By some critics Aurora Leigh has been most extravagantly praised. In this poem, declares one writer, she has proved herself the greatest of English poetesses; another says, the greatest female poet on record. Coolerheaded judges have found that the poem possesses both great beauties and serious blemishes. The metaphysical disquisitions and rambling common-place conversations, which so largely enter into it, "have more than once reminded us", says Mr. Robert Chambers, "of the descriptions of the retreat from Moscow, where the French soldier might be seen dipping his gold cup into muddy ponds for drink, or eating the meanest viands off porcelain and silver." The plot, too, has been by many authorities pronounced to be unnatural or absurd. Though intended to be a philosophical poem, it is written at a passion-heat from beginning to end; and there is no lack of vehement denunciations, not unfrequently of doubtful justice. With all these defects, it must be conceded, that Aurora Leigh is one of the most remarkable poems of modern times. The moral it teaches is succinctly enunciated in these words: No earnest work

Of any honest creature, albeit weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand

To enlarge the sum of human actions used
For carrying out God's ends.

Mrs. E. B. Browning died in 1861.

Robert Lord Lytton.

Lord Lytton's only son, Robert Lord Lytton, published in 1855, under the name of "Owen Meredith” Clytemnestra and other Poems, followed by the Wanderer in 1859, and a poetical tale, Lucile in 1860. In 1868 appeared, under his own name, his romantic, halfByronian Chronicles and Characters, and in 1874 his Fables in Song. On the whole, we rather prefer the poems of Owen Meredith, which unite fancy with good sense, and simplicity with smoothness, to those of later

date. With one passage we have been particularly struck. A wife and mother excuses the faults of her sex by reminding us that in love and marriage women have no choice, or, to give her own words: "we women cannot choose our lot:"

But blame us women not, if some appear

Too cold at times; and some too gay and light.
Some griefs gnaw deep. Some woes are hard to bear.
Who knows the past? And who can judge us right?
Ah, were we judged by what we might have been,
And not by what we are, too apt to fall!
My little child he sleeps and smiles between

These thoughts and me. In heaven we shall know all.

In the Fables in Song, the stories, simple as they generally are, show no want of invention, and are well told; but though we have been long accustomed in fables to find birds and beasts, and even trees, conversing freely, it rather takes away our breath to read of the different parts of the engine in a steamboat caballing together against the oil, and by their conspiracy bringing about an explosion. It is likewise our opinion that the following soliloquy is at once too poetical and too philosophical for the solitary eagle who utters it:

To what end,

O Time, dost thou from bright to sable turn
The restless spheres of thy revolving hours?
Whence slide the silver twilights in between,
Dreamily shuddering? Say, what is't ye roll,
Night-wanderers mute, in mystic vapour veil'd,
That linger laden on the lone hill-tops,
And pass, like sorrows with a tale untold?
Who wrought the unimaginable wrong
Thou callest upon ruin to redress,

Thou moaning storm that roamest heaven in vain,
Triumphant never, never long subdued?
Beautiful anarch! Answer, morn and eve,
Why to your coming and departing kiss
Blush, wrapt in rosy joy, the mountains old?
What happens nighest heaven, and unbeheld,
To speed thee headlong from thy native haunts,
Wild torrent cradled in the tranquil cold?

One peculiarity of these fables is a curious blending of different styles, which almost produces the effect of a medley. There are passages which remind us of Tennyson, others of Browning, and the following lines, the reader will perceive, are quite in the early style of Wordsworth:

A little child, scarce five years old,
And blithe as bird on bough;
A little maiden, bright as gold,

And pure as new-fall'n snow.

Things seen, to her, are things unknown:
Things near are far away:

The neighbouring hamlet, next our own,
As distant as Cathay!

It must not, however, be supposed that we do not sometimes meet with fine we will even say, very fine passages in the Fables in Song; and as an example we will quote from the second volume the description of a sculptor's studio:

Large was the chamber; bathed with light serene
And silence tuned, not troubled, by the sound

Of one cool fountain tinkling in the green

Of laurel groves that girt the porches round.
And in that chamber the sole dwellers were

Ideas, clad in clear and stately shape;

Save one, a prisoner, huge, uncouth, and bare,
Hung fast in fetters, hopeless of escape,
And broken at the heart, a Marble Block.
Even as a hero, in base ambuscade
Fallen; so, fall'n, and from his native rock

Borne here in chains, the indignant Marble made
No moan; but round, in dumb remonstrance gazed;
And, gazing, saw, surprised, all round him stand
The images of gods. With right arm raised,

Jove launch'd the thunders from his loaded hand:
A light of undulating lovelinesses,

Rose foam-born Venus from the foam; and, dread
With dismal beauty, by its serpent tresses

Did sworded Perseus lift Medusa's head:
There paused a-tiptoe wing-capp'd Mercury:
Apollo, pensive smiling, linger'd here:

There stately Pallas stood, with brooding eye,
Full arm'd, and grasp'd the ægis and the spear.

Besides a number of imitations and free translations from the Italian, Danish, Servian, and other languages, Lord Lytton produced, in 1869, under the name of Orval; or, the Fool of Time, a paraphrase of the very remarkable dramatic poem, the Infernal Comedy, of the Polish poet, Count Sigismund Krasinski, who, in the early part of 1859, died at Paris. We are informed by Lord Lytton, that he himself had long contemplated a poem, based on the French Revolution, the object of which, however, "was not to depict, in historical detail, any particular series of events, but to give, if possible, imaginative forms to those abstract ideas and general conceptions, from which both the character and occasion of the events of 1789 were derived." In this work he had already made some progress, when, becoming acquainted with Count Krasinski's poem, he was struck with the curious though accidental resemblance, of his own three principal characters to the three leading personages of the Polish poet. In consequence of this discovery, he threw aside his manuscript, and undertook a paraphrase of the Infernal Comedy; replacing the Polish names of the three chief actors by the more pronounceable ones of Orval, Veronica, and Muriel. The poem is divided into five epochs, in the first two of which Orval is presented to us as a sort of Faustus, deserting his home and his young wife, Veronica, to seek unholy communion with the world of spirits; in the sequel he becomes a revolutionary chief, but finally falls a victim, together with his son Muriel, to the anarchist insurrection which he has aided in evoking. All through the piece the supernatural accompanies the action, and the spirit of the neglected Veronica, after her decease, continually hovers about her son, till he, in the last scene but one, falls struck by an anarchist ball.

Of the merits of the Polish poem we are not competent to speak; but a couple of extracts from Lord Lytton's paraphrase will show in what a masterly manner his own task has been executed. In the first, Orval, climbing a rugged mountain above a stormy

sea, in pursuit of an evil spirit by whose spells he is enthralled, pauses and soliloquizes:

Where am I?

Have they a name for men to know them by,
These desert steeps

Calpe or Caucasus,
Atlas, or utmost Thule's mountain tops
Mark'd on no mariner's chart? One thing is sure;
That never, even in dream, I trod, before,
The dreadful pavement of this dizzy path
That winds I know not where: never beheld
The broken margent of that savage sea
That in his beachèd basin, far below,
Boils like Hell's caldron; nor yon livid peak
Peering and disappearing through those gaps
Of restless cloud, tormented by the wind.
How horribly the huge stone's solid bulk
Seems hovering in the gust above my head!

Already have I cross'd the groaning tract
Of thunder, that with dense blue drench blots all
The blighted plain out. Far beneath me, borne
About these fang'd and crooked crags, I hear
Faint noises only, as ever and anon

Between black sullen shores of gulfy cloud
There runs, and breaks, and falls, a pallid sea
Of momentary fire. Still on! still on!
The few lean firs, and solitary pines,

That struggled, few and fewer, as on I pass'd,
To keep pace with me, all have fallen away
Nature's self cried "Halt!

I can no further go!" Yet on went I,

And still must on, still on, while aught is left,
Above me where man's foot may tread. Still on!

The moral degradation of woman. one of the earliest consequences of the anarchist triumph-revolts the mind of Orval, and obtrudes itself on him as a menace and a foretaste of new and ineffable evils. In his despair he exclaims:

O women! women,

Whom we have loved, and honour'd, ay! and served,
Loved with the loyal heart of honest man,
That fears no falsehood where he trusts all truth!
Honour'd on knightly knee, with tender homage,
Half deified with holy poesies,

And held unsullied in the secretest shrine

Of things divine within us! . . . Served, ah God!