h.

As one, to whom I owe my love of poetry no less than my love of country,
has said of her:

Still on our ears
The clear 'Excelsior' from a woman's lip
Rings out across the Apennines, although
The woman's brow lies pale and cold in death
With all the mighty marble dead in Florence.
For while great songs can stir the hearts of men,
Spreading their full vibrations through the world
In ever-widening circles till they reach
The Throne of God, and song becomes a prayer,
And prayer brings down the liberating strength
That kindles nations to heroic deeds,
She lives--the great-souled poetess who saw
From Casa Guidi windows Freedom dawn
On Italy, and gave the glory back
In sunrise hymns to all Humanity!

She lives indeed, and not alone in the heart of Shakespeare's England,
but in the heart of Dante's Italy also. To Greek literature she owed her
scholarly culture, but modern Italy created her human passion for
Liberty. When she crossed the Alps she became filled with a new ardour,
and from that fine, eloquent mouth, that we can still see in her
portraits, broke forth such a noble and majestic outburst of lyrical song
as had not been heard from woman's lips for more than two thousand years.
It is pleasant to think that an English poetess was to a certain extent a
real factor in bringing about that unity of Italy that was Dante's dream,
and if Florence drove her great singer into exile, she at least welcomed
within her walls the later singer that England had sent to her.

If one were asked the chief qualities of Mrs. Browning's work, one would
say, as Mr. Swinburne said of Byron's, its sincerity and its strength.
Faults it, of course, possesses. 'She would rhyme moon to table,' used
to be said of her in jest; and certainly no more monstrous rhymes are to
be found in all literature than some of those we come across in Mrs.
Browning's poems. But her ruggedness was never the result of
carelessness. It was deliberate, as her letters to Mr. Horne show very
clearly. She refused to sandpaper her muse. She disliked facile
smoothness and artificial polish. In her very rejection of art she was
an artist. She intended to produce a certain effect by certain means,
and she succeeded; and her indifference to complete assonance in rhyme
often gives a splendid richness to her verse, and brings into it a
pleasurable element of surprise.

In philosophy she was a Platonist, in p