Women of Browning. The best are Pompilia, in The Ring and the Book, the lady in the Inn Album, and the heroine in Colombe’s Birthday; the others, good and bad, are the wife in Any Wife to any Husband; James Lee’s Wife, Michal, Pippa, Mildred, Gwendolen, Polixena, Colombe, Anael, Domizia, “The Queen,” Constance; and the heroines of The Laboratory, The Confessional, A Woman’s Last Word, In a Year, A Light Woman, and A Forgiveness.
Works of Robert Browning. The new and uniform edition of the works of Robert Browning is published in sixteen volumes, small crown 8vo. This edition contains three portraits of Mr. Browning, at different periods of life, and a few illustrations. Contents of the volumes:—
Worst of it, The. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) A fleck on a swan is beauty spoiled; a speck on a mottled hide is nought. A man had angel fellowship with a young wife who proved false to him; he loves her still, and mourns that she ruined her soul in stooping to save his; he made her sin by fettering with a gold ring a soul which could not blend with his. He sorrows, not for his own loss, but that his swan must take the crow’s rebuff. He desires her good, and hopes she may work out her penance, and reach heaven’s purity at last. He will love on, but if they meet in Paradise, will pass nor turn his face.
Xanthus. (A Death in the Desert.) One of the disciples of St. John in attendance upon the dying apostle in the cave.
“You groped your way across my room.” (Ferishtah’s Fancies.) The first line of the third lyric.
“You’ll love me yet.” (Pippa Passes.) A song.
Youth and Art. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) A meditation on what might have been, had two young people who had the chance not missed it and lost it for ever. They lodged in the same street in Rome. The man was a sculptor who had dreams of demolishing Gibson some day, and putting up Smith to reign in his stead; the woman was a singer who hoped to trill bitterness into the cup of Grisi, and make her envious of Kate Brown. The warbler earned in those days as little by her voice as the chiseller by his work. They were poor, lived on a crust apiece, and for fun watched each other from their respective windows. She was evidently dying for an introduction to him; she fidgeted about with the window plants, and did her best to attract his attention in a quiet sort of way; she did not like his models always tripping up his stairs, which she could not ascend, and was glad to have the opportunity of showing off the foreign fellow who came to tune the piano. But life passed, he made no advances, and so in process of time she married a rich old lord, and he is a knight, R.A., and dines with the Prince. With all this show of success neither life is complete, neither soul has achieved the sole good of its earth wanderings. Their lives hang patchy and scrappy; they have not sighed, starved, feasted, despaired, and been happy. There was once the chance of these things; they were missed, and eternity cannot make good the loss. As for life “Love,” as Browning is always telling us, “is the sole good of it.” This poem may be compared with the moral of The Statue and the Bust. In the one case reasons of prudence and the restrictions of religion and society prevented the duke and the lady from following the inclinations of their hearts; in the other case mere worldly motives operated to the same end—the missing of the union of the actors’ souls. In both cases the lives were spoiled. In Youth and Art the woman’s character cuts a very poor figure: love is subordinated to her art, and that to the mere worldly advantage of a rich marriage and the opportunity of becoming “queen at bals-parés.” The man was cold, not because his art made him so, but because of his overwhelming prudence, which we may be sure did not make him a Gibson after all.