ns and of
morbid woes into a life of wholesome reality and of "sweet
reasonableness." Their literary excellence is due also to the fact that
in the sonnet Mrs. Browning was held to a rigid form, and was obliged to
curb her imagination and restrain her tendency to diffuseness of
expression. Mr. Saintsbury goes so far as to say that the sonnet
beginning--

"If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only--"

does not fall far short of Shakespeare.

'Aurora Leigh' gives rise to the old question, Is it advisable to turn a
three-volume novel into verse? Yet Landor wrote about it:--"I am
reading a poem full of thought and fascinating with fancy--Mrs.
Browning's (Aurora Leigh.) In many places there is the wild imagination
of Shakespeare.... I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should
have a good draught of poetry again." Ruskin somewhere considered it the
greatest poem of the nineteenth century, "with enough imagination to set
up a dozen lesser poets"; and Stedman calls it "a representative and
original creation: representative in a versatile, kaleidoscopic
presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most
idiosyncratic of its author's poems. An audacious speculative freedom
pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old....
'Aurora Leigh' is a mirror of contemporary life, while its learned and
beautiful illustrations make it almost a handbook of literature and the
arts.... Although a most uneven production, full of ups and downs, of
capricious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains poetry as fine
as its author has given us elsewhere, and enough spare inspiration to
set up a dozen smaller poets. The flexible verse is noticeably her own,
and often handled with as much spirit as freedom." Mrs. Browning
herself declared it the most mature of her works, "and the one into
which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered."
Consider this:--

"For 'tis not in mere death that men die most:
And after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up-hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downwards on the cross-sticks of the world.
Yet He