pours on into his love for God. This Mr. Browning has drawn as scarcely any other man could draw it. But these are essentially different from what is properly denoted by sentiment, which is apt to lean upon the occasional, lives on memory and association, tinges everything around it with a secondary glow of its own, and has neither the immediate carnal origin of a passion, nor that absolute independence both of circumstance and instinct, which characterises what I have called a spiritual affection. It is, as I have said, in sentiment that the tempering moods are rooted which give rise to so much of our highest poetry, and which touch with a sort of illuminating magic so much which would otherwise have no intrinsic charm. Gray's "Elegy," for instance, is popular solely for the tender melancholy that hangs around it, and almost constitutes it an incarnation of evening regret. Now, of those sentiments which tune the imagination Mr. Browning's poems seem destitute, and the consequence is that he is apt to plunge us from cold spiritual or intellectual power into the fever of passion, and back again from this fever into the cold.

But I suspect that his interpreting intellect has gained through this hiatus in his imagination. Sentiment, because it is lyrical, because it tempts the mind into dwelling on its own moods, is a great hindrance to that strategic activity of the intellect which enables it to pass easily from one intellectual and moral centre to another. Mr. Browning is not a great dramatist, for in style he always remains himself, but he is a great intellectual interpreter of human character,-in other words, a great intellectual and spiritual ventriloquist; and nothing should, one would think, more interfere with the ease of spiritual ventriloquism than those clinging personal sentiments, which never leave the creative mind really free and solitary. For it must require a habit not merely of physical, but, if I

may so speak, of spiritual solitude, to migrate rapidly in this way from your own actual centre in the world of intellect and feeling to a totally different centre, where you not only try to speak an alien language, but to think unaccustomed thought and feel unaccustomed passions; and yet to do this, as Mr. Browning does, without really losing for a moment his own centre of critical life. Mr. Browning says very finely in one of his dramas,—

"When is man strong, until he feels alone?

It was some lonely strength at first, be sure,
Created organs such as those you seek

By which to give its varied purpose shape,

And, naming the selected ministrants,

Took sword and shield and sceptre-each a man!"

This seems to me to describe Mr. Browning's own work very powerfully. His intellectual and spiritual strength has apparently been much braced in this cold solitude. No poet of modern days gives us more distinctly the sense of an imagination which acts proprio motu than Mr. Browning. He is always masculine and vigorous. Original modern poetry is apt to be enervating, producing the effect of intellectual luxury; or if, like Wordsworth's, it is as cool and bright as morning dew, it carries us away from the world to mountain solitudes and transcendental dreams. Mr. Browning's-while it strings our intellect to the utmost, as all really intellectual poetry must, and has none of the luxuriance of fancy and wealth of sentiment which relaxes the fibre of the mind-keeps us still in a living world,-not generally the modern world, very seldom indeed the world of modern England, but still in contact with keen, quick, vigorous life, that, as well as engaging the imagination, really enlarges the range of one's intellectual and social, sometimes almost of one's political, experience. Mr. Browning cannot, indeed, paint action; but of the intellectual approaches to action he

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is a great master. And in spite of more grating deficiencies in the medium of expression than any eminent English poet perhaps ever laboured under, his poems will slowly win for him, and win most for him amongst those whose admiration is best worth having,—a great, a growing, and an enduring fame.

V.

THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

MANY attempts have been from time to time made

to give to the devotional poems of the Old Testa

ment the rhythmical harmony of modern verse. But hardly with even the very best of these attempts, hardly with Milton's fine versions of some of the Psalms themselves, has there been much success; and in general readers of these versions fret at the unaccustomed monotony and the ever-recurring chimes, something as they would if the sea should begin to murmur sonatas, or the wind to whistle tunes. Nor is it simply that any change of form, impressed by a foreign cast of mind on poetry that has sunk deep into the heart of ages, is distressing and bewildering. Unless I am making the mistake with which modern philosophy so often reproaches modern thought,— of confounding the "second nature" of constant association with the original nature of inherent constitution,— there is something in most of the Hebrew poetry which is essentially inconsistent with the framework of defined metre or rhyme. No doubt there are Hebrew lyrics which, had rhyme and fixed measure been then a recognised form of poetical expression, would have been naturally and effectively thrown into that form. Such one may recognise in David's lament over Saul and Jonathan; and again, in

those many Psalms which approach more in cast and conception to the religious poetry of our own day,—that is, to an artistic presentation of the devotional feelings of man, than to the sublimer type of the more characteristic Hebrew poetry, which seems generally to be busied with a direct delineation of God. But in most of the grander Psalms, and even more in the wonderful poetry of Isaiah and the minor prophets, there is something that defies the laws of regular metre or rhyme,—something that breaks through and rises up above them, when they are artificially imposed.

Not that I am of the number of those who regard these natural forms of poetry as arbitrary and ornamental restrictions, observed only in order to enhance the beauty of the essential thought; rather, to the true poet, are they fresh powers, new media of expression, enabling him to tell much which otherwise must have remained for ever untold. Metrical beauty is the inborn music, as it were, which beats a natural accompaniment to the creative toil of the imagination, and vindicates the essential unity of the life which runs through it. As the conception of the poet gradually gets itself translated into the language of mankind, the rhythm and harmony of the whole afford a real test of the depth and power of the creative genius, as distinguished from a faculty of mere mechanical construction. But though this is true of poetic efforts in general, it does not apply to the greater works of the Hebrew poets. Marvellous as is the imaginative power which they display, yet, for the most part, they are not, in the strict sense, works of imagination,-works, that is, of which the purpose, unity, and proportions are seized beforehand by the overseeing imagination, and worked out by it into their full development. On the contrary, they seem expressly to renounce all claim to imaginative unity, properly so called,-nay, to insist passionately on