Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country,
That's one vast red, drear, burnt-up plain,
Branch'd thro' and thro' with many a vein
Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt;
Look right, look left, look straight before,
Beneath they mine, above they smelt
Copper ore and iron ore,
And forge and furnace, mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till, at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt and hoar of the great sea shore,

And the whole is our Duke's country! The Duke dies, and his yellow Duchess' takes her infant abroad, where they remain many years, till the child had

grown into a man:

• And he came back the pertest ape
That ever affronted human shape;
Full of his travel, struck at himself-
You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways
-Not he! For in Paris they told the elf
That our rough Northland was the Land of Lays,
The one good thing left in evil days;
For the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time,
And only in wild nooks like ours
Could you taste of it yet as in its prime,
True Castles, with proper Towers,
Young-hearted women, old-minded men,
And manners now as manners were then.
So, all the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it,
Nor for the pride's self, but the pride of our seeing it.
He revived all usages thoroughly worn out,
The souls of them fumed forth, the hearts of them torn-out:
And chief in the chase his neck he perill'd;
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;

- They should have set him on red Berold,
With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!

Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the lady, in time of spring,
-Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!

That day, I know, with a dozen oaths
I clad myself in thick hunting clothes
Fit for the chase of the urox or buffle,
In winter-time when you need to muffle;
But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,
And so we saw the Lady arrive:
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
She was the smallest Lady alive,
Made, in a piece of Nature's madness,
Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
That over-filled her, as some hive
Out of the bears' reach on the high trees
Is crowded with its safe merry bees-
In truth she was not hard to please!
Up she look'd, down she look'd, round at the mead,
Strait at the Castle, that's best indeed
To look at from outside the walls:
As for us, styled the “serfs and thralls,”
She as much thanked me as if she had said it,
(With her eye, do you understand?)

,
Because I patted her horse while I led it;
And Max, who rode on her other hand,
Said, no bird flew past but she inquired
What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired
If that was an eagle she saw hover,
And the green and gray bird on the field was the plover?
When suddenly appeared the Duke,
And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed,
On to my hand, -as with a rebuke,
And as if his back bone were not jointed,
The Duke stepped rather aside than forward,
And welcomed her with his grandest smile;
And, mind you, his mother all the while
Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor'ward;
And

up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies
Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis,
And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies,
The Lady's face stopped its play,
As if her first hair had grown grey

For such things must begin some one day! This Duchess was an active, lively creature, who would have made an excellent chatelaine, but

• The Duke's plan admitted a wife at most
To meet his eye with other trophies,
Now outside the hall, now in it
To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
At the proper place in the proper minute,
And die away the life between.'

She sickens and pines away, her health and spirit broken. The Dowager Duchess and the Duke always scolding and snubbing her; and when her husband sees her ailing, he swears it is done to spite him.'

"Well, early in autumn, at first winter warning,
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
A drinking hole out of the fresh tender ice
That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,
Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,
And another and another, and faster and faster,
Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled:
Then it so chanced that the Duke, our master,
Asked himself, what were the pleasures in season,
And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,
He should do the Middle Age no treason
In resolving on a hunting party.
Always providing the old books showed the way of it.'

' With great pomp and preparation is this hunting party set on foot; and as the old books assigned a conspicuous place to the lady, it is of course resolved that the duchess is to fill that place with becoming state. To the duke's surprise, she refuses point blank. Her health would not allow of it. The duke is in a silent rage, and goes forth upon his expedition. A graphic description of gypsies is here introduced, for which we have no

, space. One of them, an old blear-eyed hag, comes forward to the duke

. She was come,' she said, 'to pay her duty
To the new duchess, the youthful beauty:'
No sooner had she named his lady,
Than a shine lit up the face so shady;
And its smirk returned with a novel meaning -

a
For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning;
If one gave her a taste of what life is and sorrow,
She, foolish to-day, would be wiser to-morrow;
And who so fit a teacher of trouble,
As this sordid crone, bent well nigh double?
So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture,
(If such it was, for they grow so hirsute,
That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit.)
He contrasted, 'twas plain from his gesture,
The life of the lady, so flower-like and delicate,
With the loathsome squalor of this helicat.
I, in brief, was the man the duke beckoned
From out of the throng; and while I drew near
He told the crone, as I since have reckoned,
By the way he bent and spoke into her ear

a

With circumspection and mystery,
The main of the lady's history,
Her frowardness and ingratitude;
And for all the crone's submissive attitude
I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening,
And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening,
As though she engaged with hearty good will
Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil,
And promised the lady a thorough frightening,
And so just giving her a glimpse
Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps

a
The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw,
He bade me take the gypsy mother,
And set her telling some story or other,
Of hill or dale, oakwood or fernshaw,
To while away a weary hour
For the lady left alone in her bower,
Whose mind and body craved exertion,
And yet shrank from all better diversion.'

The old gipsy has an interview with the duchess, and then, as far as we can make out the drift of some very obscure writing, she either entices the duchess away, inducing her to leave this wretched do-nothing life, and join the free roving gipsies, or else, by some necromantic spell, spirits her away. The upshot clearly is, that the duchess departs and returns no more.

It would have cost the poet very little trouble to have made all clear, which in this work is so obscure; but that little trouble he has not chosen to bestow. What is the consequence? The poem leaves no distinct impression. We have waded through columns of rhyme, sometimes pleased with a fine image, sometimes with a vigorous description, often with a strange sense of the writer's power; but we close the book with no desire to recur to it, with no picture on which to dwell. In a word, the substance of the poem has been sacrificed to the mere writing. This will appear idle criticism to our modern poets, no doubt; they only think of 'passages,' and if they have succeeded in writing here and there some dozen lines that will look well in extract, they believe they have written a poem. It is not so, however. A poem is not made out of passages;' it is the musical embodiment of some strong emotion or some deep thought; and however necessary beauty may be to the expression, the thing to be expressed requires equal if not greater labour.

In bringing our rambling observations to a close, we should say that Robert Browning deserves his position from his originality; but although his name has a certain celebrity, he has not yet won for himself a niche in the temple of his nation's literature. He is rather a thinker than a singer; and yet cannot be accepted as a remarkable thinker. The general conception of his larger works is weak and wavering, but the details exhibit no common powers. Whatever merits he may possess, are, however, damaged by the eccentricity and want of beauty of his style. It is abrupt, harsh, full of familiar turns, and yet not familiar in its general structure; spasmodic in its vehemence, and obscure from mere negligence. We should be loath to charge him with affectation, but it does appear astonishing that any man so well read as Robert Browning, should play such tricks with his style, except for the purpose of aping originality and attracting attention. Originality lies not in being unlike the rest of mankind. That is eccentricity. What is true and beautiful, has always a direct parentage with everything else that is true and beautiful. Originality, therefore, will not be shown in startling the public with a novelty; but in producing that which is at once novel yet familiar: like many other things, and yet distinctly individual, and having such an air of ease and obviousness, that people will wonder it was never done before.

We have been sparing of extracts, as neither the novelty nor the costliness of the works warranted our occupying space with passages to support our opinions. As the effect of this has perhaps been somewhat unfavourable to the poet, we cannot do better than conclude with quoting his much-admired romance:

HOW HE BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX.

1.

'I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris and He;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.
“Good speed!" cried the watch, as the gate bolts undrew;

Speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

II.

Not a word to each other, we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the check-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.