Still it must be remembered that the poem is a study of a character who starts with a distempered brain, never very far from the borderland between sanity and madness.

But these hot-headed lovers with their gusts of feeling give us the daintiest of fancies in the daintiest of phrases, when the controlling feeling happens to be delight in the thought of the lady-love.

'Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling.'

These of course are the rooks: just as in the evidently have thrushes, with the germ of the

line 3.

'Birds in our wood sang,

Ringing through the valleys,
Maud is here, here, here,
In among the lilies.

'I know the way she went

Home with her maiden posy,

next verse we Throstle' in

For her feet have touched the meadows

And left the daisies rosy.'

Surely as foolishly-charming a fancy as ever poet conceived.

'There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear,

She is coming, my life, my fate.

The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near";
And the white rose weeps, "She is late";

The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear",

And the lily whispers, "I wait."'

If I have spoken with a certain depreciation, I cannot pass on from Tennyson without making some atonement by quoting one passage more in which he does effectually strike a note far above the wild vehemence or the tender grace of those poems to which I have referred as showing the normal limits of his effective range. If to us King Arthur is something of a phantom, it is no phantom that is present to the mind of the repentant Queen.

Gone-my Lord!

Gone through my sin, to slay and to be slain !
And he forgave me, and I could not speak.—
I thought I could not breathe in that fine air,

VOL. 85 (V.-NEW SERIES).

27

NO. 506.

That pure severity of perfect light

I wanted warmth and colour, which I found
In Lancelot-now I see thee what thou art,
Thou art the highest and most human too,
Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none
Will tell the King I love him, tho' so late?
Now-ere he goes to the great Battle? None:
Myself must tell him in that purer life,

But now it were too daring. Ah my God,
What might I not have made of Thy fair world
Had I but loved Thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest :

It surely was my profit had I known:

It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We needs must love the highest when we see it,

Not Lancelot, nor another.'

I have not here to speak of that other kind of love whereof 'In Memoriam' gives us so beautiful a presentment. So it is noteworthy that, concerning love in its special sense, it is through a woman's lips that the poet has uttered his noblest words; a woman whose great sin was matched by her great repentance.

If love of one kind or another plays an important part in Tennyson's poems, its influence in Browning is assuredly not less vital. But it is not often marked by the grace and tenderness of the Laureate; the fervour is too intense, the emotion too absorbing. Yet these are not altogether absent, and indeed it is rather curious that the most marked examples of them, apart from Pompilia, are perhaps to be found among the poet's last lyrics: Summum Bonum' for instance, which one critic succeeded in discovering to be unreal and gushing.

'All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bce; All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem; In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea; Breath and bloom, wonder, wealth, shade and shine-and, how far above them

Truth that's brighter than gem,

Trust that's purer than pearl ;

Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe, all were for me

In the kiss of one girl.'

But indeed if we come to consider, we find that these qualities are present in plenty of cases, only we forget them because of others more striking. In Evelyn Hope the prominent conception is that of eternal endeavour; it is the potency, the vast reach of

the speaker's love that impress us; yet what could be more tender in thought or in expression than such lines as these?—

'Till God's hand beckoned unawares,

And the sweet white brow is all of her.

'So, hush; I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet, cold, hand.

There: that is our secret-go to sleep;

You will wake, and remember, and understand.'

Perhaps it is in those poems where, as it seems, love has 'failed of its purpose here,' that Browning's most characteristic work, and the work by which he has won most positive gratitude, was done; inasmuch as they are instinct with the belief that failure here is not failure for good and all; that God 'creates the love to reward the love.' There is no difficulty in understanding the position in such cases as Evelyn Hope or Prospice, where the love on earth is disappointed by death. But the problems suggested both by Any Wife to any Husband,' and 'The Last Ride Together,' are very much more complex. I do not propose to enter upon them; to do so would make it necessary to trench on theological and metaphysical matters, which are outside the scope of these papers. And apart from that, it may reasonably be questioned whether the logical attitude of a lover is a profitable subject of investigation. People will fall in love, and being in, will behave themselves with a complete disregard for logical propriety, which all the sages may succeed in affecting at much about the same date as they may hope to discover the philosopher's stone.

We shall not, therefore, inquire what A., if a logical person, would think about his correct relation to B. in the case where A. loves B., and B. entirely declines to return his affections. But we shall observe that the pain which the lover in Browning's poems suffers is something ennobling and purifying. I suppose that if one wished to name two poems in the language which present a really complete contrast, 'Locksley Hall' and The Lost Mistress' would be about as effective a pair as could be found. The one poem is gorgeous with magnificent accessories, splendid with music, voluble, tempestuous; the other perfectly simple, direct, unadorned. But the one lover has been hurt, mainly in his self-respect; the other is heart-stricken. Time and pluck may heal such a wound; but there is no comparison between the pain of it and the pain of the other. And when Browning's poem is coupled with 'The Last Ride Together,' the

spirit which animates the speakers is revealed in its steadfast

nobility.

"I said, "Then, Dearest, since 'tis so;
Since now at length my fate I know;
Since nothing all my love avails;

Since all my life seemed meant for fails

Since this was written, and needs must be-
My whole heart rises up to bless

Your name in pride and thankfulness.”›

In proportion to the seriousness of true love as Browning understood it, is his scorn for the merely superficial or sensuous emotions which pass in common parlance under the same title; to its degradation; so that Caponsacchi and the Venetians of Galuppi's 'Toccata' are alike classified as lovers.

'The soul doubtless is immortal-where a soul can be discerned. 'As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore their fruitage: mirth and folly were the crop. What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?' For love, as he conceives it, is something that thrills every fibre of our being; no transitory emotion that comes and goes like the breeze, casually awakened and casually quenched. Such emotions there are, the marks of human weakness and deficiency, the outcome either of undeveloped or effete Humanity; emotions which we may take for love, through ignorance,

'This was a heart the Queen leant on, thrilled in a moment erratic,' as he sings in 'Misconceptions'; but love they are not.

For the love which is indeed worthy of the name is something altogether different, having its source in whatever is noblest of our nature. Nearer we hold of God who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe ;' and in virtue of that fact, the love of man and wife is an attribute of Humanity. It is an aspect of religion, enabling us to understand the meaning of the Divine, being itself the most Divine possession we have. In 'By the Fireside,' where the husband in an age so blest that by its side youth seemed the waste instead,' meditates on that past when the bar was broken between life and life,' he gives expression to the thought.

'Think, when our one soul understands

The great word which makes all things new,
When Earth breaks up and Heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?

'Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart;

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the Divine.'

This is the love which lifts the lover, not into a fictitious paradise which vanishes at the first brush of adversity, but into an atmosphere of strength and life: a light which illumines the soul with a glory growing always fuller. Through the mouths of his many men and women, Browning set forth these conceptions; of his own love he has spoken in the Invocation in the Ring and the Book,' and 'once and only once, and for One only' in 'One Word More.' With lines written by that 'one' we may fitly conclude.

They are from the Portuguese Sonnets,' a series which assuredly ranks among the most perfect love-poems in the language, as they are incomparably their author's finest work.

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being, and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,-I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.'

ARTHUR D. INNES.