Action in drama ought constantly to be visible and various. In Strafford, and the rest, with the possible exception of noble Luria, the real performance is of thought, not deeds. The interchange of thoughts themselves proceeds, not between two or more persons, but between successive mental emotions or moods of one. Each of the pair affecting to converse might ordinarily to all effects and purposes be alone on the stage. The propensity to looking exclusively within is no less answerable for the kindred evil of carelessness, if not contempt, of public opinion. No English poet has ever equally affronted his readers with spasmodic diction, with a tangle, by no means always significant, of ragged rhythm and random rhymes.

There I have discharged my critical conscience; and if there be any other shortcoming of Browning's, let it be massed with the rest. At all events we may be sure that the total indictment will not counterbalance the depth-not less in Caliban than in Christmas Eve and Easter Day-the thoroughness, the grandeur of purpose even when he seems to be revelling in horror-as in the Inn Album, Ivan Ivanovitch, Forgiveness-the precision, the eloquence, the scorn of meanness, the generosity, the something neither wit exactly, nor exactly wisdom, which is Mr. Sludge, the Medium '. How, from a crabbed, jagged stanza, the picture of

a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,19

leaps forth, as if illuminated by a flash of lightning, to subside back the next moment into darkness! How he can suffuse a sombre reverie, like La Saisiaz, with a halo of pathos! How abruptly, yet naturally, in his narratives beauty and deformity, guilt and innocence, interlace, as a Pippa passes, with her happy lark-like songs, and as happy

rags, by the villa which harbours squalid adultery and murder, with remorse as squalid !

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Nowhere in the society of his verse is there room for tedium. We feel his meditations to be better company than talk. One whose friendship I have prized for more than forty years, as I hope and believe he has mine, once observed to me that reading Browning is like dram-drinking'. It enslaves; and I am willing to believe that it might scarcely be for the 'good either of poets, or of their readers, that many sources of similar intoxicants should be set running. Whether fortunately or not, however, the danger of temptation at any rate is remote. Such a poet-soul as Browning's is reared not often or easily. We may well apply to himself his own account of a poet's birth :

Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare ;
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend-few flowers awaken there;
Quiet in its cleft broods-what the after-age

Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.20

The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Six vols. Smith, Elder & Co., 1868 :-Balaustion's Adventure, 1871. Prince HohenstielSchwangau, 1871. Fifine at the Fair, 1872. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 1873. The Inn Album, 1875. Aristophanes' Apology, 1875. Pacchiarotto, &c., 1876. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, 1877. La Saisiaz, 1878. The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878. Dramatic Idyls, 1879. Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880. Jocoseria, 1883. Ferishtah's Fancies, 1884. Parleyings with Certain People, 1887. Asolando, 1890. 1 Parleyings with Certain People, iii, With Christopher Smart, pp. 79-95.

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2 The Two Poets of Croisic, Prelude, p. 85.

3 The Lost Leader (Dramatic Lyrics), Poet. Works, vol. iii, p. 79. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, ibid., pp. 93-4.

5 The Guardian Angels; a Picture at Fano, ibid., p. 215.

Prospice, Poet. Works, vol. vi, pp. 152–3.

The Flower's Name, stanzas 3 and 5 (Garden Fancies, Dramatic Lyrics), Poet. Works, vol. iii, pp. 87-8.

• Hervé Riel (Pacchiarotto, &c.), st. 10, p. 128.

• Parting at Morning (Dramatic Lyrics), Poet. Works, vol. iii, p. 107. 10 Evelyn Hope, st. 7 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid., p. 112.

11 By the Fire-side, st. 39 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid., p. 179.

12 Ibid., st. 25 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid., p. 176.

13 Abt Vogler (After he has been playing upon the Instrument of his Invention), stanzas 7 and 12 (Dramatis Personae), Poet. Works, vol. vi, pp. 95-6 and 98.

14 A Grammarian's Funeral, Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe (Dramatic Romances), Poet. Works, vol. iv, pp. 270-5. 15 Martin Relph (Dramatic Idyls, 1879), pp. 4-5.

16 Muléykeh (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880), p. 59.

17 Clive (ibid.), pp. 9-42.

16 The Pied Piper of Hamelin, st. 13 (Dramatic Romances), Poet. Works, vol. iv, p. 234.

19 De Gustibus, st. 2 (Dramatic Lyrics), Poet. Works, vol. iii, p. 143. 20 Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, Epilogue, p. 149.

ALFRED TENNYSON

1809-1892

THE poets-not only the great, but all the true-how each stands alone! Search the whole Golden Book; no double will be found for him with whom the register for the present closes; no real fellow for Alfred Tennyson! The character of his genius was so unexpected that the general public took long to appreciate it. The delay was a tribute to its originality. To a few elect it was obvious and heavenly. I envy their joyous surprise. Mighty Wordsworth, in the opinion of a younger generation, had declined to prosing, however wisely. Hellenic Landor raved. Rogers was antediluvian; and poor Leigh Hunt had never counted. The giants of the past were buried in their past, when a chant as exquisite as theirs, and at least as new and strange, rose into the dead air. To a brilliant, youthful brotherhood it must have been as when Christabel or Childe Harold soared above the stagnant mists half a century earlier.

The initiated were enraptured with all. The present generation discriminates. To a certain extent it has lost touch with much of the philosophy of The Two Voices, The Palace of Art, The Vision of Sin. It has outgrown the gladness, the sweet limpid sorrow, of the May Queen and its sequels, the Early Victorian elegance of the Miller's and Gardener's Daughters; even Locksley Hall the First, with its play of panoramic heart-flutterings. Though scarcely one discarded favourite but has lines, words, to

set the pulse beating faster, the Lilians, Isabels, Madelines, Adelines, Margarets, and Eleanors, Mermen and Mermaidens, Orianas, Lords of Burleigh, and Ladies Clare and Clara, elicit smiles now instead of emotion. A large part, however, is fully as fresh as when first it danced into daylight. Custom cannot stale the radiant humours of Recollections of the Arabian Nights:

When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free

In the silken sail of infancy,

The tide of time flowed back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old ;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.1

The wild swan's death-hymn may be music only; but such music!

At first to the ear

The warble was low, and full, and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,

Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;

As when a mighty people rejoice

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd

Thro' the open gates of the city afar,

To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star,
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,