"It
would be idle to enquire," he writes, "of these two kinds of poetic
faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If
the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age,
the objective in the strictest state must still retain its original
value. For it is with this world, as starting-point and basis alike,
that we shall always have to concern ourselves; the world is not to be
learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and reclaimed."

Of its critical subtlety--the more remarkable as by a poet-critic who
revered Shelley the poet and loved and believed in Shelley the man--the
best example, perhaps, is in those passages where he alludes to the
charge against the poet's moral nature--"charges which, if substantiated
to their wide breadth, would materially disturb, I do not deny, our
reception and enjoyment of his works, however wonderful the artistic
qualities of these. For we are not sufficiently supplied with instances
of genius of his order to be able to pronounce certainly how many of its
constituent parts have been tasked and strained to the production of a
given lie, and how high and pure a mood of the creative mind may be
dramatically simulated as the poet's habitual and exclusive one."

The large charity, the liberal human sympathy, the keen critical acumen
of this essay, make one wish that the author had spared us a "Sludge
the Medium" or a "Pacchiarotto," or even a "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,"
and given us more of such honourable work in "the other harmony."

Glad as the Brownings were to be home again at Casa Guidi, they could
not enjoy the midsummer heats of Florence, and so went to the Baths of
Lucca. It was a delight for them to ramble among the chestnut-woods of
the high Tuscan forests, and to go among the grape-vines where the
sunburnt vintagers were busy. Once Browning paid a visit to that remote
hill-stream and waterfall, high up in a precipitous glen, where, more
than three-score years earlier, Shelley had been wont to amuse himself
by sitting naked on a rock in the sunlight, reading _Herodotus_ while
he cooled, and then plunging into the deep pool beneath him--to emerge,
further up stream, and then climb through the spray of the waterfall
till he was like a glittering human wraith in the middle of a dissolving
rainbow.

Those Tuscan forests, that high crown of Lucca, must always have special
associations for lovers of poetry. Here Shelley lived, rapt in his