But the same subject has another side, and this Mr Browning has also been careful to present. It was the error of Paracelsus and Aprile and Sordello to endeavour to overleap the limitations of life, or to force within those limits an infinity of knowledge, emotion or volition, which they are unable to contain. It is no less fatal

an error to rest content within the bounds of our present existence, accepting this as final, or to cease straining beyond all earthly things to the highest wisdom, love, beauty, goodness-in a word, to God. And this is the side of the subject which is regarded in "Easter Day." Why is the condemnation of the soul by God in that Dream inevitable? Because the speaker in the Dream failed in the probation of life-accepted the finite joys and aims of earth, each with some taint in it, as sufficient and perfect, and never grasped at or yearned towards the heavenly influences and joys that flitted faint and rare above the earthly, but which were taintless and therefore best.

With "The Ring and the Book" began a distinct period in Mr Browning's career as poet. In the name, of that poem lay a piece of symbolic meaning; to work into the form of a ring the virgin gold, the artificer needs to mingle alloy with the metal; the ring once made, a spirt of acid drives off the alloy in fume. So in the story of the Roman murder-case the poet mingled fancy or falsehood with truth-not for falsehood's sake, but for the sake of truth. The characteristic of Mr Browning's later poetry is that it is forever tasking falsehood to yield up fact, forever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water

with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into pure air made for the spirit's breathing. Mr Browning's genius unites an intellect which delights in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature which reveals itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it unites an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power furnished by the heart or soul. Now in Mr Browning's earlier poems his strong spiritual ardours and intuitions were the factors of his art which most decisively made their presence felt; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening and resisting medium. However the poet expended his force of intellect in following the moral casuistry of a Blougram, we felt where the truth lay. In "The Ring and the Book," and in a far greater degree in some more recent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their momentary decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful to the poet than truth.

Rather to the poet,

And yet it is never actually so. as truth-seeker, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it might easily be found: the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error. The masculine characters in Mr Browning's poems are ordinarily made the exponents of his intellectual casuistry—a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanesthe female characters from Pippa and Polyxena to Pompilia, and Balaustion are revealers to men of divine truth, which with them is either a celestial

grace, or a dictate of pure human passion. Eminent moments of life have the same interest for the poet now as formerly moments when life, caught up out of the ways of custom and low levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiration from a sudden discovery of truth through some high ardour of the heart; therefore it does not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a lengthy book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in order that a shining moment at last may spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from splendour. Thus Mr Browning came more and more to throw himself into prolonged intellectual sympathy with characters towards whom his moral sense stood in ardent antagonism. We saw the errors of an idealist Aprile ; they were easy to understand; let us now hear all that an Aristophanes, darkening the light that is in him, may have to say in his own behalf. We saw how the poetry of a Chiappino's life descended into ignoble prose. Let us now hear the self-defence of the prosaic life of action, a life of compromise and expediency, from the lips of Hohenstiel-Schwangau. We saw the passionate Let us now

fidelity of love in a Colombe, in a Norbert. hear all that a husband of Elvire can say to prove that he may fitly be on the track of a fizgig like Fifine. Mr Browning's courageous adhesion to truth never deserts him; only, like that of Hugues,

"His fugue broadens and thickens

Greatens and deepens and lengthens;"

until we are tempted at times to ask like the bewildered

organist, "But where is the music?" And there are one or two poems in which we wait in vain for any unstopping of the full-organ, any blare of the mode Palestrina. A strenuous acceptance of the world for the sake of things higher than worldly is enjoined by the first principles of Mr Browning's way of thinking; the falsehoods of life must therefore be accepted, understood, and mastered for the sake of truth. His best gift to his age is however not intellectual casuistry. Better to us than his teaching of truth by falsehood is his teaching of truth as truth. Though in his recent poems he may linger long between "turf" and "towers," carefully studying each, a moment usually comes of such terrible impassioned truth-seeking as that which proved the sanity of LeonceMiranda. To approach the real world, to take it as it is and for what it is, yet at the same time to penetrate it with sudden spiritual fire has been the aim of Mr Browning's later poetry.*

* The earliest appearance in Mr Browning's poetry of what I have spoken of as its central thought is in a passage of "Pauline" and in the note in French appended to that passage.

GEORGE ELIOT.

WHEN we have passed in review the works of that great writer who calls herself George Eliot, and given for a time our use of sight to her portraitures of men and women, what form, as we move away, persists on the field of vision, and remains the chief centre of interest for the imagination? The form not of Tito, or Maggie, or Dinah, or Silas, but of one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them. Such a second self of an author is perhaps more substantial than any mere human personality encumbered with the accidents of flesh and blood and daily living. It stands at some distance from the primary self, and differs considerably from its fellow. It presents its person to us with fewer reserves; it is independent of local and temporary motives of speech or of silence; it knows no man after the flesh; it is more than an individual; it utters secrets, but secrets which all men of all ages are to catch; while, behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism. With this second self of George Eliot it is, not with the actual historical person, that we have to do. And when, having closed her books, we gaze outward with the mind's eye, the spectacle we see is that most impressive spectacle of a great nature, which has suffered