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. Cambri "London."

friendly critics 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?—

His white steed, to the belly splashed with blood,

That seemed to mourn him with its drooping head;

His right, his broken brand; and in his ear His old victorious banners flapped the winds. He called his faithful herald to his side'Go, tell the dead I come!' With a proud smile,

The warrior with a stab let out his soul, Which fled and shrieked through all the other world

'Ye dead, my master comes!' And there was pause,

Till the great shade should enter."

Or, lastly, with such a ghastly, and withal grand, imagination as this, of an act of suicide done at night near a great city?

""Twas late; for, as he reached the open roads, Where night was reddened by the drudging fires,

The drowsy steeples tolled the hour of One. The city now was left long miles behind:

A large black hill was looming 'gainst the stars. He reached its summit. Far above his head God's name was writ in worlds. A while he stood

Silent and throbbing like a midnight star. He raised his hands-alas ! 'twas not in prayer: He long had ceased to pray. Father,' he said, 'I wished to loose some music o'er thy world, To strike from its firm base some hoary wrong, 'And then to die in autumn with the flowers 'And leaves and sunshine I have loved so well. 'Thou mightst have smoothed my way to some great end

'But wherefore speak? Thou art the mighty God;

"This gleaming wilderness of suns and worlds 'Is an eternal and triumphant hymn

'Chanted by Thee unto Thine own great self. 'Wrapt in Thy skies, what were my prayers to Thee?

'My pangs, my tears of blood? They could

crudity," which most persons felt to be just to a very considerable extent, there were other charges brought forward by different sets of critics. His power, it was said, lay altogether in passages, and not in the conduct of a story or poem! As if, granting it to be so, these "passages" were not things to be thankful for; as if, after all, it were much else than such "passages" that keeps in repute many a celebrated poem! Then, all his wealth was in the form of images! As if "images" were not, as the word implies, the very molecules of a poet's thought-scattered mintage by the way, of that faculty of the poet of which each entire poem should be but a more sustained production! Farther, there was a great run for the stuff of his images on certain objects or departments of nature

and history, which might be called his poetical commonplaces the sea and its ships, sunsets, skies in rain, Mark Anthony, larks in the air, and, above all, the midnight spangled with its stars! As if, had the critics been willing to receive a psychological lesson instead of persecuting the poet whose unusual artlessness in his art had made it obvious, it might not have been here seen how every mind, even the most various, has its objects of special fascination, natural or historical, round which it hovers and to which it recurs electrically; as if it were not right, at least, that those objects or masses of physical expanse-the sea, the sky, the breadth of subjacent earth, and the like-which bulk largest in the visible sphere of things, should bulk correspondingly in the habitual thoughts of men reflecting that sphere; as if, to take that ludicrous matter of "the stars"

alone, it were not true that every man recedes from being conventionally a clever fellow, but spiritually a mean hound, exactly in proportion to the number of times he thinks of the stars! Then, crowning and including all, came the epithet of "the Spasmodic School" as defining certain general characteristics of Mr. Smith's poetry, and of the poetry of others who came into print about the same time. Perhaps the epithet did hit a blot in the species of poetry it was meant to satirize-a certain impatience of common situations, and violent dashing of the mind hither and thither in quest of monstrosities; a certain EugeneSuism in metre; a certain discontentedness with aught less for themes than Hell, Heaven, and the throes of Poetic Genius making a mess of both. Something might have been said in defence even here; and, on the whole, as far as Mr. Smith was concerned, this and all the other adverse criticisms resolved themselves back into the one charge of "crudity "i.e. the statement that, with great power, he had not yet attained the perfect management of it.

To find oneself suddenly the object of such a hurricane of criticism, pro and con, was enough to turn one's head. So far as we have ever heard, however,

Mr. Smith took it all very quietly. Transferred, soon afterwards, from Glasgow to the position which he still holds in Edinburgh-that of Secretary to the University-he went on, as if nothing extraordinary had happened, bestowing on literature the leisure afforded him by his new duties. By occasional papers in prose, descriptive, humorous and critical, he proved that it was not in verse only that he was at home; and he is, in fact, an admirable prose-writer. But to Poetry, of course, he still owned his chief allegiance; and, in due time, came forth, in evidence of his continued loyalty, his new volume, entitled City Poems. We have just been reading these poems again, and must say that, if they are not worthy of admiration, we hardly know where, in recent literature, proper objects for that sentiment are to be found. There is a decided advance on the previous volume. Sometimes, indeed, one seems to see the effects of the criticism Mr. Smith had experienced, in a certain repression of his strength; but on the whole there is a decided advance-a mellower richness without loss of power. Were there space, a detailed criticism of these poems, with extracts of some passages which have particularly struck us on reperusal, might not be useless. Let us merely refer to the poem entitled "Horton," and that entitled "Squire Maurice," as poems, original in conception, compact and careful in execution, and full of fine things, and to the longer composition entitled "A Boy's Poem" as possessing, in addition to the merits of thought and expression possessed by the other two, an interest of biographic strength and pathos all but unique. He were a man of tough fibre, we venture to think, who could read certain parts of the last poem unmoved; and, if there is not "genius" in the poem as a whole, we know not what that subtle fluid is.

Not so apparently thought a pretty large proportion of the critical public, when the volume came forth. We used to think that a poem, or other work of literary art, might be very good, and yet immediately and widely popular, and

that this privilege of being immediately popular, without being untrue, might be one of the pleasant things in the lot of a poet or other artist, as compared with the lot of such unfortunate fellows as philosophers, politicians, and social reformers. It does not seem to be quite as we thought. It seems that in literary art, too, if a thing is unusually good, and there is not a certain preparation for it in already acquired deference to its author, it must necessarily irritate. Even honest people, good-natured people enough, don't like to be perturbed; and you can't have any very good thing, be it poem, or essay, or whatever else, without a certain amount of perturbation. Your feelings are perturbed, your notions are perturbed, your canons of taste are perturbed; if you are a jog-trot person, and the pace is that of Pegasus, you are vexed in every joint of you. Besides, are there not such things in the literary world as Envies - black sprites, flying about and settling here. and there? However it happened, certain it is that the reception in some quarters of Mr. Smith's City Poems was that of the jackdaw in the fable. "Plagiarism!" was now the cry, "Borrowed feathers!" and straightway there were columns of parallel passages, to prove that there was not a sun, or a sea, or a star, or a tree, or any combination of thoughts or of images in Mr. Smith's poems, but it had been in somebody's pages before. Never was such a pecking. The feathers flew about, green, blue and crimson, as at the murder of a parrot. One recollects the affair yet with something like disgust. In the propor

tion perhaps of two per cent. of the alleged parallelisms, there was distinct evidence of latent recollection or conscious reproduction-opening up what might have been an interesting inquiry as to how far every poet works in an element of transmitted diction, and makes permutations and combinations of ideas that have slipped into his memory from books. But, admitting this, seeing to what miserable shifts the collectors were driven when they would increase the parallelisms beyond this