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it in one's meditations always a sort of shock; it was deficient in the social drapery which muffles the sharpness of human contact. His perfect silence, moreover, the fact that she never heard from him and very seldom heard any mention of him, deepened this impression of his loneliness. She asked Lily for news of him, from time to time; but Lily knew nothing about Boston; her imagination was confined within the limits of Manhattan. As time went on Isabel thought of him oftener, and with fewer restrictions; she had more than once the idea of writing to him. She had never told her husband about him-never let Osmond know of his visits to her in Florence; a reserve not dictated in the early period by a want of confidence in Osmond, but simply by the consideration that Caspar Goodwood's disappointment was not her secret but his own. It would be wrong of her, she believed, to convey it to another, and Mr. Goodwood's affairs could have, after all, but little interest for Gilbert. When it came to the point she never wrote to him; it seemed to her that, considering his grievance, the least she could do was to let him alone. Nevertheless she would have been glad to be in some way nearer to him. It was not that it ever occurred to her that she might have married him; even after the consequences of her marriage became vivid to her, that particular reflection, though she indulged in so many, had not the assurance to present itself. But when she found herself in trouble he became a member of that circle of things with which she wished to set herself right. I have related how passionately she desired to feel that her unhappiness should not have come to her through her own fault. She had no near prospect of dying, and yet she wished to make her peace with the world-to put her spiritual affairs in order. It came back to her from time to time that there was an account still to be settled with Caspar Goodwood; it seemed to her that she

would settle it to-day on terms easy for him. Still, when she learned that he was coming to Rome she felt afraid; it would be more disagreeable for him than for any one else to learn that she was unhappy. Deep in her breast she believed that he had invested his all in her happiness, while the others had invested only a part. He was one more person from whom she should have to conceal her misery. She was reassured, however, after he arrived in Rome, for he spent several days without coming to see her.

Henrietta Stackpole, it may well be imagined, was much more punctual, and Isabel was largely favoured with the society of her friend. She threw herself into it, for now that she had made such a point of keeping her conscience clear, that was one way of proving that she had not been superficial-the more so that the years, in their flight, had rather enriched than blighted those peculiarities which had been humourously criticised by persons less interested than Isabel and were striking enough to give friendship a spice of heroism. Henrietta was as keen and quick and fresh as ever, and as neat and bright and fair. Her eye had lost none of its serenity, her toilet none of its crispness, her opinions none of their national flavour. She was by no means quite unchanged, however; it seemed to Isabel that she had grown restless. Of old she had never been restless; though she was perpetually in motion it was impossible to be more deliberate. She had a reason for everything she did; she fairly bristled with motives. Formerly, when she came to Europe it was because she wished to see it, but now having already seen it, she had no such excuse. She did not for a moment pretend that the desire to examine decaying civilisations had anything to do with her present enterprise; her journey was rather an expression of her independence of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to it. "It's nothing to come to Europe," she said to Isabel;

"it doesn't seem to me one needs so many reasons for that. It is something to stay at home; this is much more important." It was not therefore with a sense of doing anything very important that she treated herself to another pilgrimage to Rome; she had seen the place before and carefully inspected it; the actual episode was simply a sign of familiarity, of one's knowing all about it, of one's having as good a right as any one else to be there. This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she had a perfect right to be restless, too, if one came to that. But she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so little. Isabel easily recognised it, and with it the worth of her friend's fidelity. She had crossed the stormy ocean in midwinter because she guessed that Isabel was unhappy. Henrietta guessed a great deal, but she had never guessed so happily as that. Isabel's satisfactions just now were few, but even if they had been more numerous, there would still have been something of individual joy in her sense of being justified in having always thought highly of Henrietta. She had made large concessions with regard to her, but she had insisted that, with all abatements, she was very valuable. It was not her own triumph, however, that Isabel found good; it was simply the relief of confessing to Henrietta, the first person to whom she had owned it, that she was not contented. Henrietta had herself approached this point with the smallest possible delay, and had accused her to her face of being miserable. She was a woman, she was a sister; she was not Ralph, nor Lord Warburton, nor Caspar Goodwood, and Isabel could speak.

"Yes, I am miserable," she said, very gently. She hated to hear herself say it; she tried to say it as judically as possible.

"What does he do to you?" Henrietta asked, frowning as if she were inquiring into the operations of a quack doctor.

"He does nothing. But he doesn't like me."

"He's very difficult!" cried Miss Stackpole. "Why don't you leave him?"

"I can't change that way," Isabel

said.

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Why not, I should like to know? You won't confess that you have made a mistake. You are too proud."

"I don't know whether I am too proud. But I can't publish my mistake. I don't think that's decent. I would much rather die."

"You won't think so always," said Henrietta.

I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one's deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't change that way," Isabel repeated.

"You have changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don't mean to say that you like him."

Isabel hesitated a moment.

"No,

I don't like him. I can tell you, because I am weary of my secret. But that's enough; I can't tell all the world."

Henrietta gave a rich laugh. "Don't you think you are rather too considerate?"

"It's not of him that I am considerate-it's of myself!" Isabel answered.

It was not surprising that Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in Miss Stackpole; his instinct had natually set him in opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from the conjugal mansion. When she arrived in Rome he said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave her friend the interviewer, alone; and Isabel answered that he at least had nothing to fear from her. She said to Henrietta that as Osmond didn't like her she could

not invite her to dine; but they could easily see each other in other ways.

She

Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one said. "I don't want to be remembered that way," Miss Stackpole declared; "I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your step-daughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me." She could not bring herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiation, of conversation, and of personal of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even sinister. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to urge a little the cause of her friend, insist a little upon his receiving her, so that he might appear to suffer for good manners' sake. Her immediate acceptance of his objections put him too much in the wrong-it being in effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt, that you cannot enjoy at the same time the credit of expressing sympathy. Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his objections-all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right thing would have been that Miss Stackpole should come to dine at the Palazzo Roccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for herself how little pleasure it gave him. From the moment, however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was nothing for Osmond but to wish that Henrietta would take herself off. It was surprising how little satisfaction he got from his wife's friends; he took occasion to call Isabel's attention to it.

"You are certainly not fortunate

in your intimates; I wish you might make a new collection," he said to her one morning, in reference to nothing visible at the moment, but in a tone of ripe reflection which deprived the remark of all brutal abruptness. "It's as if you had taken the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass-besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably tiresome that one can't tell him so; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems to me the best part of him; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he is so desperately ill there is only one way to prove it; but he seems to have no mind for that. I can't say much more for the great Warburton. When one really thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was something rare! He comes and looks at one's daughter as if she were a suite of apartments; he tries the door-handles and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he will take the place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease? Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms are too small; he doesn't think he could live on a third floor; he must look out for a piano nobile. And he goes away, after having got a month's lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing. Miss Stackpole, however, is your most wonderful invention. She strikes me as a kind of monster. One hasn't a nerve in one's body that she doesn't set quivering. You know I never have admitted that she is a woman. Do you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen-the most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes; aren't her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks and moves, and walks and looks, exactly as she talks. You may say that she doesn't hurt me, inasmuch as I don't see her. I don't see her, but I hear her; I hear her all

day long. Her voice is in my ears; I can't get rid of it. I know exactly what she says, and every inflection of the tone in which she says it. She says charming things about me, and they give you great comfort. I don't like at all to think she talks about me-I feel as I should feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat !"

Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife assured him, rather less than he suspected. She had plenty of other subjects, in two of which the reader may be supposed to be especially interested. She let

Isabel know that Caspar Goodwood had discovered for himself that she was unhappy, though indeed her ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her by coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice in the street, but he had no appearance of seeing them; they were driving,

and he had a habit of looking straight in front of him, as if he proposed to contemplate but one object at a time. Isabel could have fancied she had seen him the day before; it must have been with just that face and step that he walked out of Mrs. Touchett's door at the close of their last interview. He was dressed just as he had been dressed on that day; Isabel remembered the colour of his, cravat; and yet in spite of this familiar look there was a strangeness in his figure too; something that made her feel afresh that it was rather terrible he should have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more over-topping than of old, and in those days he certainly was lofty enough. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him, but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky.

HENRY JAMES, JUN.

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TWO THEORIES OF POETRY.

'Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older they respect the argument."

-EMERSON.

IT has often been asserted that poets are seldom good critics, that there is something so incongruous between the fervent imagination of the poetical spirit, and the cool judgment of the critical, that they are rarely to be found united in the same person. But against this assertion it may be said that critics, especially critics of poetry, fail more often from a deficiency of imagination than from a superfluity of it, and that the two finest critics of all time were both poets-Goethe and Coleridge. And at this day we have among us Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne, as living proofs of the possibility of combining the two functions. Mr. Arnold's place at the head of English criticism is beyond dispute, his poetic fame is also well assured; but Mr. Swinburne, though his poetical gifts are acknowledged without stint, even by those who have the strongest antipathy to his school of poetry, and to much of the contents of his poems, is as yet hardly recognised as an accredited critic. His style bounds onward with a wild ungovernable rush, instead of moving with the constrained and dignified paces befitting criticism; his thought is even less under control than his style, and his judgment, in the opinion of most cooler-headed persons, is not only liable to terrible aberrations strongly resembling hysteria, but on one subject is permanently unsettled. But in spite of all this, much of his criticism is so sympathetic, so deep-sighted, and so just, that we readily forgive his occasional misses in favour of the genuine ring with which he now and again hits the mark. Every one who has read his Study of Shakespeare, or his essays

on Ford, or Byron, or Coleridge, must feel that he has many of the higher One qualities of a critic of poetry. quality, indeed, which is an unfailing sign of a good critic, he possesses in abundance, and that is a wide toleration, the capability of appreciating poetry of the most different tendency to his own. He is as enthusiastic in praise of Mr. Arnold as he is in praise of Shelley. It has been said of Goethe that, especially in his latter days, he praised the works of other writers with so little discrimination, that praise from him was tantamount to a brevet of incapacity. But whoever said so said a very foolish thing. Goethe may perhaps have erred on the side of praise, but it was an error on the right side. It is the business of a critic to detect and make known to the world the good that is in a work, rather than the evil. The public are quick enough to find out the evil for themselves; it is the good that generally escapes them. The man whose sole activity consists in pulling to pieces a line here, or censuring an epithet there, now exposing a faulty rhyme, now turning up a loose construction, may be in an excellent way of earning his bread, but he has no more right to be called a critic than a weeder has to be called a gardener.

This largeness of sympathy characterises Mr. Arnold no less than Mr. Swinburne. Whether it be Homer or Chaucer, Wordsworth or Byron, Gray or Burns, who is the subject of his criticism, he can appreciate and help others to appreciate, their very different excellences. But here all resemblance between our two poet-critics ceases. With the exception of this one quality that they have in common; their criticism is as far apart as the two poles, or as their own poetry. And nowhere have we a better opportunity of studying them side by side than in

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