From Jerusalem and from Palestine the travels are continued across the desert to Cairo, to the Pyramids, to the Sphinx, and to Suez. Thence to Damascus and back again to the Mediterranean shores. Everywhere the traveler leads there is vast abundance of entertainment served in the happiest and most felicitous style. It is the poetry of travel.

ELIZABETH BARRETT

BROWNING.

(1809-1861.)

THE republication of Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh," with an introduction by Mr. Swinburne, in which he says there is not "a dull line" in the whole poem, has stirred up quite a controversy in certain literary quarters, not only over the accuracy of Mr. Swinburne's statement, but as to the merits of the poem itself. No one can deny that it abounds in many beautiful and noble passages; but when it comes to asserting that a long novel in blank verse contains no dull lines it is asking something too much.

Mrs. Browning does not appear at her best in her long poems, their blemishes being more fatiguing than their beauties are inspiring. “Aurora Leigh" is pedantic, its meter sometimes halting, and while as a story it will hold the reader's attention throughout, so it would had it been

written in prose. The theme is "sociological," and chiefly concerns three women and one man. But the moral, or whatever it may be called, of the story is utterly unnatural and impossible. Mrs. Browning came but little in contact with the world of actuality because of long years of delicate health, and she knew men and women only in imagination or from books. The characters, therefore, she portrayed are not lifelike or real. For this reason her longer poems, and "Aurora Leigh" particularly, will scarcely survive the generation for which they were written.

But her short poems will cause her to be long remembered as England's chief poetess. Like all writers who have written much she is unequal and sometimes weak and faulty, but her best work is exquisitely beautiful. Her life was sad in many of its outward aspects, and she endured much physical suffering, so that it is not strange she should have dwelt more in the house of mourning than in the house of mirth. A vein of sadness runs through the greater part of her poetry, but it is a sadness tempered by exquisite sweetness. One of her best-known poems, "Cowper's Grave," illustrates these characteristics, and few can read it without tears. The second stanza

runs:

O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing!

O Christians, at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!

O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,

Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

"The Cry of the Children" is another of her great lyrics, breathing a love of humanity that stirred the hearts of men as profoundly as did Hood's "Song of the Shirt." It was the cry of the children of the mines:

Do you 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 their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing towards 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.

The whole poem gleams with pathos and beauty and exalted feeling. Other favorites of these poems not easily to be forgotten when once read are "Isobel's Child," "The Duchess May,"

"Bertha in the Lane," "Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Hector in the Garden" and "To Flush, My Dog."

Elizabeth Barrett was singularly precocious, and when a mere child began to write. She read Greek at eight, and when she was nine, as she relates in her poem "Hector in the Garden," it suggested to her that the Greeks were nine years in besieging Troy.

Nine years old! The first of any
Seem the happiest years that come;
Yet when I was nine, I said
No such word! I thought instead
That the Greeks had used as many
In besieging Ilium.

Many of her poems show that she had a fine

classical education. One of her childish efforts was an epic on the battle of Marathon, after the style of Pope's Homer, and from that time forward she cultivated the art of poesy. She published a volume of poems when nineteen, which was well received by the English critics. Her principal volume of poems was published in 1846, the year she married Robert Browning, when she was in her fortieth year. The readers of Poe's criticisms will remember the high praise he bestowed on Elizabeth Barrett for that volume of poems. He