REVIEWS LAST POEMS BY ELIZABETH B. BROWNING. 213 



" 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 the outside ring, 

 And notched the poor, dry, empty thing 



In holes, as he sate by the river. 



" ' This is the way, laughed the great god Pan, 

 (Laughed while he sat by the river), 

 The only way, since gods began 

 To make sweet music, they could succeed.' 

 Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, 

 He blew in power by the river. 



" Sweet, sweet, sweet, Pan ! 



Piercing sweet by the river I 

 Blinding sweet, great god Pan ! 

 The sun on the hill forgot to die, 

 And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly 



Came back to dream on the river. 



" Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, 



To laugh as he sits by the river. 

 Making a poet out of a man : 

 The true gods sigh for the cost and pain. 

 For the reed which grows never more again 



As a reed with the reeds in the river." 



For fourteen years our tender yet masculine English poetess has 

 dwelt by the banks of the Arno, under bluer, sunnier skies than smile 

 above her earlier English home. From Casa Guidi's Florentine win- 

 dows she looked forth on a new world ; and from Casa Guidi's portal 

 she has at length been borne forth to her grave : another English 

 poet to mingle her ashes with the classic soil, which Chaucer and 

 Milton trod; where Byron lingered, and the veteran Landor still 

 courts the shade under southern vines ; where the graves of Keats 

 and Shelley give repose to the once o'erburdened tenements of clay ; 

 and where Robert Browning, the strange, -vigorous poet of "Men 

 and Women," has found himself more at home, than in the land to 

 which he turned for his poet-bride, and for which still he writes in 

 mother tongue his English verse. D. W. 



