Reviews

E541000B.  Poems (1853).

The Calcutta Review, October 1854, pp. 255–292.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 390–402.

We entertain a feeling of regard for all the minor poets of the present century, a feeling of regard that borders upon love. We do not wish our readers to suppose, from this confession, that we are partial to the innumerable scribblers of verses for magazines and newspapers. But we do entertain a feeling of great regard, bordering indeed upon love, for those poets, who, having the genuine afflatus from above, are yet unable, and will always be unable, from a variety of causes, to make any impression on the public mind. Alford, Strong, Trench, Elton, &c., &c., their very names are music to our ears. It may be that the fire which burns in their hearts, hath neither sufficient heat nor lustre to attract a crowd, but the flame is real, and not a mere reflexion. We do not know them personally, but we can conceive to ourselves the purity and peace in which the days of men, who are able to think and feel like them, must glide away: in the world, but apart from it: their hearts like temples in the suburbs of mighty cities, where noise cannot penetrate, and nothing is heard, but the rustle of leaves, or the gentle murmur of waters, or haply, a human voice in prayer! “Feeding all longings that aspire, like incense, heavenward.” What, if noisier men get more praise? What, if the public taste be against them and their pursuits? What, if the world neglect them? There is a music in their souls which compensates for all.

Not harsh nor grating,—but of ample power

To soften and subdue.

If any reader wish to know the names of all the minor poets, to whom our observations refer, we must tell him that we cannot even trust our memory to name them all at once. Of course, we remember them, the moment we see their books, but then to have a ready catalogue of them on one’s tongue, that is a different matter altogether, and we fairly confess we are not equal to the task! We can give the reader, instead of the names, a pretty sure test, by which [p. 256→] he may find out, whether any man that has published a book of verses comes under our category of minor poets, and is entitled to regard and love. The test is simple. Let the reader ascertain first, whether the man is a Christian, not ostensively, but in heart. If he is, well and good. If he is not, he may be rejected at once. Let him next ascertain whether he prefers the school of Byron, or the school of Wordsworth. If he prefers the former, and has a dislike for the latter, he can be rejected at once; if, on the other hand, he likes Byron, but prefers Wordsworth, well and good, he may be put to a third and final trial. Let the reader glance over his volume, and see whether the man writes for effect. If he does, he fails at the eleventh hour. A man who is blind to the poetry of the Christian religion, prefers Byron to Wordsworth, and writes for effect, can seldom have a body of thought in his verses; generally speaking, he must rant, and if there is any good in him, he is much more likely to obtain popularity, than to blossom in the shade. He can rarely indeed be a minor poet, that is, a genuine poet, whom the world does not admire. We do not say that our test is infallible, but let the reader try it on a dozen of the volumes on his table, and say if it is not a pretty fair one.

Confessing to such a love of the minor poets, it would be absurd for us to deny that we entertain as great a regard, or greater, for the poetesses, several of whom have the peculiar flame of genius to which we have before made reference, although in none burns it with that volcanic, or calm but overpowering brilliance, which attracts and gratifies the multitude. We do not of course like every blue-stocking that writes verses; no, indeed, for we know some to be insufferable bores, and Mr. Thackeray, in Pendennis, has most satisfactorily demonstrated, in the character of Miss Blanche Amory, how a lady may write poetry, and be neither deserving of admiration nor love;—but we like the generality even of those ladies who write on such subjects as Spring,—Winter,—To a Violet—To a Child sleeping—Morning,—Evening, &c., &c., in the trumpery annuals. They may not leave great names behind them, or be looked upon with reverence by future generations; but their pursuits are gentle and harmless, and their hearts generally are replete with the finest feelings of our nature. If they are not great poetesses, they, at all events, know how to appreciate great poetry; and that necessarily makes them somewhat superior to the common run of woman.

It cannot be denied that there are no poetesses in the English language, fit to take positions beside the highest poets, [p. 257→] beside Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Milton; but then, there are poetesses fit to take places beside the highest of the second class or order of poets. The women have labored under a disadvantage. In their education the ornamental accomplishments have always occupied a disproportionate share of attention. When we take into consideration the comparatively short period during which the intellectual education of women has been considered as necessary as that of men, and the very large number of excellent poetesses that have appeared in it, we have every reason to suppose, that we have had no great poetesses,—because the women have not had fair play,—and not because they are in any way our inferiors in intellect; and we have every reason to hope, that great female poets will appear in time. Our fathers could show very few poetesses, even ordinary verse-taggers,—we can show many. Our chances of a great poetess, therefore, are more favourable. Who are the female poets of Shakespeare’s time? Our readers will hardly be able to name one. Lady Jane Grey, though a great scholar, never wrote poetry. Mary of Scotland wrote poetry, but very little better than our Jane Actons and Eliza Cooks. Mrs. Phillips, the matchless Orinda, wrote far better indeed, but how many can we name to eclipse her—Hemans and Landon, Bowles and Howitt, Norton and Baillie.

Yet late in the day as our women have taken the field, they have exercised no inconsiderable influence upon English poetical literature. A softening, healing, purifying element has been introduced through their instrumentality in a body which had become offensive and corrupt ever since the time of Charles II, and which, without their interference, would probably have advanced (in spite of some glorious examples) from one stage to another, of hopeless putrefaction, till the very name of poetry stank in our nostrils. When we remember that such men as Butler could not wholly resist the “infection,” and that three or four only soared above the awful miasma, we feel that we owe our women-poets a debt of gratitude which nothing can ever repay. Nor is that feeling any wise diminished, when we contrast our literature with that of other nations—especially of nations where the female influence is not felt. When we contrast English poetical literature, with the poetical literature of India for instance, are we not startled at the gulf that lies between, and do not we feel, as if in one case, we had reached some hill or lofty eminence, where the wind blew fresh and vigorous, and in another some marsh or fen,—picturesque indeed,—but where the breeze wafted on its pinions scarcely any thing but disease and death? Is it diffi- [p. 258→] cult to conceive how different would have been the tone of Bengali poetry, if we had a female Bharut Chunder? And would not Sanscrit poetry have been much more healthy for a female Valmiki or Vyas? It is not denied, that other causes have materially aided the gradual purification of English poetry, and that the influence of the poetesses in itself has not done every thing:—what is contended for,—is, that it has done much. And when so much is admitted, it is impossible not to lament that there has been no culture of the female mind in the land of our adoption,—and not to bless the memory of the whole band of British poetesses, and especially of those glorious ones, amongst them, who have sprung forth into light and loveliness within our generation.

We do not consider Anna Seward and Mrs. Barbauld among our ancient poetesses, nor do we consider them amongst our modern. They belong to a middle space, and we shall have nothing to do with them at present.

We think the modern poetesses would stand very nearly thus, if classed according to the order of merit. Baillie, Browning, Hemans, Bowles, Norton, Mitford, Howitt, Landon. We do not class Hannah More with the set, because we think she ought more properly to take her station with the older generation of the Sewards and the Barbaulds.

It has not been without a twinge of conscience that we have given Mrs. Hemans the third place in our list. At one time, we thought she occupied the first, and verily, our old partiality comes back upon us, at intervals, especially when, on a holiday, we have a copy of her Lays of Many Lands, or her Songs of the Affections, before us. If authors were to be judged alone by occasional short pieces, Mrs. Hemans would, undoubtedly, be the greatest of our female poets. Miss Baillie or Mrs. Browning never wrote such poems as Ivan the Czar, or Cassabianca, or the Hebrew Mother. The world will never let these die. They defy the devouring flames of time as haughtily as Hohenlinden, or Laodamia, or Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled. But authors are not to be judged by short occasional pieces only; their longer efforts must be taken into the balance. It is not enough that a poet can fly. Is he able to sustain his flight? A crow might, by a desperate effort, or in a sudden fit of rapturous enjoyment, reach an eminence higher than an eagle, but before we decide that it is the bird of the stronger wing, we must assuredly enquire whether it can soar near the place it has reached as continually as its rival. Mrs. Hemans was never successful in her ambitious and sustained flights. The Forest Sanctuary, The Vespers of Palermo, The Siege of Valencia, Modern Greece, [p. 259→] are all failures. We do not mean to insinuate that she is the crow, and Miss Baillie or Mrs. Browning is the eagle, but we cannot help feeling that their intellects are more masculine and powerful, and though they must both yield to her in delicacy of feeling, and in correctness and grace of style, they are in other and higher requisites her superiors.

We do not mean to inflict on our readers, a detailed criticism on all our poetesses. It will be enough, in passing, to glance at their leading characteristics.

Joanna Baillie, the greatest of them, has a rare and happy combination of many gifts. She has less grace and delicacy than Mrs. Hemans, less fancy than Miss Landon, less pathos and simplicity than Caroline Bowles, perhaps less nerve and vigor than Mrs. Browning; but she unites in herself all these qualities more largely than any of them. Her Plays on the Passions, though constructed on a fundamentally wrong principle, and by no means adapted for the stage, are productions of extraordinary merit, and will continue to be read as long as the English language lasts. It cannot be denied that she imposed a most unnecessary restriction on herself, in devoting every separate play to the exhibition of a single passion; but the manner in which she has performed her task, cannot be praised too highly. She is a devoted admirer of Shakspeare, and has made him her model. It is well that she has done so, for she has thus been able to avoid the faults of Shakspeare’s greatest contemporaries—faults, into which a blind admiration for them has betrayed so many of our modern dramatists. Her characters are conceived long before she sets to work, and no inducement is sufficiently strong to induce her to deviate from the original outlines shadowed out in her mind. The generality of modern dramatists will not hesitate to sacrifice the original idea of a character for temporary effect; but she remains constant and faithful to her original ideas, and only looks forward to the consummation.* The consequence is, her plays are not a succession of brilliant and effective, but unconnected scenes, but of scenes of more or less brilliancy and power, harmonizing into works of the most consummate art.

It is certainly a great shame to modern dramatists, that they should permit themselves to be excelled by a woman, in almost all those qualities, where a woman is most likely to fail. In breadth and grandeur of design, in consistency of execu- [p. 260→] tion, in nerve, in sublimity, in pathos, she not only stands above all her female compeers, but above most of her male rivals—aye, above Scott and Byron, in the peculiar province of the drama. There are passages and scenes in her plays which make an indelible impression on the mind. Obedient to the spell of the enchantress, we now shudder with horror, and now weep with pity, and now tremble in suspense, and doubt, and anxiety. Who, that has ever read, can ever forget, De Montfort, or Henriquez, or The Dream of Constantine? The high-souled king haranguing his people, and turning rebellion into obedience and love with his words.

——In your homes

Ye’ve stretched your easy limbs and fanned your brows,

Whilst I, in parching toil, have spent the day—

The murderer stumbling on the scaffold, and exclaiming to the priest, while there is a blaze of torches around him:—

It is dark: I cannot see.

The innocent man scorning the pardon offered him by the guilty.

Though born of blood less noble than your own, &c.

The apparition of the stranger lady:—

So queenly, so commanding and so noble,

I shrunk at first in awe,—but when she smiled,

Methought I could have compassed sea and land

To do her bidding.

Ah! who that has read such passages as these, but will own, there is some truth in Scott’s well known high-flown compliment.

And Avon’s swans, while rung the grove

With Basil’s hate and Montfort’s love,

Awakening at the inspired strain,

Deemed their own Shakspeare lived again!

It is unnecessary to speak of Mrs. Browning in this place, as we shall have to point out her peculiar faults and beauties at some length before we conclude—and about Mrs. Hemans, our opinion has been already given. If she has less vigor than Miss Baillie, she has, undoubtedly, more elegance and tenderness; and though, on the whole, her intellect must be pronounced inferior to her rival’s, it is superior in those particular respects in which we should naturally expect the female mind most to excel. While Baillie claims our admiration, perhaps our reverence, Hemans claims our love. If she could have written her long poems as well as her short ones, and if there were more variety in the latter, she would probably have taken the first place in the first rank of British poetesses. But unfortunately for her,—perhaps, unfortunately for woman-kind,— [p. 261→] the wings of her muse, though painted right gloriously, and decorated with jewels of rare value, were not sufficiently strong to bear her through a sustained flight through etherial regions, and whenever she sang, her voice unconsciously fell into those peculiar notes for which it seemed best fitted. Though the most delightful of mannerists, she is still a mannerist. No one can take up a volume of her poetry and read a dozen of her pieces at a time, without being somewhat cloyed and satiated, and recording in his mind, what the convalescent in the Spectator recorded of his pudding:—“Mem—too sweet—there should be less sugar.” We have even the courage to think, so convinced are we of her particular failing in this respect, that an individual accustomed to read her poems,—only occasionally in annuals and magazines, would form a higher estimate of her powers than another, accustomed to read them in her own collections. Beautiful as if her imagery; pure, elevated, tender, as is the tone of her thoughts; elegant and delicate as is her language,—there is an uniformity in all which almost palls upon the ear and the mind. Who ever mistook her poems for another’s, when she published them anonymously? The stamp of her genius upon them was always too plain and too peculiar to be misunderstood, even by the greatest blunderers. The profusion of pictures—the subordination of those pictures to the great end in view—the harmonious unison of the emotions of the soul with the aspect of nature, which Lord Jeffrey thought one of the most distinguishing features in her poetry,—the free, yet harmonious flow of her versification—the artful, yet apparently artless grace,—all these indicated the master hand, and the initials F. H.; whenever they were appended, were found by most readers perfectly superfluous.

Bowles has even less vigor than Hemans; but she is as tender and as simple, or perhaps more so. No one expects any thing lofty or sublime from her, but who ever opens one of her volumes, without expecting to be, and being, melted, by her touching pictures of every-day life? Numberless eyes have moistened over the lines To a Dying Infant, and The Pauper’s Death-bed. Meek, unpretending, unobtrusive, she is the violet of modern literature, as Hemans is the rose.

Mrs. Norton is a statelier flower. She is the lily of the women. The Quarterly Review correctly observed:—“She has very much of that intense personal passion by which Byron’s poetry is distinguished from the larger grasp, and deeper communion with man and nature of Wordsworth,” and that “she [p. 262→] has also Byron’s beautiful intervals of tenderness, his strong practical thought, and forceful expression.” Each of her poems, we think, is superior to its predecessor. The Undying One is better than The Sorrows of Rosalie, The Dream better than The Undying One, and the Child of the Islands better than The Dream. She has assumed her niche in the temple of Fame by progressive steps. With less genius than Baillie, or Hemans, or Bowles, or even Howitt, she has perhaps more talent than any, and, we think, as a prose writer, excels them all. She is never mystical; and in this respect, she sets a good example to all young poets of the present day, who seem to think that to be unintelligible is to be deep or profound. Her thoughts, indeed, seldom lie, like Wordsworth’s, “too deep for tears,” but they are ever generous and noble, ever on the side of truth and virtue, and ever, such as they are, clear and open to the comprehension of the humblest reader. Mrs. Browning might take lessons from Mrs. Norton, and make herself more intelligible, in many passages of her works, with advantage. Like her husband Mrs. Browning is an admirer of Shelley’s manner, and Shelley’s manner is not certainly the best of modern writers. Shelley loves mysticism, and takes a delight in burying his ideas in glorious heaps of glorious words. He seldom clothes them in transparency. But of this, and other faults of Mrs. Browning, more hereafter in their place.

Mary Howitt belongs to the school of Caroline Bowles, and though not so elegant, is as tender, and even more simple. She is, as everybody knows, of the Quaker sect, and her poetry is tinctured by the purity and humility of her faith.

“Whitest thoughts in whitest dress,

Candid meanings best express,

Mind of quiet Quakeress.”**

Some of her ballads make a deep impression on the mind of childhood. We shall never forget her Isle of the Fairies, where the gentle moon shone by day, and the golden mist by night, though we think much less of it now, than of yore.

Who that has read Miss Mitford’s “Our Village” and “Country Stories,” would expect, that in poetry she should resemble Baillie rather than Bowles or Hemans? And yet she undoubtedly bears a great likeness to Baillie. Her Rienzi is of the Baillie school—bold, vigorous, consistent in design, free in execution, now lofty and sublime, now tender and graceful. [p. 263→] The conclusion, where Rienzi replies with bitterness to the mob thirsting for his blood:—

—For liberty! Go seek

The mountain tops, where with the crashing pines

The north wind revels! Go where ocean pours

O’er horrid rocks, or sports in eddying pools!

Go where the eagle and the sea-snake dwell,

Midst mighty elements,—where nature is,

And man is not,—and ye may see afar,

Impalpable as a rainbow on the clouds

The glorious vision! Liberty!

reminds us of Baillie’s happiest manner. It is a pity she never attempted tragedy again. We are sure she would have improved progressively, like Mrs. Norton, with each successive attempt.

Landon, we have placed last on our list, because we really think she does not deserve a high position. She has been much overrated. Her youth, her beauty, her apparent helplessness and dependence, enlisted the public sympathy strongly on her behalf, when she first made her appearance as a poetess. The unfortunate attachment she formed, her expatriation, her melancholy death, riveted and fixed that sympathy, and kept alive her fame. Posterity will not look upon her productions with the eyes of her own generation, and under its stern cold glance they will not appear arrayed in their borrowed rainbow tints of attraction. Not that she is wholly without merit. Her lively fancy, her occasional tenderness, her bursts of passion, will always have their admirers;—but, her careless versification, so careless indeed, that one often doubts whether it is prose or verse, her affectation, her continual recurrence to one subject—Love—will always prevent an extension of that circle of admirers. Even with these great defects, if she had a body of thought in her poetry, she would have done very well, but she was not a thinker. Byron and Moore were her models, not Wordsworth; and naturally, because the “public” in her day paid more homage to Byron and Moore, than to the poet-prophet, the Milton of the nineteenth century, whose laurels will grow greener and fresher with the lapse of every succeeding decade. Byron and Moore have a body of thought in their poetry. They are thinkers, shallow thinkers indeed, compared to Wordsworth, but thinkers in their way. Their imitators are different men altogether. We do not know of any thinkers amongst them, although we know several, who have partially caught the glow, the passion, the loftiness of the one, and the wit, the brilliance, and the flow of the other. Miss Lan- [p. 264→] don’s choice of models was therefore somewhat unfortunate, but it might have been a choice of necessity, a choice from an innate consciousness of inability. Who knows, but Miss Landon may have felt that the range of Wordsworth’s flight was much too high for her, and thought it more advisable to follow in the wake of Byron and Moore?

We have placed the name of Mrs. Barrett Browning between those of Baillie and Hemans. We think advisedly. There is more thought in her writings than in those of any poetess, not excepting even the first. She is a thinker, of a very high order. Her conceptions are as bold and lofty as Baillie’s, sometimes bolder and loftier still; her execution, not so elegant or delicate as Heman’s, but better far than Landon’s. We do not praise her blindly. We know that she has many faults, but if a balance were struck between her merits and defects, we conscientiously think she would be found entitled to the high position in which we have placed her.

As it is always unpleasant to have a duty which we do not like hanging unperformed over us, we shall in the first place point out Mrs. Barrett Browning’s faults. They are (as we have said) not few.

Mrs. Barrett Browning is often obscure. Her thoughts, frequently, are not fully developed. We have met with passages in her works, nay whole poems, so misty that we have wondered whether the authoress had any distinct idea in her mind at all, when she wrote them, or, whether she had not been playfully piling word upon word, to test the reader’s ingenuity or patience. Robert Browning, her husband, the author of Paracelsus and Sordello, and the Blot on the ’Scutcheon, a poet of no mean powers himself, loves to hide his thoughts similarly. There is a curious anecdote concerning him, which we have read somewhere, and which it is worth while repeating for the edification of such of the rising generation of poets as delight in enveloping their conceptions in a cloud. Douglas Jerrold had a severe attack of fever, and his doctor had interdicted him the pleasures of study for a time. The interdiction, to a man of the studious habits of the author of Cakes and Ale, and Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, was very severe, and as soon as poor Jerrold found himself a little convalescent, he retired to his own chamber, shut the door, and joyfully opened a small parcel of new books forwarded to him by his publishers. His “life guards,” wife and children, were away; the servants could not see him through the deal door that he had closed; and Jerrold chuckled over his anticipated and long denied amusement, with as [p. 265→] much zest, as ever school boy chuckled over a stolen tart or apple. The first book he opened, was one of Browning’s poems, just out. He ran over the commencing lines with breathless anxiety, then stopped, he could make nothing of them; he turned to another page, read,—and stopped again. It was as unintelligible. What could it be? He tried a third passage, it was as dark. Was it possible? Had he lost his intellect in sickness? Had he become an idiot? The perspiration stood in thick drops upon his brow, as the fearful idea crossed his mind. He flung the book aside, almost in despair. When his wife came, he hastily picked it up, and placed it in her hands, and begged her to read it. She complied with his request, while he watched her with an eager interest. When she had read about ten lines, she smiled, and offered the back to him. “What is this?” she said—“I cannot make any thing of the gibberish.” A load was off poor Jerrold’s mind. “Oh God!” he cried,—“then Thou hast not deprived me of the sovereign faculty of reason.” Now it is very possible that Mr. and Mrs. Browning understand their own and each other’s poems, without any trouble; but it would be absurd from thence to conclude that the public at large experience as little difficulty. On the contrary, if we have any right to form an opinion from our own convictions, we should say, the difficulty with the public is sometimes so great, as to be perfectly insurmountable. It would be out of our province to point out any obscure passages from Mr. Browning at present, but we shall give a few specimens of Mrs. Browning’s mysticism. Here is the commencement of a poem, of the whole of which, we cannot make anything.

a rhapsody of life’s progress.

i.

We are borne into life—it is sweet, it is strange!

We lie still on the knee of a mild Mystery,

Which smiles with a change!

But we doubt not of changes, we know not of spaces;

The Heavens seem as near as our own mother’s face is,

And we think we could touch all the stars that we see;

And the milk of our mother is white on our mouth:

And, with small childish hands, we are turning around

The apple of Life which another has found;—

It is warm with our touch, not with sun of the south,

And we count, as we turn it, the red side for four—

O Life! O Beyond,

Thou art sweet, thou art strange evermore.

ii.

Then all things look strange in the pure golden æther:

We walk through the gardens with hands linked together, [p. 266→]

And the lilies look large as the trees;

And as loud as the birds, sing the bloom-loving bees—

And the birds sing like angels, so mystical fine;

And the cedars are brushing the archangel’s feet;

And time is eternity,—love is divine,

And the world is complete.

Now, God bless the child,—father, mother, respond!

O Life! O Beyond,

Thou art strange, thou art sweet.

&c., &c., &c.,

If the reader can make out the meaning of such (the word will out) jargon, he is certainly entitled to the credit of possessing an infinitely clearer head than ourselves;—It is all “mystical fine” to us.

It is not in small occasional pieces alone, that Mrs. Browning dresses her ideas in garbs that completely shroud them. Her more ambitious and more powerful efforts are sometimes disfigured by passages that are perfect riddles. We do not comprehend the following lines in her longest poem, The Drama of Exile, though we feel they are beautiful. In truth, we

“Understand a beauty in the words,—but not the words.”

song of the morning star to lucifer.

(He fades utterly away and vanishes, as it proceeds.)

Mine orbed image sinks

Back from thee, back from thee,

As thou art fallen, methinks,

Back from me, back from me.

O my light-bearer,

Could another fairer

Lack to thee, lack to thee?

Ai, ai, Heosphoros!

I loved thee, with the fiery love of stars,

Who love by burning, and by loving move,

Too near the throned Jehovah, not to love.

Ai, ai, Heosphoros!

Their brows flash fast on me from gliding care,

Pale-passioned for my loss.

Ai, ai, Heosphoros!

Mine orbed heats drop cold,

Down from thee, down from thee,

As fell thy grace of old,

Down from me, down from me.

O my light-bearer,

Is another fairer

Won to thee, won to thee?

Ai, ai, Heosphoros,

Great love preceded loss,

Known to thee, known to thee.

Ai, ai! [p. 267→]

Thou, breathing thy communicable grace

Of life into my light,

Mine astral faces, from thine angel face,

Hast inly fed,

And flooded me with radiance overmuch

From thy pure height.

Ai, ai!

Thou, with calm, floating pinions both ways spread,

Erect, irradiated,

Didst sting my wheel of glory

On, on before thee,

Along the Godlight, by a quickening touch!

Ha, ha!

Around, around the firmamental ocean,

I swam expanding with delirious fire!

Around, around, around, in blind desire

To be drawn upward to the Infinite—

Ha, ha!

Until, the motion flinging out the motion

To a keen whirl of passion and avidity,—

To a blind whirl of rapture and delight,—

I wound in girant orbits, smooth and white

With that intense rapidity!

Around, around,

I wound and interwound,

While all the cyclic heavens about me spun!

Stars, planets, suns, and moons, dilated broad,

Then flashed together into a single sun,

And wound, and wound in one;

And as they wound I wound,—around, around,

In a great fire, I almost took for God!

Ha, ha, Heosphoros!

&c., &c., &c.,

Here are a few more specimens from the same piece. We are ready to admit that a meaning can be drawn or forced out of some of them, but we submit, whether they are not, on the whole, obscure and perplexing.

Eve.——I hear life.

Infant voices passing in the wind.

O! we live, O! we live—

And this life that we receive,

Is a warm thing and a new,

Which we softly bud into,

From the heart and from the brain,—

Something strange, that overmuch is

Of the sound and of the sight,

Flowing round in trickling touches,

In a sorrow and delight,—

Yet is it all in vain?

Rock us softly,

Lest it be all in vain. [p. 268→]

Youthful voices passing.

O! we live, O! we live—

And this life that we achieve,

Is a loud thing and a bold

Which, with pulses manifold,

Strikes the heart out full and fain—

Active doer, noble liver,

Strong to struggle, sure to conquer,—

Though the vessel’s prow will quiver

At the lifting of the anchor:

Yet do we strive in vain?

Infant voices passing.

Rock us softly,

Lest it be all in vain.

Poet voices passing.

O! we live,—O! we live—

And this life that we conceive,

Is a clear thing and a fair,

Which we set in crystal air,

That its beauty may be plain:

With a breathing and a flooding

Of the heaven life on the whole,

While we hear the forests budding

To the music of the soul—

Yet is it tuned in vain?

Infant voices passing.

Rock us softly,

Lest it be all in vain.

&c., &c., &c.

chorus of invisible angels.

First semi-Chorus:—

When your bodies, therefore,

Lie in grave or gaol,

Softly will we care for

Each enfranchised soul!

Softly and unlothly,

Through the door of opal,

We will draw you soothly

Toward the Heavenly people.

Floated on a minor fine

Into the full chant divine,

We will draw you smoothly,—

While the human in the minor

Makes the harmony diviner:

Listen to our loving!

angel chorus.

Live, work on, O Earthy!

By the Actual’s tension,

Speed the arrow worthy

Of a pure ascension.

&c., &c., &c. [p. 269→]

We could multiply our examples easily, but these are enough.

Mrs. Barrett Browning does not polish or elaborate her verses with the care of Hemans. She is sometimes even reprehensibly negligent on this head. We could point out a few instances, in which her want of attention has betrayed her into false grammar and false inflexions, and several in which it has betrayed her into false measures and egregiously ludicrous rhymes. We fear she does not hesitate to coin or misuse a word when at a very hard pinch; and we are certain she does not hesitate to put in a stiff and long “latin-dictionary word,” when a little trouble would have supplied her with a Saxon synonym, infinitely more to the point. We are by no means disposed to be harsh towards her,—no human being can be harsh to so much sensibility and genius,—but we cannot resist the temptation of pointing out a few of the instances of her recurring “sins,” in the hope, that they may, if they should happen to meet her eye, induce her to correct faults, which she may easily avoid if she have the inclination.

We do not much object to such a word as “Mandom” in the lines:—

Nay, without this rule

Of Mandom, ye would perish—beast by beast,

Devouring.

Or “ungreen” in the lines:—

I see her vales ungreen,

Where steps of man have been.

though no author, in our opinion, is entitled to coin a single word in the present state of English Literature. We do not much object to the omission of the definite article in such lines as

______some lovely lady brave,

With cheeks that blushed as red as rose, while mine were cold in grave.

though Syntax, in our opinion, should never be sacrificed at the shrine of Prosody. We do not much object to such expressions as

We, in heirdom of your soul,

Flash the river, lift the palm tree.

Not because we know that Coleridge used the word flash similarly in his Ode on Chatterton:—

Her native cot she flashed upon his view.

for we know also that Coleridge was always very lax in the use of his verbs, and could not, for the life of him, discover any error in his lines,

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,

Death came with friendly care. [p. 270→]

even after Lamb had pointed out to him, that there was a mistake in them; but because we regard all these errors or improprieties in the main, as wholly trivial and unimportant, and because the aggregate number of them, in her works, cannot be very large. But we do object to such expressions as

Then gazing, I beheld the long drawn street

Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,

With Austria’s thousand sword and bayonet,

Horse, foot, artillery—cannons rolling on

Like blind slow storm-clouds—gestant with the heat

Of undeveloped lightnings.

We do object to such false melody as

’Twas a fair sight, yet sad,

To see the tears run down the sweet blooms he had.

We do object to such false rhymes as chances—branches; done a—una; lay her—prayer; call her—taller; are—her; promise—from us; divided—did; burden—disregarding; Prophet—of it; lattice—that is; setting—written; flowings—poems; doing—showing; within—green; mission—vision; o’er me—glory; moontide—suntide; flowers—doors; islands—silence; suffice—flatteries; mission—season, &c., &c., not by any means because we consider the offences more serious, for, in truth, they are lighter still than those to which we do not much object, but because we find them habitual.

Lest our readers should suspect us of undue exaggeration, we shall take up the first poem in Mrs. Browning’s collection, The Drama of Exile, and exhibit in detail all the false rhymes, inappropriate expressions, and prosaic lines in it.

Here are the false rhymes:—angels—evangels; keeping—stepping; blé—see; raiment—lament; glories—floorwise; pardon—guerdon; norland—moorland; dessert—unmeasured; atoms—fathoms; vigil—eagle, (!) passions—exaltations; nature—creature; dazzle—Basil; glances—ignorances; gaol—soul; opal—people; accompted—trumpet; creatures—natures; vision—prison, with many others of a doubtful character.

We are not of that sect of critics who abhor false rhymes altogether in all classes of poetry. Like Leigh Hunt, we can see much beauty, grotesque beauty, in them sometimes, especially in humorous pieces. But we really cannot tolerate so many false rhymes in a single poem, and that poem not a humorous, but a serious, nay, a solemn, and, we will add, a sublime one, principally written in blank verse!

Here are some lines from the same poem which we consider [p. 271→] harsh and unmelodious. We might easily cull out more if we had a mind:—

Dost thou dream

Of guarding some monopoly in heaven

Instead of earth?—

Hark! the flow of the four rivers—

The Eden scents no longer sensible—

Soul-consummated made glorious.—

Here are some expressions, which are inappropriate and inelegant:—

While our wings, outspreading,

Double calms of whiteness

Dropped superfluous brightness

Down from star to star.

And grand half vanishings

Of the foregone things

Within our eyes belated.

I drave on with the world exultingly,

Obliquely down the Godlight’s gradual fall—

Individual aspect and complexity.

Of giratory orb and interval,

Lost in the fluent motion of delight,

Toward the high ends of Being beyond sight—

How all the grand words were full laden ships;

Each sailing onward, from enunciation,

To separate existence.

Lucifer. To stand on, beckoning pity from without,

And deal in pathos of antithesis

Of what ye were forsooth, and what ye are.

Till the heavens’ smooth grooved thunder

Spanning back, shall leave them clear,

And the angels, smiling wonder.

On either side and overhead the gate,—

Show like a glittering and sustained smoke

Drawn to an apex.

This way a goat leaps, with wild blank of beard.

Here are some whole passages which we do not like:—

Then in odes of burning,

Brake we suddenly,

And sang out the morning

Broadly up the sky,—

Or we drew

Our music through [p. 272→]

The noontide’s hush and heat and shine,

And taught them our intense Divine—

With our vital fiery notes

All disparted hither, thither,

Trembling out into the æther,—

Sensible like beamy motes! &c., &c.

I bounded with my panthers! I rejoiced

In my young tumbling lions, rolled together!

My stag—the river at his fetlocks—poised,

Then dipped his antlers, through the golden weather,

In the same ripple which the alligator,

Left in his joyous troubling of the water.—

So, in the universe’s

Consummated undoing,

Our angels of white mercies

Shall hover round the ruin!

Their wings shall stream upon the flame,

As if incorporate of the same,

In elemental fusion;

And calm their faces shall burn out,

With a pale and mastering thought,

And a steadfast looking of desire,

From out between the clefts of fire—

While they cry, in the Holy’s name

To the final Restitution!

Listen to our loving!

So, when the day of God is

To the thick graves accompted;

Awaking the dead bodies,

The angel of the trumpet

Shall split the charnel earth

To the roots of the grave,

Which never before were slackened, &c., &c.

We trust our readers will not suspect us of any ill feeling towards Mrs. Barrett Browning, for dwelling so long on her imperfections; the fact is, we reverence and admire her too much to be able to put up with any defects in her. If we were at all disposed to treat her harshly, we might make endless game of the inappropriate expressions and false rhymes, and say many, many very rude things. We might, for instance, say, that Mrs. Browning must be either of Irish extraction, because she rhymes creature (cratur) with nature; or of Cockney, because she rhymes call her with taller; or of French, because she cannot find a synonym for blé in the English language, &c., &c., but we are not at all disposed, we repeat, to treat her harshly; and we allude to the spots in the sun, more in sorrow than in anger, more in the hope of seeing them removed, than of calling down public attention upon them. [p. 273→]

Poets with a delicate ear for music, like Tennyson, often terminate every stanza of a poem with the same words, and such terminations, when skillfully managed, have a most delicious effect. Mrs. Browning is a great adept in this art, but she occasionally carries it a little too far, and makes her endeavour to be melodious too apparent. The highest art, it must be remembered, hides the appearance of art. We do not like, for instance, the “Toll slowly” in the middle of every couplet in the Rhyme of the Duchess May:—

i.

In the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,—

Toll slowly.

And the oldest ringer said:—“Ours is music for the Dead”

When the rebecks are all done.

ii.

Six abeles i’the kirkyard grow, on the northside in a row,—

Toll slowly.

And the shadows of their tops, rock across the little slopes

Of the grassy graves below.

iii.

On the south side and the west, a small river runs in haste,—

Toll slowly.

And between the river flowing,—and the fair green trees a-growing,

Do the dead lie at their rest.

We do not also like the “she said” in the opening and concluding lines of every stanza in the verses entitled The Mask:—

i.

I have a smiling, face, she said,

I have a jest for all I meet;

I have a garland for my head,

And all its flowers are sweet,—

And so you call me gay, she said.

ii.

Grief taught to me this smile, she said,

And Wrong did teach this jesting bold;

These flowers were plucked from garden bed

While a death-chime was tolled—

And what now will you say?—She said.

“The river floweth on”—at the end of every eighth line, in A Romance of the Ganges, has a quaint but a pleasing musical effect. We do not dislike it.

Mrs. Browning’s works are not free from those occasional errors into which the generality of authors fall, when they are obliged to treat of things of which they cannot have personal knowledge. We may instance one or two of these in this [p. 274→] very poem, A Romance of the Ganges. Mrs. Browning was never in India, and all her knowledge of India is derived from books. In the first place, she makes the heroine Luti, a Hindu maiden, send a boat,

A shell of cocoa carven.

with a lamp and flower inside, on the Ganges, and makes her watch it with some other maidens.

For when the boat hath carried the lamp

Unquenched till out of sight,

The maidens are sure that love will endure,

But love will fail with light.

Now if she had ever been in this country, she would have known that Hindu maidens never launch these lamps of love, and that the custom is only prevalent among the Mohamedans of India. In the next place, she says, in a foot note to the lines:—

“The rice is gathered from the plains

To cast upon thine hair.”

That “the casting of rice upon the head, and the fixing of the band or tali about the neck, are parts of the Hindu marriage ceremonial.” If she had travelled in our sultry climate, she would assuredly have known that “the casting of rice on the head” is not a part of the marriage ceremonial, but a part of (we believe) every Hindu ceremonial. It is simply an invocation of blessings on the person on whose head the rice is cast. When a child is born, is betrothed, is married, is invested with the sacred thread, &c., all his relations, who are older than he, cast handfuls of rice on him. We do not understand what Mrs. Browning means by fixing the tali or band on the neck. The custom, we are sure, is not prevalent in Bengal. Then again, Mrs. Browning calls the Hindu god of love, Hama Deva, instead of Cama Deva—a most ludicrous blunder!—and adds, that he is accompanied by the humming bird, instead of by bees. A little further on, she informs us that the Ganges is represented as a white woman with a water lily in her right hand, and in her left a lute, while the fact is that “Gunga Maee” has four hands, and holds a lotus in one, a vessel of water in another, and lifts up the two others to bless her adorers. But we are not disposed to point out more of these little errors, though there are more, because, we really think, that Mrs. Browning trips into them much more rarely than most authors. When we recollect that Barry Cornwall once wrote a Hindu Drama, in which the Dramatis Personæ were Muttra, [p. 275→] Rajah, Dacoit, and Zemindar, in a most happy state of unconsciousness, that the first word is the name of a place, that the second means king, that the third means robber, and that the last means landholder (the Dacoit, if we remember rightly, was the virtuous hero!) we can well be disposed to pardon such venial offences as Mrs. Browning’s, and regard them as no offences at all.

We have now, we think, got over the unpleasant portion of our task. It only remains to show in what Mrs. Browning excels, and this duty is, to us, a source of sincere delight.

We think Mrs. Browning bears a resemblance to Coleridge, rather than any other of our modern poets, both in thought and expression. She has his loftiness and sublimity, though not his wildness. And she has also his mysticism and obscurity. They are both eminently religious. They are both great metaphysicians. They both mingle metaphysics with poetry, and poetry with metaphysics, and though the fusion of such dissimilar agents cannot, of course, be very valuable, it cannot be denied, that in their hands, the compound takes a most remarkable appearance. Above all, they both delight to quit the earth, and sail in the regions of imagination, amidst clouds of every shape and colour, and occasional floods of overpowering sunlight. There cannot be much question, that Coleridge is the greater genius; more wild, more original, more profound; but he cultivated his talents less assiduously than Mrs. Browning has done. He permitted his mind to be overcome by his bodily infirmities. He, to use his own emphatic language—“worked without hope.” The consequence is, that he is less vigorous, less coherent, less systematic, we dare not say, he is less delicate or less tender, (though Mrs. Barrett Browning, as a woman, might be expected to excel in these respects,) so long as Genevieve and Christabel ring in our ears; and we shall not say he is less polished or less musical, for, with all his negligence, we consider him one of the most elegant, and certainly the most melodious, of the modern poets. How his verses run into each other, and how aerial seems their combined effect! With all her assiduity and diligence, Mrs. Browning must be regarded as a less skilful versifier than Coleridge, and greater ones than she—far greater ones indeed, must bow to him, yea even Keats, and Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth, must yield him precedence in this respect. It was a natural more than an acquired gift. Coleridge was born with “lutes in his rhyme.” Not one of his contemporaries has been able to equal the “linked” and mellifluous sweetness of his verse. [p. 276→]

The Drama of Exile is the longest poem of Mrs. Browning, but we do not consider it her best. Although it displays powers of no ordinary order, it must yield to Casa Guidi Windows, and of course to The Seraphim. We think The Drama of Exile is more disfigured with Mrs. Browning’s besetting faults than either of these poems. We could cull instances of false inflexion, and false grammar, and false rhymes, and obscurity, more abundantly from it, much more abundantly indeed, than from Casa Guidi Windows, or The Seraphim. With all its sins, however, it is a poem of which no one need be ashamed. There are passages in it of Miltonic grandeur and sublimity. No poet, since the days of the blind school-master of the Revolution, has been able to show us the Prince of Darkness in such vivid and soul-harrowing colours, or the first of men and women, in such a pathetic and tender light. We had marked several passages for extract, but our limits will not permit us to indulge in the pleasure to the extent desirable. We must rather content ourselves with referring the reader to the book itself. There he will see Lucifer after his fall, unterrified, and hear him describe his defeat:—

The lightnings holding open my scathed lids,

And that thought of the Infinite of God,

Drawn from the finite, speeding my descent;

When countless angel faces,—still and stern,

Pressed out upon me from the level heavens,

Adown the abysmal spaces;—

There he will see Adam and Eve flying on from the sword glare, and never looking back, yet comforting each other in their desolation.

Adam,——Hast thou strength,

Beloved, to look behind us to the gate?

Eve. Have I not strength to look up to thy face?

Adam. We need be strong: yon spectacle of cloud,

Which seals the gate up to the final doom,

Is God’s seal manifest. There seem to lie

A hundred thunders in it, dark and dead;

The unmolten lightnings vein it motionless;

And, outward from its depth, the self-moved sword

Swings slow its awful gnomon of red fire

From side to side,—in pendulous horror slow—

There he will see Gabriel in his glory, and his seraphic band dazzling the moon, and hear him speak unto the fallen one:—

I charge thee by the choral song we sang,

When up against the white shore of our feet,

The depths of the creation swelled and brake,—

And the new worlds, the beaded foam and flower [p. 277→]

Of all that coil,—roared outward into space

On thunder-edges,—leave the earth to God!

Or, yet, thou discrowned one, by the truth in me,

Which God keeps in me, I would give away

All,—save that truth, and His love over it,—

To lead thee home again into the light,

And hear thy voice chant with the morning stars;

When their rays tremble round them with much song,

Sung in more gladness!

And, lastly, there will he see, the words of the Promise,—streaking as it were the eastern horizon, and breaking upon the banished family, with a brightness infinitely more glorious than the brightness of the morn.

“exiled but not lost.”

The character of Eve is conceived with great delicacy, and is wonderfully well sustained. We cannot help transcribing a few lines from various parts of the play, in order to give the reader some idea of it. When Adam draws her attention to the angelic faces that throng the gate of Paradise, she pathetically replies:—

Though we were near enough to see them shine,

The shadow on thy face were awfuller,

To me, at least,—than could appear their light.

When Adam whispers—“Night is near”—Eve says:—

And God’s curse nearest. Let us travel back

And stand within the sword glare till we die;

Believing it is better to meet death

Than suffer desolation.

When Adams answers in anger to the upbraiding spirits of trees, and rivers, and hills, Eve expostulates with him, and entreats his permission to reply to them less harshly:—

—Adam! shall I speak—

I who spake once, to such a bitter end—

Shall I speak humbly now, who once was proud?

I, schooled by sin to more humility

Than thou hast, O mine Adam, O my king—

My king, if not the world’s?

Here is a part of her reply to the spirits. It seems to us very tender:—

——For was I not

At that last sunset seen in Paradise,

When all the westering clouds flashed out in throngs

Of sudden angel-faces, face by face,

All hushed and solemn, as a thought of God

Held them suspended,—was I not, that hour,

The lady of the world, princess of life,

Mistress of feast and favour? Could I touch [p. 278→]

A rose with my white hand, but it became

Redder at once? Could I walk leisurely

Along our swarded garden, but the grass

Tracked me with greenness? Could I stand aside

A moment underneath a cornel tree,

But all the leaves did tremble as alive,

With songs of fifty birds, who were made glad,

Because I stood there? Could I turn to look

With these twain eyes of mine, now weeping fast,

Now good for only weeping,—upon man,

Angel, or beast, or bird, but each rejoiced

Because I looked on him? Alas! alas!

And is not this much woe, to cry ‘alas!’

Speaking of joy? And is not this more shame,

To have made the woe myself, from all that joy?

To have stretched mine hand, and plucked it from the trees,

And chosen it for fruit? Nay, is not this

Still most despair, to have halved that bitter fruit,

And ruined, so, the sweetest friend I have,

Turning the Greatest to mine enemy?

Adam. I will not hear thee speak so.

There is a deeper tenderness still, in the following lines, in another part of the book:—

Eve. * * * Love said to me,—‘do not die,’

And I replied,—‘oh! Love, I will not die.

I exiled, and I will not orphan Love.’

But now it is no choice of mine to die—

My heart throbs from me.

If we were disposed to point out stray lines of beauty from the poem, we could quote myriads of such as these:—

beauty.

As form, when colourless,

Is nothing to the eye; that pine-tree there,

Without its black and green, being all a blank;

So, without love, is beauty undiscerned

In man or angel.—

eve on satan’s overthrow.

The starry harmony remote,

Seems measuring the heights from whence he fell.

But as we are of opinion, that such stray lines cannot convey any adequate or just idea of the poem, we shall (against our expressed intention) make room for one long extract, to justify our praise. It is taken indiscriminately from about ten passages which we had selected for insertion.

Eve. O Adam, Adam! by that name of Eve—

Thine Eve, thy life—which suits me little now,

Seeing that I confess myself thy death

And thine undoer, as the snake was mine,—

I do adjure thee, put me straight away, [p. 279→]

Together with my name. Sweet, punish me!

O Love, be just! and, ere we pass beyond

The light cast outward by the fiery sword,

Into the dark which earth must be to us,

Bruise my head with thy foot,—as the curse said

My seed shall the first tempter’s: strike with curse,

As God struck in the garden! and as He,

Being satisfied with justice and with wrath,

Did roll His thunder gentler at the close,—

Thou, peradventure, mayst at last recoil

To some soft meed of mercy. Strike, my lord!

I, also, after tempting, writhe on ground;

And I would feed on ashes from thine hand,

As suits me, O my tempted!

Adam. My beloved,

Mine Eve and life—I have no other name

For thee or for the sun than what ye are,

My blessed life and light! If we have fallen,

It is that we have sinned,—we: God is just;

And, since His curse doth comprehend us both,

It must be that His balance holds the weights

Of first and last sin on a level. What!

Shall I, who had not virtue to stand straight

Among the hills of Eden, here assume

To mend the justice of the perfect God,

By piling up a curse upon His curse,

Against thee—thee—

Eve. For so, perchance, my God

Might take thee into grace for scorning me;

Thy wrath against the sinner giving proof

Of inward abrogation of the sin!

And so, the blessed angels might come down

And walk with thee as erst,—I think they would,—

Because I was not near to make them sad,

Or soil the rustling of their innocence.

Adam. They know me. I am deepest in the guilt,

If last in the transgression.

Eve. Thou!

Adam. If God,

Who gave the right and joyance of the world

Both unto thee and me,—gave thee to me,

The best gift last; the last sin was the worst,

Which sinned against more complement of gifts

And grace of giving. God! I render back

Strong benediction and perpetual praise

From mortal feeble lips (as incense smoke,

Out of a little censer, may fill heaven,)

That thou, in striking my benumbed hands,

And forcing them to drop all other boons

Of beauty, and dominion, and delight,—

Hast left this well-beloved Eve—this life

Within life—this best gift between their palms,

In gracious compensation.—

We turn the page over reluctantly. There is much more [p. 280→] as good in it, or better, especially where Adam speaks of the consolation which he derives from his partner, in his affliction.

Adam. Because with her, I stand

Upright, as far as can be in this fall,

And look away from heaven, which doth accuse me,

And look away from earth, which doth convict me,

Into her face; and crown my discrown’d brow

Out of her love; and put the thought of her

Around me, for an Eden full of birds.—

If the reader wish for more extracts, we must refer him to the book itself. Turn to the speech, “Ah, ye talk the same,” in page 31, or to the Lament of the Spirits at page 45, commencing from “I wail,—I wail, now bear my charge today,” down to

We were obedient—what is this convulses

Our blameless life with pangs and fever pulses?

Or to the grand, the glorious, the sublime speech of Adam, commencing with the words, “And also the sole bearer of the seed,” at page 73, and concluding with the words “And to this End of Death and the hereafter!” at page 75. Some of the lines in the Lament of the Spirits, to which we have referred,—for instance, such as

Lo! my lions scenting

The blood of wars roar hoarse and unrelenting,

strike us as very much in the manner of Coleridge, and some of the turns of expression in Adam’s speech, the last passage to which we have referred, seems to us perfectly Shaksperian.

If Mrs. Browning’s long poems were to be arranged in the order of merit—they would stand thus: The Seraphim—Casa Guidi Windows—The Drama of Exile—Prometheus Bound. Now it will be evident to the reader, that our space will not permit us to criticise each of these poems at length, or to give as copious extracts from them all, as we have done from The Drama of Exile. We must content ourselves with one isolated passage from Casa Guidi Windows, and one or two of moderate length from The Seraphim.

Casa Guidi Windows is the latest production of Mrs. Browning’s pen, written shortly after the birth of her eldest child, to whom a tender allusion is made at the conclusion. The passage which we have marked for quotation, has been praised highly, but justly, in a recent number of Fraser’s Magazine.

I love no peace, which is not fellowship

And which includes not mercy. I would have

Rather, the raking of the guns across

The world, and shrieks against Heaven’s architrave— [p. 281→]

Rather, the struggle in the slippery fosse

Of dying men and horses, and the wave

Blood-bubbling——Enough said! By Christ’s own cross,

And by the faint heart of my womanhood,

Such things are better than a peace which sits

Beside the hearth in self commended mood,

And takes no thought how wind and rain by fits

Are howling out of doors against the good

Of the poor wanderer. What! Your peace admits

Of outside anguish while it sits at home?

I loathe to take its name upon my tongue—

It is no peace. ’Tis treason, stiff with doom—

’Tis gagged despair, and inarticulate wrong,—

Annihilated Poland, stifled Rome,

Dazed Naples, Hungary fainting ’neath the thong,

And Austria wearing a smooth olive leaf

On her brute forehead, while her hoofs outpress

The life from these Italian souls, in brief.

O Lord of Peace, who art Lord of Righteousness,

Constrain the anguished world from sin and grief,

Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress,

And give us peace which is no counterfeit—

There is much vigor in the lines—few women can write with such masculine energy.

The Seraphim, which seems to us the best of Mrs. Browning’s efforts, is well sustained throughout, and is, in many places, perfectly sublime. We have met with no obscure passages in it—not one, and the rhymes and melody are seldom “out of tune, and harsh.” Two Seraphs, Ador the Strong, and Zerah the Bright One, are supposed to linger outside the Gate of Heaven, which is shut, while all the other Angels have directed themselves toward the earth, at the command of the Most High, to witness the crucifixion. While the ‘pomp angelical’ sinks beneath them, and the roar of its descent dies

‘To a still sound, as thunder into rain’,

and the lingerers can behold no more than

A fall

And eddy of wings innumerous, crossed

By trailing curls that have not lost

The glitter of the God-smile shed

On each bowëd angel’s head!

And gleamed between by hands that fling

Up homage, like retorted rays,

From high instinct of worshipping,

And habitude of praise,—

they turn their discourse on the great events about to transpire. Hear them speak:—

Ador. Zerah, do not wait to see.

His voice—the voice that thrills us so

As we our harp-strings—uttered Go,

Behold the Holy in his woe— [p. 282→]

And all are gone, save thee and—

Zerah. Thee!

Ador. I stood the nearest to the throne,

What time the voice said go.

And whether I was moved alone

By the storm-pathos of the tone,

Which swept through Heaven the alien name of woe!

Or that the subtle glory broke

Through my strong and shielding wings,

Bearing to my finite essence,

Incapacious of the presence,

Infinite imaginings—

None knoweth, save the Throned who spoke.

But I, who, at Creation, stood upright,

And heard the God-breath move,

Shaping the words that lightened—“Be there light,”—

Nor trembled but with love;

Now fell down tremblingly,

My face upon the pavement where I towered;

As if that mine immortal were o’erpowered

Bu God’s eternity!

Zerah. Let me wait!—let me wait!—

Ador. Oh, gaze not backward through the gate!

God fills our heaven with God’s own solitude

Till all its pavements glow:

His God-head being no more subdued

By itself, to glories low

Which seraphs can sustain,

What if thou, in gazing so,

Should behold but only one

Attribute, the veil undone—

And that the one to which we press

Nearest, for its gentleness—

Ay, His love!

How the deep ecstatic pain

Thy being’s strength would capture!

Without a language for the rapture,

Without a music strong to come

And set the adoration free,

For ever, ever, wouldst thou be

Amid the general chorus dumb,

God-stricken to Seraphic agony!—

Or, brother, what if on thine eyes

In vision bare should rise

The life-fount, whence his hand did gather

With solitary force

Our immortalities!—

Straightway how thine own would wither,

Falter like a human breath,—

And shrink into a point like death,

By gazing on its source!

My words have imaged dread.

Meekly hast thou bent thine head,

And dropt thy wings in languishment,

Overclouding foot and face;

As if God’s throne were eminent [p. 283→]

Before thee, in the place.

Yet not—not so,

O loving spirit and meek, dost thou fulfil

All motions of the One pre-eminent Will,

Which stirreth unto will and act our natures

As human souls do stir the fleshly creatures.

Not for obeisance, but obedience,

Give motion to thy wings! Depart from hence—

The voice said ‘Go.’

Zerah. Beloved, I depart.

His will is as a spirit within my spirit;

A portion of the being I inherit—

His will is mine obedience. I resemble

A flame all undefiled, though it tremble—

I go and tremble. Love me, O beloved!

O thou, who stronger art,

And standest ever near the Infinite,

Pale with excelling light!

Love me, beloved! me, more newly made,

More feeble, more afraid—

And let me hear with mine thy pinions moved,

As close and gentle as the loving are;

That love being near, heaven may not seem so far.

Ador. I am near thee, and I love thee;

Were I loveless, from thee gone,

Love is round, beneath, above thee—

God, the Omnipresent One.

Spread the wing, and lift the brow—

Well-beloved, what fearest thou?

Zerah. I fear,—I fear—

Ador. What fear?

Zerah. The fear of earth—

Ador. Of earth, the God-create and beautiful?

From whence the sweet sea-music hath its birth,

And vernal forests lift their leaves in tune

Beneath the gracious, water-leading moon?

Where every night, the stars do put away

Meekly its darkness dull,

And look their spirit-light into the clay?

Where every day, the kingly sun doth bless

More lovingly than kings,

And stir to such harmonious happiness

All leafed and reeded things,

It seems as if the joyous shout which burst

From angel lips to see him first,

Had left a silent echo in his ray?

Zerah. Of earth—the God-create and God-accurst:

Where man is, and the thorn:

Where winds and waves have borne,

Where sun and star can roll,

No tune, no shining to the human soul:

Where Eden’s lapsing rivers all are dry,

And in their stead, do flow perpetually,

Do flow and flow hot streams of human tears—

Where Eden’s tree of life no more uprears [p. 284→]

Its spiral leaves and fruitage, but instead

The yew-tree bows its melancholy head,

And all the under-grasses kills and seres.

Ador. A fear of earth, the weak?

Where men that faint, do strive for crowns that fade;

And stoop to clasp metallic heaps conveyed

From the green sward their delving labour scars—

When upright they might stand, and view the stars.

Where, having won the winning which they seek,

They lie beside the sceptre and the gold,

With fleshless hands that cannot wield or hold;

And the stars shine in their unwinking eyes?

Zerah. Of earth the terrible:

Where the blind matter brings

An awful potence out of impotence,

And all the spiritual prostrated lies,

Before the things of sense:

Where the strong human will saith “ay” or “no,”

Because the human pulse is quick or slow—

Where stronger Love succumbeth unto Change,

With only his own memories, for revenge;

And where the fearful mystery—

Ador. Called Death?

Zerah. Nay! Death is fearful; but who saith

‘To die,’ is comprehensible.

What’s fearfuller, thou knowest well,

Though its utterance be not for thee,

Lest it blanch thy lips from glory—

Ay! the cursed thing that moved

Its shadow of ill, long times ago,

Across our heaven’s own shining floor!

And when it vanished, some who were

On thrones of holy empire there,

Did reign—were seen—were—never more—

Come nearer, O beloved!

Ador. I am near thee. Didst thou bear thee

Ever to this earth?

Zerah. Before!—

When thrilling from his hand along

Its lustrous path with spheric song,

The earth was deathless, sorrowless.

Then, fearless, angel feet might press

The grasses brightening with their feet—

For God’s own voice did mix its sound

In a solemn confluence oft

With the rivers’ flowing round,

And the life tree’s waving soft.

Beautiful new earth, and strange!

Ador. Hast thou seen it since—the change?

Zerah. Nay! or wherefore should I fear

To look upon it now?

I have beheld the ruined things

Only in depicturings

Of angels sent on earth-ward mission;

Strong one, e’en upon thy brow [p. 285→]

When, with task completed, given

Back to us, in that transition

I have beheld thee silent stand,

Abstracted in the seraph band—

Without a smile in heaven.

Ador. Then thou wert not one of those

Whom the loving Father chose,

In visionary pomp to sweep

O’er Judea’s grassy places,

O’er the shepherds and the sheep,—

Though thou are so tender?—dimming,

All the stars except one star,

With their brighter, kinder faces;

And using heaven’s own tune in hymning,—

While deep response from earth’s own mountains ran,—

“Peace upon earth—good will to man.”

Zerah. “Glory to God!”—I said Amen afar.

And they who from that earth-ward mission are,

Within mine ears have told,

That the seven everlasting Spirits did hold

With such a sweet and prodigal constraint,

The meaning yet the mystery of the song,

The while they sang it, on their natures strong;

That, gazing down on earth’s dark stedfastness,

And speaking the new peace in promises,

The love and pity made their voices faint

Into that low and tender music, keeping

The place in heaven, of what on earth, is weeping.

Ador. Peace upon earth! Come down to it.

Zerah. Ah me

I hear thereof uncomprehendingly.

Peace where the tempest—where the sighing is—

And worship of the idol, ‘stead of His?’

Ador. Yea, Peace, where He is.

Zerah. He!

Say it again.

Ador. Where He is.

Zerah. Can it be

That earth retains a tree

Whose leaves, like Eden foliage, can be swayed

By breathing of His voice, nor shrink and fade?

Ador. There is a tree!—it hath no leaf nor root;

Upon it hangs a curse for all its fruit:

Its shadow on His head is laid.

For He, the crowned Son,

Hath left His crown and throne,—

Walks earth in Adam’s clay,

Eve’s snake to bruise and slay—

Zerah. Walks earth in clay?

Ador. And walking in the clay which He created,

He through it shall touch death.

Our extract is a very long one, but what reader would wish [p. 286→] it shorter? Is it not beautiful? We hardly know what to admire most,—the dramatic power displayed in the lines,

Did reign—were seen—were never more—

Come nearer, O beloved!

in which the young and timid angel is represented as shuddering at evil, and unable to name the Prince of Darkness without an unconscious tremor,—or the sublimity of the distant response,

‘Glory to God’—I said Amen afar!

or the luxuriant imagery in the description of the beauty of the earth,

Of earth the God-create and beautiful,

From whence the sweet sea-music hath its birth;

or the deep human interest which breaks out at the conclusion,

There is a tree!—it hath no leaf or root,

Upon it hangs a curse for all its fruit.

Mrs. Browning is peculiarly conscientious in acknowledging her obligations to others; she borrows rarely,—but when she borrows, however distantly or little, she gives us the source from whence the light is drawn. In a poem on Sounds she has the following lines:—

“Half mystical and half pathetic,

Like a sighing in a dream.”

And although the idea is perfectly original,—she has put a foot note to the passage, in which she informs us that she owes the music of it to the following beautiful lines by her valued friend John Kenyon:—

While floating up—bright forms ideal,

Mistress or friend around me stream;

Half sense supplied, and half ideal,

Like music mingling in a dream.

We may therefore inform her that she has unconsciously put Shakspear’s well known simile in Troilus and Cressida,

And like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane

Be shook to air.

into the mouth of Ador,

Like a desert lion shaking

Dews of silence from its mane.

We were very anxious to make some extracts from the second part of the Seraphim, in which the two Angels are represented as hanging in mid-air above Judea,—a little apart from the visible Angelic hosts, but the length of our first extract does not [p. 287→] leave us at liberty to do so. We must however make room for the opening lines:—

Ador. Beloved! dost thou see?—

Zerah. Thee,—thee.

Thy burning eyes already are

Grown wild and mournful as a star,

Whose occupation is for aye

To look upon the place of clay,

Whereon thou lookest now!

The crown is fainting on thy brow

To the likeness of a cloud—

Thy forehead’s self, a little bowed.

From its aspect high and holy,—

As it would in meekness meet

Some Seraphic melancholy.

The very wings that lately flung

An outline clear, do flicker here,

And wear to each a shadow hung,

Dropped across thy feet.

In these strange contrasting glooms,

Stagnant with the scent of tombs,

Seraph faces, O my brother,

Show awfully to one another.

Ador. Dost thou see?

Zerah. Even so—I see

Our empyreal company;

Alone the memory of their brightness

Left in them, as in thee;

The circle upon circle,—tier on tier,

Piling earth’s hemisphere

With heavenly infiniteness;

Above us and around,—

Straining the blue horizon like a bow;

Their songful lips divorced from all sound;

A darkness gliding down their silvery glances,—

Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances,

As if they heard God speak, and could not glow.

Ador. Look downward! dost thou see?

Zerah. And wouldst thou press that vision on my words?

Doth not the changed earth

Speak loud enough of change and jeopardy

Without my witness?

We should not do justice to Mrs. Browning’s powers, if we were to omit the Epilogue of the poem:—

the epilogue.

i.

My song is done!

My voice that long hath faltered shall be still.

The mystic darkness drops from Calvary’s hill,

Into the common light of this day’s sun. [p. 288→]

ii.

I see no more Thy cross, O holy Slain!

I hear no more the horror and the coil

Of the great world’s turmoil,

Feeling Thy countenance too still,—nor yell

Of demons sweeping past it to their prison.

The skies, that turned to darkness with Thy pain,

Make now a summer’s day,—

And on my changed ear, that Sabbath bell

Records how christ is risen.

iii.

And I—ah! what am I

To counterfeit with faculty earth-darkened

Seraphic brows of light,

And Seraph language never used nor hearkened?

Ah me! what word that Seraphs say, could come

From mouth so used to sighs—so soon to lie

Sighless, because then breathless, in the tomb?

iv.

Bright ministers of God and grace!—of grace

Because of God!—whether ye bow adown,

In your own heaven, before the living face

Of Him who died, and deathless wears the crown—

Or whether at this hour, ye haply are

Anear, around me, hiding in the night

Of this permitted ignorance, your light,

This feebleness to spare,—

Forgive me, that mine earthly heart should dare

Shape images of unincarnate spirits,

And lay upon their burning lips a thought

Damp with the weeping which mine earth inherits;

And while ye find in such hoarse music, wrought

To copy yours, a cadence all the while

Of sin and sorrow—only pitying smile!—

Ye know to pity, well.

v.

I too may haply smile another day,

At the far recollection of this lay,

When God may call me in your midst to dwell,

To hear your most sweet music’s miracle,

And see your wondrous faces. May it be,

For His remembered sake, the Slain on rood,

Who rolled His earthly garment red in blood,

(Treading the wine press) that the weak, like me,

Before His heavenly throne should walk in white.

It would be an insult to the reader’s judgment to point out the grace,—the beauty,—the solemnity,—the pathos of such a conclusion. Worthy of the subject is the strain!

Several of the minor poems in Mrs. Browning’s works, promise to last for ages—beloved by all thoughtful men, if not popular with the multitude. The Romaunt of the Page is ex- [p. 289→] cellent and in parts very tender. The conclusion reminds us of Coleridge in his happiest vein:

Ingemisco,—ingemisco!

From the convent on the sea,

Now it sweepeth solemnly!

The Lay of the Brown Rosary, is very wild and dreamlike:

While—oh—soft! Her speaking is so interwound

Of the dim and the sweet, ’tis a twilight of sound,

And floats through the chamber,

are verses which may be applied to the fair authoress of the poem herself. The conclusion of the second part, in which the lady starts from slumber, and finds

There is nought. The great willow, her lattice before

Large drawn in the moon lieth calm on the floor,

recalls Tennyson’s Marianna to our mind,—and her dreary apartment:

But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,

The shadow of the poplar fell

Upon her bed, across her brow.

A Romance of the Ganges, with all its faults, is very good. We like the lines,

The maiden Luti watcheth

Where onwardly they float,

That look in her dilating eyes

Might seem to drive her boat.

And also

The little maiden cometh,

She cometh shy and slow,

I ween, she seeth through her lids,

They drop adown so low.

But our chief favorites are, The Romance of the Swan’s Nest,—A Child Asleep—My Doves—The Sea-mew—The House of Clouds—Wisdom unapplied—A Song against Singing—Cowper’s Grave—Catarina to Camoëns,—and some others which we have not now upon the muster roll of our memory.

We do not think Mrs. Browning succeeds in the sonnet as well as in the average of her small pieces in other measures. We fear she finds it a Procrustes’ bed, and though not a few of the nearly fifty sonnets she includes in her first volume, are nobly conceived, there are not more than a dozen, if so many, that are as nobly executed. The thought in several of them is not fully or properly developed; and the versification in even more, is rough and harsh. Two or three are so obscure, that we confess, we cannot understand them. The sonnet on a Portrait of [p. 290→] Wordsworth, by the unfortunate Haydon,—may be regarded as an ordinary specimen, neither better nor worse than the ordinary run.

on a portrait of wordsworth.

Wordsworth upon Helvellyn! Let the cloud

Ebb audibly along the mountain wind,

Then break against the rock, and show behind

The lowland valleys floating up to crowd

The sense with beauty. He, with forehead bowed

And humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined

Before the sovran thought of his own mind,

And very meek with inspirations proud,—

Takes here his rightful place as poet-priest

By the high altar, singing praise and prayer

To the higher Heavens. A noble vision free,

Our Haydon’s hand hath flung out from the mist!

No portrait this, with Academic air—

This is the poet and his poetry.

We shall conclude our extracts with the verses on Cowper’s Grave, but we entreat the reader to peruse the others we have named, from the book itself:—

cowper’s grave.

i.

It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying,—

It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying:

Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish!

Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

ii.

O poets! from a maniac’s tongue, was poured the deathless singing!

O Christians! at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!

O men! this man, in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling,

Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

iii.

And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,

How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,

And how, when one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,

He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted;

iv.

He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,

And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration:

Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken;

Named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken.

v.

With quiet sadness and no gloom, I learn to think upon him,

With meekness, that is gratefulness to God, whose heaven hath won him—

Who suffered once the madness-cloud, to His own love to blind him—

But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him; [p. 291→]

vi.

And wrought within his shattered brain, such quick poetic senses,

As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences!

The pulse of dew upon the grass, kept his within its number;

And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.

vii.

Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home caresses,

Up-looking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses:

The very world, by God’s constraint, from falsehood’s ways removing,

Its women and its men became beside him, true and loving.

viii.

But while, in blindness he remained unconscious of the guiding,

And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,

He testified this solemn truth, through phrenzy desolated—

Nor man, nor nature satisfy, whom only God created!

ix.

Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses

And drops upon his burning brow, the coolness of her kisses;

That turns his fevered eyes around—“My mother! where’s my mother?”

As if such tender words and looks could come from any other!—

x.

The fever gone, with leaps of heart, he sees her bending o’er him;

Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him!—

Thus, woke the poet from the dream, his life’s long fever gave him,

Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes, which closed in death, to save him!

xi.

Thus? Oh, not thus! no type of earth could image that awaking,

Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking,

Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted;

But felt those eyes alone, and knew “My Saviour! not deserted!”

xii.

Deserted! who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested,

Upon the Victim’s hidden face, no love was manifested?

What frantic hands outstretched have e’er the atoning drops averted,

What tears have washed them from the soul, that one should be deserted?

xiii.

Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather:

And Adam’s sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father;

Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphan’d cry, His universe hath shaken—

It went up single, echoless, “My God, I am forsaken!”

xiv.

It went up from the Holy lips amid his lost creation,

That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation:

That earth’s worst phrenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope’s fruition,

And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see his rapture, in a vision!

This is poetry,—true poetry,—poetry worthy of Wordsworth’s own pen. We dare not offer a word of comment on it. [p. 292→]

Mrs. Browning is still a very young woman, and great things may therefore be expected of her. We have never had the pleasure of seeing her personally, but we have been assured that her countenance is most prepossessing, and her demeanour most unassuming and gentle. “In person she is slender and petite, her voice very soft and low; her complexion pale; her eyes and hair dark,—the latter being very long and hanging down her neck.” Many persons who know her and the family well, and have known them for years, are totally unconscious of her immense and extraordinary attainments, which she knows how to veil with feminine modesty. She read Greek when very young, spontaneously,—indeed, against her father’s command—with the family tutor Hugh Boyd, to whose memory she has devoted two exquisite sonnets; and she made such rapid progress in that language, that at the age of twelve years she finished either a translation or an imitation of the earlier books of Homer, and a few years after published her fine translation of Æschylus. At the age of fifteen she gave to the world a philosophical poem called an Essay on Mind, but as it is not included in her collected works, we have not noticed it, although we think parts of it have great merit. She has suffered much in her domestic life. Among her afflictions, may be mentioned the death of her brother Edward, who was drowned before her eyes while swimming in the Torbay. She always loved seclusion, and after the distressing accident, until her marriage, she led a life of quiet retirement, mixing little with the society of the great Babylon in which she lived. All who know her bear witness to the modesty of her deportment, and the generosity of her character, as all who are conversant with her productions bear witness to the richness, the intensity and the manly strength, as well as the delicacy, the tenderness, and the feminine and pious humility, of her mind.

Reviewed:

Poems (EBB), 3rd ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1853.

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