Then must the Infinite Himself condescend to take upon Him the form of finite suffering Humanity to rescue them O Saul, it shall be A face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! So Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. And David returned unto the sheepfolds. I have been irresistibly carried on much farther in my quotations than I had at first intended; but put aside, if you can, the marvellous conception of the poem, forget its rush of music and the noble thoughts sublimely true wherewith it closes, and tell me if the vivid scenes embodied in it do not bear out the assertion of Mr. Browning's remarkable presentative power. Closely connected with this phase of his poetic genius is the strikingly dramatic character of almost all his writings. Not only in his plays, but in his romances and lyrics this is remarkably conspicuous. The terms objective and subjective have been put to such hard and constant work of late, that one is almost ashamed to press them once more into active service, and yet it is hard sometimes to do without them. Some poets there are, like Shelley and Dante, Burns and Byron, Moore and Cowper, whose minds seem perpetually directed inwards; their own feelings and passions are always the subjects of the verse, or at least they furnish the coloured medium through which all outward nature is seen. Others appear to project themselves entirely out of their own personality into their subjects, and reveal their own nature and character only indirectly: such are the objective poets, among whom we may number Homer, Scott and most others of our illustrious epic and dramatic writers. Shakspere in his Sonnets, and Tennyson in In Memoriam' and some of the minor poems fall under the former head, but on the whole they may both be ranked with the latter. In our country the influence of Byron and of Wordsworth, though so opposed in most other directions, has combined to make the subjective tendency strongly, almost fatally, prevalent in the poetry of the last half-century. Now Mr. Browning, standing boldly aloof from popular currents, and owing no allegiance to any master of the poetic art, is essentially and entirely objective. With the exception of "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," and "One Word More to E. B. B.," in own which he speaks straight from the heart, if ever man did, even his lyrics are dramatic, the utterance not of his own feelings, but of those of the men and women he depicts as filled with varied passions. Not but that the material for all true poetry must be drawn fresh from a man's own heart; Schiller truly said that he who would write a noble epic must make his life one; but when the living stream has been drawn from the true Castalian spring, it may be poured forth through other channels, and derive its form from the shape of the fountain's mouth. And amid the sickly subjectivity of much of the rhyme produced by poetasters of our own day, the objective character of Mr. Browning's poems contributes not a little to that thoroughly healthy and manly tone, which gives them their bracing and tonic effect. This part of my subject naturally leads me on to speak of what is one of Mr. Browning's most striking characteristics; his fondness for the delineation of complex and intricate characters, which he analyses with a power and skill that is quite marvellous. This alone would not justify his claim to high poetic genius; that it is genius, and that of a rare and splendid kind, few acquainted with it would hesitate to admit; but by itself it might be considered metaphysical rather than poetical: especially now that poets seem inclined to abdicate their high prerogative, and relinquish this mental analysis in favour of the higher class of novelists. It is its combination with his vigorous and truly poetical presentative power, that warrants us in placing him so high among our poets. And this adds an element of constant and permanent value to his writings, in respect of which I would feel inclined to place him almost second to Shakspere. You never can feel that you have wholly exhausted the character. Just as one comes again and again to every one of Shakspere's plays, and ever finds some fresh trait in Hamlet or Iago, Rosalind or Imogen, before unseen, yet exquisitely true and natural, so is it with the master-pieces of Robert Browning. And for the same reason; the persons represented are real live men and women, not bundles of virtues, or bundles of vices ticketed with certain names, and made to display themselves for a short time on the stage. It is easy to draw a demon in human form: not difficult to draw an angel "A faultless monster that the world ne'er saw," but the highest art of the poet or the novelist is to draw a man or woman, such as those we see around us daily, puzzling mixtures of good and evil, no strangers to high and noble impulses, or even principles, and yet not seldom over- ́ mastered by base temptation or unbridled passion. Yet this faithful portraiture of nature is precisely what is so distasteful to the great mass of the English public: they do not like the trouble of studying a character for themselves; nor do they like to have their convenient division of all the world into the good and the bad disturbed by the appearance of obstinate people who will not fit comfortably into either class; they want each man and woman marked off plainly in black and white "This is the heroine," "This is the villain;" they prefer the graceful flattery of a crayon-sketch by Richmond, to the stern fidelity of a portrait by Holman Hunt. Partly indeed this is the result of a wholesome sense of the broad and everlasting distinction between right and wrong; and of a healthy reaction against the French fashion now-adays of abolishing all fixed lines of demarcation between them, and of making the one fade off into the other by imperceptible gradations. But partly it is the result of positive mental sloth, that cares not to have any problem presented that will require any thought for its solution. And thus it comes to pass that George Eliot's master-pieces, the Mill on the Floss and Romola, are read by hundreds, and coarse daubs like the Channings and the Haliburtons by tens of thousands, and that Robert Browning is the poet of a narrow circle. The very nature of this excellence, requir ing space for its full manifestation, prevents me from giving any extracts to illustrate my meaning. Even in the poems entitled "Men and Women," where I had fancied it might be more possible than in the dramas to show the masterly way in which Mr. Browning brings out a character, I have found it quite impossible to gather quotations which should give even a faint idea of the whole. It were as easy to attempt to represent a painting alive with the glow of the hues of Titian or Correggio by effacing half the tints. There are two of these which I would recommend above all to the careful study of the lover of true poetry; they are complete contrasts in style, but each in its way is perfect. The one is called Fra Lippo Lippi; it is a sketch of a monkish painter, of a most unmonkish temperament. He shall tell himself how he entered the convent I was a baby when my mother died, And father died and left me in the street. I starved there, God knows how, a year or two Then his aunt took him to the convent Six words, there, While I stood munching my first bread that month: “So, boy, you're minded," quoth the good fat father Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time, "To quit this very miserable world? "Will you renounce"...... The mouthful of bread? thought I; By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me; I did renounce the world, its pride and greed, Have given their hearts to-all at eight years old. So he entered the convent, little fit to study monastic lore, but with a quick wit, and a wonderful talent for sketching. Much of the poem is taken up by the descriptions that he gives of his earliest paintings, vigorous scenes of common life, heartily admired by all his brother-monks, till the Prior comes in. He had encouraged the young painter, but only that their convent of Carmelites might have some one, as well as the rival orders of Camaldolese and Preaching Friars, to adorn their walls with portraits of the saints. And now he stands aghast at these sketches full of honest flesh and blood how? what's here? Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all! Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh. So the poor painter, with all his hearty passionate life, all his longing for natural human enjoyment, stifled into mere sensuality in the chilling air of the convent, is immured in the cloister to paint bloodless ecclesiastical abstractions, and ever and anon break out in such wild fooleries as that in which he is caught at the beginning. As a study of the Manichæanism of the monastic system and its inevitable results, it ranks by the side of Prof. Kingsley's masterpiece Hypatia. The poem that comes next in the series as now published is one of a very different order. I must borrow better words than my own wherewith to describe it. "It is a surpassingly beautiful picture of Andrea del Sarto' and his wife: a twilight scene, full of the sweetest silvery greys. It is twilight too, in more senses than one. Twilight in the poor painter's soul, whose love-longings bring him no rest; light up no evening star large and luminous against the coming night. The poem is sweet to sadness; the pathos of the painter's pleadings with the bold bad woman whom he loved, and who dragged down his lifted arm, broke his loving heart, is very touching. The evening hush, the twilight tone, the slow musical speech, serve solemnly to lay bare the weary soul and wasted life, and make clear the wreck lying below the surface, that is trying so piteously to smile, with a cheery effort to love and labour on."(Quarterly Review for June, 1865.) I do not envy the man who can read this poem through quietly in the still evening hour with eyes undimmed with tears. But Mr. Browning does not only employ the brief narrative or dramatic poem for this mental analysis. He can lay claim to the invention of a very remarkable style of composition, examples of which he has given us in "Bishop Blougram's Apology" and "Mr. Sludge, the Medium." These are poems each extending to more than a thousand lines, occupied exclusively with the analysis of a single character under the form of a confession: the subject in the former case is a sceptical Romish bishop of modern days, in the latter an American spiritualist. This kind of poetry is hardly if at all emotional, but as a rich and rare intellectual treat, it would be hard to find anything of the sort to compare to it. All this keen subtlety of course has a strong effect in rendering Mr. Browning's poetry "caviare to the general "; but it is not only to the reconditeness of his subjects, or the profound and masterly analysis of character that he owes his comparative unpopularity and temporary neglect. He knows that he must always be pre-eminently the poet of the thoughtful and cultured, and cares not to endeavour to be otherwise. His poems, like those of Pindar, are pwvârтa ovveτοῖσιν· ἐς δὲ τοπὴν ἑρμηνέων χατίζει. Το quote his own words, he prefers to write "what the few must-instead of what the many may-like." Hence comes it that he seldom dwells on the more simple and elemental passions that sway the breasts of men. He has poems breathing with love, hate, ambition, jealousy or devotion, but seldom unmixed or unqualified by the circumstances or the character of the subject of them. Not that he does not possess the power of painting scenes of fresh innocent love or simple pathos. The poet who sung of "A Woman's Last Word" and |