"Abt Vogler" and "Caliban Upon Setebos" belong to the Dramatis Personæ. and "A Forgiveness" to the Dramatic Lyrics. None of them have the dramatic form, but all are impregnated with that power of projection into the life, the thoughts of other beings, which is the prompting soul of the drama. Browning has this power in an intense, at times a marvelous degree; and, in applying it to the lyrical and narrative forms, he has developed almost a new kind of poetry. But neither in these nor in his plays is he objective, according to the manner essential to success on the stage. I cannot, however, agree with the opinion that makes him subjective. The truth seems to me, rather, that having thrown himself completely into the spirit and condition of his personages, he expresses not his own but their subjectivity. In one faculty he is supreme. To explain, I must remark that the method of the drama has always been to condense the expression of the enactors' thought or mood, until it becomes conventionalized-a symbol of what is going on in their minds, rather than an exact record. Browning, however, follows out all the complexities and sinuosities of reflection in his characters. Every important action, in the human being, proceeds from innumerable little turnings and twistings of the mind, flashes of revery, conflicting sentiments and impulses. All these Browning interprets better than the actual creatures could; for, although we are sometimes aware that our motives are subtle and intricate, we are seldom able to analyze them. The very copiousness of his illustrations, his wealth of simile, his tangle of clause within clause, are the means of art which make it possible for Browning to trace the complexities and mirror them so wonderfully. He does not present them literally, any more than the purely objective dramatists do. He merely employs another kind of symbol. His is diffuse; theirs is succinct. But his way is equally truthful, and it is new. It not only presents the figure and the action, but also presents the mind, irradiated by a mysterious and vivid interior light. Nothing could surpass the boldness and

completeness with which he grasps the idea of Caliban, and bodies forth with an apt roughness the uncouth musings of the brute-man, on the nature of God and existence. At the same time the picturing of this creature sprawling in the mire of the cave, while

"He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider web
(Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times"),

is effected by a few clear, masterly strokes. Perhaps Browning could not originally have created Caliban; but it is also questionable whether Shakespeare could have brought Caliban's mind into view, under a ray so searching, luminous and comprehensive as that which Browning sheds upon it. Browning has discovered and conquered a new province in poetry; the province of this present age, with its habit of thought; and he has annexed it to the great republic of past ages already bound together in literature. I speak of him, of course, at his best; and in his three selections we have him at his best.

There has been no voice, in our time, more mellowly and perfectly turned to artistic cadences, than Tennyson's. Rarely, indeed, has it sinned by harshness; hardly at all has its utterance lapsed into prosaic movement or phrase, as Browning's has often done and as Wordsworth's used to, when the muse failed to keep her eye upon him. There is always associated with Tennyson a sense of the unmistakable poetic tone; a resonance which we feel to be distinct from that of ordinary speech, as easily as we separate the harmonious breath of organ-pipes from the garrulous sharpness of a piano. "The Daisy" and the lovely blank-verse song,

"Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain-heights," bring back this sense and echo this quality. "The Revenge," a sturdy war-poem, although somewhat recalling Browning's "Hervé Riel," and not as polished as the "Charge of the Light Brigade," shows the lyrist and the idyllist in a sterner mood of sympathy with heroic action, and of the love for the old fashion

of telling a thing strongly, breezily, without much comment or meditation. Charles de Kay's "Ulf In Ireland," repellent in theme, is still noticeably powerful as a ballad-study of ancient crime and savagery. There would appear to be in American life, or character and customs, something which restrains the boldest flights of poetry, and too frequently tames down our singers either to an inoffensive warbling, or to a placid musing, sometimes exchanged for a dalliance of wit and humor, that shall not conflict with some pre-conceived popular theory as to the function of song. Perhaps this potent something is the knowledge that the popular mind is always cherishing an ideal "average," in every department. Possibly it is the fear, floating in the air, of a supposed majority which may be offended. Whatever the cause, American poets are somewhat held back from the free growth of individuality, and are denied-as American novelists are-the right of free speech. They are permitted to compose lays of the fireside and the home, or to exult in the passions of war and patriotism, but there are elements, passions, situations which they must not touch, and many things they must not dare to say, unless they choose to be put under a ban. It is natural, therefore, that Lowell and Whittier should take their places in this gallery as contributors of poems quiet in character; Lowell alternating a sonorous strain of noble patriotism with his quaint and famous Yankee humor; Whittier picturing landscape, or sounding the lay of humanitarianism and chanting of heavenly love and pity. Edmund Stedman has shown that he could set his hand to ringing verse, full of verve and fire; but, for his own taste, he has selected mainly the tenderer and more pensive lyrics, including that one of softly muffled music, "The Discoverer," concerning the child who, voyaging with Death, 'has sailed where the noiseless surges roll." Stoddard is the exponent of retrospective sorrow and a gentle melancholy. Sombre themes generally suit him best; and yet, even in his mourning over The Flight of Youth," there is a note of warm,

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quick feeling, which proves that the heart of youth is with him still and takes wing only in his verse. The actual life of American men and women, however-especially in its phases of every-day struggle and average emotional experience, pathetic or humorous, has never been so faithfully rendered as in the poems of Will Carleton, whose “ First Settler's Story" and I Over the Hill to the Poor - House" bid fair to rank as classics, through their strong, fresh representation of human feeling. There is one American poet whose faults of art and judgment are on a scale commensurate with his original genius. I mean Walt Whitman, whose speech is often as drearily prosaic as the wide sands and mud-flats of the sea which he so loves, when they are left bare by the tide; but after one is fairly embarked on the ocean of his more rhythmic lines, their long swing-their multitudinous rise and fall-have the same strange, irregular harmony that one feels in the curve and motion of the billows. In "Eidolons" he reveals himself as the mystic thinker and dreamer, looking always for the essence within the show, and the thought within the thought; but in "Spirit That Form'd This Scene," he contemplates the wild gorges and the "naked freshness" of a Colorado cañon, finding justification there for the rough freedom of his verse:

"Was't charged against my chants, they had forgotten art?

To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse ?

The lyrist's measured beat, the wrought-out temple's grace-column and polish'd arch forgot?

But thou that revelest here-spirit that form'd this scene-
They have remembered thee."

Whitman, like Browning, has invaded and annexed a new province, although one that is less habitable. But he is always, and above everything, meditative, moralizing, introspective; seeing all other objects and persons in himself, and himself in all other persons and objects.

Wordsworth said, in a letter: "I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself

that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated in something of the same way to heaven. . . . I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree, to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality." A rapt vision such as he thus describes, disclosing the sway of the human soul over inanimate things, and the startling semblance of a soul that peers out upon us from earth and cloud and sky, is the source of all those poems in which some sight or sound of nature prompts and sustains a piercing glimpse into the depths of mystery surrounding our lives. The overpowering sense of mere earth-beauty, or of the relentless energy exerted by physical forces, has developed in some modern singers-especially the later English poets—a materialistic tendency; so that instead of being lost in an "abyss of idealism," they fall into gulfs of doubt and disbelief. In reality, however, the nature of the process is the same, though the tendency is downward instead of upward. It is still the spirit of man, dissolving all things in its alembic and recombining them by the creative power of an idea; but this mood of materialism—while it is artistic and poetic-seems to offer a reflection of the analytical and reasoning unbelief which characterizes many teachers of science. This is a curious result, because there is said to be a conflict between poetry and science. There is said, also, to be a conflict between religion and science; and it is sometimes hinted that there may be one between poetry and religion. I do not believe any of these rumors. It seems to me

that the conflict is not between those several departments of human intellect, but simply a needless clashing among the separate supporters and advocates of each one of them. They all think, so it seems, that it is their duty to insist that there shall be only one way of looking at things in the world. I wonder if it ever occurs to them that religionists have several