VII. Among the Rocks.-The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the white-breasted sea-lark. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.

She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:

66

If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for
you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!

Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!”

The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. Beside the Drawing-Board. She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

"Drew and learned and loved again,

While fast the happy moments flew,
Till beauty mounted into his brain

And on the finger which outvied

His art, he placed the ring that's there,

Still by fancy's eye descried,

In token of a marriage rare :

For him on earth his art's despair,

For him in heaven his soul's fit bride."

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: "the worth of flesh and blood at last!" There's something more than beauty in a hand. Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:

"Shall earth and the cramped moment-space
Yield the heavenly crowning grace?
Now the parts and then the whole ! 1
Who art thou with stinted soul

And stunted body, thus to cry

'I love, shall that be life's strait dole?
I must live beloved or die!'

This peasant hand that spins the wool
And bakes the bread, why lives it on,
Poor and coarse with beauty gone,

What use survives the beauty? Fool!"

She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.

IX. On Deck. - In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love has been. There's a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit. But her heart, after all, must have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circumstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored? of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life,

All sense

1 "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.”. Vogler.

-Abl

and a life that was love. Could one touch of such iove for her come in a word or look of his, why, he might turn into her illfavoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead of joy.

A TALE.

(The Epilogue to 'The Two Poets of Croisic.')

The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet, and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize, when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue for himself,

and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize. If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket when his statue's built tell the gazer 'twas a cricket helped his crippled lyre; that when one string which made "love" sound soft, was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant and duly uttered, "Love, Love, Love," whene'er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?

CONFESSIONS.

The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love, which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright. Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession, using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside to illustrate his story.

The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.

RESPECTABILITY,

By the title of the poem is meant respectability according to the standard of the beau monde.

The speaker is a woman, as is indicated in the third stanza. The monologue is addressed to her lover,

Stanza I shows that they have disregarded the conventionalities

of the beau monde. Had they conformed to them, many precious months and years would have passed before they found out the world and what it fears. One cannot well judge of any state of things while in it. It must be looked at from the outside.

Stanza 2. The idea is repeated in a more special form in the first four verses of the stanza; and in the last four their own nonconventional and Bohemian life is indicated.

Stanza 3, vv. 1-4. The speaker knows that this beau monde does not proscribe love, provided it be in accordance with the proprieties which it has determined upon and established. v. 5. "The world's good word!" a contemptuous exclamation: what's the world's good word worth? "the Institute!" (the reference is, of course, to the French Institute), the Institute ! with all its authoritative, dictatorial learnedness! v. 6. Guizot and Montalembert were both members of the Institute, and being thus in the same boat, Guizot conventionally receives Montalembert. vv. 7 and 8. These two unconventional Bohemian lovers, strolling together at night, at their own sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the "respectables" do congregate; and the woman says to her companion, with a humorous sarcasm, "Put forward your best foot!" that is, we must be very correct passing along here in this brilliant light.

By the two lovers are evidently meant George Sand (the speaker) and Jules Sandeau, with whom she lived in Paris, after she left her husband, M. Dudevant. They took just such unconventional night-strolls together, in the streets of Paris.

HOME-THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD.

An Englishman, in some foreign land, longs for England, now that April's there, with its peculiar English charms; and then will come May, with the white-throat and the swallows, and, most delightful of all, the thrush, with its rapturous song! And the buttercups, far brighter than the gaudy melon-flower he has before him!

ANDREA DEL SARTO.

(Called "The Faultless Painter.")

In this monologue, "the faultless painter" (Andrea Senza Errori, as he was surnamed by the Italians) is the speaker. He addresses his worthless wife, Lucrezia, upon whom he weakly dotes, and for whom he has broken faith with his royal patron, Francis I. of France, in order that he might meet her demands for money, to be spent upon her pleasures. He laments that he has fallen below himself as an artist, that he has not realized the possibilities of his genius, half accusing, from the better side of his nature, and half excusing, in his uxoriousness, the woman who has had no sympathy with him in the high ideals which, with her support, he might have realized, and thus have placed himself beside Angelo and Rafael. "Had the mouth then urged 'God and the glory! never care for gain. The present by the future, what is that? Live for fame, side by side with Angelo - Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three !' I might have done it for you."

In his 'Comparative Study of Tennyson and Browning,'1 Professor Edward Dowden, setting forth Browning's doctrines on the subject of Art, remarks:

"The true glory of art is, that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts to God Himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble or in color, or in music, his ideal, has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In Pippa Passes' the regeneration of the young sculptor's work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, 'Andrea del Sarto,' has been devoted to the exposition of this thought. Andrea is the faultless painter'; no line of his drawing ever goes

1

Originally a lecture, delivered in 1868, and published in 'Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art' (Dublin), 5th series, 1869; afterwards revised, and included in the author's Studies in Literature, 1789-1877.' It is one of the best criticisms of Browning's poetry that have yet been produced. Every Browning student should make a careful study of it.