain. She is not "native and endued" into that element. We would warn her off the giddy region, where tempests may blow as well as clouds gather. Her recent sonnets in Blackwood" are sad failures-the very light in them is darkness-thoughts, in themselves as untangible as the films upon the window pane, are concealed in a woof of words, till their thin and shadowy meaning fades utterly away. Morbid weakness, she should remember, is not masculine strength. But can she not, through the rents in her cloudy tabernacle, discern, far below in the vale, fields of deep though homely beauty, where she might more gracefully and successfully exercise her exquisite genius? She has only to stoop to conquer. By and by we may-using unprofanely an expression originally profane-be tempted to say, as we look up the darkened mountain, with its flashes of fire hourly waxing fewer and feebler, "As for this poetess, we wot not what has become of her."

While we are venturing on accents of warning, we might also remind her that there are in her style and manner peculiarities which a wicked world will persist in calling af fectations. On the charge of affectation, generally, we are disposed to lay little stress-it is a charge so easily got up, and which can be so readily swelled into a cuckoo cry; it is often applied with such injustice, and it so generally attaches to singularities in manner, instead of insincerities in spirit and matter. But why should a true man, or a true woman, expose themselves needlessly to such a charge? We think in general, that true taste in this, as in matters of dress and etiquette, dictates conformity to the present mode, provided that does not unduly cramp the freedom and the force of natural motions. There is, indeed, a class of writers who are chartered libertines-who deal with language as they please who toss it about as the autumn wind leaves; who, in the agony of their earnestness, or in the fury of their excitement, seize on rude and unpolished words, as Titans on rocks and mountains, and gain artistic triumphs in opposition to all the rules of art. Such are Wilson and Carlyle, and such were Burke and Chalmers. These men we must

just take as they are, and be thankful for them as they are. We must just give them their own way. And whether such a permission be given or not, it is likely to be taken. "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will the Unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? canst thou bind him with his band in the furrow? will he harrow the valleys after thee? wilt thou believe that he will bring home thy seed, and gather into thy barn?" No like the tameless creatures of the wilderness-like the chainless elements of the air-such men obey a law, and use a language, and follow a path of their own.

But this rare privilege Mrs. Browning cannot claim. And she owes it to herself and to her admirers to simplify her manner to sift her diction of whatever is harsh and barbarous-to speak whatever truth is in her, in the clear articulate language of men-and to quicken, as she well can, the dead forms of ordinary verbiage, by the spirit of her own. superabundant life. Then, but not till then, shall her voice break fully through the environment of coteries, cliques, and magazine readers, and fall upon the ear of the general public, like the sound, sweet in its sublimity, simple amid its complex elements, earthly in its cause and unearthly in its effect upon the soul, of a multitude of waters.

MRS. SHELLEY.

MUCH as we hear of Schools of Authors, there has, properly speaking, been but one in British literature-at least, within this century. There was never, for example, any such thing as a Lake school. A school supposes certain conditions and circumstances which are not to be found among the poets referred to. It supposes, first of all, a common master. Now, the Lake poets had no common master, either among themselves or others. They owned allegiance neither to Shakspeare, nor Milton, nor Wordsworth. Each stood

near, but each stood alone, like the stars composing one of the constellations. A school, again, implies a common creed. But we have no evidence, external or internal, that though the poetical diction of the Lakers bore a certain resemblance, their poetical creed was identical. Indeed, we are yet to learn that Southey had, of any depth or definitude, a poetical creed at all. A school, again, supposes a similar mode of training. But how different the erratic education of Coleridge, from the slow, solemn, silent degrees by which, without noise of hammer or edge-tool, arose, like the ancient temple, the majestic structure of Wordsworth's mind! A school, besides, implies such strong and striking resemblances as shall serve to overpower the specific differences between the writers who compose it. But we are mistaken if the dissimilarities between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey be not as great as the points in which they agree. Take, for example, the one quality of speculative intellect. That, in the mind of Coleridge, was restless, discontented, and daring-in Wordsworth, still, collected, brooding perpetually over narrow but profound depths-in Southey, almost totally quiescent. The term Lake School, in short, applied at first in derision, has been retained, principally because it is convenient-nay suggests a pleasing image, and gives both the public and the critics "glimpses that do make them less forlorn," of the blue peaks of Helvellyn and Skiddaw, and of the blue waters of Derwent and Windermere.

The Cockney School was, if possible, a misnomer more absurd striving, as it did, in vain to include, within one term, three spirits so essentially distinct as Hazlitt, Keats, and Leigh Hunt-the first a stern metaphysician, who had fallen into a hopeless passion for poetry; the second, the purest specimen of the ideal-a ball of beautiful foam, "cut off from the water," and not adopted by the air; the third, a fine tricksy medium between the poet and the wit, half a sylph and half an Ariel, now hovering round a lady's curl, and now stirring the fiery tresses of the sun-a fairy, fluctuating link, connecting Pope with Shelley. We need not be at pains to cut out into little stars the Blackwood constellation, or dwell on the differences between a Wilson, a Lockhart, and a James Hogg.

One school, however, there has appeared within the last fifty years, answering to all the characteristics we have enumerated, namely, the Godwin school, who, by a common master-the old man eloquent himself a common philosophical as well as poetical belief, common training, that of warfare with society, and many specific resemblances in manner and style, are proclaimed to be one. This cluster includes the names of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecroft, Brockden Brown of America, Shelley, and Mrs. Shelley.

Old Godwin scarcely got justice in Tait's Magazine from Mr. De Quincey. Slow, cumbrous, elephantine as he was, there was always a fine spirit animating his most lumpish movements. He was never contemptible-often commonplace, indeed, but often great. There was much in him of the German cast of mind-the same painful and plodding diligence, added to high imaginative qualities. His great merit at the time-and his great error, as it proved afterwards—lay in wedding a partial philosophic system with the universal truth of fiction. Hence the element which made the public drunk with his merits at first rendered them oblivious afterwards. So dangerous it is to connect fiction (the finer alias of truth) with any dogma or mythus less perishable than the theogony of Homer, or the catholicism. of Cervantes. After all, what was the theory of Godwin but the masque of Christianity? Cloaking the leading principle of our religion, its disinterested benevolence, under a copy of the features of Helvetius and Volney, he went a mumming with it in the train on the philosophers of the Revolution. But when he approached the domain of actual life and of the human affections, the ugly disguise dropped, and his fictions we hesitate not to characterize as among the noblest illustrations of the Sermon on the Mount. But to the public they seemed the reiterations of exploded and dangerous errorssuch a load of prejudice and prepossession had been suspended to their author's skirts. And now, the excitement of danger and disgust having passed away from his theories, interest in the works which propounded them has also subsided. "Caleb Williams," once denounced by Hannah More as a cunning and popular preparation of the poison which the "Political Justice" had contained in a cruder form, is now forgotten, "St. Leon," we suspect, by all but a very select class.