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and even in Mary Wollstonecraft, to sug-[peculiar weakness, are all but female. And gest the idea of heights, fronting the very whatever may be said of the effects of culpeaks of the Principia and the Paradise, to ture, in deadening the genius of man, we which woman may yet attain? Thirdly, are mistaken if it has not always had the has not woman understood and appreciated contrary effect upon that of woman (where the greatest works of genius as fully as man? do we find a female Bloomfield or Burns?) Then may she in time equal them; for what so that, on entering on the far more highly is true appreciation but the sowing of a civilized periods which are manifestly apgerm in the mind, which shall ultimately proaching, she will but be breathing the bear similar fruit? There is nothing, says atmosphere calculated to nourish and inviGodwin, which the human mind can con- gorate, instead of weakening and chilling ceive, which it cannot execute; we may her mental life. Our admirable friend, add, there is nothing the human mind can Mr. De Quincey, has, we think, conceded understand which it cannot equal. Fourth- even more than we require, in granting ly, let us never forget that woman, as to (see his paper on Joan of Arc) that woman intellectual progress, is in a state of in- can die more nobly than man. For whether fancy. Changed as by malignant magic, is the writing or the doing of a great tranow into an article of furniture, and now gedy the higher achievement? Poor the into the toy of pleasure, she is only as yet attitude even of Shakspeare, penning the undergoing a better transmigration, and fire-syllables of Macbeth, to that of Joan of "timidly expanding into life."

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Arc, entering into the flames as into her Almost all that is valuable in Female wedding suit. What comparison between Authorship has been produced within the the face inflamed of a Mirabeau or a Challast half-century, that is, since the female mers, as they thundered; and the blush on was generally recognised to be an intel- the cheek of Charlotte Corday, still extant, lectual creature; and if she has, in such a as her head was presented to the people? short period, so progressed, what demi- And who shall name the depicter of the Mahometan shall venture to set bounds to death of Beatrice Cenci; with Madame her future advancement? Even though we Roland, whose conduct on the scaffold should grant that woman, more from her might make one in "love with death?" If bodily constitution than her mental, is in- to die nobly demand the highest concentraferior to man, and that man, having got, tion of the moral, intellectual, and even shall probably keep, his start of centuries, artistic powers-and if woman has par exwe see nothing to prevent woman overtak-cellence exemplified such a concentration, ing, and outstripping with ease, his present there follows a conclusion to which we furthest point of intellectual progress. We should be irresistibly led, were it not that do not look on such productions as " Lear," we question the minor proposition in the and the "Prometheus Vinctus," with the argument-we hold that man has often as despair wherewith the boy who has leaped fully as woman risen to the dignity of death, up in vain to seize, regards ever after the and met him, not as a vassal, but as a moon and the stars; they are, after all, the superior.

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masonry of men, and not the architecture of. Το say that Mrs. Browning has more of the gods; and if man may surpass, why the man than any female writer of the may not woman, taken out of his side," period, may appear rather an equivocal his gentle alias, equal them? compliment; and its truth even may be Of woman, we may say, at least, that questioned. We may, however, be perthere are already provinces where her power mitted to say, that she has more of the

is incontested and supreme. And in pro-heroine than her compeers. Hers is a high

"Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

portion as civilization advances, and as the heroic nature, which adopts for the motto darker and fiercer passions which constitute at once of its life and its poetry, "Perfect the fera natura subside, in the lull of that through suffering." Shelley says:milder day, the voice of woman will become more audible, exert a wider magic, and be as the voice of spring to the opening year. We stay not to prove that the sex of genius is feminine, and that those poets who are most profoundly impressing our young British minds, are those who, in tenderness and sensibility-in peculiar power, and in

But wrong is not always the stern schoolmistress of song. There are sufferings springing from other sources-from intense sensibility-from bodily ailment-from the

loss of cherished objects, which also find in [not complained of neglect nor of injury at poetry their natural vent. And we do all. But she has acknowledged herself inthink that such poetry, if not so powerful, spired by the genius of suffering. And this is infinitely more pleasing and more in- seems to have exerted divers influences upon structive than that which is inspired by real her poetry. It has, in the first place, taught or imaginary grievance. The turbid tor- her to rear for herself a spot of transcenrent is not the proper mirror for reflecting dental retreat, a city of refuge in the clouds. the face of nature; and none but the moody Scared away from her own heart, she has and the discontented will seek to see in it soared upwards, and found a rest elsewhere. an aggravated and distorted edition of their To those flights of idealism in which she own gloomy brows. The poetry of wrong indulges, to those distant and daring themes is not the best and most permanent. It was which she selects, she is urged less, we not wrong alone that excited, though it think, through native tendency of mind, unquestionably. directed, the course of than to fill the vast vacuity of a sick and Dante's and Milton's vein. The poetry of craving spirit. This is not peculiar to her. Shakspeare's wrong is condensed in his son- It may be called, indeed, the Retreat of the nets-the poetry of his forbearance and for- Ten Thousand; though strong and daring giveness, of his gratitude and his happiness, must be those that can successfully accomis in his dramas. The poetry of Pope's plish it. Only the steps of sorrow we had wrong (a scratch from a thorn hedge!) is almost said only the steps of despair-can in his "Dunciad," not in his "Rape of climb such dizzy heights. The healthy and the Lock." The poetry of Wordsworth's the happy mind selects subjects of a healthy wrong is in his "Prefaces," not in his and a happy sort, and which lie within the "Excursion." The poetry of Byron's sphere of every-day life and every-day wrong is in those deep curses which some- thought. But for minds which have been times disturb the harmony of his poems; and that of Shelley's in the maniacal scream which occasionally interrupts the peans of his song. But all these had probably been as great, or greater poets, had no wrong befallen them, or had it taught them another lesson, than either peevishly to proclaim, or furiously to resent it.

wrung and riven, there is a similar attraction in gloomy themes, as that which leads them to the side of dark rivers, to the heart of deep forests, or into the centre of waste glens. Step forth, ye giant children of Sorrow and Genius, that we may tell your names, and compute your multitudes. First, there is the proud thundershod Mrs. Browning has suffered, so far as we Eschylean family, all conceived in the are aware, no wrong from the age. She" eclipse" of that most powerful of Grecian might, indeed, for some time have spoken spirits. Then follows the vast skeleton of of neglect. But people of genius should"De Rerum natura," the massive product now learn the truth, that neglect is not of the grief of Lucretius—

wrong; or if it be, it is a wrong in which they often set the example. Neglecting the tastes of the majority, the majority avenges itself by neglecting them.

Stand

"Who cast his plummet down the broad

Deep universe, and said, No God;
Finding no bottom, he denied
Divinely the divine, and died,
Chief poet upon Tiber side."

MRS. BROWNING.

ing and singing in a congregation of the deaf, they are senseless enough to complain that they are not heard. Or should they There stalk forward, next in the procession, address the multitude, and should the mul- the kings, priests, popes, prelates, and the titude not listen, it never strikes them that yet guiltier and mightier shapes of Dante's the fault is their own; they ought to have Hell. Next, the Satan of Milton advances, compelled attention. Orpheus was listened champing the curb, and regarding even to: the thunder is: even the gentlest spring Prometheus as no mate for his proud and shower commands its audience. If neglect lonely misery. Then comes, cowering and means wilful winking at claims which are shivering on, the timid Castaway of Cowper. felt, it is indeed a wrong; but a wrong He is followed by Byron's heroes, a haughty seldom if ever committed, and which com- yet melancholy troop, with conscious madplaint will not cure-if it means, merely,ness animating their gestures and glarignorance of claims which have never been ing in their eyes. The Anciente Marepresented or enforced, where and whose is the criminality?

To do Mrs. Browning justice, she has

nere succeeds, now fearfully reverting his looks, and now fixing his glittering eye forward on a peopled and terrible vacancy.

And, lastly, a frail shadowy and shifting | the dainties of the heavens-where celestial shape, looking now like Laon, now like plants grew under the same sun with terLionel, and like Prometheus, proclaims that Alastor himself is here, the Benjamin in this family of tears.

restrial blossoms, and where the cadences of seraphic music filled up the pauses in the voice of God. Far different, indeed, is Mrs. Browning's from Dryden's disgusting inroad into Eden-as different, almost, as the advent of Raphael from the encroachment of Satan. But the poem professed to stand in the lustre of the fiery sword, and this should have burnt up some of its conceits, and silenced some of its meaner minstrelsies. And all such attempts we regard precisely as we do the beauties of the Apocrypha, when compared to the beauties of the Bible. They are as certainly beauties, but beauties of an inferior order-they are flowers, but not the roses which grew along the banks of the Four Rivers, or caught in their crimson cups the first sad drops wept at committing of the mortal sin.”

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"One blossom of Eden outblooms them all."

"Whither shall I wander," seems Mrs. Browning to have said to herself, "to-day to escape from my own sad thoughts, and to lose, to noble purpose, the sense of my own identity? I will go eastward to Eden, where perfection and happiness once dwelt. I will pass, secure in virtue, the far flashing sword of the cherubim ; I will knock at the door and enter. I will lie down in the forsaken garden; I will pillow my head where Milton pillowed his, on the grass cool with the shadow of the Tree of Life; and I will dream a vision of my own, of what this place once was, and of what it was to leave it for the wilderness." And she has passed the waving sword, and she has entered the awful garden, and she has dreamed a dream, and she has, awaking, told it as a "Drama of Exile." It were vain to deny that the Having accepted from Mrs. Browning's dream is one full of genius-that it is en- own hand sadness, or at least seriousness, tirely original; and that it never once, as the key to her nature and genius, let us except by antithesis, suggests a thought of continue to apply it in our future remarks. Milton's more massive and palpable vision. This at once impels her to, and fits her for, Her paradise is not a garden, it is a flush the high position she has assumed, utterAnd whom on a summer evening sky. Her Adam is ing the "Cry of the Human." not the fair large-fronted man, with all would the human race prefer as their earthly manlike qualities meeting unconsciously in advocate, to a high-souled and gifted wo his full clear nature-he is a German meta-man? What voice but the female voice physician. Her Eve is herself, an amiable could so softly and strongly, so eloquently and gifted blue-stocking, not the mere and meltingly, interpret to the ear of him meek motherly woman, with what Aird whose name is Love, the deep woes and beautifully calls the "broad, ripe, serene, deeper wants of " poor humanity's afflicted and gracious composure of love about her." will, struggling in vain with ruthless desHer spirits are neither cherubim nor sera- tiny?" Some may quarrel with the title, phim-neither knowing nor burning ones-"The Human," as an affectation; but, in they are fairies, not, however, of the Puck the first place, if it be, it is a very small or Ariel species, but of a new metaphysical one, and a small affectation can never furbreed; they do not ride on, but split hairs; they do not dance, but reason; or if they dance, it is on the point of a needle, in cycles and epicycles of mystic and mazy motion. There is much beauty and power in passages of the poem, and a sweet inarticulate infinite melody, like the fabled of mandrakes in the lyrics. Still we do not element in human nature? That has found see the taste of turning the sweet open an organ in Byron-an echo in his bellowgarden of Eden into a maze-we do not ing verse. It is the human element in man approve of the daring precedent of trying-bruised, bleeding, all but dead under the conclusions with Milton on his own high pressure of evil circumstances, under the field of victory-and we are, we must say, ten thousand tyrannies, mistakes, and dejealous of all encroachments upon that fair lusions of the world, that has here ceased Paradise which has so long painted itself any longer to be silent, and is speaking in upon our imaginations-where all the luxu- a sister's voice to Time and to Eternityries of earth mingled in the feast with all to Earth and Heaven. The poem may

nish matter for a great quarrel. Secondly, we are not disposed to make a man, and still less a woman, an offender for a word; and thirdly, we fancy we can discern a good reason for her use of the term. What is it that is crying aloud through her voice to It is not the feral or fiendish Heaven? cry

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truly be called a prayer for the times, and was St. Simonianism? What else is Young no collect in the English liturgy surpasses Englandism? And what else are the it in truth and tenderness, though some hopes built by many now upon certain permay think its tone daring to the brink of fected schemes of education, which, freely blasphemy, and piercing almost to anguish. translated, just mean the further sharpenGracefully from this proud and giddy ing and furnishing of knaves and fools; pinnacle, where she had stood as the con- and now upon a Coming Man," who is scious and commissioned representative of to supply every deficiency, reconcile every the human race, she descends to the door of contradiction, and right every wrong. Yes, the factory, and pleads for the children in- he will come mounted on the red-roan closed in that crowded and busy hell. The horse of sweet Ella's vision! "cry of the factory children" moves you, Shadowed by the same uniform seriousbecause it is no poem at all-it is just a ness are the only two poems of hers which long sob, veiled and stifled as it ascends we shall further at present mention-we through the hoarse voices of the poor beings mean her." Vision of Poets," and her themselves. Since we read it we can" Geraldine's Courtship." The aim of the scarcely pass a factory without seeming to first is to present, in short compass, and hear this psalm issuing from the machinery, almost in single lines, the characteristics of as if it were protesting against its own the greater poets of past and present times. abused powers. But, to use the language of This undertaking involved in it very cona writer quoted a little before, "The Fairy siderable difficulties. For, in the first Queen is dead, shrouded in a yard of cotton place, most great poets possess more than stuff made by the spinning-jenny, and by one distinguishing peculiarity. To select a that other piece of new improved machinery, single differential point is always hazardous, the souls and bodies of British children, for and often deceptive. 2dly, After you have which death alone holds the patent." From selected the prominent characteristic of Mrs. Browning, perhaps the most imagina- your author, it is no easy task to express it tive and intellectual of British females, down in a word, or in a line. To compress thus to a pale-faced, thick-voieed, degraded, an Iliad in a nutshell, to imprison a Giant hardly human, factory girl, what a long and genie in an iron pot, is more a feat of precipitous descent! But though hardly, magic than an act of criticism. 3dly, It is she is human; and availing herself of the especially difficult to express the differentia small, trembling, but eternally indestructi- of a writer in a manner at once easy, and ble link of connexion implied in a common natural, and picturesque, and poetical. In nature, our authoress can identify herself the very terms of such an attempt as Mrs. with the cause, and incarnate her genius in Browning makes, it is implied that she not the person of the poor perishing child. only defines, but describes the particular How unspeakably more affecting is a plead-writer. But to curdle up a character into ing in behalf of a particular portion of the one, noble word, to describe Shakspeare, race, than in behalf of the entire family for instance, in such compass, what sunMrs. Browning might have uttered a hun-syllable shall suffice; or must we renew dred" cries of the human," and proved her- Byron's wish? self only a sentimental artist, and awakened little save an echo dying away in distant elfin laughter; but the cry of a factory child, coming through a woman's, has gone

to a nation's heart of hearts.

Although occupied thus with the sterner wants and sorrows of society, she is not devoid of interest in its minor miseries and

"Could I unbosom and embody now
That which is most within me; could I wreak
My thought upon expression!

*

And that one word were Lightning, I would speak ́;

But as it is I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a

sword."

Accordingly, this styte of portraiture disappointments. She can sit down beside (shall we call it, as generally pursued, the little Ella (the miniature of Alnaschar) thumb-nail style?) has seldom been proand watch the history of her day-dream secuted with much success. Ebenezer beside the swan's nest among the reeds, Elliot has a copy of verses after this fashion, and see in her disappointment a type of not quite worthy of him. What, for exhuman hopes in general, even when tower-ample, does the following line tell us of ing and radiant as summer clouds. Ella's Shelley?

dream among the reeds! What else was

Godwin's Political Justice? What else "Ill-fated Shelley, vainly great and brave."

and

The same words might have been used connecting us with distant countries, nay, about Sir John Moore, or Pompey. Mrs. connecting us with distant worlds. GraviBrowning's verses are far superior. Some-tation has, amid all her immensity, wrought times, indeed, we see her clipping at a no such lovely work as when she rounded a character, in order to fit it better into the tear. place she has prepared for it. Sometimes From this beautiful poem alone, we she crams the half of an author into a verse, might argue Mrs. Browning's capacity for and has to leave out the rest for want of producing a great domestic tragedy. We room. Sometimes over a familiar face she might argue it, also, from the various pecuthrows a veil of words and darkness. But liarities of her genius-her far vision into often her one glance sees, and her one the springs of human conduct-into those word shows, the very heart of an author's viewless veins of fire, or of poison, which genius and character. Our readers may wind within the human heart-her symparecur to the lines already quoted in refer- thy with dark bosoms-the passion for ence to Lucretius, as one of her best por- truth, which pierces often the mist of her traitures. Altogether this style, as gene- dimmer thought, like a flash of irrepressible rally prosecuted, is a small one, not much lightning-her fervid temperament, always better than anagrams and acrostics-ranks, glowing round her intellectual sight-and indeed, not much higher than the inge- her queen-like dominion over imagery nuity of the persons who transcribe the language. We think, meanwhile, that she "Pleasures of Hope" on the breadth of a has mistaken her sphere. In that rare atcrown-piece, and should be resigned to mosphere of transcendentalism which she such praiseworthy personages. By far the has reached, she respires with difficulty best specimen of it we remember, is the and with pain. She is not "native and very clever list involving a running com- endued" into that element. We would mentary of the works of Lord Byron, by warn her off the giddy region, where temDr. Maginn; unless, indeed, it be Gay's' pests may blow, as well as clouds gather. Catalogue Raisonné of the portentous, Her recent sonnets in Blackwood are sad poems of Sir Richard Blackmore. Who failures,-the very light in them is darkshall embalm, in a similar way, the endless! ness--thoughts, in themselves as untangible writings of James, Cooper, and Dickens? as the films upon the window pane, are "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," as a concealed in a woof of words, till their transcript from the "red-leaved tablets of the heart"-as a tale of love, set to the richest music-as a picture of the subtle workings, the stern reasonings, and the terrible bursts of passion-is above praise. How like a volcano does the poet's heart at length explode? How first all power is given him in the dreadful trance of silence, and then in the loosened tempest of speech! What a wild, fierce logic flows forth from his lips, in which, as in that of Lear's madness, the foundations of society seem to quiver like reeds, and every mount of conventionalism is no longer found; and in the lull of that tempest, and in the returning sunshine, how beautiful, how almost super-human, seem the figures of the two lovers, seen now and magnified through the mist of the reader's fast-flowing tears! It is a tale of successful love, and yet it melts you like a tragedy, and most melts you in the crisis of the triumph. On Geraldine we had gazed as on a star, with dry-eyed and distant admiration; but when that star dissolves in showers at the feet of her poet lover, we weep for very joy. Truly a tear is a sad yet beautiful thing; it constitutes a link

thin and shadowy meaning fades utterly away. Morbid weakness, she should remember, is not masculine strength. But can she not, through the rents in her cloudy tabernacle, discern, far below in the vale, fields of deep though homely beauty, where she might more gracefully and successfully exercise her exquisite genius? She has only to stoop to conquer. By and bye we may-using unprofanely an expression originally profane--be tempted to say, as we look up the darkened mountain, with its flashes of fire hourly waxing fewer and feebler, "As for this poetess, we wot not what has become of her."

While we are venturing on accents of warning, we might also remind her that there are in her style and manner peculiarities which a wicked world will persist in calling affectations. On the charge of affectation, generally, we are disposed to lay little stress-it is a charge so easily got up, and which can be so readily swelled into a cuckoo cry; it is often applied with such injustice, and it so generally attaches to singularities in manner, instead of insincerities in spirit and matter. But why

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