"As if that kings could grasp the earth,
Who from its dust began;

As if that suns could shine at night,
Or glory dwell with man.

"She told me, she had freed his soul,
Who aye did freedom love;

Who now reck'd not, were worms below,
Or ranker worms above!

"She said, the student's heart had beat
Against its prison dim;

Until she crush'd the bars of flesh,

And pour'd truth's light on him.

"She said, that they who left the hearth,
For aye in sunshine dwell;

She said, the funeral tolling brought
More joy than marriage bell!

"And as she spake, she spake less loud;
The stream resounded more:

Anon I nothing heard but waves
That wail'd along the shore."

And what didst thou say, oh my soul,

Upon that mystic strife?

I said, that Life was only Death,
That only Death was Life."

EARTH.

How beautiful is earth! my starry thoughts
Look down on it from their unearthly sphere,
And sing symphonious - Beautiful is earth!
The lights and shadows of her myriad hills;
The branching greenness of her myriad woods;
Her sky-affecting rocks; her zoning sea;
Her rushing, gleaming cataracts; her streams
That race below, the wingèd clouds on high;
Her pleasantness of vale and meadow!-

Hush!
Meseemeth through the leafy trees to ring
A chime of bells to falling waters tuned;
Whereat comes heathen Zephyrus, out of breath
With running up the hills, and shakes his hair
From off his gleesome forehead, bold and glad
With keeping blythe Dan Phoebus company;
And throws him on the grass, though half afraid;
First glancing round, lest tempests should be nigh;
And lays close to the ground his ruddy lips,

And shapes their beauty into sound, and calls
On all the petall'd flowers that sit beneath
In hiding-places from the rain and snow,
To loosen the hard soil and leave their cold
Sad idlesse, and betake them up to him.
They straightway hear his voice-

A thought did come,

And press from out my soul the heathen dream.
Mine eyes were purgèd. Straightway did I bind
Round me the garment of my strength, and heard
Nature's death-shrieking the hereafter cry,
When he o' the lion voice, the rainbow-crown'd,
Shall stand upon the mountains and the sea,
And swear by earth, by heaven's throne, and Him
Who sitteth on the throne, there shall be time
No more, no more! Then, veil'd Eternity
Shall straight unveil her awful countenance
Unto the reeling worlds, and take the place
Of seasons, years, and ages. Aye and aye
Shall be the time of day. The wrinkled heav'n
Shall yield her silent sun, made blind and white
With an exterminating light: the wind,
Unchained from the poles, nor having charge
Of cloud or ocean, with a sobbing wail
Shall rush among the stars, and swoon to death.
Yea, the shrunk earth, appearing livid pale
Beneath the red-tongued flame, shall shudder by
From out her ancient place, and leave a void.
Yet haply by that void the saints redeem'd
May sometimes stray; when memory of sin
Ghost-like shall rise upon their holy souls;
And on their lips shall lie the name of earth
In paleness and in silentness; until
Each looking on his brother, face to face,
And bursting into sudden happy tears
(The only tears undried), shall murmur-'

-"Christ!"

In 1838 and 1839 Mrs. Browning gave to the world several other poems, including the Seraphim, the Romant of the Page, and the Drama of Exile. The subject of the latter is the fall of man, or rather, to quote her own words, "the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness". Of course it is chiefly the dialogues between the erring first parents of the human race that awaken our sympathies; but the reader cannot fail to be struck with the beauty of such passages as

the farewell greeting of the spirits to the hapless fugitives, as they leave their blissful abode with the haste of conscious guilt:

Hark! the Eden trees are stirring
Soft and solemn in your hearing!
Oak and linden, palm and fir,
Tamarisk and juniper,

Each still throbbing in vibration
Since that crowning of creation
When the God-breath spake abroad,
Let us make man like to God!
And the pine stood quivering
As the awful word went by,
Like a vibrant music string
Stretched from mountain-peak to sky,
And the platan did expand

Slow and gradual, branch and head;
And the cedar's strong black shade
Fluttered brokenly and grand.

Grove and wood were swept aslant
In emotion jubilant.

Hearken, oh hearken! ye shall hearken surely
For years and years,

The noise beside you dripping coldly, purely,
Of spirit's tears.

We shall be near you in your poet-languors

What time ye vex

And wild extremes,
the desert with vain angers,
Or mock with dreams.
weary after roaming,
Death's seal is put,
shall discern the coming,
Through eyelids shut.

And when upon you,

By the foregone ye

Of Mrs. Browning's minor poems, her beautiful lines on Cowper's Grave, Lady Geraldine's Courtship, the story of a peasant poet who loves and wins an earl's daughter, the Cry of the Children, a pathetic pleading for the children of the poor toiling for their bread in unwholesome factories, and Bertha in the Lane, are the chief favourites. In the last-named poem, two orphan sisters live together; and the elder is happy in the affection of a lover, till he at length becomes estranged from

her, overcome by the superior charms of the younger girl. The elder sister, mindful of the vow she had made her dying mother, to guard and watch over Bertha, struggles hard to hide her sufferings, but "blood runs faint in womanhood", and the effort undermines her strength and wears her out. On her deathbed she acknowledges all to Bertha, and finds nothing unnatural in the transfer of her lover's affections:

When he saw thee who art best,

Past compare, and loveliest,

He but judged thee as the rest.

Then she makes the touching request:

And, dear Bertha, let me keep
On my hand this little ring,
Which at night, when others sleep,
I can still see glittering.

Let me wear it out of sight,

In the grave where it will light
All the dark up, day and night.

The Sonnets from the Portuguese are in the style of Shakespeare's sonnets, and passed at first for translations from Camoens; but nothing at all resembling them has been discovered in Portuguese literature.

While engaged in the composition of a large portion of these poems, Miss Barrett for she was not yet Mrs. Browning lived as an invalid in a darkened room, and for several years she remained in a highly precarious state of health. Convalescent at last, if not physically strong, she gave her hand to the poet Robert Browning, who took her to Italy to recruit her shattered constitution; and while residing at Florence, in 1848, she was a witness of the revolutionary outbreak in that city. This furnished the subject of her poem, Casa Guidi Windows, in which she narrates what she saw from the windows of her residence, and describes the impressions made on her by these stirring popular movements. Every line is instinct with the love of Italy and the passion for political freedom. By an allusion in this poem to her "young Florentine, not two years old", we learn that there was now a new

link to unite her at once to her husband, and to the land which they had chosen as their home.

Aurora Leigh (1856) is the most ambitious of Mrs. Browning's poems, and she herself called it "the most mature" of her works. It is the first attempt ever made to write a novel in blank verse a bold attempt, and only partially successful; for we find in it the poetical and the prosaic so strangely mixed up together that we are often mystified and irritated by the amalgamation. Aurora is the daughter of a learned English father and a Florentine mother; and on the death of the latter, four years after the child's birth, her father becomes her tutor:

My father taught me what he had learnt the best
Before he died and left me, grief and love.
And, seeing we had books among the hills,
Strong words of counselling souls confederate
With vocal pines and waters, out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men,
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says "Here I'm learned; this, I understand;
In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt."
He sent the schools to school, demonstrating
A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
While a philosopher will pass for such,

Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system.

Her father dies, and she is sent back to England, to her father's sister:

Although my father's elder by a year)

A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves

Or peradventure niggardly half-truths.

This elderly lady had seen but little of the world, for
She had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Under her aunt's care, Aurora receives a curiously assorted education, comprising languages, science, theology,