e hills
Like shot from guns."

The whole of that wonderful poem of "Aurora Leigh" is full of such
impassioned sympathy with womanhood, and shows the great heart of the
poet as perhaps none of her other poems do. Written in the maturity of
her powers, and after she had learned much of life in all its intricate
depths, it contains perhaps more passion and power and fiery-burning
eloquence than any other poem in the English language. Only an inspired
womanly hand, which had sounded all the deeps of the world's scanty
wisdom, could have penned it.

But Mrs. Browning shows great wealth of human sympathy in all her poems.
Oppression and wrong sink into the very depths of her nature, and she
cannot bear that they shall go unreproved in the universe while she
exists. Her sympathy with our labors for the emancipation of the slaves
was well known, in a time when little sympathy was to be found among the
English, and her feeling for the poor and oppressed of her native land
was always deep and strong. Her "Cry of the Children" will never be
forgotten while there are suffering children in the world, and while
there are human hearts to listen to their wail. It is as sacred a piece
of inspiration as the Psalms of David; and the need for such an
expression of the woe of the outcast poor of England is almost as great
to-day as when the immortal poem was written. Still can we ask of the
English people:--

"Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west.
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly;
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free."

This poem, Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and a few others, have added
their mite to the influence of Dickens in benefiting a little the
poorest of England's poor; yet how much remains to be done is shown in
the present deplorable condition of the lower orders in that country.
What might not such a poet as Robert Browning have done, could he have
emancipated himself from his involved and difficult style, and written
in a manly and straightforward way of the world of men and women around
him, instead of goi