tical faction, condemns the Byronic
_Welt-schmerz_, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of
life. Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs
his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. Such is
the drift of the verses entitled _House_; a peep through the window is
permitted, but "please you, no foot over threshold of mine." This was
not Shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was
with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature. He did not stand
in the window of his "House" declaring that he was not to be seen; he
did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at
home and not at home. In the poem _Shop_ Browning continues his
assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is "a temple-worship
vague and vast." Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and
jewel-selling is the goldsmith's--but do you suppose that the poet lives
no life of his own?--how and where it is not for you to guess, only be
certain it is far away from his counter and his till. These poems were
needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be
vouchsafed to them.

But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of
self-assertion. The two love-lyrics _Natural Magic_ and _Magical Nature_
have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale
of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability.
_Bifurcation_ is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses
duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier
way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses
passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the
harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which
was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In _St
Martin's Summer_ the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a
love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon
passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that
is defeat. _Fears and Scruples_ is a confession of the trials of
theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee. What
had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries;
what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the
natural law of heredity. Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it
would have borne fruit:

All my days I'll go