the poetry of Wordsworth a higher place than for the poetry of Byron ? In the present volume I try to give some account of the genius and productions of Mrs. Browning and the Brontë sisters. Mrs. Browning was a poet in the simple, yet intense, meaning of the ancient word -a maker, an imaginative life-giver and artist. Casting the mind's eye over what she did and what she was, I am strongly moved to claim for her precedence of Wordsworth in the procession of English poets. In no poet whatever was the lyrical glow more authentically fervid and genuine. In another respect she is exemplary and classic. The motivation of her work is perfect. To the great movements of thought and feeling, as they work themselves into action in the world of her time, she gives intense and melodious expression. We may figure her as hovering in her singing robes, a herald of victory, over the van of the spiritual armies that fought the good fight of advancing civilisation in two hemispheres, to strike down rebellion and slavery in the West, and despotism in Italy. Had she done as much for men as she did for women-had man's work, passion, character been delineated on a scale, and with a truth and power, correspondent to those with which, in the world of her art, she embodied woman's-I scarce know what place among the throned ones would have been too high for her. Woman, as Mrs. Browning shows her, is once more the entrancing object that men have loved without measure and without end,-loved as they have The Brontë Sisters. lxxvii been loved in return, totally, passionately, with selfoblivious pride, Such pride as from impetuous love may spring, as Shelley worthily sings. But Mrs. Browning is not so great in the delineation of men as in that of women. With all deductions, I reckon her one of the greatest poets of her time. I have, I think, been able to prove in the following pages that, in her treatment of the theme handled by Milton in Paradise Lost, she has succeeded in bringing out the human tenderness of the subject, and imparting a realisable personality to Adam and Eve, better than the Puritan poet. Of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters I have written, if with erring appreciation, at least with honest affection. One's heart is drawn towards the three unmothered girls who attracted the eyes of all Europe to the sequestered parsonage among the Yorkshire moors. What, after all, can we say of genius, but that it is inscrutable, heaven-descended, wonder-working? From a headland you look over a wide district, all wrapped in somnolent haze, beneath which nothing is distinctly visible. Suddenly, through a rift in a cloud, a sunbeam glances from the blue and touches one spot. There, in piercing brilliance, shine out tower and tree and meadow. Then the cloud closes, the ray is withdrawn, and once more the impartial haze drops its shroud upon the landscape. The genius of the Brontë sisters was that single ray, descending upon Yorkshire. So intense was the clearness of it, so fine and sweet its beauty, that all England-all Europe-looked towards the remote moorland hill in the West Riding, with its parsonage and its graves. To that illuminated spot, while the ray still falls on it, I invite my readers to turn for a little time. |