1871. 'The Illustrated Magazine,' March 15, 1871, pp. 359-364. Robert Browning, M.A. [With wood-cut portrait, after a Photo: by Charles Watkins.]-C. 1871. Athenæum,' June 10, reviews R. H. Hutton's Essays, Theological and Literary,' 2 vols, Strahan and Co., 1871 (-C), and differs from some of his opinions on Browning, "whose poetry, more than that of any other poet, requires a critical introduction and even an explanatory commentary "—which, let us hope, the Browning Society will provide.

1871. Primitiæ,' one vol. small 8vo, pp. i-viii. 1-148: printed for private circulation. Dublin: Hodges, Foster and Co., 1871. Essays by the Students of Alexandra College, Dublin,' pp. 1-37. 'Browning as a Preacher." By Miss E. Dickinson West. At end, "The rest of this essay is omitted, being too long." Afterwards reprinted in full in 'The Dark Blue Magazine,' Oct. and Nov. 1871.-C. Miss West is the daughter of the Dean of St. Patrick's. 1871. 'Robert Browning's First Poem.' By Richard Herne Shepherd. The St. James's Magazine,' August, 1871, vol. vii. new series, pp. 485-496. An account of Pauline, with copious extracts, which were submitted to Mr. Browning, and printed by his express permission. This paper was written, though not published, in 1867, before the reinstatement of Pauline in the new edition of the author's collected works, and was intended to form one of the chapters of a volume entitled Unknown Writings of Well-known Authors,' which never saw the light, and the greater part of which has now been superseded or forestalled.-S.

1871. 'Athenæum,' Aug. 12, p. 199-200, rev. Balaustion's Adventure.

1871. Contemporary Review,' Sept. 1871, pp. 284-296. Mr. Browning's new poem [Balaustion], by Matthew Browne [an assumed name].-C. 1871. G. A. Simcox. 'Academy,' Sept. 1, on Balaustion.

1871. Sidney Colvin. 'Fortnightly Review,' Oct. 1, on Balaustion. 1871.

The Times,' Oct. 6. A very long review of Balaustion's Adventure. The poem “is a garden of delights to those whose taste has been educated to appreciate its theme."-C.

1871. 'Standard Penny Readings, &c.,' edited and prefaced by Tom Hood. New edition, 3 Parts. Moxon, Son and Co., 1871. I. pp. 1-6, How they brought the Good News, &c. II. pp. 83-88, Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis. III. An Incident of the French Camp.-C.

1871. Mr. Browning.- Essays, Theological and Literary,' by Richard Holt Hutton. London: Strahan and Co., 1871, vol. ii. pp. 190-247. [A reprint of the article of 1869. ?]-S. A somewhat hard and grudging review, not realising what a help and power Browning is to the Broad Church School, and all Believers. 1871. 'Our Living Poets: An Essay in Criticism.' By H. Buxton Forman. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1871. (The Fourth Chapter, on Robert Browning, extends from pp. 103-152.)-S. Not worth much.

1871. Robert Browning's latest Poem, Balaustion's Adventure, including a Transcript from Euripides. The St. James's Magazine,' October, 1871, vol. viii. new series, pp. 83-91.-S.

1871. The Examiner,' Dec. 23, 1871, pp. 1267-8, rev. Mr. Browning's Saviour of Society.-C.

1871. ‘Athenæum,' Dec. 23, p. 827-8, rev. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 1871. Balaustion's Adventure. Review by Sidney Colvin, in the 'Fortnightly Review,' October 1871, vol. x. new series, pp. 478-490.-S.

"Mr. Browning. . takes hold of the play [Euripides's Alkestis, or a husband lying at the point of death, and his wife informd that her one chance of saving him is by dying in his place]; translates it; and since so many observations suggest themselves to his vivacious genius as he goes along... and since one thing may have so many sides... he invents a mouthpiece for his translation and commentary in the shape of a girl who is made to recite the play in her own character, together with the circumstances of a previous recital she has given of it,-such circumstances constituting the romance or adventure upon which her interest as a figure depends (p. 479). . . From the point of vie BROWNING, 2.

scholarship, Mr. Browning's translation must, in the main, be confessed a
model of facile felicity" p. 45.

1871. Browning as a Preacher. By Miss E. Dickinson West. Two Papers.
'The Dark Blue,' October and November, 1871, vol. ii. pp. 171-84, 305-19. —S.
**Browning's poetry has one characteristic, which gives its teaching peculiar
influence over contemporary min is I mean the way in which, all the while
being perfectly free from egoism, it brings its readers in some inexplicable way
into a contact with the real self of the author, closer and more direct than that
which we have with any other poets through their writings. Once you succeed
in construing the complicated thinking and feeling of this or that passage of
his, you feel, not that you are seeing something that a man has made, but that
you are in the immediate presence of the man himself. I know of no other
writings except J. H. Newman's having this peculiarity to such a degree. ...
and the knowledge that there is the real living mind of another man speaking
to your mind, gives a restful sense of reality, that is the starting-point of all
belief and of all motive to action. Surely any one who has received this from
Browning, must feel as if there would be a miserable ingratitude in the sort of
criticism which should carp at his poetry for its lack of polish in style, or pret-
tiness in ideas. Browning is greater than his art, and the best work which his
poetry does, is to bring you into his own presence (p. 174-5). . . . Browning
brings from out of his own individuality something which he did not receive
from his age, and which he offers to it as a gift... some of the intense earnest-
ness of Puritanism, and the strenuousness of effort which gave heroic grandeur
to the old asceticism. . . The idea of a struggle and a wrestling in which the
wills of men are to be engaged-the central idea of early and mediæval Chris-
tian thought—is recognised fully and distinctly by Browning in all that he has
written. He holds that men's business in this world is labour and strife and
conquest, and not merely free unconscious growth and harmonious develop-
ment... his chief point of difference from the majority of modern poets, is his
being emphatically the poet of the will (p. 176-7)... it is chiefly in the human
impulses which in the world of sense are never satisfied, that he considers the
subjective evidence of the spirit world to lie (p. 177-8). . . having taken all
the higher human impulses and aspirations to be evidences whereby we discern
an order of things extending beyond the world of which sense is cognizant, he
becomes able to conceive of the life that now is, as a condition, not of men
waiting and watching-not as a struggle only on the defensive against evil, in
which safety is the only kind of success sought for-but as a state in which
growth and progress are to be things of the present-in which the struggle is
to be for acquisition and not alone for defence (p. 178). . . . All human feel-
ings and aspirations become precious in Browning's eyes, not for what they are,
but for what they point to. He becomes capable of seeing a grandeur (potential
though not actual) in human aims whose aspect would be, to careless, unsym-
pathizing eyes, ridiculous rather than sublime (p. 179). He, more than any
other poet, has ever present with him these two ideas: that the world-the
material and the human-contains what is 'very good'; and also that 'the
fashion of this world passeth away.' His noble christianised Platonism takes
'all partial beauty as a pledge of beauty in its plenitude'. . . The earth is to
him God's ante-chamber... He does not image to himself the life after death
as a home, in the sense of a state that shall be rested in, and never exchanged
for a higher. He conceives of it as differing from the life that now is, not in
permanency, but in elevation and in increase of capacities. And the earth has
its own especial glory, which he will not overlook, of being first of an infinite
series of ascending stages, showing even now, in the beauty and love that is
abroad in it, the tokens of the visitings of God's free spirit (p. 180) . . . it may

be that the feeling gained by Browning's onward gaze of expectation is higher, even if considered purely as an artist's feeling, than that of the wistful pathos that comes to other poets through their sense of a seeking baffled alike behind and before. And it may be that our inability to recognise it as higher, is because of our having, although contemporaries with Browning, lagged

1 Among the very best Articles written on 'Browning.'—E. Dowden.

1.

behind him in thought and aspiration; and not having as yet attained to the conception towards which his poetry reaches in its beautiful imperfect grandeur, of a Christianity and Art-nowhere destructive of each other-two parts of one great Revelation.. p. 316. What Browning seeks is truth absolute, not relative; and if he thinks he has got hold of the minutest particle of that, it is to him as a thing indestructible by any mass of contradictions; and it suffices to him as a sure earnest of the rest. His own heart's instinctive conviction of a law of love is out of the reach of whatever 'evil dreams' Nature may lend, and does not need to concern itself with analogies of her waste and destruction (p. 317). . . one of the aspects of Mr. Browning's preaching [is] its stern moral lessons, and its peculiar downrightness of enforcing them. As poet of the Will, he has words of unsparing condemnation to bestow on such sins as failure 'through weak endeavour'. There is an earnest severity in The Statue and the Bust, and in his Sordello-terriblest of tragedies, inasmuch as it depicts the deterioration of a soul. I gladly cease from the attempt to write little definitions of the poetry which I would rather feel indefinitely, and grow into increasingly."-E. Dickinson West. [An admirable essay.]

1872. Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, p. 27. "543. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. . . . Miss A. M. Lea."

'From street to street he piped advancing,

And step by step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser,

Into which all plunged and perished.'-R. Browning.

Miss Anna Lea (now Mrs. Merritt) is an American artist settled in England. This picture of hers, 3 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 6, has been alterd since it was exhibited; all the background repainted, changed and improved. It now belongs to Mr. C. Kegan Paul. The earliest English version of the story is Verstegan's, 1605.

1872. Mr. Browning's Balaustion. 'Edinburgh Review,' January, 1872 (vol. cxxxv. pp. 221-249).-S.

[With

1872. 'Illustrated News,' Jan. 13, on Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 1872. G. A. Simcox. 'Academy,' Jan. 15, on Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 1872. Once a Week,' Feb. 17, 1872, pp. 164-167. Robert Browning. humorous full-length of R. B. in character of the Pied Piper.]—C. 1872. Mr. Browning's New Poem [by Richard Herne Shepherd].-' Echo,' Thursday, June 6, 1872. A notice of Fifine at the Fair, then newly published.-S.

1872. F. Wedmore, in 'Academy,' July 1, on Fifine at the Fair.

1872. The Guardian,' Sept. 25, p. 1215-16, reviews Fifine at the Fair unfavourably, contrasting it with Pippa Passes, which the reviewer likes.

1872. Septimius.' A Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2nd ed. London: Henry S. King & Co., 65, Cornhill. 1872. [Preface signed Una Hawthorne :-last paragraph,]“My earnest thanks are due to Mr. Robert Browning for his kind assistance, and advice in interpreting the manuscript, otherwise so difficult to me."-C.

1872. The Fleshly School of Poetry and other Phenomena of the Day.' By Robert Buchanan. Strahan & Co. . 1872. "To my thinking, there is no grander passage in literature than that tremendous scene between Ottilia and her paramour, in Pippa Passes: no one accuses the author of that, and of the Ring and the Book, of neglecting love or overlooking the body; and yet I do daily homage to the genius of Robert Browning." See too p. 1 & 43. 1873. George Macdonald, LL.D., on Browning's Christmas-Eve, in 'The Day of Rest, an Illustrated Journal for Sunday Reading,' Jan. 18 and 25, 1873. The verse is full of life and vigour, flagging never. Where, in several parts, the exact meaning is difficult to reach, this results chiefly from the dramatic rapidity and condensation of the thoughts. The argumentative power is indeed wonderful; the arguments themselves powerful in their simplicity, and embodied in words of admirable force. The poem is full of pathos and humour, full of beauty and grandeur, earnestness and truth."-C.

66

1873. Temple Bar,' Feb. 1873, pp. 315-328. Fifine at the Fair, and Robert Browning.-C. A fairly helpful review.

1873. Contemporary Review,' June, 1873, pp. 83-106. Signed, ‘A. Orr.' A review of Red Cotton Night-cap Country.-C.

1873. 'St. Paul's Magazine,' June, 1873, pp. 680-699. July, 1873, pp. 49-66. Signed, ‘E. J. Hasell.' Ön ‘Euripides in Modern English—Browning's Balaustion.”—C. 1873. 'Daily News,' May 5, p. 5, reviews Red Cotton Night-cap Country: thinks its theme and motive outside the sphere of true and healthy art, but does justice to the poem's power, pathos, and strange vague mystical charm. 1873. ‘Athenæum,' May 10, rev. Red Cotton Night-cap Country. 1873. G. A. Simcox. 6 Academy,' June 2, on Red Cotton Night-cap Country. 1873. 'Illustrated London News,' June 21, on Red Cotton Night-cap Country, on Devey's Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets,' and the odd classification in it—which puts Browning with Goldsmith and Thomson, &c. 1873. A Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets,' by J. Devey, M.A. of the Inner Temple. London: E. Moxon, Son & Co., 1873. The chapter on Browning, which closes the book, occupies pp. 376-421.-S.

On

1873. Master-Spirits.' By Robert Buchanan. Henry S. King & Co., 1873.
pp. 89-109 is a revized reprint of the Athenæum' Reviews of the Ring and
the Book in Dec. 1869, and March 1870.1 It ends, "Mr. Browning exhibits,—
to a great extent in all his writings, but particularly in this work—a wealth of
intellect and a perfection of spiritual insight which we have been accustomed
to find in the pages of Shakspeare, and in those pages only. His fantastic
intellectual feats, his verbosity, his power of quaint versification, are quite
other matters. The one great and patent fact is, that, with a faculty in our
own time at least unparalleled, he manages to create beings of thoroughly human
fibre; he is just without judgment, without pre-occupation, to every being so
created, and he succeeds, without a single didactic note, in stirring the soul of
the spectator with the concentrated emotion and spiritual exaltation which
heighten the soul's stature in the finest moments of life itself." See p. 95 above.
The following poem has been sent me as by Robert Buchanan, and as in his
'Faces on the Wall;' but it is not in those containd in his 'Poetical Works,'
1874, ii. 337-347:
"ROBERT BROWNING.

"Bearded like some strong shipman, with a beam
Of grey orbs glancing upward at the sky,
O friend, thou standest, pondering thy theme,
And watching while the troublous days blow by
Their cloudy signs and portents; then thine eye
Falleth, and reading with poetic gleam

The human lineaments that round thee lie,
Peers to the soul, and softens into dreams.
O dweller in the winds and waves of life,
Reader of living faces foul and fair,
No nobler mariner may mortal meet!

4

8

Stedfast and sure thou movest thro' the strife,
Knowing the signs and symbols of the air,

12

14

Yet gentle as the dews about thy feet.”

1873. Living Voices.' Selections chiefly from Recent Poetry with a Preface by His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. Strahan and Co., 56 Ludgate Hill, London, 1873. pp. 96-8. In a year. pp. 213-16. How they brought the good

news. pp. 217-18. Incident of the French Camp.-C.

1873. Fly Leaves.' By C. S. Calverley, author of 'Verses and Translations.' 3rd. ed. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co. London: Bell & Daldy, 1873. pp. 113-120. "The Cock and the Bull,' a Parody on The Ring and the

Book.-C.

1874. Contemporary Review,' May, 1874. pp. 934-965. Mr. Browning's Place in Literature,' by A. Orr. [Mrs. Sutherland Orr.]-C.

1 It is headed "Browning's Masterpiece, The Ring and the Book."

1874. The Muses of May Fair.' By H. Cholmoudly Pennell. London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1874. pp. 60-2. "A Likeness (Extract). p. 63. Song, 'Nay, but you, who do not love her.' p. 64. Youth and Art' (Extract). — C. 1875. J. A. Symonds. 'Academy,' April 17, 1875, rev. Aristophanes' Apology. 1875. Athenæum,' Nov. 27, pp. 701-2, on The Inn Album... “we rank The Inn Album beyond The Ring and the Book. To us it seems almost equal to Pippa Passes.

1875. 'Athenæum,' April 17, pp. 513-14, rev. Aristophanes' Apology.

1875. J. A. Symonds. 'Academy,' Nov. 27, on The Inn Album. (Against it.) 1875. The Times,' Oct. 4, rev. Aristophanes' Apology.-C.

1875. A. C. Swinburne. Introduction to 'The Works of George Chapman Poems and Minor Translations.' With an Introduction by Algernon Charles Swinbare. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1875, pp. 14-19. Pages 17-19 are on Sordello:-"Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity, is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the slowness of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity. . . the rate of his thought is to that of another man's, as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon (p. xiv). . Coleridge defined the style of Propertius as 'hard, not obscure,' this is equally true in the main of Sordello (p. xv).... The best parts of this poem also belong, in substance always, and sometimes in form, to the class of 'monodramas' or soliloquies of the spirit; a form to which the analytic genius of Mr. Browning leads him ever as by instinct to return (p. xviii). . . the very essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method. . . is such as implies above all other things the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity—a faculty of spiritual illumination, rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its central object, by way of direct and vivid illustration, every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing (p. xix).'

1875. McCrie, George.1 "The Religion of our Literature Essays upon Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson,' &c. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875.-S.

1875. The Guardian,' June 9, on Aristophanes' Apology.-C.

1875. The Times,' Oct. 16, p. 4, col. 4, on Wit and Humour,' by the late genial editor of Punch' (Shirley Brooks), (Bradbury, Agnew & Co, London, 1875). "Gladstone Unmasked' is so clever a parody of The Spanish Cloister that Mr. Browning himself must be almost inclined to forgive it."-C.

1875. Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters.' Edited by Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart. In Two Volumes. London: Macmillan and Co., 1875. Contains passim many interesting particulars of Macready's intercourse with Browning and of his production of the two plays of Strafford

1875.

and A Blot in the Scutcheon.-S.

The Guardian,' Dec. 1, on The Inn Album: strongly against it.

1876. Church Quarterly Review,' July, on 'Scepticism of the Day-Matthew Arnold,' quotes A Death in the Desert, on p. 296; and on p. 303, the five last stanzas of Gold Hair, a Legend of Pornic.

1 This feeble and pretentious religionist understands Browning's glorious Invocation to his wife: "O Lyric Love, half angel, and half bird," in the Ring and the Book, to apply to Christ! Though Lyric Love is here a quality personified, it seems to be so interchangeably with Christ. This is the interpretation we attach to the lines, though we have heard that some interpreters have actually considered them to be addressed to his wife!" p. 87.-F.