between his work and the varieties of nature issuing in poetry, false under whatever form, which shows a thing, not as it is to mankind generally, nor as it is to the particular describer, but as it is supposed to be for some unreal neutral mood, midway between both and of value to neither, and living its brief minute simply through the indolence of whoever accepts it or his incapacity to denounce it as a cheat.

"An absolute vision is not for this world, but we are permitted a continual approximation to it, every degree of which in the individual, provided it exceed the attainment of the masses, must procure him a clear advantage. Did the poet ever attain to a higher platform than where he rested and exhibited the result? Did he know more than he spoke of? With respect to Shelley, as well as some other few illustrious examples, the unmistakable quality of the verse would be evidence enough, under usual circumstances, not only of the kind and degree of the intellectual but of the moral constitution. . . . In conjunction with noble and rare powers came the subordinate power of delivering these attained results to the world in an embodiment of verse more closely answering to, and indicative of, the process of the informing spirit with a diction more adequate to the task in its natural and acquired richness, its material colour, and spiritual transparency-the whole being moved by, and suffused with, a music at once of the soul and the sense, expressive both of an external might of sincere passion and an internal fitness and consonancy than can be attributed to any other writer among us. Such was the spherical poetical faculty of Shelley, as its own self-sacrificing central light, radiating equally through immaturity and accomplishment, through many fragments and occasional completion, reveals it to a competent judgment.

But the acceptance of this book by the public has been retarded by certain objections which cast us back on the evidence of biography, even with Shelley's poetry in our hand. The misapprehension of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy; and the interval between his operation and the general perceptible effect of it is no greater, less indeed, than in many other departments of great human effort.

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The experience of Shelley was peculiarly unfortunate that the disbelief in him as a man even preceded disbelief in him as a writer; the misconstruction of his moral nature preparing the way for the misconstruction of his intellectual labour. The doubts, therefore, arising from such a question required to be set at rest, as they were effectually by those

early authentic notices of Shelley's career, and the corroborative accompaniment of his letters, in which not only the main purity of his life, but the purity and beauty of many of the processes which had conduced to them, were made apparent enough for the general reader's purpose-whoever lightly condemned Shelley first on the evidence of reviews and gossip, as lightly acquitting him now, on that of memoirs and correspondence-a biography composed in harmony with the present general disposition to have faith in him, yet not shrinking from a candid statement of all ambiguous passages through a reasonable confidence-in the perfection of his character according to the poor limits of our humanity.

"Nor will men persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity those passionate impatient struggles of a boy towards distant love and truth-crude convictions of boyhood conveyed in imperfect and inapt forms of speech-for such things all boys have been pardoned.

A Divine Being has Himself said that a word against the Son of Man shall be forgiven, while a word against the Spirit of God (implying a general deliberate preference of perceived evil to perceived good) shall not be forgiven to a man.

"I shall say what I think-had Shelley lived, he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians: his very instinct for helping the weaker side, his very hate of hate

which at first mistranslated itself into delirious' Queen Mab would have notes and the like, would have got clear-sighted by exercise. house a The preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the cristian.

dead to bury their dead: already he had attained to a profession of a worship of the Spirit within.'

"In Shelley the world has a Titan of genius, murmuring in divine music his human ignorance through his very thirst for knowledge the tragic cutting short of life perpetuated into sins, such faults as, under happier circumstances, would have been left behind.

"Shelley's noblest and predominant characteristic is as subjective artist: His simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films, for the connection of each with each, than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge: proving how, as he says:

"The spirit of the worm within the sod,

In love and worship blend with God.''

It is because I have long held these opinions in assurance and gratification that I catch at the opportunity offered to

me of expressing them here. It was the dream of my boyhood to render signal service to his fame and memory."

This text of Browning's Essay on Shelley may be found in the Cambridge Edition of Browning; the exact text as given here is from a copy of that edition issued by the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. (Mifflin and Co.).

CHAPTER III

"MEN AND WOMEN"

Poems written in Italy-Dedicated to Mrs. BrowningExpression of purposes of Art, Music, Love, AspirationChristian Mysticism-Christian Apologetics-Israelitish method of combating mental trouble-Faculty of imagination-Mesmerism - Ideal of complete man as knowledge seeker-Transcendentalism-Adventure of the intuitionist-Human isolation of spirit-Intoxication of spiritual ideas-Last word to E. B. B.Gratitude for human love, thankfulness for human companionshipPersonal confession by the fireside.

IN 1855 a collection of poems with the title "Men and Women" was published.

Volumes I. and II. comprise the work of Browning from 1855 to the death of his wife, and end with his tribute to her and what she had meant to him. In a letter to her he had referred to his habit, after seeing her, of sitting down to add the "one word more " to carry on the subject of interest that had been occupying their minds : so the volumes of "Men and Women" went out to the world seven years before her death with the old "One Word More: To E. B. B."

These poems and the Essay on Shelley represent his mind and soul interest for the five years after "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" was published, and are mainly of Italian atmosphere.

Volume I. of "Men and Women" contained: "A Lovers' Quarrel ""Love Among the Ruins"; "Evelyn Hope"; Up at a Villa-Down in the City"; "A Woman's Last Word"; Fra Lippo Lippi";""A Toccata of Galuppi's"; "By the Fireside"; "Any Wife to

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Any Husband"; "An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician " "Mesmerism"; "A Serenade at the Villa"; My Star"; "Instans Tyrannus"; "A Pretty Woman "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"; "Respectability"; "A Light Woman"; "The Statue and the Bust"; "Love in a Life"; "Life in a Love"; "How it Strikes a Contemporary"; "The Last Ride Together"; "The Patriot: An Old Story"; "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"; "Bishop Blougram's Apology"; "Memorabilia."

Volume II. contained : Andrea del Sarto (called the Faultless Painter)"; "Before"; After"; "In Three Days"; "In a Year"; "Old Pictures in Florence"; "In a Balcony"; "Saul" (of which the first part had been published in No. 7 of "Bells and Pomegranates," 1846; in that the poem ended at Section 9, in 1855 was added the Sections 10 to 19); "De Gustibus"; "Women and Roses"; "Protus"; "Holy Cross Day"; "The Guardian Angel: A Picture at Fano"; "Cleon"; "The Twins"; "Popularity"; "The Heretic's Tragedy : A Middle-Age Interlude"; "Two in the Campagna "A Grammarian's Funeral"; "One Way of Love"; Transcendentalism"; "Misconceptions"; "One Word More To E. B. B."

The biographies by Vasari supply the groundwork of the art poems, and although, as Miss Barrett reminded him, Vasari is not the textbook of the world, these poems are so deeply instructive that they (as there are so many art lovers in the world) appealed direct and beyond the lives of the people specified. In these poems collateral terms do not embarrass; it matters not who the "Hulking Tom " of "Fra Lippo Lippi" may have been the art emotion goes direct to the general art soul, from the merry soul in the cowl of frolicsome Lippi, and speaks its message for the natural life in art, that Browning made so many of his poems an apologia and plea for.