and "accidental sharps" (exceptions by which some would triumphantly prove the rule),-subtle intellect, deep searchings of heart, shrewd experience, genial spirits, æsthetic culture, lyrical expression,-what gifts are these, and more besides them, for the making of a not-to-be-made Poet (nascitur non fit). Yet time as it passes, instead of exalting these gifts to the exclusion of faulty mannerisms, and once easily now hardly eradicable blemishes, seems to confirm the singer in a habit of putting on his singing-robes after so strange a fashion, that one's wonder is the inverse of one's regret that so few should gather round him, with a mind to hear, and the mind to understand.

To note some of the peculiarities that offend or perplex your jog-trot courteous reader in the volumes before us. Expressions very commonly occur of the kind italicised in the following fragments: "And he lay, would not moan, would not curse, As if lots might be worse." "It was roses, roses, all the way, With myrtle mixed in my path like mad." "Still our life's zigzags and dodges." Why you cut a figure at the first," &c. "Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere.' "But these my triumphs' straw-fire flared and funked."

Aaron's asleep shove hip to haunch,

Or somebody deal him a dig in the paunch!
Look at the purse with the tassel and knob,
And the gown with the angel and thingumbob.

What, again, is to be said of, or for, such lines as these, to show that when the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something?—

God stoops o'er his head,

Satan looks up between his feet-both tug-
He's left, himself, in the middle, &c.

Or the description of a church's "crypt, one fingers along with a torch, -its face, set full for the sun to shave"? Or this congratulation of departed worthies" For oh, this world and the wrong it does! They are safe in heaven with their backs to it"? The name of "Holy-Cross Day" may tempt lovers of the "Baptistery" and the "Christian Year" to seek acquaintance with a poem whose name sounds so well; but we should like to watch the pale lenten faces of such inquirers as they read the first verse of "Holy-Cross Day;" to wit (we had almost written tu-whit, with its invariable sequent tu-whoo, infected by the strain):

Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week.
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff.

Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime

Gives us the summons-'tis sermon-time.

The third verse is stuffed full as it can hold of imagery and bustling life-like excitement :

Higgledy piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.

Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop-here he comes.

In verse-making of this reckless, rollicking sort, Mr. Browning often shows remarkable verve and gusto. But he is apt to be slovenly in tagging his verses, which at times are rather too tag-raggish. When a rhymester is master of his rhymes, in their freaks and conjunctions of the kind called Hudibrastic, it is pleasant enough to note their "wanton heed and giddy cunning"-for one is satisfied the while, that the "heed" will keep in check the wantonness, and that the wildest whirl of "giddiness" will not turn the head of that sage supervisor, "cunning." But when the rhymester is not master of, but mastered by, his rhymes, all zest in the spectacle is gone. Unhappily this is frequently the case with Mr. Browning's rhymes. He does not mould them at will, and shape them, as plastic things, to suit his meaning. On the contrary, they mould, or rather distort, his thoughts-sometimes wresting his sense into non-sense. Here is a stanza from "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," of which the rhymes and the meaning are alike fitted to "puzzle the will" to make the best of them :

Now, they ply axes and crowbars

Now, they prick pins at a tissue

Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's

Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue?
Where is our gain at the Two-bars?

Well may the two last lines have a note of interrogation each. One thinks of Billy Black in the farce, with his eternal "D'ye give it up?" -an ever-recurring query, impertinent enough in the farce, but highly pertinent at the end of too many of these rhymes without reason, or most unreasonable rhymes. In the verses hyper-tersely entitled "Before," we read:

'Tis but decent to profess oneself beneath her.
Still, one must not be too much in earnest either.

In "Old Pictures in Florence," godhead rhymes (de facto rhymes, never
mind about de jure) with embodied; Theseus with knees' use; San
Spirito with weary too; Sofi's eye with prophesy; Florence with
Loraine's; Witanagemot with bag 'em hot, &c. Again:

Thyself shall afford the example, Giotto!-
Done at a stroke (was it not?) "O!"
... From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo
... So now to my special grievance-heigh ho!

Not that I expect the great Bigordi

Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor wronged Lippino-and not a word I
Say of a seraph of Fra Angelico's.

But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,

To grant me a taste of your intonaco

Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?

No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco ?

It is by somewhat compulsory measures that "cock-crow" has for its rhyming complement such a phrase as "rock-row;" so "earth's failure" is the occasional cause of "life's pale lure," and "His hundred's soon

hit" that of "Misses an unit," and "Lightnings are loosened" of "Peace let the dew send." Instances like these tempt us to attach a special significance to what sounds like a confession, in the second stanza of "Two in the Campagna :"

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

"Tis pity the poet did not "let go" many and many which he did "catch at." But we too may as well let go this catching at, and carping at, his demerits, and pass on, in a less captious mood, to his deserts. Not that we affect to enumerate, classify, and duly signalise the latter-mille fois non! But neither are they to be taken for granted, to the extent of being ignored altogether. A word or two, then, on a Representative one or two of these Men and Women. "Saul" is a vigorous and highly graphic sketch of a scene between the first king of Israel and the golden-haired son of Jesse, whose harp had power to soothe and sober the moody monarch. It needs more than a single reading, of the railway reading sort, to follow out its purport; but there is, on the whole, a power and beauty in it of a less jagged outline and misty envelopment than belong to the majority of this collection. Many of its lines are fluent and musical, with a flow and music such as this:

Then I tuned my harp,-took off the lilies we twine round its chords

Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide-those sunbeams like swords! And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,

So docile they come to the pen-door, till folding be done.

They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed;
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us, so blue and so far!

Numerous passages, too, it contains of that rich picturesque genre which marks some of the poet's happiest earlier works; for example :

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock-
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree,-the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living water,-the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal-the rich dates-yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust's-flesh steeped in the pitcher; the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

Another Scriptural study, and of still greater interest if not excellence, is that entitled "An Epistle," indited in the poet's best blank verse (which at its best is very good indeed), and having for its subject Lazarus of Bethany in his resurrection-life, as seen and speculated upon by an Arab physician, "Karshish, the picker up of learning's crumbs, the not incurious in God's handiwork." The epistle is supposed to be written about the time of the Romans' advance on Jerusalem:

Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,

*

And of the passing of a mule with gourds-
"Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact-he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness-
(Far as I see) as if in that indeed

He caught prodigious import, whole results
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we too see not with his opened eyes!
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.

Which of us all, in reading the fourth gospel, has not mused in awful dreamy wonder on the looks, and ways, and words of Lazarus redivivus.? and longed to overhear from those lips that Death had kissed as his own, the secrets of that prison-house from which he so strangely had been freed, some news of that bourne from which no traveller returns? As surely as we have all thus mused and longed, shall we all be attracted to know what a poet of earnest, thoughtful, religious feeling has made of this conjectural theme. It has a psychological value of an unwonted kind.

There is another long piece in blank verse, of philosophic and religious interest, called "Cleon," which discusses the problem of life from the stand-point of an inquiring mind, unenlightened by divine revelationguessing at truth, groping in the darkness after light, daring to imagine a hereafter, some future state," "unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy."

But, no!

Zeus has not yet revealed it; and, alas!
'He must have done so-were it possible.

In a sort of post-scriptum to this letter from Cleon the poet to Protos the tyrannos, the perplexed and finally desponding seeker is made, with pregnant effect, to allude in cavalier obiter terms to "one called Paulus,” to whom Protos had despatched a messenger on some errand, to Cleon unknown and uncared for:

We have heard his [Paulus] fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him.-
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
'Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all.

"Cleon" will repay a reflective and time-taking perusal. So, on a cognate topic, or group of topics, but radically alien in style, will the polemical nondescript yclept "Bishop Blougram's Apology"—a tissue of violent contrasts and provoking incongruities-fine irony and coarse abuse, subtle reasoning and halting twaddle, the lofty and the low, the refined and the vulgar, earnestness and levity, outpoured pell-mell by the blustering yet "pawky" bishop over his wine. But what is probably the most perfect specimen of even, sustained, and lofty excellence afforded in this collection, is the dramatic fragment, "In a Balcony"-than which there are few better things in the best of its author's dramas; and that is saying more, by a great deal, than would be supposed by idle play-goers and railway-bookstall-keepers, whose gauge of excellence is the run of so many nights, and the run on so many copies. Let such as doubt Mr. Browning's possession of a real dramatic talent, listen to his speakers "In a Balcony," and note the construction and quietly markedout action of the piece; and they will surely abate their scepticism, or the avowal of it. We had intended to quote several excerpts from these scenes, but space is wanting, and the reader will of course enjoy them fifty times as much in their proper place; for to cull elegant extracts from any drama good for anything, is almost a crime against the dramatist or rather, 'tis worse than a crime, 'tis a blunder. Nor will we drag in disjecta membra from "Andrea del Sarto," painting from himself and to himself,-from "A Grammarian's Funeral," that piquant elegy on an old scholar who, the ruling passion strong in death, was heard still," through the rattle," settling the busing of 'ort and the proper basis of 'ovv, and (after he was dead up to the waist) the true "doctrine of the enclitic De”- -or from that jovial confession of "Fra Lippo Lippi," escaped from a three weeks' painting job, to overtake, in the fresh air (past midnight though), the "hurry" he has overheard from his open window, of "feet and little feet, a sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song." But it were unfair to quote no one piece entire; so here is one more than commonly fitted for popularity:

EVELYN HOPE.

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead

Sit and watch by her side an hour.
This is her bookshelf, this her bed;

She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass.

Little has yet been changed, I think—
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays thro' the hinge's chink.

Sixteen years old when she died!

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name-
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,

And now was quiet, now astir

Till God's hand beckoned unawares,

And the sweet white brow is all of her.