agree that a poet's far more
essential qualities are hers: usefulness, fervor, a noble aspiration,
and above all a tender, far-reaching nature, loving and beloved, and
touching the hearts of her readers with some virtue from its depths. She
seemed even in her life something of a spirit; and her view of life's
sorrow and shame, of its hearty and eternal hope, is something like that
which one might imagine a spirit's to be." Whether political, or
sociological, or mystical, or sentimental, or impossible, there is about
all that Mrs. Browning has written an enduring charm of picturesqueness,
of romance, and of a pure enthusiasm for art. "Art for Art," she cries,

"And good for God, himself the essential Good!
We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail."

This was her achievement--her hands did not fail!

Her husband's words will furnish, perhaps, the best conclusion to this
slight study:--"You are wrong," he said, "quite wrong--she has genius; I
am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine a clever sort of angel
who plots and plans, and tries to build up something,--he wants to make
you see it as he sees it, shows you one point of view, carries you off
to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to
understand; and whilst this bother is going on, God Almighty turns you
off a little star--that's the difference between us. The true creative
power is hers, not mine."

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep, cool bed of the river.
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from t