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For her eyes alone smiled constantly: her lips had serious sweetness,
And her front was calm-the dimple rarely rippled on her cheek:
But her deep blue eyes smiled constantly,—as if they had by fitness
Won the secret of a happy dream, she did not care to speak.

How fine are both the descriptive and critical touches in the following passage:

Ay, and sometimes on the hill-side, while we sat down in the gowans,

With the forest green behind us, and its shadow cast before;

And the river running under; and across it, from the rowens,
A brown partridge whirring near us, till we felt the air it bore-

There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made by Tuscan flutes, or instruments, more various, of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser-or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch's sonnets—here's the book—the leaf is folded down!

Or at times a modern volume-Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt's ballad-dew, or Tennyson's god-vocal reverie,—

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

Or I read there, sometimes, hoarsely, some new poem of my making—

Oh, your poets never read their own best verses to their worth,

For the echo, in you, breaks upon the words which you are speaking,
And the chariot-wheels jar in the gate through which you drive them forth.

After, when we were grown tired of books, the silence round us flinging
A slow arm of sweet compression, felt with beatings at the breast,—
She would break out, on a sudden, in a gush of woodland singing,
Like a child's emotion in a god-a naiad tired of rest.

Oh, to see or hear her singing! scarce I know which is divinest

For her looks sing too-she modulates her gestures on the tune;

And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest, "Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal light, and seem to swell them on.

Then we talked-oh, how we talked! her voice so cadenced in the talking, Made another singing-of the soul! a music without bars—

While the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were walking, Brought interposition worthy-sweet,—as skies about the stars.

And she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them—
And had sympathies so ready, open-free like bird on branch,

Just as ready to fly east as west, which ever way besought them,
In the birchen wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange.

In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly;
And she has a grace in being gay, which mourners even approve;
For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so rightly,
As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above."

We must copy yet one other poem to give some idea of the range of Miss Barrett's power.

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN.

If it be said that the poetry, the tragedy here is in the facts, yet how rare is it to find a mind that can both feel and upbear such facts.

We have already said, that, as a poet, Miss Barrett is deficient in plastic energy, and that she is diffuse. We must add many blemishes of overstrained and constrained thought and expression. The ways in which words are coined or forced from their habitual meanings does not carry its excuse with it. We find no gain that compensates the loss of elegance and simplicity. One practice which has already had its censors of using the adjective for the noun, as in the cases of "The cry of the Human," "Leaning from the Golden," we, also, find offensive, not only to the habitual tastes, but to the sympathies of the very mood awakened by the writer.

We hear that she has long been an invalid, and, while the knowledge of this increases admiration for her achievements and delight at the extent of the influence, so much light flowing from the darkness of the sick room,—we seem to trace injurious results, too. There is often a want of pliant and glowing life. The sun does not always warm the marble. We have spoken of the great book culture of this mind. We must now say that this culture is too great in proportion to that it has received from

actual life. The lore is not always assimilated to the new form; the illustrations sometimes impede the attention rather than help its course; and we are too much and too often reminded of other minds and other lives.

Great variety of metres are used, and with force and facility. But they have not that deep music which belongs to metres which are the native growth of the poet's mind. In that case, others may have used them, but we feel that, if they had not, he must have invented them; that they are original with him. Miss Barrett is more favoured by the grand and thoughtful, than by the lyric muse.

We have thus pointed out all the faults we could find in Miss Barrett, feeling that her strength and nobleness deserves this act of high respect. She has no need of leniency, or caution. The best comment upon such critiques may be made by subjoining this paragraph from her Preface:

"If it were not presumptuous language on the lips of one to whom life is more than usually uncertain, my favourite wish for this work would be, that it be received by the public as a deposite, ambitious of approaching to the nature of a security for a future offering of more value and acceptability. I would fain® do better, and I feel as if I might do better: I aspire to do better, In any case, my poems, while full of faults, as I go forward to my critics and confess, have my life and heart in them. They are not empty shells. If it must be said of me that I have contributed unworthy verses, I also to the many rejected by the age, it cannot, at least be said that I have done so in a light or irresponsible spirit. Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work; not as mere hand and head work apart from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain; and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling its faultiness more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration, but feeling also that the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done should protect it in the thoughts of the reverent and sincere."

Of the greatest of Grecian sages it was said that he acquired such power over the lower orders of nature, through his purity and intelligence, that wild beasts were abashed and reformed by his admonitions, and that, once, when walking abroad with his disciples, he called down the white eagle, soaring above him, and drew from her willing wing a quill for his use.

We have seen women use with skill and grace, the practical goose-quill, the sentimental crow-quill, and even the lyrical, the consecrated feathers of the swan. But we have never seen one to whom the white eagle would have descended; and, for a while, were inclined to think that the hour had now, for the first time, arrived. But, upon full deliberation, we will award to Miss Barrett one from the wing of the sea-gull. That is also a white bird, rapid, soaring, majestic, and which can alight with ease, and poise itself upon the stormiest wave.

BROWNING'S POEMS.

ROBERT BROWNING is scarcely known in this country, as, indeed, in his own, his fame can spread but slowly, from the nature of his works. On this very account,-of the peculiarity of his genius, we are desirous to diffuse the knowledge that there is such a person, thinking and writing, so that those who, here and there, need just him, and not another, may know where to turn.

Our first acquaintance with this subtle and radiant mind was through his "Paracelsus," of which we cannot now obtian a copy, and must write from a distant memory.

It is one of those attempts, that illustrate the self-consciousness of this age, to represent the fever of the soul pining to embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance. Men who are once seized with this fever, carry thought upon the heart as a cross, instead of finding themselves daily warmed and enlightened to more life and joy by the sacred fire to which their lives daily bring fresh fuel.

Sometimes their martyrdoms greatly avail, as to positive achievements of knowledge for their own good and that of all men; but, oftener, they only enrich us by experience of the temporary limitations of the mind, and the inutility of seeking to transcend, instead of working within them.

Of this desire, to seize at once as a booty what it was intended we should legitimately win by gradual growth, alchemy and the elixir vitæ were, in the middle ages, apt symbols. In seeking how to prolong life, men wasted its exquisite spring-time and

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