"How strange that we were both in the world so long without being aware of each other's existence!" but I do not remember seeing it elsewhere expressed in verse or prose. Having put love's chalice to her lips, she will now drink of it boldly. She tells her lover to repeat, again and again, that he loves her. She cares not though it may seem a "cuckoo-strain," for she will have the air filled with it as the vales are filled with the voice of the blithe bird of spring. You cannot have too many stars, or too many flowers, or too many assurances of love.

-toll

Say thou dost love me, love me, love me-
The silver iterance!-only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence, with thy soul.

The same strain of proud and exultant joy in love and the loved one is continued through several spirited and splendid sonnets. The sadness in them is but a dark background to the rainbow of their joy. She tells him in one of the noblest of the series, which I must quote entire, that her chamber had been peopled by visions before he came.

I lived with visions for my company
Instead of men and women, years ago,

And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know

A sweeter music than they played to me.

But soon their trailing purple was not free

Of this world's dust,-their lutes did silent grow,

And I myself grew faint and blind below

Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU did'st come-to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendours-(better, yet the same,

As river-water hallowed into fonts)

Met in thee, and from out thee overcame

My soul with satisfaction of all wants

Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

There are forty-three of these sonnets, and I had marked several others for extract; but my desire is to quote only enough to create in the reader an importunate wish for more. A very beautiful one describes the love-letters she had received, or, rather, chronicles a few of them in the order of ascending intensity of love. It would be too cruel to forbear quoting the thirty-eighth, which contains an account of three kisses which the lover had the bliss of bestowing upon the lady.

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write,
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its "Oh, list,"
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst

I could not wear here plainer to my sight,

Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,

Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!

That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.

The third upon my lips was folded down

In perfect, purple state! since when, indeed,

I have been proud and said, "My love, my own."

But the sonnet which of all the forty-three attests, to my thinking, most explicitly, that tenderness of domestic sympathy, that intense feeling of home joys, that loving remembrance of the friends of her child

hood, which characterises Mrs. Browning, is the thirtyfifth: I quote part of it.

If I leave all to thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range

Of walls and floors-another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is

Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?

So far as I know, there is not in the history of literature a parallel instance to the marriage of Elizabeth. Barrett Barrett and Robert Browning. Poets both of undoubted genius, they were yet of markedly diverse genius. Their harmony may, on that account, have been only the more complete. In the works of Mr. Browning are to be found many references to Mrs. Browning, all couched in terms of ardent affection. More than once, indeed, when she is the subject of his verse, he seems to pass into a less rugged, a more tenderly melodious and chastened, mood of literary execution than that in which he usually works. We have nothing from his pen more delicate in its beauty than the One Word More, in which he dedicates to her his series of poems called Men and Women. Here are a few of the most quotable, not by any means the best, of the lines.

Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,

Enter each and all, and use their service,

Speak from every mouth, the speech, a poem.

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving :
I am mine and yours-the rest be all men's,
Karshook, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty.
Let me speak this once in my true person,
Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea,

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence—
Pray you, look on these my men and women,
Take and keep my fifty poems finished;

Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!

Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.

Once he permits us to glance into the sacred privacy of his evening home. His "perfect wife" sits "reading by firelight," her "great brow" propped by "the spirit small hand"-a vignette picture that vividly reminds us of those of herself in her girlish verses, as she sat studying by the side of her favourite brother.

CHAPTER XI.

POEMS OF PATRIOTIC SYMPATHY.

WR

E saw how nobly Mrs. Browning responded to the highest sentiments, the most heroic endeavours, of her time, in connection with the movement for the abolition of slavery, and with the general philanthropic impulse and effort to alleviate the distress of factory operatives, of overworked children, and of all men and women into whose soul the iron of luxurious, indifferent, cruel civilisation had too deeply entered. The Cry of the Children is part of the inspired poetry of our age, a word of God in a very strict and solemn sense. Similar in spirit, though not so deeply imbued with immortal fire, is A Song for the Ragged Schools of London. It was written in Rome, and the locality lends colour to the poem.