LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY.

WHAT is properly the History of our Literature closes with the age or generation preceding the present; for history takes cognizance only of that which is past. What of literary production has taken place within the last thirty years, much or most of it by writers who are still alive, is hardly yet ripe for impartial appreciation. We may call this period the Victorian era. If we compare its poetical literature with that of the immediately preceding period of the same length, which will take us back to the beginning of the century, and may be called the last age of the Georges, confining ourselves to writers of established reputation, or whose names are universally more or less familiar, we shall find about the same number, between forty and fifty, in each; but differently distributed in the two cases in respect of their degrees of eminence. While of those of the Georgian thirty years we may reckon about ten as belonging to the first rank, and about as many more as belonging to the second, leaving only twenty-five for the third, of the equal number belonging to the subsequent portion of the century we cannot account more than three, or at most four, as being of the first rank, leaving, with again ten or eleven of the second, about thirty who must be assigned to the third or lowest. The difference, then, between the two periods will be, that in the poetical literature of the first we have ten writers of the highest and only twenty-five who must be held to belong to the lowest of the three ranks, and that in that of the second we have only three or four of the highest with about thirty of the lowest. This enumeration takes account of the leading poetical writers who have arisen in the American division of the English race, two or three of whom may be reckoned as of the second rank, though certainly not one as of the first.

In the prose literature of the two periods, however, we should probably find the above proportions more than reversed. The literary greatness of the Victorian age has hitherto manifested itself mostly in the works of our writers in prose. It is as if the one age were distinguished for its production of gold, the other for its production of silver. Probably in no other period, moreover, has there been seen so much activity of female genius and talent as we have had in the present, displaying itself princi

pally, indeed, in fictitious narrative, but yet ranging, too, in several instances, above or beyond that. Of the writers in verse, however, who have attained any considerable distinction in the two periods, while about ten are women in the first, there are only five or six in the second.

Yet it is a memorable distinction of the present age, and one which belongs to no other in any literature (unless, indeed, we are to except that in which Sappho flourished), that one of its greatest writers in verse is a woman. And, if we put aside the possible case of Sappho, of whom so little remains that, exquisite as that little is held to be by all who are best able to judge, we are left to estimate her in the main merely from her fame among her countrymen-which, however, resounds through all the after ages of Greece-probably Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning) is entitled to be regarded as the greatest woman poet that has yet appeared in any language. With whatever her poetry may be chargeable whether of defect or of excess-whatever it either wants which it should have, or has which it should not havethere are two vital elements, and they are the chief ingredients of the poetical, in which it is never wanting;-subtlety of imagination and force of conception and feeling. In not much modern verse shall we find more of Greek intensity than in the following lines, entitled "A Child's Grave at Florence (A. A. E. C.; born July, 1848; died November, 1849)":

Of English blood, of Tuscan birth,
What country should we give her?
Instead of any on the earth,

The civic Heavens receive her.

And here, among the English tombs,
In Tuscan ground we lay her,
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes
Our English words of prayer.

A little child!-how long she lived
By months, not years, is reckoned:
Born in one July, she survived
Alone to see a second;

Bright-featured, as the July sun

Her little face still played in,
And splendours, with her birth begun,
Had had no time for fading.

So, LILY, from those July hours,
No wonder we should call her;
She looked such kinship to the flowers,
Was but a little taller.

A Tuscan lily,-only white,

As Dante, in abhorrence

Of red corruption, wished aright
The lilies of his Florence.1

We could not wish her whiter,-her
Who perfumed with pure blossom
The house!-a lovely thing to wear
Upon a mother's bosom !

This July creature thought perhaps
Our speech not worth assuming;
She sat upon her parents' laps,

And mimicked the gnats humming;

Said "father," "mother,"-then left off,
For tongues celestial fitter.

Her hair had grown just long enough
To catch heaven's jasper-glitter.
Babes! Love could always hear and see2
Behind the cloud that hid them.
"Let little children come to me,
And do not thou forbid them."

So, unforbidding, have we met,
And gently here have laid her,
Though winter is no time to get

The flowers that should o'erspread her.

We should bring pansies quick with spring,
Rose, violet, daffodilly,

And also, above everything,

White lilies for our Lily.

Nay, more than flowers this grave exacts,—

Glad, graceful attestations

Of her sweet eyes and pretty acts,
With calm renunciations.

Her very mother with light feet

Should leave the place too earthy,
Saying, "The angels have thee, Sweet,
Because we are not worthy."

But winter kills the orange buds,
The gardens in the frost are,

And all the heart dissolves in floods,
Remembering we have lost her!

Poor earth, poor heart,-too weak, too weak,
To miss the July shining!

Poor heart!-what bitter words we speak
When God speaks of resigning!

3

1 The emphasis on the his; and in the next line on the are and the her.

The always emphasised.

The we emphatic.

Sustain this heart in us that faints,

Thou God, the self-existent !
We catch up wild at parting saints,
And feel thy heaven too distant.
The wind that swept them out of sin
Has ruffled all our vesture:

On the shut door that let them in
We beat with frantic gesture,-
To us-us also-open straight!
The outer life is chilly-
Are we too, like the earth, to wait
Till next year for our Lily?
-Oh, my own baby on my knees,
My leaping, dimpled treasure,
At every word I write like these

Clasped close, with stronger pressure!

Too well my own heart understands,—
At every word beats fuller-

My little feet, my little hands,'

And hair of Lily's colour!

-But God gives patience, Love learns strength,

And Faith remembers promise,

And Hope itself can smile at length

On other hopes gone from us.

Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death,
Through struggle made more glorious.
This mother stills her sobbing breath,

Renouncing, yet victorious.

Arms, empty of her child, she lifts,
With spirit unbereaven,—

"God will not all take back his gifts;
My Lily's mine in heaven!

"Still mine! maternal rights serene

Not given to another!

The crystal bars shine faint between

The souls of child and mother.

"Meanwhile," the mother cries, "content!
Our love was well divided.

Its sweetness following where she went,
Its anguish stayed where I did.

"Well done of God, to halve the lot,
And give her all the sweetness;

To us, the empty room and cot,-
To her, the Heaven's completeness.

The my strongly emphasised, both times, of course.

"To us, this grave--to her, the rows
The mystic palm-trees spring in.
To us, the silence in the house,-
To her, the choral singing.

"For her, to gladden in God's view,—
For us, to hope and bear on !-
Grow, Lily, in thy garden new,
Beside the rose of Sharon.

"Grow fast in heaven, sweet Lily clipped,
In love more calm than this is,-
And may the angels dewy-lipped
Remind thee of our kisses! 1

"While none shall tell thee of our tears,
These human tears now falling,

Till, after a few patient years,

One home shall take us all in.
"Child, father, mother, who left out?
Not mother, and not father!-
And when, our dying couch about,
The natural mists shall gather,

"Some smiling angel close shall stand,

In old Corregio's fashion,

And bear a LILY in his hand,

For death's ANNUNCIATION."

Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh has some serious and pervading faults, both in manner and in spirit,-too much evidence of effort and ambition, both in the thought and the language, exploding occasionally in mere tricks of style, oftener putting us off with wit instead of poetry, and generally over-charging and over-straining the expression, together with a constantly recurring tone of dictation and sarcasm, which is the more unpleasant inasmuch as it does not seem natural to the writer, and, what is perhaps worst of all, a visibly uneasy consciousness, or at least apprehension, never long absent, that her task is after all beyond her strength; but, with all its faults, it may fairly claim to be, so far as is known, the greatest poetical work ever produced by a woman. Yet it is still all over and all through, in form and in substance, as evidently a product of the female mind as any other long poem by a woman that we possess. It is, indeed, we should say, pre-eminently feminine in character. It would be almost as impossible to take it for the work of a man as to take the Iliad for the work of a woman.

Born in Tuscany, the child of an English father and an Italian mother, who died when she was four years old, Aurora thus 1 The our emphatic.