"It["Evangeline"] is a psalm of love and forgiveness; the gentleness and peace of Christian meekness and forbearance breathe through it."—Whittier. "His heart was pure, his purpose high, His thoughts serene, his patience vast. And lived to God from first to last." -William Winter. ILLUSTRATIONS. "Then shall the good stand in immortal bloom, In the fair gardens of that second birth; And each bright blossom mingle its perfume With that of flowers which never bloomed on earth." -God's Acre. "Then pealed the bells more loud and deep : 'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men.'" -Christmas Bells. "Let us be patient! These severe afflictions Not from the ground arise, But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. We see but dimly through the mists and vapors ; What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps."— Resignation. 14. Simplicity-Naturalness.-"In respect of this simplicity and naturalness, his style is in strong contrast with that of many writers of our time. There is no straining for effect, there is no torturing of rhythm for novel patterns, no wearisome iteration of petted words, no inelegant clipping of syllables to meet the exigencies of a verse, no affected archaisms, rarely any liberty taken with language-unless it may be in the form of a few words in the translation of Dante." -Oliver Wendell Holmes. "He was no word-monger, no winder of coil upon coil about a subtle theme. He used his culture not to veil the word, but to make it clear. He drew upon it for the people in a manner which they could relish and comprehend." -E. C. Stedman. "The clear thought, the true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity. . . His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine stateliness, as in the Arsenal at Springfield,' and even a resounding splendor of diction, as in Sandalphon.' But when the melody is most delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought or its most transparent expression, is seen in The Evening Star' and Snow-Flakes.'"-George William Curtis. "His thought, though often deep, was never obscure. His lyrics have a singing simplicity. This simplicity was the the result of rare, artistic repression; it was not due to any poverty of intellect."-Brander Matthews. ILLUSTRATIONS. "The twilight is sad and cloudy, "But in the fisherman's cottage "Close, close it is pressed to the window, As if those childish eyes Were looking into the darkness To see some form arise."-Twilight. "He goes on Sunday to the church, He hears the parson pray and preach, Singing in the village choir, And it makes his heart rejoice. "It sounds to him like her mother's voice, He needs must think of her once more, And with his hard, rough hand he wipes A tear out of his eyes." -The Village Blacksmith. On sunny slope and beechen swell, "Far upward in the mellow light Rose the blue hills. One cloud of white In the warm blush of evening shone ; An image of the silver lakes, By which the Indian's soul awakes." 42 -Burial of the Minnisink. BROWNING, 1812-1889 Biographical Outline.-Robert Browning, born May 7, 1812, at Camberwell, London; father a clerk in the Bank of England and a man of fine literary taste; mother "a Scottish gentlewoman" descended from German stock; Browning is a precocious child of great activity and fiery temper ; he enters a private school in infancy, makes verses before he can write, and so excels older children in his studies as to cause maternal jealousy; later he enters the private school of the Rev. Thomas Ready, where he remains till he is fourteen ; he is passionately devoted to his mother, who gives him a careful biblical training; he manifests also an early fondness for animal pets; he exhibits, as a boy, contempt for the educational methods of his school and for the stupidity of his school-fellows, although he writes plays and compels the other boys to act them; his father is a great reader, and the house is "literally crammed with books; " Browning reads omnivorously, preferring history and literature, and early develops a fondness for rare books and first editions; he becomes especially interested in the writers of the Elizabethan school and in Byron; at the age of twelve he writes a "volume" of poems showing strong traces of Byron's influence, and calls it "Incondita; " his father seeks in vain for a publisher of this volume, and the original was probably destroyed by Browning, although a copy made by a friend of his mother was extant till 1871, when Browning destroyed it; "Incondita" was read by the Rev. W. J. Fox, who afterward became Browning's literary adviser and patron; the copy so long preserved in manuscript was made by Miss Flower, a musician of rare merit, who afterward wrote the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee;" Browning was deeply devoted to her, and she is supposed to have inspired his "Pauline;" in 1826 he accidentally picks up "Mr. Shelley's atheistical poem," as the bookstall advertisement called it; soon afterward he obtains most of Shelley's writings and three volumes of Keats's, although the local booksellers then hardly knew these poets' names; Shelley and Keats came to Browning, as he said, "like two nightingales singing together in a May night," and they had an important influence on the development of his genius; he long regarded Shelley as the greatest poet of his age, if not of any age; for two years after reading "Queen Mab" Browning becomes "a professing atheist and a practising vegetarian," and he returns to a natural diet only when he sees that his eyes are becoming weakened by his abstention; his "atheism" soon cured itself. As Browning's father is himself a scholar, he determines to educate the boy at home, where he learns music, dancing, riding, boxing, and fencing, and excels in the last three accomplishments; in music he makes such advancement as to write the airs for the songs he sung, and he remained all his life a fine musical critic; he afterward destroyed his boyish musical compositions; during his fourteenth and fifteenth years he acquires a good knowledge of the French language and literature under a native tutor, and in his eighteenth year he attends, for a term or two, a Greek class at the University of London; he seems to have entirely neglected mathematics, logic, and the other branches that train the thinking powers -studies that were "doubly requisite for a nature in which the creative imagination was predominant over all the other mental faculties;" this omission doubtless accounts in great part for the unfortunate involutions and inversions of his style; during his later teens his restlessness and aggressiveness became intense, and he "gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was and some things that he was not; " one of his dearest friends at this period was Alfred Domett, whom |