onate love is displayed in
her _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, which are among the finest in the
language. Differing in many respects from those of Shakspeare, they are
like his in being connected by one impassioned thought, and being, without
doubt, the record of a heart experience.

Thoroughly interested in the social and political conditions of struggling
Italy, she gave vent to her views and sympathies in a volume of poems,
entitled _Casa Guidi Windows_. Casa Guidi was the name of their residence
in Florence, and the poems vividly describe what she saw from its
windows--divers forms of suffering, injustice, and oppression, which
touched the heart of a tender woman and a gifted poet, and compelled it to
burst forth in song.

AURORA LEIGH.--But by far the most important work of Mrs. Browning is
_Aurora Leigh_: a long poem in nine books, which appeared in 1856, in
which the great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with
great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse:
it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of
life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language
of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual
claims of woman; and the poem is, in some degree, an autobiography: the
identity of the poet and the heroine gives a great charm to the narrative.
There are few finer pieces of poetical inspiration than the closing scene,
where the friend and lover returns blind and helpless, and the woman's
heart, unconquered before, surrenders to the claims of misfortune as the
champion of love. After a happy life with her husband and an only child,
sent for her solace, this gifted woman died in 1863.

HER FAULTS.--It is as easy to criticize Mrs. Browning's works as to admire
them; but our admiration is great in spite of her faults: in part because
of them, for they are faults of a bold and striking individuality. There
is sometimes an obscurity in her fancies, and a turgidity in her language.
She seems to transcend the poet's license with a knowledge that she is
doing so. For example:

We will sit on the throne of a purple sublimity,
And grind down men's bones to a pale unanimity.

And again, in speaking of Goethe, she says:

His soul reached out from far and high,
And fell from inner entity.

Her rhymes are frequently and arrogantly faulty: she seems to scorn the
critics; she writes more fo