while, whether he had any wishes he should like to see carried out?

She did not say that she would see to them. She could not have told him it would be possible for her to do so. Nor could he, perhaps, have helped her much to the discovery. But there was in her an instinct that his work and his will must be hers. There was in him the confidence, that whatever she meant, that she would do. Small details of personal kindness and forethought-debts to be excused; tenants struggling with difficulties to be gently helped through them; old comrades' pensions to be continued, renewed to their widows; old comrades' graves to be kept up; children to be put to school; old servants not to be disturbed in the possession of their cottages or plots of land; an eye to be kept on this covetous neighbour, that bullying bailiff, that giddy girl or rakish youth; certain wanderers or fugitives to be welcomed on their return, or looked after in their exile or their hiding-places! Dry, petty, details, many of them such as would not be embodied in any will or formal document-such details as the husband intrusts to the wife when he is about to undertake a long journey! Allerton's will was in the hands of a Templar friend, or he would have handed it over to his cousin. At one time, fearing to overwhelm her with the multiplicity of his directions, he offered to fetch pen and paper. She declined with a shake of the head. She felt that all his wishes were engraving themselves on her heart as with a style of iron.

Beyond all these directions as to individuals there was a plan, which had been building itself up in his heart all his life long, but which the troubles of the time had never enabled him to realize, of a school embracing handicrafts and field-work as well as book learning, and which by degrees, so far as the Allerton property might go, should bind all the parish into one community of profit as well as labour. A crude scheme, no doubt, such as the sevententh century could conceive-a revolutionary scheme, no doubt, such as the friend No. 23.-VOL. IV.

of regicides might entertain-which looked upon plough-boys and servants as equally entitled to the fruits of the land, the rewards of labour, the development of the intellect, with the hereditary owners of the soil! Still, if peace and good government should allow, it did not seem altogether unfeasible to that old Puritan soldier and that Romish nun. The practical communism of the convent, indeed, enabled her to enter into it fully-her experience of the difficulties of monastic rule, to suggest many improvements, additions, curtailments. There grew upon her the sense of something healthier, broader, holier, and nobler, precisely because humbler and more vulgar, than the discipline of the cloister-wherein yet all the precious lessons of that discipline might be applied, all its prophecies of the blessings of fellowship, and a common life, might have their true fulfilment. And yet, as they felt themselves borne on into the future, the past also seemed to rise and float by their side. They thought of the old days when they read the Utopia together. The whole of midlife seemed well-nigh a dream'; only that real, and this.

This! but a moment longer; for the bugle has shrilled, and the tramp of men is heard on the stairs. She uttered one wild cry, and a death-pallor spread over her. The over-taxed frame could bear out no longer. He blessed God that she was spared all further anguish for the present. He bore her in his arms into the oratory, laid her tenderly on the bed, bent over her for the last time, and dropped upon her cold brow his first kiss since the days of childhood. "Farewell, my Lucy-my wife! God be with thee!" were his murmured words. She made no movement; the nerves of motion no longer answered to the will; or, rather, there was no will left in her to question their power. But sensation was not extinguished. She felt as in a dream what he did to her, and from that hour until her dying day his words rang ever in her ears, "My Lucy-my wife!" But she neither felt nor heard aught

more.

Ꭰ Ꭰ

He returned to his room, strong, calm, and proud. The veil, wimple, and rosary caught his eye, hanging on a chair-back. Partly to conceal the fact of her late presence, partly with an indefinable sense of triumph, he flung them hastily into the cinder heap that stood yet in the hall fire-place, and then advanced to unbolt the door to Major Marston, whom, after courteous greetings on either side, he followed down into the courtyard.

Whilst all were pressing behind them, a man slipped unobserved into the room, looked towards the window seat, and, observing it unoccupied, opened the door

of the oratory, cast a glance into it, and then locked it from outside, taking away with him the key, as well as that of the staircase, which he found lying on the window-seat.

The sharp crash of musketry startled Lucy from her swoon. She sprang to her feet, pressed one instant her head between her hands, then flew alternately to either locked door and to the wellbarred oratory window, then felt that all was over, that all was vain, and sank on the floor helpless, in a yet more deadly swoon.

I WISH to say a few words about Mrs. Browning. As a poet it is not my purpose to speak of her here. Her writings remain behind her, and are well able to answer for themselves. Of her life-story I have not anything to tell; and, even if I had, it would seem to me a kind of profanity to discuss in public the private life of one who was so pure, so child-like, and so kindlyhearted.

It is of one phase of her literary character, little understood at home, that I am anxious to say something. Circumstances threw me a good deal across the path of Mrs. Browning during the last two years of her life, while a certain community of sentiment on subjects in which she was deeply, even passionately, interested, enabled me, I believe, to judge more truly of her "Imperialism" than might have been expected from one who had known her previously by name only.

How far her views on the Empire were right or wrong, is a question about

1 In a paper like this, in memory of such a woman as Mrs. Browning, it is but right that the expression of political opinion, as it might be maintained on other occasions, should give place to the sympathetic exposition, by one who knew her, of the opinions which Mrs. - Browning held. ED.

which I feel there may well be different opinions; but no one, I think, who knew her, could fail to see that these views sprang from feelings which were good and noble. She had no vulgar love of power, no sympathy even with success, in itself. Woman-like, her heart was always with the oppressed, not with the oppressor-with the "causa victa" rather than the "causa victrix." About all cruelty, all oppression, and all tyranny, whether of class, or race, or government, she had an intense and almost morbid feeling; and, if she had held the common English view, and looked upon the Empire as a triumph of brute force over mind, then the whole imperial system Iwould have had no more bitter adversary than the authoress of the "Poems before Congress."

Indeed (strange as the remark may seem at first sight to some of my readers), it was the deepness of Mrs. Browning's faith in the world's being divinely governed which, I believe, first prompted her to look favourably on the Napoleonic regime. It is hard, if you think well of it, to reconcile the ordinary English belief about the Empire with any creed save that of a blank scepticism. If it is really the truth, as popular English opinion would

teach us to believe, that the Emperor is a third-rate sharper and the Empire a clumsy juggle; that the whole history of the last ten years has been a sort of Saturnalia of thimble-rig, in which the greatest events of our time, the Crimean Campaign, the Anglo-French Alliance, and the Italian war, have been cards played for the vulgarest ends then it seems difficult to fancy that (if this, in truth, be so) the whole of the world's history is anything more than a game of hazard at which the black-legs win. The creed may be true or false, but it was not one which a heart like Mrs. Browning's could have held. She saw a great work being worked out around her, and instinctively she believed that in the workers also there must be something of great and godlike.

Still, no doubt, the keenness of Mrs. Browning's Imperialism dated from the time of the Italian war. It is difficult to convey an idea to strangers of the intenseness of all her feelings about Italy. Her's was no dilettante artistic love, but a deep personal attachment, to the land of her home and her affections. All who had written or spoken or worked in behalf of Italy were to her welcome as friends of long standing; while for those who had exerted their powers against Italy, as open enemies or false friends, she felt as personal an enmity as it was possible for that gentle nature to feel against any living being. One who knew her towards the end of her life has told me that her last words to him, at their parting not long ago, were to thank him, with thanks that were little merited, because he had done something for the cause of Italy. Higher thanks, however undeserved, she knew none to give.

This being so, it would have been strange had she not shared the common Italian feeling about the Emperor of the French. The feeling, even if mistaken, is a natural one. In this world of doubt and difficulty men, after all, look to the facts, not to motives; and, explain away the motives as you like, talk as you please about imperial ambition, about the annexation of Nice or

the designs on Sardinia, you cannot escape the broad fact that, in the hour of Italy's need (before, mind you, not after the victory) it was the Emperor Napoleon alone who came forward to rescue Italy, who overthrew the tyranny of Austria, and who, willingly or unwillingly, thereby created the Italian kingdom. Had it not been for Napoleon III., Austria would still have lorded it over Italy. This is the one simple fact which the Italians have not forgotten and cannot forget; and of this fact Mrs. Browning's mind took hold, with all the ardour of her love for Italy, and all the intensity of her poet's feelings.

It was this depth of feeling about Italy, not any want of patriotism, which at times caused her to appear unjust in her appreciation of her own country. It was because at heart she loved England so dearly, that she could not brook what seemed to her the selfishness of English policy towards Italy. When every fibre of her heart was throbbing with sympathy for the Italian war of independence, it jarred upon her unspeakably to be told by her own people that the maintenance of Austrian dominion in Italy was necessary for the safety of England-to know that the sympathies of her own country were on the side of Austria, not of France-of the oppressors of Italy against her deliverers.

To

Moreover, all her feelings on political subjects were intensified not only by her woman's impetuosity, but by the circumstances of her secluded life. me her judgments, both for good and bad, seemed oftentimes like those of a dweller in some city convent. Out of the cloister windows she could see the world moving without, but in its active life she had neither share nor portion. For many years past the days had been few in number, almost to be counted upon the fingers, throughout the long year, on which she was carried down into the open air, to gaze upon the world from a carriage-seat. All, indeed, that one of more than common intellect, and who watched over her with more than

a woman's care, could bring her of gleanings from the outer world, she had to aid her in her thoughts; all that books, written in almost every modern language, could bring her of instruction, she sought for eagerly; but still no aid of books or friends could supply what daily contact with active life alone can give. It was thus that her views of the world had something of the unreality of cloister visions. Yet, at the same time, and by the self-same cause, she seemed to me to see deeper, and sometimes truer, than common minds; and, from the very fact that she did not see things which all of us can see, she saw much also which we cannot see-saw something of God's working in the world, hidden from common and sharper eyes.

So it was that she gained an influence over all she came across, not likely, you would think at first sight, to be exercised by one so unpretending, so anxious always to receive rather than to give knowledge. It is in grateful recollection of having known one whom all were

better for knowing that I have written these few words. They are not in favour of Imperialism, still less against it; they are designed solely to explain what was the true nature of Mrs. Browning's Napoleonic sympathies. If I have been successful in my endeavour, I trust that those who have read these lines will peruse again the "Poems before Congress," and see whether, instead of the vulgar sycophancy of success, of which the English critic would accuse that gentle and noble heart, they cannot see the half-suppressed, half-outspoken passion of a soul that yearned, almost too eagerly, after truth and justice.

Time alone can show whether Mrs. Browning was right or wrong; but, when the passions of the hour are forgotten, I think that her own country will do fuller justice than has yet been done to the true English poetess, who now rests in the land where Keats and Shelley lie-in the city which she loved so well the Florence of Dante and of Michael Angelo. E. D.

It is now about nine years since there appeared, in some of the London weekly papers, scraps of verse, which were said to be specimens of poems, then still in manuscript, written by a young man in Glasgow, of whose powers local critics thought highly. The impression made by these scraps was far from ordinary. Literary authorities in London, though naturally distrustful of the provincial partiality which had so often before found a new poet in some commonplace versifier, were startled into believing that for once rumour might be right, and became curious to know somewhat more of the vague Mr. Alexander Smith, whose name had been thus suddenly introduced to them.

Mr. Smith soon gave the public an opportunity of judging how far his first

"Edwin of Deira. By Alexander Smith: Macmillan & Co. Cambridge and London."

friendly crities were right, by publishing, under the title of A Life-Drama and other Poems, the compositions from which the extracts they had praised were taken. The response, in the matter of circulation, was unusually gratifying. A sale of ten thousand copies in Great Britain and the Colonies, over and above American editions, was a reception of a "new poet," which showed how willing people were, all over the English-speaking part of the world, to welcome such a personage, and how widely the expectation had spread that this might be he. Nor, when those whom experience had made cautious in accepting the evidence of mere popularity in such cases, tried, more at leisure, to decide for themselves whether the new comer ought to have a place among contemporary English poets, under such a laureateship as Tennyson's, was the verdict, in most cases, un

favourable.

With much "crudity" (that is the established phrase) in the poems, and especially in the conception and construction of the main one, there was found in the volume, by readers not likely to be mistaken, an assemblage of qualities sufficiently remarkable. How was it, in the first place, that this young author, circumstanced as he was said to be, had floated off at once in an element of such high intellectual freedom-not making his beginnings in small casual themes of the place and day, nor yet clinging sluggishly to a round of fixed phrases and rhymes, but starting at once among those generalities of time, love, life, death, and the probation of genius, to which only free and highly cultivated art attains with ease, and treating of these large matters of the poet's philosophy in a spirit absolutely unsectarian, and with a corresponding strength of verse? Clearly, for one thing, the notions of some as to where and how a man might be educated so as to be up to a high level of contemporary thought might need to be corrected! Not in literary London alone, it seemed, might this level be reached, but anywhere, even in the midst of crowded mills and warehouses, if only books might be had, and thinking persons might have their evenings and their Sundays to themselves, and kindred spirits might meet to flash their mutual lights. Still to have taken such a clear flight at once as Mr. Smith had done, into the higher region of thoughts and topics, and to have acquired such facility of metrical expression in that region, argued something in himself beyond the common fellowship. For, on examining more closely the texture of his poems, it hardly appeared that it was a mere ambition after fine sound and words that had inspired him to the flight, a mere inflation with the ready-made phraseology of any big style of philosophizing about man and his destiny that books might have made current among minds of imperfect training. Find fault as one might, here was plainly no half-cultured weakling, but a writer who could strew his pages with distinct and even striking thoughts,

who had an unusual power of expressing such thoughts in rich and wellconceived images, and who maintained in his verse a logical precision, a regulated connexion of clause and metaphor, which showed that, even when his meaning was wildest, he had it cunningly in hand. Could any one, it was asked, have fallen in anywhere with such passages as the following, and not have acknowledged their power? With this, for example, as an image of the worth of friendship with a superior mind?—