only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit. Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room-a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet." This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereave ment and pain-even though it was pain triWith marriage and Italy a new It became her adopted country umphed over. life began. And now I come, my Italy, My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills, And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hillfarms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words. Oh! to be in England now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough- That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism-alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life-reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic-touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears. They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so "With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes: I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Or: A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky II "MR. KENYON," wrote Miss Barrett, was with me yesterday . . . . he accused me of writing a certain paper in the Athenæum, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, 'You diplomatic!'” Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner that is not enough—but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence. There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis-in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency, to use a colloquial expressionthat she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness. To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote φωνάντα συνετοῖσιν on his Odes he meant that |