WOMEN WRITERS.

The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
The monarch's crown to light the brows?
He giveth His beloved sleep.

What do we give to our beloved?
A little faith all undisproved,

A little dust to overweep,
And bitter memories to make

The whole earth blasted for our sake:
He giveth His beloved sleep.

"Sleep soft, beloved!" we sometimes say,
Who have no tune to charm away

Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep :

But never doleful dream again

Shall break the happy slumber, when
He giveth His beloved sleep.

O earth, so full of dreary noises !
O men, with wailing in your voices !
O delved gold, the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And giveth His beloved sleep.

His dews drop mutely on the hill,

His cloud above it saileth still,

Though on its slope men sow and reap:

More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,

He giveth His beloved sleep.

Ay, men may wonder while they scan
A living, thinking, feeling man,

Confirmed in such a rest to keep;
But angels say, and through the word
I think their happy smile is heard,—
"He giveth His beloved sleep."

For me, my heart, that erst did go

Most like a tired child at a show,

That sees through tears the mummers leap,

Would now its wearied vision close,

Would childlike on His love repose

Who giveth His beloved sleep.

479

And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,

And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let one, most loving of you all,

Say, "Not a tear must o'er her fall!
He giveth His beloved sleep."

12. But her Aurora Leigh is her best long poem; and she herself says of it that it is "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions of life and art have entered." The poem, besides being a narrative and a medium for the expression of lyrical beauty and song, discusses all kinds of questions— among others, the "woman's question," education, the doctrine of work (stated also by Mr. Carlyle), art, and, in general, the misery and disjointedness of the present time. The poem closes with a belief in the omnipotent power and all-subduing nature of love.

I swear

That when all's done, all tried, all counted here,

All great arts, and all good philosophies,

This Love just puts its hand out in a dream,

And straight outstretches all things.

Over and over again she explains and impresses her doctrine of work in many different ways:—

For foreheads," men say "crowns," and so we are crowned,—

Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel

Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;

Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.

Oh, cousin, let us be content, in work,
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it's little.

Better far

Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,

Than a sublime art frivolously.

She takes every opportunity of throwing sarcastic glances at what is called the "education" of girls:

I learnt the royal genealogies

Of Oviedo; the internal laws

Of the Burmese empire; by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe;
What navigable river joins itself

To Lara; and what census of the year five

Was taken at Klagenfurt.

And, in the following passage, she strikes the true key-note to all "reading":

We get no good

By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits,—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,*
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth-
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

She utterly abjures the patronage of women, the "inequality" of the sexes, and all other vague and inaccurate ways of thinking and speaking about women. Romney, speaking of Aurora Leigh, says: You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book,
Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work,
Expressing the comparative respect

Which means the absolute scorn.

And, speaking for all women, she cries:

And, in that we have nobly striven at least,

Deal with us nobly, women though we be,

And honour us with truth and not with praise.

The following lines sum up her belief regarding Art:

Art's the witness of what Is

Behind this show. If this world's show were all,

*Mrs. Browning was fond of the Greek and Latin habit (found also in Milton) of using adjectives as nouns :

Lo! from the depths of God's divine

The Son adjures the Father.

Then imitation would be all in Art;

There, Jove's hand gripes us! For we stand here, we,

If genuine artists, witnessing for God's

Complete, consummate, undivided work.

Everywhere in the poem she strikes out profound truths in very few, and these the directest, words :

I worked with patience, which means almost power.

-a mother never is afraid

Of speaking angerly,1 to any child,

Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

But it would be a mistake to judge, from the extracts given above, that the tone and manner of the poem are didactic. The poetic eye is active throughout, and the poetic imagination rules over all. She is very happy in her comparisons-as, speaking of a woman washing, she describes :

:

Round, glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,

Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.

It is a special mark of a "modern" style to find a poet comparing what is seen to what is unseen.

-headlong leaps

Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it.

1 For angrily a mere affectation, in which Mrs. Browning followed Keats and others. See also Shakspeare, Macbeth, III. v. 1.

1.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

LTHOUGH for us the central interest of English Literature connects itself with the life and character of the men who produced it, we can see that a certain unity of purpose and idea runs through the character of that Literature, and that this character was modified at different times by influences from other European nations. Before the railway and the telegraph existed, there was always a strong and eager desire-stronger perhaps and more eager than it is now, to learn what was being written by the great authors of Italy, or of France, or of Germany.

2. The period of which Chaucer is the central figure is generally called the Period of Italian Influence. This does not mean that Chaucer and his contemporaries were in the habit of directly imitating Italian writers; but that the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were much read by them, and exercised considerable influence upon their thoughts and modes of expression. Dante, or Durante Alighieri (1265-1321), is the greatest poet of Italy, and wrote the Divine Comedy, which consists of three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. It is probable that Chaucer knew him also by his sonnets and songs in his Vita Nuova (New Life), a poem written on Beatrice, a young lady with whom Dante was in love. Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), is best known, not by his Latin works, as he expected, but by his Rhymes and Canzonets* (Rime e Canzoniere) which he wrote in honour of a lady called Laura.

Boccaccio (Giovanni, or John, 1313-1375) was the author of the Decamerone, or Book of Ten Days, a collection of one hundred stories told by ten ladies and gentlemen who had fled from Florence to a country-house from the plague of 1348. The form of the book is

*One of the best of these has been translated by Leigh Hunt. It begins : Clear, fresh, and dulcet streams."