212 REVIEWS LAST POEMS BY ELIZABETH B. BROWNING. 



And God knows, who sees us twain, 



Child at childish leisure, 

 I am near as tired of pain. 



As you seem of pleasure. 



This union of the suffering woman and the agonising poet-seer^ 

 grres a tone to all her verse ; and though her fond aspirations were 

 mingled with brighter anticipations in her Italian sympathies, when 

 the happy wife and mother looked forth from a sunny present into a 

 more hopeful future, yet her latest Italian poems still thrill from the 

 same treble chord ; and she seems ever to have felt what finds ex- 

 pression in one of her latest snatches, where she asks and answers : — 



What's the best thing in the world ? 

 — Something out of it, I think. 



In " The Forced Recruit," the poetess sings in sad tenderness of the 

 nameless Venetian conscript forced into the Austrian ranks, and 

 perishing by his own Italian brothers' hands at Solferino, his un- 

 loaded musket dropping from his dead grasp : and all the mother and 

 the poet blend in the verses she puts into the mouth of Laura Savio, 

 of Turin, an Italian poetess and patriot, whose two sons perished at 

 Ancona and Gseta. It is from such mingling elements of the woman 

 and the poet that we trace the vein of thought which runs through 

 the following fine allegory of the making of such a songstress : — 



"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 a leaf indeed 

 To prove it fresh from the river. 



