of things not seen, had a peculiar attrac- almost suddenly, and he thus describes tion; while to the more masculine intellect the uplifting of his soul:— of her husband, the alleged "manifestations were nothing but a "hateful form of foolery." Mrs. Orr's remarks in her biography of the poet sums up all that need perhaps be said on the subject: : They might agree to differ as to the abstract merits of spiritualism; but Mr. Browning could not resign himself to his wife's trustful attitude towards some of the individuals who at that moment represented it. . . . He chafed against the public association of her name with theirs. Both his love for, and his pride in, her resented it. That Mr. Browning's "love for and pride in" his wife remained in its strength to the evening of his days, is shown by the fact of his uncontrolled expression of resentment at a slight to her memory in a letter, published recently, but written thoughtlessly by a hand dead, thirty years before, when the news reached England that the gifted author of “Aurora Leigh had passed away. Mrs. Browning died in the summer of 1861, at Florence, where she was "lamented with extraordinary demonstrations." "The Italians understood her by an instinct," writes her husband in a letter describing the circumstances of her death, which, like her own last uttered word, was " beautiful." Did she so speak of the human love that had made her life "beautiful," or was that word so emphatic and spiritual - a sign that her poet-soul beheld already the lifting of the veil? The letter in its entirety belongs to Robert Browning's "Life," and must not be irreverently read elsewhere; enough to say that it is almost unique in its simple pathos, in its depth and intensity of feeling, and is distinctive for the manly expression of the writer's resolve to fulfil his own life as she would require were she here." 66 Some friends of mine, who saw a good deal of Mr. Browning in 1865, told me that he used frequently to speak to them of his wife. On one occasion he pointed to a drawing of his study in Casa Guidi, their Florence home, and said: "You see that chair I sat there waiting to hear of the birth of our child and of her safety." The words were few, but because of their fewness they spoke volumes. The years went on, the past had wedded the future, in memory and in promise; he, the poet, now lonely, had to fulfil the purpose of his life. The work came to him A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair, Letting me have my will again with these. The materials of "The Ring and the Book," collected long before, had been lying dormant, till, as by a flash, he saw their poetic use and purpose. The raw material worked up by the poet into his "greatest constructive achievement," as some critics say, was nothing more or less than a faded manuscript, chanced upon in an old curiosity shop in Florence, bought for the value of eightpence, and found to contain the full records of a Roman murder trial in the seventeenth century. The actualities of life seem generally to have been selected by Mr. Browning for the ground plan of his poetic superstructure. An interesting proof of his method of working came before me a few years since. I was lent by a friend the quite recently published little volume, a very precious volume of "Feristitah's Fancies." The author himself had pencilled on its pages various notes, stating when and how such and such thoughts had occurred to him. Against one paragraph was written, "A telegram in the Times," adding place and date; three or four other passages were "suggested," if I recollect rightly, by other incidents mentioned in the newspapers, or from some statement in a review, or by an anecdote in an old book of travels long ago stored in the memory. The main idea, as Mrs. Orr remarks, "grew out of a fable by Pilfray, which Mr. Browning read as a boy." In 1872 I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Browning again. On the occasion of his taking me in to dinner, I made known to him that I, too, was Kenyon's friend. We talked much of the old days in Devonshire Place, and he observed: "It is very pleas ant to me to hear Kenyon's name tossing to and fro." Mr. Browning was very intimate at the house where we were dining, and I noticed that one of the servants placed a decanter of port wine near him, offering him no other during dinner. On expressing my surprise at his drinking port, having been so long in Italy, he replied: "It is because I have been so long in Italy that I am tired of their sour wines." In the course of conversation I mentioned that an accident had happened to our gas meter, and that when I left my house the place was in darkness. "I should not be surprised if the same thing occurred to me," said Mr. Browning, "for my critics tell me there is something very wrong with my metre." The reviews of "The Ring and the Book" were then appearing. "plain livers" besides, who shall prove that the poet or prose-writer under trial for worldliness, has had the crucial test offered him of a choice between the stalled ox or the dinner of herbs? Those who content themselves with plain living become shy of the fêted diner-out, and insensibly, and without set purpose, there is a drifting apart. The habit of luxury throws a chain round the best of us, and then comes a warning that "the world is too much with us." I remember Mr. Kinglake saying, with the candor peculiar to his humor, "that he for one preferred dining with people who had good glass and china and plenty of servants." Do these nice things always prove an immu. nity against boredom ? If so, then let happiness be gauged by the amount of income-tax, and poets be told to leave off talking nonsense! Years before, when they met in Rome, Lockhart had said: "I like Browning, he isn't at all like a damned literary man." I would not presume to say " ditto " to Mr. Lockhart or Mr. Burke, but I don't know how Mr. Browning can be better described than by this forcible remark on what he was not. In conversation he was a many-sided man. I have heard him talk on financial matters as Solomon himself might have spoken had he been a member of the Stock Exchange. Mr. Browning's enthusiasm for Italy did not prevent a feeling of soreness at their taxing his interest coupons. Investors generally have been broken in since then to the doleful fact of seeing their property confiscated. Remarkable for his common-sense "hand- A trivial anecdote occurs to me which ling of daily life," Mr. Browning con- has nothing to do with the "Countesses " trasted favorably with the poet dreamer of who were supposed to absorb Mr. Brownliterary history, who can neither keep the ing over-much. It appeared that on one Ten Commandments nor his own ac- occasion Mr. Browning's son had hired a counts. He would never have said, as did room in a neighboring house in which to recently an eclectic Oxford don in his exhibit his pictures. In the temporary superior tone: "What is the meaning of absence of the artist, Mr. Browning was these lines across the cheque?" The doing the honors, the room being half inpression made on me by Mr. Browning filled with fashionable friends. Mr. in his quality of layman, not as poet, was Browning was standing near the door, that of a thorough-paced English gentle- when a visitor, unannounced, made her man, not aristocratic in appearance or appearance; he immediately shook hands even scholarly in manner, and still less a with the stranger or tried to do so, when doctrinaire in argument. All the time, she exclaimed: "Oh, I beg your pardon, this is the same man who in the spirit con- but please, sir, I'm the cook. Mr. Barrett fidence which a poet gives only to his asked me to come and see his pictures." readers, he, with rare eloquence and impe-" And I am very glad to see you," said rial thought, could report "as a man may Mr. Browning, with ready courtesy. of God's work," where "All's love, yet "Take my arm and I will show you all's law," as seen "in the star, in the round." stone, in the flesh, in the soul, and the clod." The gondoliers of Venice are supposed to know their Tasso and Ariosto; the folThe social critic is hard to satisfy; what lowing little incident leads to the supposiis done, or what is left undone, gives oc- tion that Browning's "Ride to Ghent" casion to his cavilling tongue. "What may possibly be found in the poetic reperhas Browning been doing since his wife's tory of the London cabmen. A neighbor death?" said such an one. "Oh, he has one day saw Mr. Browning alight from a been dining out," was the reply. And hansom; the cabby looked at the fare in why, in the name of all true sentiment, his open palm with an air of dissatisfacshould he not have been dining out? It tion, and, wheeling round, delivered himwas enough that during the whole of his self of this parting shot: "You may be a married life he devoted all his evenings-d-d good poet, but you're a bad paywithout regret or thought of himself to the companionship of his invalid wife, who could rarely go abroad into society. Mr. Browning, who was now living in London, with no one to claim his evenings, enjoyed society with honest zest, and found himself invited everywhere. The "high thinkers" are not necessarily master.' As time goes on, Browning's poetry proves more and more stimulating to his critics and admirers; both classes are being unconsciously educated by the poet himself. Out of every three who read him, two at least are seized with the desire of explaining him to the rest of the world. But unless the reader has an assimilating power within him, all these patent digesters do no good. It might be said, as Croker did of Warburton's commentaries on Pope, "Egad, the interpreter is the harder of the two!" A propos of Pope, it has been recently remarked that one of Browning's "most striking central ideas" has been anticipated by the earlier poet, where he says: Then say not man's imperfect, Heav'n at fault; Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measured to his state and place, His time a moment and a point his space: The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind. Nothing is new! Strictly speaking, nothing can be new in ethics, but every age has its own dialect. It is striking when the above passage from Pope is read in apposition with Browning, to see how immeasurably our contemporary appears beyond him in power of stirring the imagination and uplifting our thoughts to a spiritual conception of things. It would be very interesting if we knew more of Browning's estimate of other poets. During the not unfrequent opportunities I had of meeting him in society, I never remember his talking of poets or poetry but once, and then the subject was Coleridge. Curiously enough, it was the last time I ever saw him-a circumstance never to be forgotten; it was a few days only before he left London for Italy never to return! Mr. Browning then seemed remarkably well, and except that he did not bear his shoulders so well thrown back as in earlier years, he was wonderfully little changed. As I said, we spoke of Coleridge, and he evinced some surprise at the interest I expressed in that writer, an interest enhanced by the fact that Coleridge, in his "blossoming time," had dwelt among the Quantock Hills, very near the home of my married life, where many traditions lingered about him, in my young days. Mr. Browning responded to the feeling excited by early and local associations, but I inferred that he held Coleridge's poetry in no great esteem; at the same time, there was an amount of reticence in what he said and left unsaid, that made me doubt whether I was in possession of his opinion. His own distinct originality, and his apparent habit of directly transmuting the materials ob tained by reading and experience, in the alembic of his own mind, would probably not incline him to a critical attitude, generally speaking. It is a curious and interesting fact that the wedded poets withheld all mutual criticism or consultation on each other's work while in manuscript; we are told that neither saw the writings of the other till they appeared in the unalterable form of a printed book. A wise resolve, for a poet, above all others, must preserve his own individuality. Wordsworth and Coleridge, as we know, began writing "The Ancient Mariner" together, till Wordsworth, finding his friend's "manner so different from his own," gave up the attempt - fortunately, I think all will agree, for each individual mind has his own focus. Browning himself well observes: "When is man strong until he feels alone?" Perhaps the most characteristic faculty of mind is humor; a touch of this solvent of genius makes the whole world kin, yet it is purely egoistic, belonging strictly to each man's nature. This incomparable character of individual humor was to be found in Mr. Browning's conversation: the wit was there in its most subtle essence; but because of its subtlety, and its peculiar unlikeness to all models of witty speech or thought, difficult to weigh, measure, or to determine in actual quality. His broader sense of humor must sometimes have been moved, one would think, by the ratiocinations of the "society' which met together to expound his writings while he, the poet-prophet, was yet in the flesh. It chanced that one of those injudicious persons, whose name is Legion, on some occasion pressed through the circle gathered round Mr. Browning, and incontinently asked him to explain there and then a difficult passage in one of his own poems—a passage where prob ably the masterful thoughts elbowed each other for precedence. Upon my word, I don't know what it means," said the poet, laughing, as he closed the volume thrust into his hands; "I advise you t ask the Browning Society' they'll tell you all about it." 66 From The Fortnightly Review. A HANDFUL OF LEAD. On the table before me stands a smal silver cup or "quaigh," filled with misshapen lumps and fragments of baser metal. It is of Scandinavian workman- | have been fortunate enough to secure for ship, and roughly engraved with devices myself a hunting ground, the respectable emblematical of the chase. In the middle size of which-about that of the county of the last century, as the date and name of Surrey-insures me against any immescratched upon it prove, it was owned, and diate danger of being crowded out; there, in all probability fashioned, by one Thor during the past season, that handful of Thorsen, some peasant hunter of the lead was expended and recovered; and it Northern wilds, by whom also, we may is my purpose in this article to take it as fairly suppose, it was often drained to cel- my theme, and to try to sketch the cirebrate the death of the elk, the bear, or the cumstances under which some at least of wolf, or, which is quite as likely, by way those now emeriti veterans performed their of consolation for their escape. Its pres- deadly duty. ent contents, themselves once liquid, form I confess that at eight o'clock on the when emptied into the palm a small hand-morning of September the 17th, 1891, ful of lead, and are the mutilated remnants of modern rifle bullets, which, after finding their billets and fulfilling the purpose of their creation, have been released from active service. Originally the uniform offspring of one mould, they now vary considerably in size and shape. Some appear to have met with but little resistance in penetration, and although bruised and blunted still retain in a great measure their cylindrical form; others bear the strongest miniature resemblance to a battered Tyrolese hat with the crown knocked out; there are flattened fragments like chips from the edge of a broken plate; and vicious-looking deformities, twisted and crumpled out of all recognition, the veritable "ragged lead." So tightly clinched in the cruel amorphism of one of the latter as to have survived the thorough cleansing which it has undergone, are two or three long brown hairs, significant of the missile's passage through the hide of a bear. Meditating, as I sit in my chair, on these relics, I am transported in mind across the rolling billows of the North Sea, and far up the coast of Norway, to a grand region of fjeld, forest, and lake, now lying silent and desolate beneath the white mantle of winter, to be traversed only by the runner on snowshoes; and happily at all seasons impenetrable except on foot. For there over a couple of thousand square miles are found neither inns, nor stations, nor roads, nor vehicles, nor horses, nor any convenience whatever whereby the ordinary tourist and scenery-seeker might be assisted in his intrusion. Half-a-dozen small homesteads, buried in the wilderness and accessible only by long boat voyages on the larger lakes, or weary travel across the fjelds, contain the inland population, and, together with the same number of private huts, specially built in sequestered glens, afford temporary resting-places to the wandering hunter, whose entire kit and outfit must, in shifting quarters, be carried on the backs of men. There I when I came out of my hut after an early breakfast, I was in a bad temper and low spirits. In spite of the excellence of my Lapp hunter, Elias, a man of great experience and thoroughly familiar with the country, and of his dog, Passop, the most perfect leash-hound I have ever met with - superior, I am bound to say, even to my own Huy; in spite of the considerable number of elk seen up to date in all, twenty-five, including cows, calves, and two-year-olds at these I would not draw trigger; and in spite of hard work day by day from early morn until dusk, I had killed but one bull, and to my sorrow wounded another, which escaped in a dense fog on the high ground, and could never be found again. All things, as in the case of Sisera, had conspired to fight against us. A whole valuable week had been consumed in the search for and vain pursuit of an enormous beast, magnificently horned, who, in the company of an extremely wary cow with a calf, and a younger bull, frequented a wide expanse of open field, and defeated during that time all our efforts to get within shot. At length, with supernatural cunning, he separated himself from his companions, and took up his abode in the large tract whereon I had already slain one of his kindred, and there by operation of the law which forbids the killing of more than one elk on each registered division of the land, was in perfect safety. Two attempts to dislodge him from this sanctuary being unsuccessful, we had to leave him in peace and move on. Therefore, I say, when I came out of my hut on the 17th, I was discontented and dispirited. It had, as usual, been raining all night as it had poured, after two months of splendid summer, ever since the elk season began, and there was not a sign of improvement in the wretched weather; beneath the canopy of dark cloud which rested on the fjeld, the lower pine-clad slopes showed as black as the "invisible green " of the rifle man; a chilly breeze, laden with drizzle, ruffled the leaden waters of the lake, whose extremity was veiled by the curtain of another approaching snow-storm; my clothes and boots were still suggestive of their last soaking on these occasions one's wardrobe is perforce limited — and the boat in which I was about to embark looked abominably damp. Even my four cheery followers, Peter, Johannes, Eric, and the ever-hopeful Nils, accustomed as they were to hard work and hard weather, were somewhat dejected; we were to shift quarters that day, and they had before them a long, wet tramp over the hills, under their heavy burdens. And had the elements been only fairly kind, how delightful would everything have been! The log-hut stood close to the margin of a narrow channel, which connected with a swift current the two divisions of the lake, and commanded from its spacious altan, or verandah-porch, a glorious view of the upper sheet of water girt by the terraced hills. The last built, it had been constructed with all the improvements suggested by experience. The lake in front was full of trout and char; game, big and small, abounded in the adjacent forests; nothing was wanting but a little blue sky and sunshine to render it an ideal residence for a sportsman. And yet here was I leaving it with a kind of sullen thankfulness that my next quarters would be in a small farmhouse. All the attractions of its position and the wild beauty of its surroundings were neutralized by the vileness of the weather. But, be it fair or foul, the hunter whose legal opportunities will be exhausted in forty days must not shirk the obligations of the chase. Artemis is a hard mistress; her votaries, especially those who pursue the elk, must offer, day after day, their resolute homage of action and toil; there must be no slackness in her cult, lest the irate goddess turn from them the light of her countenance, and cause them to miss the best chances of the season. Leaving to the men the task of packing up, and the use of a large watertight boat adapted for the transport of baggage, Elias and I, with the dog Passop, the only member of the party whose spirits seemed unaffected by the weatner, entered a small and leaky one, and crossed the lake. My dear Huy, whose vivacity is now tempered by mature age, regarded our departure with melancholy resignation. During the passage the fresh rain-storm overtook us, and increased the dismal tone of my reflections. There is an old song that has been a favorite of mine from my youth up; I believe that in former years I used to sing it; on occasion I still hum or whistle the air. It begins in this fashion: Some love to roam on the dark sea foam, Where the wild winds whistle free, But a mountain-land and a chosen band, And a life in the woods for me! with some bitterness that the author, whilst I thought of it that morning; I reflected noticing the fact that the sea may be dark and foamy, and the winds thereon_wild and free, ignores altogether the possibility of the woods being sodden with rain, the mountain-land shrouded in mist, and the chosen band down upon their luck. When morning beams streams, on the mountain Oh! merrily forth we go! But how if there are no beams of morning? what if the streams are all muddy torrents? How about your merriment then? Under these conditions, my good sir, I think you would be inclined to modify your cheery refrain of Yoho! Yoho-oo! with its prolonged high G. We landed at the mouth of a very narrow glen, scarcely more than a ravine, and found ourselves forthwith in a copse of birch and alder, with dense undergrowth of tall ferns, sowthistle, sorrel, and other highland herbage. Before we had penetrated thirty yards I was conscious of being moist all over. But this unpleasant consciousness was speedily ousted by the varied signs of wild animal life which revealed themselves in the thicket. There was the spoor of elk to begin with, cer tainly not more than a few hours old; the markings were those of a cow and calf only, but where a cow is, a bull may be not far off, and hope is happily eternal. Then appeared the signs of a bear that had been feeding on the rank mountain sorrel, very much the reverse of fresh, and difficult to determine by reason of the incessant rain. Then again, all within the same small area, came the traces of a martin-cat, a fox, and an old cock capercailzie. But, for the moment, the tracks of the big game only had any real interest for us. Quitting the thicket, which extended but a short distance from the beach, and was succeeded by thin birchwood, we began to slowly ascend the steep, narrow ravine by the side of its central watercourse, now filled with a foaming torrent; above the tree-tops we could see the inland boundary of the gorge, a smooth wall of black, precipitous rock, shining with wet and crested on its sky-line by a |