olitics an Opportunist. She
attached herself to no particular party. She loved the people when they
were king-like, and kings when they showed themselves to be men. Of the
real value and motive of poetry she had a most exalted idea. 'Poetry,'
she says, in the preface of one of her volumes, 'has been as serious a
thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing. There
has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook
pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the
poet. I have done my work so far, not as mere hand and head work apart
from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being
to which I could attain.'

It certainly is her completest expression, and through it she realises
her fullest perfection. 'The poet,' she says elsewhere, 'is at once
richer and poorer than he used to be; he wears better broadcloth, but
speaks no more oracles.' These words give us the keynote to her view of
the poet's mission. He was to utter Divine oracles, to be at once
inspired prophet and holy priest; and as such we may, I think, without
exaggeration, conceive her. She was a Sibyl delivering a message to the
world, sometimes through stammering lips, and once at least with blinded
eyes, yet always with the true fire and fervour of lofty and unshaken
faith, always with the great raptures of a spiritual nature, the high
ardours of an impassioned soul. As we read her best poems we feel that,
though Apollo's shrine be empty and the bronze tripod overthrown, and the
vale of Delphi desolate, still the Pythia is not dead. In our own age
she has sung for us, and this land gave her new birth. Indeed, Mrs.
Browning is the wisest of the Sibyls, wiser even than that mighty figure
whom Michael Angelo has painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel at
Rome, poring over the scroll of mystery, and trying to decipher the
secrets of Fate; for she realised that, while knowledge is power,
suffering is part of knowledge.

To her influence, almost as much as to the higher education of women, I
would be inclined to attribute the really remarkable awakening of woman's
song that characterises the latter half of our century in England. No
country has ever had so many poetesses at once. Indeed, when one
remembers that the Greeks had only nine muses, one is sometimes apt to
fancy that we have too many. And yet the work done by women in the
sphere of poetry is really of a ve