"Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of Ionica, "I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.
"The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling.
"The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences—the necessity of dissembling suffering:
I have a smiling face, she said,
I have a jest for all I meet,
I have a garland for my head,
And all its flowers are sweet—
And so you call me gay, she said.
Behind no prison-grate, she said,
Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile,
Live captives so uncomforted
As souls behind a smile.
God's pity let us pray, she said.
If I dared leave this smile, she said,
And take a moan upon my mouth,
And twine a cypress round my head,
And let my tears run smooth,
It were the happier way, she said.
And since that must not be, she said,
I fain your bitter world would leave.
How calmly, calmly, smile the dead,
Who do not, therefore, grieve!
The yea of Heaven is yea, she said.
It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter—critics may say what they will—goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.
Lastly, "Confessions" is the story of passionate love, lavished by a soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the Father of men. The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that it has seen. "And how," comes the terrible question, "have they requited it? God's love, you have rejected it—what have you got in its stead from man?"
I saw God sitting above me, but I ... I sate among men,
And I have loved these.
The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by
day and by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light:
Their least gift, which they left to my childhood, far off in
the long-ago years,
Is turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystal of
tears.
"Dig the snow," she said,
"For my churchyard bed,
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these my beloveds, shall love me with heart-warm
tears
As I have loved these!"
"Go," I cried, "thou hast chosen the Human, and left the
Divine!
Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild
berry wine?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached
thee with blame
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee
the same?"
But she shrunk and said,
"God, over my head,
Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-seas,
If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these."
We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?