are

Lang. Mr. Lang's light and graceful touch is well illustrated in this little volume, containing some of his prettiest lyrics. He is fond of the old French verse forms, and the sentiments which belong to them. The gay verses wholly gay; the serious ones are pervaded with a pensive sadness-that of old memories and legends. Mr. Lang's sober muse is devoted to Scotland, and after that to old France and older Greece; but whether grave or gay, his exquisite workmanship never fails him.

The Ring and the Book, by Robert

Browning. This dramatic monologue, the longest and best sustained of Browning's poems, was published in four volumes in 1868-69, and is his greatest constructive achievement. This poem of twenty-one thousand lines contains ten versions of the same occurrence, besides the poet's prelude. It presents from these diverse points of view the history of a tragedy which took place in Rome one hundred and seventy years before. Browning, one day in Florence, bought for eightpence an old book which contained the records of a murder that of the olden time in Rome, with the pleadings and counter-pleadings, and the statements of the defendants and the witnesses; this Browning used as the raw material for The Ring and the Book,' which appeared four years later. The story follows the fate of the unfortunate heroine, Pompilia, who has been sold by her supposed mother to the elderly Count Guido, whose cruelty and violence cause her eventually to fly from him. This she does under the protection of a young priest named Giuseppe Caponsacchi, whom she prevails upon to convey her safely to her old home. She is pursued by the Count, who overtakes her and procures the arrest of the two fugitives, accusing her and Caponsacchi of having eloped. They are tried; and the court banishes Caponsacchi for three years, while Pompilia is relegated to a convent. Having at a later period been removed from there to her former home, she is suddenly attacked by the Count and several hired assassins, who brutally murder her and her two parents; then follows the Count's trial and condemnation for the murders, and (even in Italy) his final execution, The events of the

Pompilia, Caponsacchi, the Pope, and others, each from his or her peculiar point of view; and two opposing aspects of the case as seen from outside are offered by "Half Rome» and «The Other Half." Browning in conclusion touches upon the intended lesson, and explains why he has chosen to present it in this artistic form. The lesson has been already learned from the Pope's sad thought: —

"- Our human speech is naught,

Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind."

The Pope's soliloquy is a remarkable piece of work, and the chapters which contain the statements of Pompilia and Caponsacchi are filled with tragic beauty and emotion. The thought, the imagery, and the wisdom embodied in this story, make it a triumph of poetic and philosophic creation.

A"

urora Leigh, a poem by Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which appeared in 1857. She called it the "most mature" of her works, the one in which "the highest convictions upon life and art are entered.» It is in reality a novel in blank verse. The principal characters are Aurora Leigh, who is supposed to write the story; Romney Leigh, her cousin; Marian Earle, the offspring of tramps; and a fashionable young widow, Lady Waldemar. The book discusses various theories for the regeneration of society. The chief theme is the final reconcilement of Aurora's ideals with Romney's practical plans for the improvement of the masses. Bits of scenery, hints of philosophy, and many of Mrs. Browning's own emotions and reflections regarding art, are interspersed through the narrative. Aurora Leigh, the child of a cultivated and wealthy Englishman, is at his death sent from Tuscany to England, and put into the care of a prim maiden aunt. She devotes herself to study; refuses the hand of her rich cousin Romney, who has become a socialist; and goes to London to gain a livelihood by literary work. Romney Leigh wishes to afford society a moral lesson by a marriage with Marian Earle, a woman of the slums, who becomes involved in a tragedy which renders the marriage impossible, when Romney retires to Leigh Hall. Through an accident he becomes blind, and these misfortunes reveal to

Aurora her love for him; and the poem closes with a mutual exchange of vows and aspirations. It is filled with passages of great beauty, and ethical utterances of a lofty nature.

Poetry, History of English, by William John Courthope. The work which in their day both Pope and Gray con

and the early dramatists, with all the various types of versifie.s who were famous in that period. Mr. Courthope's broad and generous spirit, his keenness of analysis, his wide learning, and his clearness of vision, make his work, so far as it is completed, an ideal history of poetry.

lish poetry, and which Warton began but never finished, has been taken up anew but with a far different scope by the professor of poetry at Oxford. His plan embraces a history of the art of English poetry-epic, dramatic, lyrical, and didactic-from the time of Chaucer to that of Scott, as well as "an appreciation of the motives by which each individual poet seems to have been consciously inspired." He also inquires into "those general causes which have unconsciously directed imagination in England into the various channels of metrical composition.» Mr. Courthope believes that in spite of the different sources from which the English national consciousness is derived, there is an essential unity and consistency, so that both the technic of poetical production and the national genius- the common thought, imagination, and sentiment-may be traced in its evolution. He shows with great fullness the "progressive stages in the formation of the mediæval stream of thought, which feeds the literatures of England, France, and Italy," and tries to connect it with the great system of Græco-Roman cultures so prominent before the death of Boethius. He also explores the course of the national language, to show the changes produced by Saxon and Norman influences on the art of metrical expression before Chaucer. To Chaucer himself are devoted less than fifty octavo pages, and this chapter does not appear in the first volume until it is more than half finished. The history closes with a careful account of the rise of the drama. Dry as the subject in its earlier stages threatens to be, Mr. Courthope's brilliant style and his wealth of illustration make it absorbingly interesting to the student. The second volume, after surveying the influence of European thought in the sixteenth century, and the effects of the Renaissance and Reformation, goes into a careful study of the works of Wyatt and Surrey, the court poets and the Euphuists, Spencer

romance belongs to that AngloDanish cycle from which the Norman trouvères drew SO much material. 'King Horn' is perhaps the most famous poem of this cycle, but "Guy of Warwick was one of the most popular of those which appeared in the thirteenth century. The earliest existing manuscripts of this romance are in

French; though it is supposed to have been written by Walter of Exeter, a Cornish Franciscan. It consists of about 12,000 verses, iambic measure, arranged in rhymed couplets. Although the value of this poem is less as literature than as a picture of ancient English manners, the story has considerable interest as an example of the kind of fiction that pleased our ancestors. The hero, Guy, is represented as the son of a gentleman of Warwick, living in the reign of King Edgar. The youth becomes great, after the fashion of medieval heroes, entirely through his own unaided efforts. He is spurred on by his love for Felicia, daughter of Earl Rohand, for at first she scorns his suit because he has not distinguished himself; but when he sets out in search of adventures, they come thick and fast. He wins in a fight with Philbertus, kills a monstrous dun cow, makes peace between the Duke of Lovain and the Emperor, slays a dragon and a boar, with the help of Herraud rescues Earl Terry's lady from sixteen villains, travels with Terry and saves his father's life, and finally returns home to claim his bride. Not long after, he leaves Felicia to go on a pilgrimage. On his return, finding England invaded by the Danes, he kills in single combat the Danish giant, Colbrond. After his victory, entirely weary of the world, he retires to a cave and lives a hermit's life; all this time he is supported by alms, and sees no more of Felicia except for one brief interview just before he dies. Though Guy is probably a fictitious character, definite dates are given for his life, and he in

said to have died about 929. For those who can follow the quaintness of its middle English style, this poem is very attractive. The story has been told in an excellent modern prose rendering also.

Wuthering Heights, the one novel

written by Emily Brontë, and the work which exhibited the remarkable quality of her genius, was published in December 1847, only a year before her death, when she was twenty-eight years old. The scene of the tale is laid in the rugged moorland country in the north of England, with which she was familiar from childhood; the persons are drawn from types only to be found perhaps in that country,— outlandish characters in whom gentility and savagery are united. The hero of Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff, a man of stormy, untrained nature, brought as a child to Wuthering Heights, the home of the Earnshaw family, by Mr. Earnshaw, who had picked him up as a stray in the streets of Liverpool. He is reared with Earnshaw's two children, Hindley and Catherine; for the latter he conceives an intense affection, the one gleam of light in his dark nature. Catherine returns his love; but Hindley hates him. Hindley is sent away to college, but returns on his father's death, bringing with him wife, who afterwards dies at the birth of a son, Hareton. Catherine meanwhile has made the acquaintance of Edgar and Isabel Linton, gentleman's children, living at Thrushcross Grange, not far from Wuthering Heights. In course of time, Catherine marries Edgar, though she loves Heathcliff. Isabel falls in love with Heathcliff, who marries her in the hope of revenging himself thereby on the Linton family. His cruel treatment drives her from him. She gives birth to a son, Linton; Catherine to a daughter, Catherine. The elder Catherine's death is precipitated by Heathcliff's stormy avowal of his continuing passion for her. Long after her death he plans to marry his son Linton to Catherine's daughter, because he hates them both, children as they are of marriages that should never have been. In this he is successful; but Linton dies, leaving Catherine a very young widow in the house of her dreadful father-in-law. Hareton Earnshaw, Hind

a

ley's son, and another object of Heathcliff's hate, is also one of the household. With the death of Heathcliff, and the union of Hareton and Catherine, the story ends. Heathcliff is buried by the side of his beloved Catherine. The greater part of the narrative is related by Nellie, the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange, the old nurse in the Earnshaw family. Among the minor characters is Joseph, a servant in the same family, whose eccentric character is drawn with marvelous skill. The entire book remains a monument of unmodified power,-of strength without sweetness. Only at the close of the book, the tempest ceases, revealing for a moment the quiet spaces of the evening sky. The one to whom the strange troubled story had been related, seeks the graves of Heathcliff and Catherine:

"I lingered round them under a benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.»

Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte's first novel,

was published in December 1847, a year and a half before her death, when she was twenty-seven years old. Her talents were of the moonlight order. The book is but a pale reflection of the brilliant Bronté genius.

The heroine, Agnes Grey, the daughter of a clergyman in the North of England, becomes, through reverses of fortune, a governess. Her experiences are those of Anne Brontë herself, the unpleasant side of such a position being set forth. The book, however, ends happily in the marriage of Agnes to a clergyman. Although well written, it lacks the elements of strength and warmth. It lives by the name of the author rather than by its intrinsic merit.

those in full possession of their faculties. His father, a rich merchant, has made two marriages. Elias, the child of the first, inherited vast wealth from his mother. Hendryk and Hubert Lossell, sons of the second marriage, find on their father's death that Elias is the richest of the family, and the heau of the firm in which his money is vested. Taking advantage of Elias's helplessness, his half-brothers get his property into their hands, although apparently with his consent; but their greed brings upon them their own destruction. The most pleasing character of the book is the fool himself. His pure, noble, childlike nature perfumes the heavy worldly atmosphere that surrounds him; and he comes in as a kind of gracious interlude between the dramatic but sordid incidents of the plot. The story is well conceived, if slightly improbable; and like Maartens's other books, is told with vigor and grace.

Hammer and Anvil (Hammer und

Amboss'), by Friedrich Spielhagen (1869), is a novel grounded on a conception of the continual struggle between castes, arising largely from the character of the social institutions of Germany, the nobility, the military organization, and the industrial conditions. The leading idea is expressed by one of the characters, the humane director of a house of correction, who says: «Everywhere is the sorry choice whether we will be the hammer or the anvil» in life. And the same character is made to express Spielhagen's solution of the difficulty when he says: "It shall not be 'hammer or anvil' but hammer and anvil'; for everything and every human being is both at once, and every moment.»

It is not, however, easy to trace the development of this idea as the motive of the book; for the novelist's power lies rather in his charm as a narrator than in constructive strength or analytical ability. In this, as in most of his stories, he obtains sympathy for the personalities he creates, and enchains attention by his gift of story-telling. Georg Hartwig, the hero of the novel, is brought into contact with a fallen nobleman, a smuggler, «Von Zehren the wild," with his beautiful and heartless daughter Constance, and with a contrasted group of honorable and generous persons who

teach him much. Chief of these is another Von Zehren, the prison director, an ideal character. His daughter Paula exercises the influence which opposes that of Constance in Hartwig's life, and leads him to new effort and success. Georg himself is one of those who by nature tend to become "anvil» rather than "hammer." The story, though less famous than Problematic Characters > or Through Night to Light,' is a great favorite with German readers.

The Silence of Dean Maitland, by "Maxwell Grey" (Miss Mary G. Tuttiett). Cyril Maitland, a young clergyman of the Church of England, accidentally kills the father of a village girl whom he has led astray. The man's body is found, and circumstantial evidence points to Henry Everard, Cyril's lifelong friend and the lover of his twin sister. Cyril is silent; allows his friend to be sentenced to penal labor for twenty years. His sensitive soul suffers torture, but he cannot bear to lose the approval of man, which is very life to him. His little sister gives unconsciously the keynote of his character: "I think, papa, that Cyril is not so devoted to loving as to being loved.»

Endowed with a magnetic personality that fascinates all, with a rare voice, and with wonderful eloquence, Cyril Maitland who becomes almost an ascetic in his penances and self-torture, gains great honor in the church, becomes dean, and is about to be appointed bishop. Life has proved hard to him. His wife, and all his children save one daughter and a blind son, have died, and the thought of his hidden sin has never left him.

On the day before that in which he is to preach the sermon that will put him in possession of the highest place in the church, he receives a letter from Everard, who is out of prison after eighteen years of suffering, telling Cyril that he knows all, but forgives freely. This breaks the dean's heart. The next day he rises before the great audience of the cathedral and confesses all,-lays his secret soul bare before them. the awful pause that follows the benediction, they approach Cyril, who has fallen into a chair, and find him dead.

In

The book falls just short of being great: it reminds one of "The Scarlet Letter, though it lacks the touch of the master hand.