Hymns of Faith and Hope. By HORATIUS BONAR, D.D. Third Series. London: James Nisbet & Co. 1866. A NEW book of good hymns is to the lover of sacred song an unmixed pleasure. And such is the volume now before us. Dr. Bonar is already known as the author of some of the very best of modern hymns: hymns which, as he himself described them in the preface to the first series, "belong to no Church or sect: are not the expression of one man's or one party's faith and hope: but are meant to speak what may be thought and spoken by all to whom the Church's ancient faith and hope are dear." This, we hardly need say, they have been found to do. The author of "I lay my sins on Jesus," and "Go up, go up, my heart," needs no praise of ours. Our task is confined to saying that this new volume will be found quite worthy of his fame. There are, perhaps, fewer hymns proper in it than in the former volume, and more of exquisite little poems. The following, we venture to think, is hardly inferior in poetic power to the best parts of the "Christian Year," while, in its translucent simplicity, it contrasts favourably with the involved and enigmatic style of that popular book: "THE WHITE RAIMENT. "The babe, the bride, the quiet dead, "The babe, the bride, the quiet dead, Each entering on an untried home, "Of death and life, of mirth and grief, "Not the rich rainbow's varied bloom, "But purity of perfect light, Its native undivided ray, "O cradle of our youngest age, Adorned with white, how fair art thou ! O robe of infancy, how bright! Like moonlight on the moorland snow. "O bridal hall, and bridal robe, How silver-bright your jewelled gleam, Of some translucent mountain stream. "O shroud of death, so soft and pure, "Mine be a robe more spotless still, "Mine be the raiment given of God, Wrought of fine linen, clean and white, Meet for His home of holy light!" The latter part of the volume is occupied by metrical versions of the Psalms, rather stiff, and somewhat resembling those published by Milton. We cannot say that we think these successful. If the Psalms are to be turned into English, it must be in the English idiom and rhythm. Such lines as, "And all he doeth prosper shall," and such stanzas as,— "Not in the assembly of the just Shall the unrighteous stand at all; cannot be recommended to English ears by any amount of faithfulness to the original Hebrew. Since the above notice was written, we have received a beautiful “edition de luxe," containing the whole three series of the "Hymns of Faith and Hope." Two Hundred Sketches, Humorous and Grotesque. By GUSTAVE DORE. London: F. Warne & Co. THESE drawings are, indeed, outrageously grotesque. We feel ourselves in the plight of the lover of old, "Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, but-why did you kick me down-stairs?" So here any queer contortions of the human face or form may pass muster: but-why all these monsters? We own to a sort of revulsion from the big-head-and-little-body kind of caricature. Respected prelates do not look well thus put into two foci nor do imaginary beings such as those with which this book is filled. Such a preponderance of the pure grotesque seems to us to swamp genuine humour. The one natural group of "doggies," on p. 12, strikes our fancy more than most things in the book. When M. Doré comes to the caricature of real life, he does not seem to us to shine. E. g., "M. Berniquet's Visit to the Country" is not for a moment to be compared with the M. Jabot and M. Pipon of our younger days. The likenesses are not at all well kept up, and the humour is sometimes of the flattest. But there are some very clever things. Among them are the sketches called "Consequences of the London Exhibition of 1862." The boat full of Chinese on p. 42, and the triple groups sleeping on a roof at 300 francs each, are the best of these. Here and there we have some broad humour: but never, either in drawing or humour, does M. Doré rise to the level of our best English caricaturists. The fun is torn to rags, not quiet and lurking, as in their drawings. And four out of five of the jokes are, at least in their English dress, not worth having, to begin with. ROBERT BROWNING. SECOND PAPER. II. THE noblest of all Mr. Browning's lyrics and romances, "Saul," we postpone, as coming more fitly under the last head of our classification. Of the second, our first notice must be in words at once of admiration for their versatility and power, and, we are constrained to add, of regret also, and of a feeling which, but that it has become familiar, would be disappointment. We do not expect every poet to be an Arndt or a Burns, but we are compelled to confess that we sigh, as we read these poems, for a somewhat stronger flavour of nationality. No poet of equal power (Byron, perhaps, excepted) has done so little to represent and to ennoble English thought and life; and the absence of this element from Mr. Browning's poems will, we fear, always stand in the way of his attaining the place in the affections of the English people to which they have welcomed Mr. Tennyson. The Laureate turns, at once by instinct and by deliberate choice, to English scenes and characters. The "Talking Oak," the "Gardener's Daughter," the "May Queen," "Maud," "Enoch Arden," "Aylmer's Field," "Sea Dreams," will occur to every one as examples. Even the Arthurian cycle of idyls gives to the king of British legend a far more ideally English character than the "Morte d'Arthur," upon which they are raised as on a foundation. And the "In Memoriam," the most intensely personal of poems, is the history of a friendship which, in its essence and in its circumstances, would not have been what it was, without the recollections of the school and the college, the country house and the village church, which are specially characteristic of this country. With Mr. Browning, on the other hand, the poems, with one or two exceptions, that cling to one's memory, are all thoroughly Italian. Pictures, with Mieris-like minuteness of detail, of the life of Italy in "Up at a Villa," "Down in the City," "The Englishman in Italy," and "By the Fireside;" of its union of aesthetic culture with hateful vindictiveness in "My Last Duchess," and with ecclesiastical debasement in "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church;" of its higher and lower forms of art-life in "Old Pictures of Florence," "Fra Lippo Lippi," " Andrea del Sarto," and "The Guardian Angel;" of its phases of passionate love, and yet more passionate jealousy, in "Two in the Campagna," "In a Gondola," "In a Balcony," and a "Serenade at the Villa,"-all these (to say nothing of many poems which are either Italian in their feeling or their circumstances, though not in both) come to one's mind at once, while there are but few to balance them connected in any way with the history, life, characteristic feelings of our country. Mr. Browning seems to have lived so long under brighter skies, and amid a people of more glowing temperament, that English life is tame and cold to him. If this gives an intensity to his representations of emotions which are not national but human, to the mingling of love, disappointment, jealousy, despair, the transitions by which passionate idolatry passes into terrible scorn or cynical indifference, which he is so fond of painting, and which he paints (as in "Any Wife to any Husband," " A Woman's Last Word," "In a Year," "James Lee") with such a wonderful insight into the morbid physiology of passion, we still feel some touch of regret that so great a poet has been so far denationalized. The intensity itself, belonging, as it does, to the South rather than to the North, makes his poems harder for Englishmen and Englishwomen to understan. There is a wisdom, as Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Tennyson have consciously or unconsciously recognised, in the old counsel, “Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna." Rydal Mount and Faringford have proved themselves better poets' homes even than the fair city on the banks of the Arno. It is interesting to note the exceptions to this rule in the instances in which Mr. Browning's path has led him across the history of other nations than the land of his adoption. "Strafford" brought him into the heart of the great conflict between despotism and freedom; and although we do not find, either in that play or elsewhere, any adequate appreciation of the Puritan character (that character is hardly visible even in his Pym or Vane), yet the "Lays of the English Cavaliers" show how thoroughly he entered into the spirit of one party in that struggle. Even in "The Lost Leader" we seem to hear an echo of the lament of the Commons over Wentworth's defection transferred to the circumstances and politics of our own time. We know not what individual leader, if any, Mr. Browning had in view; but if the early admirers of the French Revolution had wished to utter their hearts over the Toryism of Wordsworth or Southey, or the Chartists and Christian Socialists of 1848 over Mr. Kingsley's panegyric on the peerage and his vindication of martial law ad libitum, they could hardly find fitter language. Those who care, not to point out how a poet repeats himself, but how a noble thought presents itself under different aspects, will find it interesting to compare a few lines from each. Pym, in "Strafford," speaks of the old love and hope which he had cherished for the Wentworth of his early days: "Yes, I will say I never loved but one man,-David not In my inmost heart, Believe, I think of stealing quite away To walk once more with Wentworth—my youth's friend, "The Lost Leader" ends thus in the same note: "Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! Best fight on well, for we taught him,-strike gallantly, Then let him receive the new knowledge, and wait us, Something of the same kind of connection, that of belonging to the same time and growing out of the same studies, we find between "A Grammarian's Funeral" and "Paracelsus." As the latter gives the portraiture of a man mingling thirst for knowledge with lower ambition, and finding therefore that all is vanity, so the former exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon's friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some one region of knowledge, and content to labour without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook: "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, Heedless of far gain; Greedy for quick returns of profit, surə, Bad is our bargain! Was it not great? Did not he throw on God (He loves the burthen), |