forces our most earnest respect. But unless we had space to extract three-fourths of the volumes, how could we convey this aggregation by specimens? We might quote, to be sure, an example of keen insight into our psychal nature, such as this: I fell flooded with a Dark,

In the silence of a swoon-
When I rose, still cold and stark,

There was night,-I saw the moon;
And the stars, each in its place,
And the May-blooms on the grass,
Seemed to wonder what I was.
And I walked as if apart

From myself when I could stand-
And I pitied my own heart,

As if I held it in my hand

Somewhat coldly,—with a sense

Of fulfilled benevolence.

Or we might copy an instance of the purest and most radiant

imagination, such as this:

So, young muser, I sat listening

To my Fancy's wildest word

On a sudden, through the glistening
Leaves around, a little stirred,

Came a sound, a sense of music, which was rather felt than heard.
Softly, finely, it inwound me-

From the world it shut me in-
Like a fountain falling round me
Which with silver waters thin,

Holds a little marble Naiad sitting smilingly within

Or, again, we might extract a specimen of wild Dantesque vigor, such as this-in combination with a pathos never excelled:

Ay! be silent-let them hear each other breathing

For a moment, mouth to mouth

Let them touch each others' hands in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth!

Let them feel that this cold metallic motion

Is not all the life God fashions or reveals-

Let them prove their inward souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!

Or, still again, we might give a passage embodying the most ele vated sentiment, most tersely and musically thus expressed:

1

And since, Prince Albert, men have called thy spirit high and rare,
And true to truth, and brave for truth, as some at Augsburg were-
We charge thee by thy lofty thoughts and by thy poet-mind,
Which not by glory or degree takes measure of mankind,
Esteem that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring,

And hold her uncrowned womanhood to be the royal thing!

These passages, we say, and a hundred similar ones, exemplifying particular excellences, might be displayed, and we should still fail, as lamentably as the skolastikos with his brick, in conveying an idea of the vast totality. By no individual stars can we present the constellatory radiance of the book. To the book then, with implicit confidence we appeal.

That Miss Barrett has done more, in poetry, than any woman living or dead, will scarcely be questioned :-that she has surpassed all her poetical contemporaries of either sex (with a single exception,) is our deliberate opinion-not idly entertained, we think, nor founded on any visionary basis. It may not be uninteresting, therefore, in closing this examination of her claims, to determine in what manner she holds poetical relation with these contemporaries, or with her immediate predecessors, and especially with the great exception to which we have alluded,-if at all.

If ever mortal "wreaked his thoughts upon expression," it was Shelley. If ever poet sang (as a bird sings)-impulsively-earnestly--with utter abandonment-to himself solely-and for the mere joy of his own song-that poet was the author of the Sensitive Plant. Of Art-beyond that which is the inalienable instinct of Genius-he either had little or disdained all. He really disdained that Rule which is the emanation from Law, because his own soul was law in itself. His rhapsodies are but the rough notes--the stenographic memoranda of poems-memoranda which, because they were all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of transcribing in full for mankind. In his whole life he wrought not thoroughly out a single conception. For this reason it is that he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in having done too little, rather than too much; what seems in him the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many;-and this concision it is which renders him obWith such a man, to imitate was out of the question; it would have answered no purpose-for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue;-he was, therefore, profoundly original. His quaintness arose from intuitive perception of that truth to which Lord Verulam alone has given distinct voice :-" There is no exquisite beauty which

scure.

has not some strangeness in its proportion." But whether obscure, original, or quaint, he was at all times sincere. He had no affectations.

From the ruins of Shelley there sprang into existence, affronting the Heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angles, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the great original-faults which cannot be called such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A "school" aroseif that absurd term must still be employed-a school-a system of rules-upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered with the bizarrerie of the divine lightning that flickered through the clouds of the Prometheus, had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were content, perforce, with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were great and mature minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus gradually were interwoven into this school of all Lawlessness-of obscurity, quaintness, exaggeration-the misplaced didacticism of Wordsworth, and the even more preposterously anomalous metaphysicianism of Coleridge. Matters were now fast verging to their worst, and at length, in Tennyson, poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But it was precisely this extreme (for the greatest error and the greatest truth are scarcely two points in a circle)—it was this extreme which, following the law of all extremes, wrought in him-in Tennyson-a natural and inevitable revulsion, leading him first to contemn and secondly to investigate his early manner, and, finally, to winnow from its magnificent elements the truest and purest of all poetical styles. But not even yet is the process complete; and for this reason in part, but chiefly on account of the mere fortuitousness of that mental and moral combination which shall unite in one person (if ever it shall) the Shelleyan abandon, the Tennysonian poetic sense, the most profound instinct of Art, and the sternest Will properly to blend and vigorously to control all;-chiefly, we say, because such combination of antagonisms must be purely fortuitous, has the world never

yet seen the noblest of the poems of which it is possible that it may be put in possession.

And yet Miss Barrett has narrowly missed the fulfilment of these conditions. Her poetic inspiration is the highest-we can conceive nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself, but has been contaminated by pedantic study of false models -a study which has the more easily led her astray, because she placed an undue value upon it as rare-as alien to her character of woman. The accident of having been long secluded by ill health from the world has affected, moreover, in her behalf, what an innate recklessness did for Shelley-has imparted to her, if not precisely that abandon to which I have referred, at least a something that stands well in its stead--a comparative independence of men and opinions with which she did not come personally in contact a happy audacity of thought and expression never before known in one of her sex. It is, however, this same accident of ill health, perhaps, which has invalidated her original Will-diverted her from proper individuality of purpose-and seduced her into the sin of imitation. Thus, what she might have done, we cannot altogether determine. What she has actually accomplished is before us. With Tennyson's works beside her, and a keen appreciation of them in her soul--appreciation too keen to be discriminative ;-with an imagination even more vigorous than his, although somewhat less ethereally delicate; with inferior art and more feeble volition; she has written poems such as he could not write, but such as he, under her conditions of ill health and seclusion, would have written during the epoch of his pupildom in that school which arose out of Shelley, and from which, over a disgustful gulf of utter incongruity and absurdity, lit only by miasmatic flashes, into the broad open meadows of Natural Art and Divine Genius, he-Tennyson-is at once the bridge and the transition.

R. H. HORNE.*

MR. R. H. HORNE, the author of the "Orion," has, of late years, acquired a high and extensive home reputation, although, as yet, he is only partially known in America. He will be remembered, however, as the author of a very well-written Introduction to Black's Translation of Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," and as a contributor with Wordsworth, Hunt, Miss Barrett, and others, to "Chaucer Modernized." He is the author, also, of "Cosmo de Medici," of "The Death of Marlowe," and, especially, of "Gregory the Seventh," a fine tragedy, prefaced with an "Essay on Tragic Influence." "Orion" was originally advertised to be sold for a farthing; and, at this price, three large editions were actually sold. The fourth edition (a specimen of which now lies before us) was issued at a shilling, and also sold. A fifth is promised at half a crown; this likewise, with even a sixth at a crown, may be disposed of-partly through the intrinsic merit of the work itself-but chiefly through the ingenious novelty of the original price.

We have been among the earliest readers of Mr. Horne-among the most earnest admirers of his high genius;-for a man of high, of the highest genius, he unquestionably is. With an eager wish to do justice to his "Gregory the Seventh," we have never yet found exactly that opportunity we desired. Meantime, we looked, with curiosity, for what the British critics would say of a work which, in the boldness of its conception, and in the fresh originality of its management, would necessarily fall beyond the routine of their customary verbiage. We saw nothing, however, that either could or should be understood-nothing, certainly, that was worth understanding. The tragedy itself was, unhappily, not devoid of the ruling cant of the day, and its critics (that cant incarnate) took their cue from some of its infected passages, and proceeded forthwith to rhapsody and aesthetics, by way of giving

*Orion: an Epic Poem in Three Books. By R. H. Horne. Fourth Edition. London: Published by J. Miller.

VOL. III.-18.