REVIEWS — LAST POEMS BY ELIZABETH B. BROWNING. 211 



" That stand ia the dark on the lowest stair, 

 While affirming of God, ' He is certainly there,' " 

 Said the South to the North. 



It is with Italy in its aspirations for unity and freedom that all the 

 poet's later thoughts were. It was there that her wedded life was past, 

 with her strong, vigorous, if not seldom roughly felicitous poet-hushand, 

 Robert Browning. There her Tuscan boy, the son of so illustrious 

 a lineage, saw the light, under sunnier skies than England knows : 

 though England will not the less lovingly watch the future of this 

 child of hope. It is a pleasant story told of the Italian street- 

 beggars who walk through Via Maggio under the windows of Casa 

 Guidi, that they always spoke of our English poetess, while living in 

 that house, the name of which she has linked with her prophetic song, 

 not by her well-known English name, nor by any softer Italaian word, 

 but simply and touchingly as " the mother of the beautiful child." 

 This, as Tilton says, was pleasanter to that woman's ears than to 

 Hear the nations praising her far ofif. 



Elizabeth Barrett, as is well known to every reader of her earlier 

 verse, was a delicate, fragile, invalid, with a keenly sensitive poetic 

 temperament, strung to acuter intensity of feeling by physical suf- 

 fering; and this gives a certain tinge to all her verse. In her 

 ** Vision of the Poets," she beholds the 



Poets true 

 Who died for beauty, as martyrs do 

 For truth — the ends being scarcely two ; 



and a favourite sentiment of Shelley's reappears in many forms in 

 her verse, that poets 



learn in suffering 

 What they teach in song. 



To her dog Flush, after contrasting the sportive graces of others of 

 his race, she exclaims : — 



But of thee it shall be said. 

 This dog watched beside a bed 



Day and night unweary, — 

 Watched within a curtained room. 

 Where no sunbeam brake the gloom 



Round the sick and dreary. 



And again, tenderly and touchingly, in her " Sleeping and Watching," 

 she apostrophises the child just fallen asleep with his playthings in 

 his tiny hands : — 



