the most intense love of his life-Elizabeth Barrett, the adored wife who for twenty years had slept the sleep that knows no waking, in the Protestant cemetery at Florence.

The memory of this ideal woman and poetess has been recently revivified by Tullo Massarani, who has published translations of some of Mrs. Browning's best poems. In the prose preface which precedes his poetical versions, Massarani speaks with much affection for the woman, and with rare discrimination of the poetess. I will give a brief abstract of his biography.

It is uncertain whether Elizabeth was born in London or Durham, in 1806 or 1809. "I" says Massarani, "am naturally in favor of the date .which enables me to picture her as the younger woman." She passed her childhood at Hope-End, close to the Malvern Hills, one of the most picturesque parts of England.

Her father, Edward Multon Barrett, owned several plantations in America, and the strong character of the man had been rendered still more tenacious and overbearing by the habit of ruling over his slaves. But whatever he had of rough or rigid faded into ineffable tenderness in the society of the eager and ardent girl whose rides, walks and day-dreams still left her time for solid reading and serious study. At fifteen, while saddling her horse, she let the saddle drop. Falling on her back, she received a shock to her spine which very nearly proved fatal. She remained an invalid for many years and never perfectly recovered her health. To physical ills mental were added. Her mother died and her father lost his fortune.

While still at Hope-End, Elizabeth had published anonymously her first volume. It was a mixture of prose and verse, and bore the title "Essay on Mind." After she had removed with

her people to Sidmouth there appeared in print her version of the "Prometheus Bound" of Eschylus. From Sidmouth, the Barretts, including Elizabeth, went to London, where, among other acquaintances, she became intimate with Wordsworth and Carlyle, and where her poetry, rich in sentiment, but not addressed to the general public, found ready acceptance with cultured and thoughtful minds. She was thirty-seven when she and Robert Browning met. His reputation had already been made by two poems on Italian subjects, "Sordello" and "Pippa Passes." Pippa is a silkworker of Asolo, the smiling hamlet where Catherine Cornaro tried to forget, amid the pleasures of a select court, the splendors of her lost crown of Cyprus. And it was from the soft breezes of these same Asolan hills that Browning himself, in the last year of his life, was to seek relief from the sadness of old age.

The tender poetess sung the story of her love for Browning in a marvellous series of forty-four sonnets. But the marriage of the two lovers was opposed by the father, who could not endure the thought of being separated from his adored child. Love, conquering every consideration and every obstacle, suggested an audacious move, a secret marriage and flight. The impediment of ill-health disappeared, as by a miracle wrought of love, and Elizabeth went with Robert first to Paris and then to Pisa. In "Aurora Leigh," the greatest of her poems, Mrs. Browning has left a lasting record of all that at this time gave her pleasure or pain or joy.

In gentle Tuscany Mrs. Browning became an Italian in heart and sympathy, and through the grey dawning of national redemption she shared the hopes and enthusiasms of the most ardent patriots. In the days which preceded the revolution of '48, Casa

Guidi in Florence, where the Brownings had established themselves, became a rendezvous for patriots and foreign-born sympathizers with Italy. And the hopeful songs of this dear pilgrim from over-seas never failed to accompany the daring projects of those who dreamed of their country's unity. With the restoration of the Austrian archdukes, discomfort and bitterness also returned, but behind the "nipping frost" came wafted once more the breath of spring, and a hymn of triumph broke from the heart of the poetess when, in '59, upon the bloody hills of Lombardy, victory kissed the tri-colored standard of Italy.

Mrs. Browning might well believe that at last she saw her ideal country -our Italy, as she loved to call it-once more become a nation. But in '61 her always delicate health still further declined and on the twenty-ninth of June in that year she gently died, as she had lived, in the arms of the man who, for fifteen years, had made her absolutely happy. "God took her to Himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark, uneasy bed into your arms and the light," such were the words of her sorrowing husband.

The versions that Tullo Massarani has made of his selection of Mrs. Browning's poems are at once so accurate and so graceful as to seem less translations than original compositions. With this valuable little book its eloquent and copious author should undeceive many of those who fancy that in Italy the sun of poetry has shone only on a select few who all profess the same literary creed. Even for those who do not worship at their shrine there is salvation. Massarani proves that talent and the power of writing really good verse still endures our country.

ere are two methods of translate reproduces the letter and the

other the spirit of the original. Tommaseo believed that the first was good for beginners, and the second not without use for adepts. One reproduces the beauty of form, the other goes deeper and shows the charm of the spirit. Massarani's theory is that when you wish to give the story of a poem it is better to do so in prose, making your version as analytically literal as possible. On the other hand, your aim may be that your public, educated doubtless, but not bookish, should gain some idea of a poet's style. Now this cannot be directly transplanted into another tongue.

The translator should therefore permit himself a considerable license and try to produce the same effect by somewhat different means. In this way Massarani has been able to reconcile perfect freedom of form with absolute fidelity to the thought.

I wish I were free to speak at greater length than is possible in a brief article of the merits of this book, which seems to me destined to endure to the honor of Italy. I must at least permit myself to linger over a poem which, alike in motive and metre, presents exceptional difficulty to the translator. The aim in the mind of the gentle poetess when she wrote "The Cry of the Children," was to induce legislation which should forbid the employment in mines and factories of children and, above all, of young girls. And her object was in part effected, in England at least. The gravest social problems have often been solved by the eager and sympathetic utterance of a poet, who may raise himself to heights which the reflections of a sociologist do not attain. In Italy also, the voice of a poet (Giacomo Zanella) was heard in the defense of suffering childhood. And the Italian code contained compassionate provisions similar to those adopted in England. But with us, alas! they only

exist on paper, and have never been thoroughly applied.

Mrs. Browning's poem begins with a rapid and moving description of the children who come tearful and faint from their unrighteous toil to seek rest in their mother's bosom:

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,

The young birds are chirping in the nest,

The young fawns are playing with the shadows,

The young

flowers are blowing toward the west

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others,

In the country of the free.

Life in the factory is described in a few brief touches, but with evident repulsion. The children speak:

For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning

Their wind comes in our facesTill our hearts turn-our heads, with pulses burning,

And the walls turn in their places. Turns the sky in the high window

blank and reeling,

And her emotion draws from the poetess this cry of anguish and compassion:

"Aye! be silent! Let them hear each other breathing

For a moment, mouth to mouth! Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing

Of their tender human youth! Let them feel that this cold, metallic motion

Is not all the life God fashions or reveals.

Let them prove their living souls against the notion

That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!

Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,

Grinding life down from its mark; And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward,

Spin on blindly in the dark.

In that charming poem, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," is told the story of the loves of a poet and a great lady, who, resisting and overcoming the prejudices of caste in her native land, gives herself to a brave man, sprung from peasant stock, but worthy of her respect and love. The tale is too prolixly told, the fancy often fails, the reader's heart is not always moved. But there are passages of novel beauty and often the octaves of the translator revel in the flowery richness of a style so picturesque as to recall the classic models:

Oh to see or hear her singing, scarce I know which is divinest

For her looks sing too-she modulates her gestures on the tune; And her mouth stirs with the song, like song; and when the notes are finest,

'Tis the eyes that shoot out vocal lights and seem to swell them on.

La luce che glù plove trema e futtua,
Su' travicei le mosche anche vacillano
E noi si va con tutto il resto a vanvera.
E tutto, tutto il dì le rote frullano
SI che talvolta avvien

Che noi si gridi mezzo matti: "O statevi
Rote, quest' oggi almen!"

And she spake such good thoughts

natural, as if she always thought them;

She had sympathies so rapid, open, free as bird on branch,

Just as ready to fly east as west,

whichever way besought them, In the birchen-wood a chirrup, or a cock-crow in the grange."

She who was so profoundly acquainted with the life of her day, who understood and pitied its miseries and misfortunes, this most distinguished artist who longs to join a Faculty of Arts in promoting the welfare of hu

knew also how to frame S of a limpid confidence in h her most intimate emotions are aled. No one can read certain ns of Mrs. Browning without perving in them that peculiar and der frankness of which only a Oman's heart is capable. At times

her soul goes out to meet the great soul of creation, and seems to lose itself in Nature so that the poetess might ask with Byron:

conceptions which are the principa and essential outcome of poetical beauty, as indeed they are of all the highest manifestations of beauty in this world. In the midst of these painful fluctuations her sentiments always stand out sincere and true, and the translator has been able to render them with a perfection of form which is a faithful reflection of the profound sentiment within.

One characteristic of this poetry is the frequency with which emotion is translated by imagery. This quality finds perhaps its highest expression in "My Heart and I," so simple without a trace of vulgarity, so impassioned with no ostentation of passion. But this facility of impression and emotion possessed by the gracious lady received fresh stimulus from the sight of the beautiful Italian country and the memories, sufferings and hopes of its inhabitants. Her political poems breathe now the tenderest pity and now a fierce disdain.

"Napoleon III. in Italy," "A Court

Last week I terminated, by a brief cable, a family connection with the West Indies dating from the early part of this century. I wired my agent there to get rid of my remaining sugar estates at whatever price they would fetch. This week I received a telegraphic reply from him saying that in the case of one estate he had been made a purely nominal offer, but it seemed to him so ridiculous that he did not like to take the responsibility of accepting it. As to the other three estates, absolutely no offer had been forthcoming. I wired back to him to take the offer that had been made, and, in the event of no bid being forthcoming for the other three estates, to let them go out of cultivation. I cannot afford to lose any more money in the West Indies. Indeed, I have not got it to lose.

For the past ten years-even longer than that, indeed, for the subject was in the air before the De Worms Con

5 E ancor nunziate pace?

Mai più, mai più. Per quanto ancora è nerbo Nel braccio, nel voler, nella parola. Vi diciam che mentite per la gola: Con noi gelosi della patria sorti

Sorgono i nostri morti,

E l'annunzio feral gridan mendace;
O del tradito verbo

Chieggon vendetta e del morire acerbo.

ference-a Conservative govern had been promising to do someth for the West Indian sugar-planter. has had a majority with which to it. Its ministers, notably Mr. Cham berlain, have gushed-even ravedabout England's duties to her colonies, the crime, not only the folly, of leaving the West Indies to be ruined by bounty-fed sugar.

What has been the result of this asParturiunt tonishing flow of words? montes-but what need to finish the quotation? The West Indies have asked for bread, and they have received a stone. So much for Imperialism in the year of grace 1898! Rather than call upon the working man and the jam manufacturers-particularly the jam manufacturers-to pay for a few months a farthing a pound extra for their sugar, the West Indies are to be reduced to beggary, possibly to revolution. The whites will not revolt, of course-not yet, that is; they have a

Più rispetto a chi muore!

Dal di che parve rinverdir cotesta Terra infelice e anticipar gli eventi, Quanti prodi per lei fecer portenti! Oh perchè d'esser primi in su la via, Perchè di morir pria,

A noi dato non fu, sognando in core, Altra pace da questa,

All'onta no, ma a libertà contesta?