The Sun.
London, England, 1855-12-17 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Poems. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Third
edition. 2 volumes. Chapman and Hall.
It positively distresses us to find these exquisite
" poems" by Elizabeth Browning only in a third
edition, while Pollock's dreary, long-winded howl
about the " Course of Time" is running glibly
through a twentieth or thirtieth, earning for itself
at last the right to be substantially stereotyped. A
fact like this says but little indeed for the taste of
our generation. It betrays ou the part of our
book-purchasers an extraordinary obliquity of
judgment. It reveals the utter folly of our ever
regarding what is called popularity, in the vulgar
sense of the word, as a genuine criterion of merit.
It demonstrates the absurdity of ever looking to
the public at large for the evidences of literary dis-
crimination. Elizabeth Barrett Browning we take
to be about the first of our lettered Englishwomen.
Yet the Poems of this Sappho of the Anglo-Saxons
aro only now printing in a third, while " The
Course of Timo' is already in a twenty-second, and
" The Omnipresence of the Deity" actually in a
twenty-eighth edition ! "So the world wags."
However, even the timbre of a " third edition"
upon the title-page of volumes as replete with iu
trinsic excellence of the very highest order as are
indisputably the two volumes here happily sub-
mitted to us for re-examination, comes to us
as a very welcome, though, to our thinking,
under the circumstances, as a wholly inadequate
or rather an odiously disproportionate token that
the poems of Mrs. Browning are in some manlier
at least appreciated. Considerably worthier of ad-
miration, as expressions of a highly political and
imaginative intellect, than the " Poems " of either
Letitia Landon or Felicia Hemans, these remark-
able effusions of the genius of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning—effusions sometimes charming by their
dulcifluous beauty—at others inspiriting by their
nervous and forceful eloquence, assume for them-
selves, we cannot but think, the very loftiest rank
among the more treasured of those minor, or mis-
cellaneous, or as they are called for want of some
better term, simply "fugitive pieces," constituting
the vast aggregate of our national wealth in versifi-
cation. Precisely as we should declare of Eliza Cook
and Charles Mackay, that they aro beyond all
question incomparably the greatest of the living
song writers of England—so we should unquestion-
ably assert of Elizabeth Browning and Alfred
Tennyson, that each is facile princeps among the
few Other poets of the present generation. Eliza-
beth Barrett frowning, indeed, is to our mind
more than this, taking the most elevated
post among the more gifted of her sex,
not merely in the present, but in all past
generations. Her fame, however, does not in
any way rest, to our thinking, upon her more ela-
borated compositions—upon the "Poet's Vision,"
or the " Poet's Vow "—upon " The Seraphim," or
" The Drama of Exile "—upon her noble versions
of either " The Lament for Adonis," of Bion, or
the "Prometheus Bound" of ./Eschylus. Neither
for that matter can she be considered to rely in any
considerable degree for future remembrance upon
her numerous, and some of them very admirable
sonnets—Petrarch having secured to himself
in some wholly mysterious and altogether
bewildering manner the rather enigma-
ticA and indeed scarcely comprehensible
privilege of possessing immortal fame by right
of his reputation simply and exclusively as a son-
neteer ! What Mrs. Browning will be remembered
for hereafter may be discerned, we conjecture, even
elsewhere than in her " Romance of the Swan's
Nest," or her " Romance of the Ganges"—elso-
where even than in her "Rhyme of the Duchess
May," or her " Lay of the Brown Rosary"—in her
more brief and less pretentious poems, the
" poems of our choice" in her tender
ditty of " Bertha in the Lane," in her
lovely ballad of the " Lady Geraldine'a
Courtship," in her passionate " Cry of the Human,"
and her most touching " Cry of the Children," in
her loyal " Crowned and Wedded" befitting the
courtly muse of a laureate, and her pathetic
" Crowned and Buried" noblest among the many
noble tributes offered to the shade of the Great

Emperor and King, Napoleon. Wonderful guaran
tees, too, of the permanence of the renown won by
the witching music of this exquisite songstress, are
discoverable, few will fail to acknowledge, in her
dainty dream of " The Lost Bower," in her
marvellous fiction of "The Deserted Garden,"
in her memorable conceit of " Hector in
the Garden," in her delicious apostrophy to
" A Dead Rose," in that loveliest of all her
lovely outpourings of melody and grief, and allur-
ing passion, and irresistible tenderness—her match-
less poem entitled "Catarina to Camoens." These
are among the nobler sureties of the future fame of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning—as they are among
the readiest passports to present admiration. I t
is especially remarkable, however, that even these
masterly effusions of the genius of Mrs. Browning
are still, in the " third edition," blurred by the
old blemishes, by which their grace and symmetry
were originally disfigured. This, too, in spite of
the writer's avowal, at page viii. of Vol. 1., that
"the author has done her best to remedy the over-
sights and defects of the former revision !" It is
scarcely comprehensible, after this, how it come.
to pass that we still find " Catarina to Camoens"
jarring upon our ears with such abominable rhymes
as for example—(st. 2.) " bowers" and " yours," as
(st. 14.) " floorings" and "poems," as (st. 15.)
"praying" and "away in," as (st. 19.) "future"
and "suitor." While in " The Cry of the Chil
dren" our senses are still horrified with rhymes
like (st. 4.) " stilled in" and " children," as (st.
11.) "heaven" and "unbelieving," or again as (st.
12.) " before you" and "glory," and " unretrie v-
ingly" and "heavenly." Villainously bad rhymes,
however, are the arch-fault of Mrs. Browning, a
crime against taste, in her instance, altogether in-
comprehensible. Abominable, too, in its way is the
dreary iteration indulged in by her at times as in
the case of the wearisome "Toll slowly"—" Toll
slowly"—" Toll slowly" repeated again, and again,
and yet again, in the interminable " Rhyme of the
Duchess May." Mrs. Browning, we may likewise
observe, evinces a curious delight in—what shall
we say ? how possibly can wo express it ?—dimly
idealising wholly inaudible sounds ! Can it
be forgotten ? for example how the very first
of her "Poems," not, of course, in regard to their
merit, but in reference simply to their arrangement,
the first poem in the first volume, i. c., the "Drama
of Exile," closes with that wonderful intimation—
" There is a sound through the silence as of the
falling tears of an angel !" Again, have we not in
" Bertha in the Lane" that amazing avowal, at the
22d stanza :
" And I answered coldly, too,
When you met me at the door ;
And I only heard the dew
Dripping from me to the floor!"
Better than this, though of a similar kind, that
exquisite sentence occurring a little earlier in the
same poem :
" And the Silence, as it stood
In the Glory's golden flood,
Audibly did bud—did bud."
If we desired, however, to shadow forth by a single
quotation the many rare and noble characteristics
of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning we
should adduce some such passage as the follow-
ing—a passage to us of solemn harmony and ex-
quisite and pathetic beauty. " Crowned and
Buried"—it is an apostrophe to the Modern Sesos-
TIS :
Napoleon !—years ago, and that great word
Compact of human breath in hate and dread
And exultation, skied us overhead—
An atmosphere whose lightning was the sword
Scathing the cedirs of the world—drawn down
In burnings, by the metal of a crown.
Napoleon 1 Nations, while they cursed that name,
Shook at their own curse ; and while others bore
Its sound, as of a ...rumpet, on before,
Brass-fronted legions justified its fame—
And dying men, on trampled battle-sods,
Near their last silence, uttered it for God's.
Napoleon ! Sages, with high forehead drooped,
Did use it for a problem : children !3[13a1.1. .
Leapt up to greet it, as at manhood '$ call .
Priests blessed it from their altars overstooapemdoan
By meek-eyed Christs,—and wide we with
sate alone.
Spake it, when questioned why
That name consumed the silencel ne.fy_thide
_Tows
In Alpine keeping, holy and c d
The mimic eagles dared what Nature's did,
And over-rushed her mountainous_ rtey
.ver
In search of eyeries ; and the
Mingled the same word with ithsggyrpriadn'.rkl'or ever.'
That name was shouted near.tdep3ramidal
Nilotic tombs, whose m.uminie habitants,
Packed to humanity's significance,
Motioned it back with stillness. Shouts as idle
As hireling artists' work of myrrh and spice
Which swathed last glories round the Ptolemies.
The world's face changed to hear it. Kingly men
Came down, in chidden babes' bewilderment.
From autocrat places—each content
With sprinkled ashes for anointing ;—then
The people laughed or wondered for the nonce
To see one throne a composite of thrones.
Napoleon 1 even the torrid vastitude
Of India felt in throbbings of the air
That name which scattered by disastrous blare
All Europe's bound-lines,--drawn afresh in blood.
Napoleon—from the Russias, west to Spain
And Austria trembled—till ye heard her chain.
And Germany was 'ware—and Italy
Oblivious of old fames—her laurel-locked,
High-ghosted Caesars passing uninvoked,—
Did crumble her own ruins with her knee,
To serve a newer.—Ay ! but Frenchmen cast
A future from them nobler than her past."
Hearken again to the voice of the Pythoness,
chanting anew the glory and the woe of the Great
Conqueror !
" Napoleon 1 'twas a high name lifted high !
It mot at List God's thunder dent to clear