Anael passes away, and Djabal, still vaguely adored by the astonished people, whose future he entrusts to the true heart and unswerving will of Khalil, falls, stabbed by his own hand, thus completing the atonement for his guilt and the union with her, whom her love, not his deed, has exalted. Of the many fine passages in this tragedy the last lines, spoken by Djabal, are perhaps the finest; they are addressed to a young knight of the Order of Rhodes, the son of his protector in exile and his constant friend. DJABAL [raises Loys.] Then to thee, Loys! - Yet wronged, no less thou shalt have full The first sword of Christ's sepulchre- thou shalt had sworn only to give her love to the saviour of her race; to her, an initiated Druse, the Saviour, and Hakeem were one; and Djabal, enthusiast as much as deceiver, feigned himself Hakeem that he might win that love, and vaguely hoped that its possession would transform him to the reality of what he pretended to be; but the hope has proved fitful, and the desire of confession weighs heavily upon him, quickened no less than repelled by the glowing veneration of Anael, now his promised wife, and by the simple worship of Khalil her brother. Anael, too, has her struggles; her reverence for Djabal the saviour is inextricably bound up with her passion for Djabal the man, and in the clairvoyance of her highly strung nature she doubts the belief which can thus appeal to her in the tumult of an earthly love. An interview with the man whom but for Djabal she probably would have loved, proves to her that her feeling for Djabal differs from her feeling for Guard Khalil and my Druses home again! other men much less in kind than in de-Justice, no less God's justice and no more, gree, and in her desire to expiate the im- For those I leave! -to seeking this, devote Some few days out of thy knight's brilliant perfectness of a faith which possesses life: her intelligence but cannot transform her And, this obtained them, leave their Lebanon, life, she herself murders the common My Druses' blessing in thine ears (they shall enemy, the Prefect. The moment of Bless thee with blessing sure to have its way). this deed was to be that of Djabal's - One cedar blossom in thy ducal cap, transfiguration. It prostrates him at her One thought of Anael in thy heart, — perfeet in agonized confession of his fraud. chance She cannot at once disbelieve, she clings to him for refuge against the newly awakened sense of crime, she entreats him to "exalt " himself, and let her share in the exaltation; but at length the knowledge of his helpless humanity is borne irrevocably in upon her; she gives utterance to one brief passionate burst of scorn, and then the liberated earthly love wells up triumphant through the ruins of her faith, and she gathers the shamed existence the more absolutely into her Own. done One thought of him who thus, to bid thee "A Blot on the Scutcheon" is a domestic tragedy, but of almost historic magnitude. It stands alone amongst Mr. Browning's dramatic works, as conveying tragic impressions under that purely ob Side by side with this fierce conspiracy jective form, which is derived from no runs a friendly plot which we have not subtle, individual, slowly ripening fatality, space to describe, strongly illustrative of but from the rapid and distinct collision the manner in which the natural course of the elemental forces of the human of events often tends towards a result soul. Three out of five of its principal which fraud or violence are made to actors fall victims to love, revenge, or rebring about. In the last act the living morse, and it is characteristic of the personages of the drama are assembled author's manner that whilst this work in the same Hall of the Prefect's palace, gives so much scope to the more violent brought together by the news of his emotions, its tone seldom exceeds the .death. The Nuncio denounces, the expression of a profound and concenDruses waver, the finer nature in Djabal trated sorrow. We notice this especially triumphs. A solemn and sorrowful con- in the case of the heroine Mildred, a very fession cast round him a sudden halo young girl, whose self-condemning grief of redeeming glory. With a cry of has something of the introspectiveness "Hakeem!" the overstrained life of wrongly imputed to all Mr. Browning's wise, Marching to fortune, not surprised by her. lift His manhood to the height that takes the prize; characters, and we think detracts a little | He gathers earth's whole good into his arms; from the tragic simplicity with which the Standing, as man now, stately, strong and story is otherwise conceived. Her death, which is immediately caused by the murder of her lover, is perhaps also an overstraining of natural possibilities; but this event was necessary to carry out the dramatic idea of a short fierce tempest and a sudden calm. The tender brotherly love so terrible in its revulsion but so truly asserted in the Earl's self-inflicted death, is expressed with great delicacy and power in the passage in which he himself defines this form of affection. It is unfortunately too long to be quoted. Mertoun's words of comfort to his grieving child-love are also very touching and heartfelt. Have I gained at last "Columbe's Birthday" is the slightest in conception of Mr. Browning's plays, and the only one which is somewhat theatrical in its effects, but it contains much genuine poetry and some genuinely dramatic scenes. The reputed heiress of two duchies finds herself suddenly called upon to surrender her honours or to retain them by marriage with the rightful heir, who, on coming to dispossess her, is struck by her beauty and dignity, and bethinks himself of this compromise as likely to be advantageous to both. He opens his negotiations through Valence, an advocate, a devoted adherent of the young Duchess and her unconfessed lover, and Valence is so conscientiously afraid of disposing her against his rival that he says everything he can in his behalf. He cannot plead the ardour of the Prince's attachment, for the young aspirant to a possible empire imagines himself a cynic, and has not included his heart in the offer of his hand; but he sets forth, in a glowing discourse, the mystical glories of a career of prosperous ambition as the prize which she is invited to share; and though this exordium is a tribute not to merit but to success, and therefore its very solemnity a satire, it is one of the finest passages in Mr. Browning's collective works. A prize not near- lest overlooking earth Nor, as from each to each exultingly : Of God and man, reality, tradition, With his own prowess on the other half. power And men shall dread his weakness more, nor dare Peril their earth its bravest, first and best, The man of men, the spirit of all flesh, Such a speech stands in admirable contrast to the business-like simplicity evinced by the hero himself, when he accepts the title-deeds to the Duchy and resigns Colombe to her obscure admirer, at the same time admitting that though he has himself no tendency to romance, a life in which it has no place appears to him rather more dreary than before. Lady, well rewarded! Sir, as well deserved I could not imitate - I hardly envyI do admire you! All is for the best! Too costly a flower were this, I see it now, To pluck and set upon my barren helm The play is also enlivened by a continuous flow of good-humoured satire on the morality of court-life and its rewards. from his native East. He dies, surrounded by the repentant captain, commissary, and other citizens of Florence, aroused too late by the fervent testimony of Tiburzio, combined with their own latent belief in the nature they could so little understand, each tendering in his own way, love, gratitude, and obedience to the friend whom they have in one supreme moment found and lost. The restless intriguings of Florentine life are powerfully symbolized by Husein, the condottiere's one Moorish friend, in words of warning to him. Say or not say, So thou but go, so they but let thee go! And in one blandness to us Moors unite say harm; ... Come out of them! Against its shifting background of craft and hatred and mistrust, the image of Luria, living as it is, assumes an almost monumental character; it dwells upon the mind as a great conception of all lasting greatness and purity. The tragic interest of Luria is entirely psychological, though its external elements are derived from history. It is the latest of Mr. Browning's tragedies, the most pathetic, and perhaps the finest in the impression it conveys of deliberate creative power. Its protracted action has all the excitement of suspense, whilst Which still in all their tangles, hissing tongue the lengthened monologues which char- And threatening tail, ne'er do each other acterize the last act form a fitting prelude to the quiet mournfulness of the catas-While any creature of a better blood, trophe. The central figure is Luria, a They seem to fight for, while they circle safe Moorish condottiere, who has led the And never touch it, -pines without a wound, Florentine army against that of Pisa, and Withers away beside their eyes and breath. whose noble qualities have won for him See thou, if Puccio come not safely out the admiration of both. Luria has served As Braccio's safely from Domizia's toils Of Braccio's grasp, this Braccio sworn his foe, Florence not only faithfully but lovingly. Who hates him most! But thou, the friend Her æsthetic refinement appeals to every of all, aspiration of his soul, and he believes, as men so often believe of women, that the outward charm is the sign of an inward grace. He is convinced that "his Florentines" are good, and though the delicate instincts of his race warn him that whatever friendship they may profess, their nature has no sympathy with his, his large heart rejects all suspicion of To the testimony of the Dramas we their gratitude. He has yet to learn that may add this fact, that at the age of Florence knows gratitude only in the twenty-two, Mr. Browning conceived from form of fear, only knows a protector as a slender historic materials the character potential tyrant and foe; and whilst his and career of Paracelsus - the apostle of devotion is, day by day, deepening his natural truth, still hampered by the tramistrust, his guilelessness is as con- ditions of a metaphysical and mystical stantly sending forth some careless word age; his high hopes and crushing disapto bear witness against him. The hostile pointment; the lapse into more doubtful General Tiburzio, in whom he has gained striving and more anomalous result; and a friend, becomes the means of warning the death-bed vision which blended the him that the day of his expected victory old, fitful gleamings of the secret of uniis also to be that of his trial and condem-versal life into the larger sense of a divine nation. Luria probes his situation sadly but deliberately. He sees that his judgment is fixed. The Florentine army is in his hands; the Pisan troops are of fered to his command; he has no natural alternative but to perish at the hands of Florence, or to save himself through her destruction, and true to the end, he swallows poison, the one refuge against possible misfortune, which he has brought presence throughout creation in which every abortive human endeavour is alike anticipated and subsumed. "Paracelsus" is considered the most transcendental of Mr. Browning's poems. It certainly combines the individuality which with him has so often the effect of abstruseness with a sustained loftiness of poetic conception, and we find in it a faithful reflex of the desire of absolute knowledge and the reverse his style is essentially expressive, and when, as in "Pauline," "Paracelsus," almost all the Dramas, and most of the minor poems, there is an inward harmony to be expressed, it is expressed the more completely for the re the belief in the possibility of its attainment. But it is no less remarkable for its humanity; for the sympathy it evinces with the complex, struggling, misguided soul, which begins by spurning all human aids and breathes out its last and finest essence under the fostering warmth of af-jection of all such assistance as mere fection; and its appreciation of the craving for unbounded intellectual life is even less abnormal as expressed by so young a poet, than the tribute it contains to the ideal of human existence which rests upon limitation. pure But strong from weakness like a chance-sown plant Which, cast on stubborn soil, puts forth changed buds And softer strains, unknown in happier climes; Love which endures and doubts, and is oppressed And cherished, suffering much and much sustained, And blind, oft failing, yet believing love, These lines form part of the dying confession which is probably so well known that we need not regret being unable to quote it at length. The one peculiarity of Mr. Browning's verse through which his character of poet is most generally impugned is its frequent want of melody, and his known contempt for melody as distinct from meaning would be sufficient to account for the occasional choice of subjects that excluded it. But he thus admits the more fully the essential unity of matter and form; and the unmusical character of so much of his poetry is in some degree justified by the fact, that its subjects are in themselves unmusical. So I will sing on fast as fancies come; His actual ruggedness lies far more in the organic conception of his ideas than in the manner of rendering them, whilst his rapid alternations and successions of thought often give the appearance of ruggedness where none is. In beauty or *Pauline. sound could afford. He has even given to so satirical a poem as "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church,' a completely melodious rhythm, its satire being borrowed from the simple misapplication of an earnest and pathetic emorebel against the laws of sound it is in tion. If he ever appears gratuitously to his rhymed and not in his blank verse; and there might be truth in the idea that his contempt for the music of mere iteration is excited by the very act of employing it, but that so many of his grandest and sweetest inspirations have been appropriately clothed in rhyme. There is a passage in "Pauline" in which the speaker describes himself, which accords to so great an extent with the varying impressions produced by Mr. Browning's mind as to present itself as a possible explanation of them. He has deprecated, perhaps unnecessarily, the execution of this poem in an explanatory preface to it, and if he admitted it to contain so much of permanent truth he might more justly deprecate the manner in which it was conceived. But the lines to which we refer have a deliberate emphasis which impresses us with the idea that the young poet was speaking of himself, and that what he said may in some measure have remained true. I am made up of an intensest life, Of a most clear idea of consciousness Of self, distinct from all its qualities, From all affections, passions, feelings, powers; And thus far it exists, if tracked in all: But linked in me, to self-supremacy Existing, as a centre to all things, Most potent to create and rule and call Upon all things to minister to it; And to a principle of restlessness Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all Though gifted lower than the meanest soul. Whatever this passage may or may not mean, it can only confirm the one significant fact that a life-long reputation for self-conscious poetic power might have rested unassailed on this the author's very earliest work. From Blackwood's Magazine. A TALE OF THE SOUTH DOWNS. CHAPTER XIX. THE excellent people of Coombe Lorraine as yet were in happy ignorance of all these fine doings on Hilary's part. Sir Roland knew only too well, of course, that his son and heir was of a highly romantic, chivalrous, and adventurous turn. At Eton and Oxford many little scrapes (which seemed terrible at the time) showed that he was sure to do his best to get into grand scrapes, as the occasion of his youthful world enlarged. must the greatest man ever "developed " have desired a million-fold, because he lived in each one of the million. However, there were but two to whom Sir Roland Lorraine ever yielded a peep of his deeply treasured anxieties. One was Sir Remnant; and the other (in virtue of office, and against the grain) was the Rev. Struan Hales, his own highly respected brother-in-law. Struan Hales was a man of mark all about that neighbourhood. Everybody knew him, and almost everybody liked him. Because he was a genial, openhearted, and sometimes even noisy man; full of life in his own form of that mat"Happen what will, I can always trust ter and full of the love of life, whenever my boy to be a gentleman," his father he found other people lively. He hated used to say to himself, and to his only every kind of humbug, all revolutionary real counsellor, old Sir Remnant Chap-ideas, methodism, asceticism, enthusiastic man. Sir Remnant always shook his head; and then (for fear of having meant too much) said, "Ah, that is the one thing after all. People begin to talk a great deal too much about Christianity." At any rate, the last thing they thought of was the most likely thing of all that Hilary should fall in love with a good, and sweet, and simple girl, who, for his own sake, would love him, and grow to him with all the growth of love. "Morality" whereby we mean now, truth, and right, and purity-was then despised in public, even more than now in private life. Sir Remnant thought it a question of shillings, how many maids his son led astray; and he pitied Sir Roland for having a son so much hand-trees and a garden of comfort, and snug somer than his own. humanity, and exceedingly fine language. And though, like every one else, he respected Sir Roland Lorraine for his upright character, lofty honour, and clearness of mind; while he liked him for his generosity, kindness of heart, and gentleness; on the other hand, he despised him a little for his shyness and quietude of life. For the rector of West Lorraine loved nothing better than a good day with the hounds, and a roaring dinner-party afterwards. Nothing in the way of sport ever came amiss to him; even though it did · -as no true sport does depend for its joy upon cruelty. Here, in his snug house on the glebe, under the battlement of the hills, with places to smoke a pipe in, Mr. Hales was well content to live and do his duty. He liked to hunt twice in a week, and he liked to preach twice every Sunday. Still he could not do either always; and no good people blamed him. Little as now he meddled with it, Sir Roland knew that the world was so; and the more he saw of it, the less he found such things go down well with him. The broad low stories, and practical jokes, and babyish finesse of oaths, invented for Mrs. Hales was the sweetest creature the ladies-many of which still survive ever seen almost anywhere. She had in the hypocrisy of our good tongue- plenty to say for herself, and a great deal these had a great deal to do with Sir more to say for others; and if perfection Roland's love of his own quiet dinner- were to be found, she would have been table, and shelter of his pet child, Alice. perfection to every mind, except her And nothing, perhaps, except old custom own, and perhaps perhaps her husband's. and the traditions of friendship, could The rector used to say that his have induced him to bear, as he did, with wife was an angel, if ever one there Sir Remnant's far lower standard. Let a were; and in his heart he felt that truth. man be what he will, he must be moved Still he did not speak to her always as if one way or another by the folk he deals he were fully aware of being in colloquy with. Even Sir Roland (though so differ- with an angel. He had lived with her ent from the people around him) felt "ever so long," and he knew that she their feelings move here and there, and was a great deal better than himself; but very often come touching him. And he he had the wisdom not to let her know never could altogether help wanting to it; and she often thought that he know what they thought about him. So preached at her. Such a thing he never |