"Then uprose the King;
His daughter's hands half startled from his knee
Dropt loosely, but her eye caught fire from his.
He snatched his truncheon, and the hollow earth
Smote strongly, that it throbbed : he cried aloud—
"Twixt me and William, say that never doom,
Save that.which sunders sheep from goats, and parts
"Twixt Heaven and Hell, can righteously pronounce.'
-He sate again, and with an eye still stern,
But temperate and untroubled, he pursued:

"Twixt me and England, should some senseless swain
Ask of my title-say I wear the crown,

Because it fits my head!"

The king's head differed hugely from that of the monk who declared he was unlucky in his hopes of promotion, that he verily believed if it rained mitres not one would be found to fit him. The closing lines of the poem are very fine and solemn. It seems a piece of sculpture.

"In Waltham Abbey on St. Agnes' Eve
A stately corpse lay stretched upon a bier.
The arms were crossed upon the breast; the face,
Uncover'd, by the taper's trembling light

Show'd dimly the pale najesty severe

Of him whom death, and not the Norman Duke,
Had conquer'd; him the noblest and the last
Of Saxon Kings; save one the noblest he;
The last of all. Hard by the bier were seen
Two women, weeping side by side, whose arms
Clasped each the other. Edith was the one.
With Edith, Adeliza wept and pray'd."

Thus ends "the Eve of the Conquest."

Mr. Taylor's narrative poetry naturally suggests a reference to his contemporaries who have written in that form. We will take his verse, therefore, at his own valuation; and, for the sake of testing his dogma, we will assume that the constituent essence of his own poetry is "good sense." In Byron, every tongue proclaims it is passion, fierce, resistless, human passion; bearing us like a torrent through the breathless space of his narrative. With Scott it is stirring incident, romantic costume, and the reanimated chivalry of the stormy past. Southey clothes his song in the marvellous, the wild, and the elevated! Leigh Hunt is always vivacious, sometimes picturesque, and not unfrequently frivolous; now and then indulging in a pretty image or conceit, when he ought to be voiceless with emotion. Mr. Landor arrays his characters in the classical dress of the antique Greek, and we are repelled from all sympathy by their stateliness and their heroism. Coleridge spirits us away with him to a supernatural region, where the heart is not roused, but where it seems to beat under some wizard spell. Wordsworth makes mountains, waterfalls and lakes represent certain characters, and endeavors to make his voice sound from them as though speaking under certain influences, and in divers words; but, like a poor ventriloquist, he has but one voice, and the monotony of his intonation betrays him. In his drama of "The Borderers" the dramatis persona are a family of Wordsworths, all differing somewhat in moral or mental calibre, though their dialogue is a curious combat of weaker and stronger Wordswortheanisms. The catastrophe is

brought about by the strongest one in the family coming forward, and in a dictatorial manner uttering a few philosophical sentences, which settles the question, silences the others, and ends the play.

Keats, in his narrative, with its haunting sense of beauty, its wondrous superfluities of description, and its remoteness from human interest; Shelley, also, with his dazzling metaphysical distinctions; and Tennyson, with his refined psychologies, possess too little of the nature of men and women to come altogether within the range of humanity; while Crabbe, with his hard, dry paintings, as though he used charcoal instead of colors, converts the world into one huge pauper planet, where there are but two classes, the jailer and the thief-the tyrant and the slave-the millionaire and the destitute-the Pharisee and Lazarus.

In which of these, we would ask Mr. Taylor, is common sense the constituent essence of genius?

We shall close our mental portrait of Mr. Taylor with two extracts from a poem of his, entitled Ernesto :"

"Thoughtfully by the side Ernesto sate

Of her whom in his earlier youth, with heart
Then first exulting in a dangerous hope,
Dearer for danger, he had rashly loved.
That was a season when the untravelled spirit,
Not way-worn nor way-wearied, nor with soil
Nor stain upon it, lions in its path
Saw none-or, seeing, with triumphant trust
In its resources and its powers, defied-
Perverse to find provocatives in warnings
And in disturbance taking deep delight.
By sea or land he then saw rise the storm
With a gay courage, and through broken lights,
Tempestuously exalted, for awhile

His heart ran mountains high, or to the roar

Of shattered forests sang superior songs

With kindling, and what might have seemed to some,

Auspicious energy; by land and sea

He was way-foundered-trampled in the dust

His many-colored hopes-his lading rich

Of precious pictures, bright imaginations,

In absolute shipwreck to the winds and waves
Suddenly rendered."

It is very apparent that the writer is a poet whose deficiency of imagination renders his journey a toilsome march, and not a glorious flight. He treads the earth heavily, not flies through the air, or marches with the stately force and untiring alacrity of the athlete or the belted knight.

The conclusion of Ernesto is one of the few attempts which our author makes to be tender

"Once again

He sate beside her-for the last time now,
And scarcely was she altered; for the hours
Had led her lightly down the vale of life,
Dancing, and scattering roses; and her face
Seemed a perpetual daybreak; and the woods
Where'er she rambled, echoed through their aisles
The music of a laugh so softly gay

That Spring with all her songsters and her songs
Knew nothing like it. But how changed was he!
Care and disease and ardors unrepressed,
And labors unremitted, and much grief,

Had written their death-warrant on his brow.

Of this she saw not all-she saw but little

That which she could not choose but see she saw-
And o'er her sunlit dimples and her smiles

A shadow fell-a transitory shade

And when the phantom of a hand she clasped

At parting, scarce responded to her touch,

She sighed but hoped the best.

When winter came

She sighed again; for with it came the word

That trouble and love had found their place of rest,

And slept beneath Madeira's orange groves."

We bid good-bye to the author of Philip Van Arteveldt, by assur ing him that one half the pains he has bestowed upon his dramas would have given to the world a translation of Virgil little inferior to the original. We are not aware of any poet who possesses so many first-rate qualities for a translator.

MISS BARRETT.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was, till her marriage with the author of Sordello, so entirely hidden from the world that she might have suggested to Wordsworth the idea of

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye,
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.”

And truly the poetical spirit of Miss Barrett was so exquisite as to deserve altogether the epithet of being the violet of women. 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. In addition to her honors as a poetess, she has lately added that of a mother! All honor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the greatest poetical intellect ever vouchsafed to an English woman!

Miss Barrett, who is now close upon her fortieth year, was married to Robert Browning, in November, 1846, and has since then resided at Florence. Marriages of this kind have not in general been happy, but let us hope this will prove an exception to the rule.

The facts of her life are so few, and she has mixed so little with society, owing to her fragile state of health, that we shall devote the rest of this chapter to the consideration of her genius; we