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estine in the next generation after Christ. Another peculiarity of Browning's method in his short poems is that he throws the reader into the midst of the theme with startling suddenness, and proceeds with a rapidity which is apt to bewilder a reader not in the secret of the method. There are no explanations, no gradual transitions. A capital example of this peculiarity is the "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister," which has to be read to the end before we see it for what it is, the self-revealed picture of a narrow-minded, superstitious, sensual monk, stirred to hatred by a brother monk, whose mild, benignant ways and genuine piety we gradually discern through the speaker's jeers and curses. If we add to these peculiarities of method the fact that Browning's best work is very compressed in style, we see why many persons have found obscure in him what is in reality clear enough, but is not to be perceived clearly without alertness on the reader's part. Perhaps the poem which best illustrates all Browning's peculiarities of method, harmoniously combined, is "My Last Duchess," a marvellous example of his power to give a whole life-history, with a wealth of picturesque detail, in a few vivid, suggestive lines. Some of Browning's Themes.-In "Caliban upon Setebos," taking a hint from Shakespeare's Tempest, Browning has shown the grotesque imaginings of a half-human monster, groping after an explanation of the universe. In "Childe Roland," starting with a snatch of song from the fool in Lear, he has shown the heart of medieval knighthood, fronting spectral terrors in its search after the stronghold of sin, the Dark Tower, where lurks the enemy of life and joy. In "Abt Vogler," and "A Toccata of Galuppi" he has touched upon the inner meanings of music, and has painted for us permanent types of the musical enthusiast. In "The Grammarian's Funeral" he has shown the poetry and heroism hidden underneath the gray exterior of the life of a Renaissance pedant. In "Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto," and "Pictor Ignotus," he has given the secret workings of the painter's nature, and has flashed illumination upon the sources of success and failure in art which lie deep in the moral being of the artist. In "Balaustion's Adven

ture" he has revealed the inner spirit of Greek life in the fourth century before Christ. In "A Death in the Desert" he has led us into the mystical rapture of the early Christians; and in "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day" he has approached Christian faith from the modern standpoint. In "Saul" he has shown us, against the splendid background of patriarchal Israel, the boy David singing, in the tent of the great king, songs of human joy which rise, in a sudden opening of the heavens of prophecy, into a song of the coming of the Messiah. Nowhere out of Shakespeare can be found a mind more wide-ranging over the outer circumstances and the inner significance of man's life.

Love, as the supreme experience of the soul, testing its temper and revealing its probable fate, holds the first place in Browning's thought. In such poems as "Cristina," "Evelyn Hope," "The Last Ride Together," "My Star," "By the Fireside," and a multitude more, he has presented love in its varied phases; and has celebrated its manifold meanings not only on earth, but in the infinite range of worlds through which he believes that the soul is destined to go in search after its own perfection. By the intensity and positiveness of his doctrine he has influenced his age profoundly, and has made his name synonymous with faithfulness to the human love which life brings, and through that to the divine love which it implies and promises.

The robustness of Browning's nature, its courage, its abounding joy and faith in life, make his works a permanent storehouse of spiritual energy. In an age distracted by doubt and divided in will, his strong unfaltering voice has been lifted above the perplexities and hesitations of men, like a bugle-call to joyous battle, in which the victory is to the brave.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.-One of Browning's most perfect short poems, "One Word More," is addressed to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), and is a kind of counter-tribute to her most perfect work, the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which contain the record of her courtship and marriage. Her early life was shadowed by illness and affliction; and her early poetry (The Seraphim,

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1838, Poems, 1844) shows in many places the defects of unreality and of overwrought emotion natural to work produced in a sick-chamber. The best known of these early poems are perhaps "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," where she works under the influence of Tennyson's idylls, and "The Cry of the Children," where she voices the humanitarian protest against child-labor in mines and factories. After her marriage and removal to Italy her health improved, and her art greatly strengthened. The Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) are among the noblest lovepoems in the language. Mrs. Browning was deeply interested in the struggle of Italy to shake off her bondage to Austria, as is shown by her Casa Guidi Windows, published in 1851. In 1856 appeared her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh, a kind of versified novel of modern English life, with a social reformer of aristocratic lineage for hero, and a young poetess, in large part a reflection of Mrs. Browning's own personality, for heroine. Aurora Leigh shows the influence of a great novel-writing age, when the novel was becoming more and more imbued with social purpose. The interest in public questions also appears in Mrs. Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860), and in her Last Poems (1862). Mrs. Browning's touch is uncertain, and her style sometimes vague or extravagant. But she had a noble sympathy with noble causes, her emotion is elevated and ardent, and her expression, at its best (as in the Sonnets from the Portuguese), is as lofty as her mood. Her characteristic note is that of intimate, personal feeling; even Casa Guidi Windows has been called "a woman's love-making with a nation."

VI. MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

Arnold's Life.-Browning's robust optimism in the face of all the unsettling and disturbing forces of the age is thrown out in sharp relief when we contrast him with a somewhat younger poet, Matthew Arnold, in whom the prevailing tone is one of half-despairing doubt. Arnold was born in 1822, the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous head-master of Rugby. The Arnolds had a house in the lake country,

near Wordsworth, and the two families were on friendly terms. In his later life as a critic Matthew Arnold was to do much toward fixing Wordsworth's high place in the minds of his countrymen. From the first the influence of Wordsworth's poetry upon Arnold was strong. Arnold went up to Oxford in 1840, and five years later won a fellowship at Oriel College. His first volume appeared in 1849, with the title, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. This was followed by Poems (1853), Merope, a drama in Greek form and on a Greek subject (1858), and by New Poems, in 1867. From his thirtieth year until shortly before his death, he held the position of inspector of schools. To the demands and responsibilities of this official position were added, in 1857, those of a professorship of poetry at Oxford. These outer circumstances were largely instrumental in turning his energies away from poetry into the field of prose criticism, where, for the last twenty years of his life, he held the position of a leader, almost of a dictator. His most important work in prose is the Essays in Criticism (1865). Toward the end of his life he made a lecturing tour in America, the chief outcome of which was the brilliant address on Emerson, published, with other essays, in Discourses in America. He died in 1888.

Arnold as a Poet.-Arnold may be described as a poet of transition. He grew up in the interval between the first and the second outburst of creative energy in the century. Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, and others, were, each in his way, already building anew the structures of spiritual faith and hope; but by Arnold, as by many others, the ebbing of the old wave was far more clearly felt than the rising of the new one. Standing, as he says,

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"between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born,"

he fronts life wearily, or at best stoically. He seeks consolation in the intellect; and his poetry, which addresses itself to the cultivated few, is rather thoughtful than impassioned. His religious dejection is expressed very beautifully in "Dover

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