which awaits her if she will become the bride of Berthold. Nothing, surely, can be finer than the scene in which Colombe discerns how she is beloved by the young advocate; for a time she is rent by conflicting emotions; but, at last, she resigns the duchy, and finds that love is better than worldly pomp. One passage, in this play, must be quoted, in which Valence thinks he is losing Colombe for ever, and yet he declares that the very memory of having met with her will exalt his life for ever:

Oh, what amplest recompense!
Is the knowledge of her nought? the memory, nought?
--Lady, should such an one have looked on you,
Ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world,
And say, love can go unrequited here!

You will have blessed him to his whole life's end-
Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back,
All goodness cherished where you dwelt and dwell.
What would he have? He holds you-you, both form
And mind, in his,-where self-love makes such room
For love of you, he would not serve you now

The vulgar way,-repulse your enemies,
Win you new realms, or best, in saving you
Die blissfully-that's past so long ago!

He wishes you no need, thought, care of him—
Your good, by any means, himself unseen,

Away, forgotten!-He gives that life's task up,
As it were.

The Blot on the Scutcheon is a domestic tragedy in which the disaster is precipitated by a conflict of youthful passion, aristocratic pride, and fatal misunderstanding. This play is a striking instance of the method in which genius can deal with actions and events which traverse the bounds of conventional order,

B

creating for our sympathetic imagination a realm of Art which accepted codes of judgment are utterly inadequate to explore.

The hero of Luria is one of Browning's noblest characters; he is a soldier who has given his services to the city of Florence; but, finding himself entangled by Italian treachery, he sacrifices his life rather than stain himself with baseness and disloyalty. Leading the army of the Florentines against Pisa, he is surrounded by spies who in the moment of victory intend to impeach him for an ambition which threatens the independence of his adopted city. When he has won the battle he is told of the plot, and is entreated by his friends to transfer his allegiance to the Pisans and inflict a well-merited vengeance on Florence. But, with steadfast will, he maintains his integrity; and in his death both friends and foes. discover the splendid magnanimity of this single-hearted, unselfish man whom they have been trying to use as the tool of their intrigues. In one very notable speech, Luria contrasts the intuitional feelings of his native East with the subtleties of thought through which the Italian mind works its way to conviction and decision:

:

My own East!

How nearer God we were! He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours!
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know!
The everlasting minute of creation

Is felt there; Now it is, as it was Then ;
All changes at His instantaneous will,
Not by the operation of a law

Whose maker is elsewhere at other work!

His hand is still engaged upon His world

Man's praise can forward it, Man's prayers suspend,
For is not God all-mighty ?—to recast

The world, erase old things and make them new,
What costs it him?

5.-MARRIAGE.

In his personal history the year 1846 was the most notable for Browning, for it was then that Elizabeth Barrett became his wife. The great poetess was in delicate health, and till her death they lived in Italy, where their only child, Robert, was born at Florence in 1849. There were fourteen years of an almost perfect married life; in 1861, the Poet was left a widower; but we know how much of his inspiration was given by her continued spiritual presence with him. In one poem, A Wall, he describes in exquisite symbols how all the obstacles of change and death have not deprived him of the sense of her undying influence upon his spirit. In One Word More, he longs to give his wife some proof of his love which shall be unique, a sacred gift quite different from the things which the world reviews and criticises. The painter, Rafael, made "a century of sonnets" when he learnt to love a woman; the poet Dante, urged by his passion for Beatrice, painted the picture of an angel; and Browning thinks that there is a sacredness about those sonnets and that picture which transcends the power and beauty of all the productions which they bequeathed to the world. He, the dramatic poet, cannot do anything more than

dedicate his verse to his beloved; but, for her sake, he will, for a moment, drop the mask of dramatic utterance, and attune his lines to a sweeter tone, as he speaks to her directly of his pure devotion. If the Moon were to love a mortal, she would surely desire to turn her new side to that one elect soul, and reveal that mysterious face which not even the most favoured men have ever seen. So the world will only know his wife as 66 Poetess;" but he knows how the wife transcends the artist; he has been favoured by the vision of that Ideal Womanhood embodied in her character:

Think of you Love!

This to you-yourself my moon of poets!

Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you.
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you,

Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.

But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,

Come out on the other side, the novel

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.

But his passion rises into its clearest strain in that
ineffable aspiration which closes the first part of The
Ring and the Book, where he supplicates strength to
accomplish his work from those "realms of help"
where "Lyric love, half-angel and half-bird" has found
a heavenly sanctuary.
"Never" he protests :-

Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except, with bent head and beseeching hand—
That still, despite the distance and the dark,

What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
-Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall.

6.-" MEN AND WOMEN."

Previous to the production of The Ring and the Book Browning published some of his most characteristic poems in two volumes, called Men and Women. Among these are his poems on Art, in which we can trace the deep influence of his Italian studies. In many of these poems he exhibits the various tragedies and triumphs of the love of man and woman; especially in Any Wife to any Husband and James Lee's Wife the subtle complications and vital problems of the marriage bond are analysed with the profoundest insight. In An Epistle of Karshish we have an epilogue to the narrative in the Gospel of John recording the resurrection of Lazarus. An eastern physician, in his travels meets with Lazarus, and writes to a friend to tell him of this strange man for whom the blazon of eternity has obliterated the distinctions of time, and reduced the pride of this world to an empty show. He professes to ridicule the wild story that Lazarus tells about an Incarnate God who, years ago, lived in Palestine, and raised him from the dead; and yet the sceptic cannot help betraying how he is fascinated by