treachery and hard-heartedness, make up a personality which, above all others, must have been hateful to Milton. Shakspere would have smiled, and secretly accepted the enchantress as a fruitful subject of study. Milton brings her upon the scene only to expose her, and drive her away with most genuine indignation. The Lady, Eve, Dalila--these are the women of Milton; each a great ideal figure, one dedicated to admiration, one to love, and the last to loathing.

We have now gone the round of Milton's poetical works. A line will recapitulate the substance of this essay. Milton works from the starting-point of an idea, and two such ideas brought into being what he accomplished as a man and as an artist. His prose works, the outcome of his life of public action, have for their ideal centre a conception of human liberty. His poetical works, the outcome of his inner life, his life of artistic contemplation, are various renderings of one dominant idea that the struggle for mastery between good and evil is the prime fact of life; and that a final victory of the righteous cause is assured by the existence of a divine order of the universe, which Milton knew by the name of "Providence."

MR BROWNING'S "SORDELLO."

[A fragment from this article on "Sordello" appeared in Fraser's Magazine for 1867, in which year the whole was written. Some paragraphs from the article then printed were transferred in an expanded form to the essay on 66 Tennyson and Browning" in my "Studies on Literature." These paragraphs therefore I omit here, with the excep tion of two or three, which are necessary to place "Sordello" in position with reference to some leading ideas of Mr Browning. In 1867 it was customary to speak of "Sordello" as being wholly unintelligible; and although it may now be considered more correct to speak of it as a model of lucidity, I have a suspicion that many people still find it hard to understand. I print the article because it is a rendering of the poem into prose, lying closer to the original than any other that I have seen, and because as such it may be helpful to some readers of Mr Browning.]

MUCH has been recently written concerning the poems of Mr Browning, but no serious attempt has been made to give an account of his largest work. It was on all hands briefly dismissed as unintelligible. Here is a singular fact: Mr Browning is declared by his contemporaries to be a distinguished poet, a profound and original thinker ; and when we ask, "What of his most laborious undertaking?" the answer of his ablest critic is, "We do not at all doubt that Mr Browning understands his own drift clearly enough," but "probably no man or woman except the author ever yet understood it; and We suspect that if it be true, as his dedication appears to indicate, that there is really one mortal who to his own satisfaction has understood Mr Browning in Sordello, it would be found on cross

examination of that one, that (like Hegel's sole philosophical confidant) even he has misunderstood him." So wrote an admirable critic in the National Review. And what says Mr Browning himself? That the poem is one which the many may not like, but which the few must that he imagined it with so clear a power of vision, and so faithfully declared what he saw, that no material change can be made in it without injury; and that though the faults of expression are numerous, they are such as "with care for a man or book " may be surmounted.* The truth on the critic's side-not a very profitable truth-has perhaps received adequate consideration in the last twenty-seven years; we may now with a good conscience try to see the truth on the author's side, which may happen to be more productive.

It arises

One word on the obscurity of "Sordello. not so much from peculiarities of style, and the involved structure of occasional sentences, as from the unrelaxing demand which is made throughout upon the intellectual and imaginative energy and alertness of the reader. This constant demand exhausts the power of attention in a short time, and the mind is unable to sustain its watchfulness and sureness of action, so that if we

*

"My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since; for I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must like; but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave it as I find it."—Dedication of Sordello to J. Milsand of Dijon. M. Milsand's article on Mr Browning's poetry which appeared many years ago in the Revue des deux Mondes, may still be read with advantage.

read much at a sitting we find the first few pages clear and admirable, while the last three or four over which the eye passes before we close the book leave us bewildered and jaded. The truth is, Mr Browning has given too much in his couple of hundred pages; there is not a line of the poem which is not as full of matter as a line can be; so that if the ten syllables sometimes seem to start and give way under the strain, we need not wonder. We come to no places in to no places in "Sordello " where we can rest and dream or look up at the sky.

Ideas, emotions, images, analyses, descriptions, still come crowding on. There is too much of everything;

we cannot see the wood for the trees. Towards the end of the third book Mr Browning interrupts the story that he may "pause and breathe." That is an apt expression; but Mr Browning seems unable to slacken the motion of his mind, and during this breathing-space heart and brain, perceptive and reflective powers, are almost more busily at work than ever.

Before proceeding to trace in detail the story of "Sordello," including what the author has called "the incidents in the development of a soul," it will be right to indicate the place of "Sordello" amongst the poems of Mr Browning, and to make clear its purport as a whole. "Sordello" is a companion poem of "Paracelsus," five years after the publication of which it appeared, and no one can possess himself of the ideas of Mr Browning without a study of the two. Je sens en moi l'infini" exclaimed Napoleon one day, with his hand upon his breast. Je sens en moi l'infini," is the

germ-idea of these poems.

An account of Mr Browning

as a thinker would be an insufficient account of his genius, for he is also an artist. But more than almost any other poet he is an intellectual artist, and especially in "Paracelsus" and "Sordello" he worked-worked too much, perhaps-under the guidance of ideas, abstract views of character, or the translation into intellectual theorems of the instincts of the heart, too little perhaps through a pure sympathy with life in some of its individual, concrete forms. If any artist may be said to embody in his work a clearly defined system of thought, this may be said of Mr Browning; a system, however, which is not manufactured by logic, but the vital growth of his whole nature in an intellectual direction.

Man here on earth, according to the central and controlling thought of Mr Browning, man here in a state of preparation for other lives, and surrounded by wondrous spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere that contains him, while at the same time he can exist only by submitting for the present to the conditions it imposes; never without fatal loss becoming content with such submission, or regarding those conditions as final. Our nature here is unfinished, imperfect; but its glory, its peculiarity that which makes us men, not God and not brutes-lies in this very character of imperfection, giving scope as it does for indefinite growth and progress. This progress is at the present time commonly thought of as progress of the race; Mr Browning does not forget this, but he dwells chiefly upon the progress of the individual. Now a man may commit either of two irretrievable errors; through temptations of sense and other causes, but most frequently through