meaning something; 2d, in always knowing what he means; 3d, a clear expression of his meaning; 4th, by a profound regard for fact as distinguished from baseless speculation.

Thus far we have contented ourselves with exposition. In conclusion, we must say that this logical question is the most fundamental one in philosophy. Until it is settled, philosophy is only dogmatism, irrational, and baseless. Let it then be settled. Let the possibility and the limit of knowledge be inquired into. The author's position is a most sweeping one, and its truth is a matter of great interest. If, then, any one has aught to offer against the leading principle here expounded, we hope that he will not fail to urge it; and we promise him in advance a cordial and a candid hearing.

ARTICLE III.-PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU,

SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY.

ROBERT BROWNING has been long enough in the eye of his generation to have achieved a somewhat unique fame. He is a thinker, plainly. He is a philosopher. He is a metaphysician. In the field of pure reason he handles keen logic, and handles it deftly. But his place as a poet is a vexed question, and seems likely to become more so with every book that emerges from his teeming brain. His poetic virtue is occasionally marvelous. But he is wont to build his airy fabrics upon the firmest and toughest of prose. From his sublimest flight through the firmament of song he suddenly drops upon the arena of debate, and plunges into abstruse dialectics which are equally fatal to his antagonist and to his reader. James Russell Lowell, in one of his delightful essays, has preserved for us a racy anecdote, whose moral, more in sorrow than in anger, may be commended to Mr. Browning: "Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to Wordsworth, 'Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, and it will only elevate and enliven; but the moment he mixes a particle of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole.' Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him."

It has become common also to complain of Mr. Browning's obscurity. His logic is so pertinacious, his syntax is so curt, and he so disdains the verbal conveniences which his mother tongue has provided, that instead of poet, he is a very knight of the fog. We lose him, and have to watch for his reappearing. He prefers to write for the illuminati. Many of his metrical tractates are esoteric doctrine, prepared only for the initiated few. It is on principle too. If it were only the oracular utterances of a genius that must speak according to the nature of the inspiration which possesses it, or if it were only the eccentricities of a genius born under an odd star, the sin would be venial. But after whole generations of the finest and largest minds have achieved so much, both in prose and

poetry, towards purifying and glorifying English style and making it an instrument for expressing at once the subtlest and the sublimest thoughts in the clearest manner, it requires more of grace than we have ordinarily at command to stand by and see one of the foremost of modern poets spurning it and trampling it under foot. It is a pity that such an Olympian mind, that can speak so plainly, should think so meanly of his mother tongue and so heedlessly of his readers. The quaint fancy and tripping music of the Piper of Hamelin, the spiritual tenderness of Evelyn Hope, the intense dramatic velocity and glow of the Ride from Ghent to Aix, and to enumerate no further, the marvelous metaphors which glitter in every one of his poems, should have convinced their author that he had mag. netic power over all hearts, and need not withdraw into the clouds. He might have made the whole world of English and American homes his constituency; but the circle of his readers is small, and even their homage is not unmixed. He writes two kinds of verse, one of which is poetry and addresses the kindling imagination; the other is metrical speculation, addressed to the cooler brain. His prolific genius has produced full reams of both. In a country which winnows its literature with such energy, it is not hard to predict which of the two has the best chance for immortality. A century and a half ago, the presses of London and Oxford issued in the course of two years more than eight hundred different works in prose and verse, of which it is said all but one have totally disappeared out of the knowledge or memory of man. Of the whole eight hundred, only Prior's ballad of Down-Hall still lives to illustrate the "survival of the fittest," and is occasionally fingered by some curious reader. A familiar couplet from the Dunciad might serve as a possible epitaph for the innumerable forgotten

Yet sure, had Heaven decreed to save the state,
Heaven had decreed these works a longer date.

In less than a century and half ahead the writings of our time will be found to have experienced a like sifting, and it is to be feared that such literary ventriloquism as the Ring and the Book will have vanished forever.

I have just been re-reading for the severalth time (and will not stop to copyright the word-only to apologize for the improvidence of the language in not foreseeing the need of itand to adduce the example of Mrs. Browning herself, who in one of her letters coins a similar convenient term concerning "the Reverend Robert Montgomery, who walks into his twentyand-somethingth edition 'like nothing'")—have been re-reading that particular poem of Mr. Browning's which bears the Teutonic title above written. It contains a fair average of his peculiarities, except in the article of poetry itself, which can be readily explained by saying that it stands in the second list, not in the first. It is metaphysics in rhythm. Only in occasional passages do the words vibrate with that delicious thrill which reveals the poetic presence. Here and there a flash of inspiration; the rest is an abstruse revery, uttered aloud by a princely improvisatore across the table to a "bud-mouthed listener," who very appropriately falls asleep before the close. Poor weak human nature!-but then, what can a body do when harangued by the Sphynx?

The scene of the poem is the princedom of HohenstielSchwangau, a not over-manageable set of syllables, that give the muse some heavy work before she has done with them.

The soliloquizer is the Prince of this princedom of Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

His rôle is that of the Conservative.

The action of the poem comprises in detail a relation of all the political movements, with their causes and their philosophy, by which the Prince, though surrounded and nettled by reformers and specialists of every stripe and in all directions, sought to save his turbulent Hohenstielers-Schwangauese from their selfish selves, and that in the conservative way.

It contains some very sensible reasoning, sometimes violent, sometimes shrewd. It puts forward some grand ideas. But you rise from the study (and without study it is not intelligible) with the conviction that it must be hard to turn politics into poetry, for with all his genius Mr. Browning has not succeeded in doing it. The world has pretty generally settled to its own satisfaction that the business of its poets is to please it, not attempt to instruct it. Poetry must shun the laborious

tasks of the reason and the moral sense, and be content with kindling the heart and inspiring the imagination. If it can incidentally accomplish more-convince-persuade—reform— throw light upon duty-quicken the sense of right-that may be so much clear gain. But to poetry these objects must always remain secondary. And if it be an error to make them primary, it is a fortiori an absurdity to urge them with vehement casuistry and obscure turns of thought. Mr. Browning has made the Prince talk some strong didactic prose, but we can hardly receive it as a poem. It is a political pope's allocution.

The Prince opens on his fair vis-a-vis with the sagacious act of joining two blots with his pen. This is his point of departure.

You are taught thereby

That 'tis my nature, when I am at ease,
Rather than idle out my life too long,
To want to do a thing-to put a thought,
Whether a great thought or a little one,
Into an act, as nearly as may be.

And several pages later he recurs to his typical beginning to make the lesson still more specific:

Why, just now,

With nothing else to do within my reach,

Did I prefer making two blots one line

To making yet another separate

Third blot, and leaving those I found unlinked?

It meant, I like to use the thing I find,

Rather than strive at unfound novelty:

I make the best of the old, nor try for new.

Others have a genius for reform; he will hold things steady as they are. Others can destroy, transmute, rebuild: but he sees the possibility of good in society as already constituted, and chooses to maintain those possibilities, save what is good now instead of risking all in trying to create more.

Make what is absolutely new-I can't;

Mar what is made already well enough

I won't but turn to best account the thing
That's half-made-that I can.