A Vision of Poets can hardly fail to suggest Tennyson. A first and partial acquaintance, indeed, with the works of Mrs. Browning, is apt to prompt the opinion that she may be classed among the pupils and followers of that poet. Both belong to one time, and their thoughts run, not unfrequently, in the same channels. But a more complete knowledge of Mrs. Browning's works puts to flight every imagination of an influence which could do more than stimulate, which could in the slightest degree control, her powers. Her genius is of an order altogether above that which can be permanently or organically affected by any other mind. And, in truth, her whole mode of imaginative action is different from that of Tennyson. The unrivalled finish and strange perfection of the latter, his unique imaginative faculty, which combines a color more rich than that of Eastern gardens, with a science more austere than that of Greek architecture, his instinctive and imperious rejection of aught wearing even the semblance of fault or imperfection, requiring that all his marble be polished, and all his gems crystals, can in no respect or degree be said to characterize Mrs. Browning. Tennyson, more than any English poet of mark, approaches the statue-like calmness of Goethe: Mrs. Browning thrills with every emotion she depicts, whether passion kindles with a smile her own funeral pyre, or earnestness flows rhythmic from the lips of the Pythoness, or irrepressible weeping shakes the breast of the child. Tennyson is the wizard, looking, with unmoved face, into the furnace, whose white heat melts the flint: Mrs. Browning has the furnace in her own bosom, and you see its throbbings. Tennyson's imagination treads loftily on cloth of gold, its dainty foot neither wetted with dew nor stained with mire: Mrs. Browning's rushes upwards and onwards, its drapery now streaming in the wind,

now draggled in the mountain rivers, making, with impetuous lawlessness, for the goal. Mrs. Browning has scarcely a poem undefaced by palpable error or extravagance: Tennyson's poetry is characterized by that perilous absence of fault, which seems hardly consistent with supreme genius. Between our greatest living poet, therefore, and the greatest of all poetesses, there can be instituted no general comparison. But in A Vision of Poets, and in The Poet's Vow, there is much to recall Tennyson. In the former, the individual portraits, in the latter, the central thought, point unmistakably to The Palace of Art. But even when most like Tennyson, Mrs. Browning is unmistakably herself. If the succession of individual likenesses in A Vision of Poets recalls that in The Palace of Art, as the melody sometimes suggests that of The Two Voices, there is a boldness, a sweeping breadth of touch, in Mrs. Browning's delineations, belonging to herself alone. If the thought of The Poet's Vow, the fatal error and deadly sin of preferring self-culture to human sympathy, -is the same as in The Palace of Art, the imagery is totally dissimilar from Tennyson's, and is adapted, but for the intervention of some of Mrs. Browning's tantalizing dimness, to come upon the general heart with more powerful directness than the more elaborate idealization of Tennyson. The poet gave the thought in allegory: the poetess gives it in life. One or two of the portraits of "God's prophets of the Beautiful," from the hand of Mrs. Browning, cannot be passed over. They occur, of course, in A Vision of Poets.

"There, Shakspeare! on whose forehead climb
The crowns o' the world. Oh, eyes sublime
With tears and laughters for all time!

This is a critique on Burns. When you have said this, you have spoken the one indispensable word concerning him; if you wrote folios on his poetry, you could hardly supplement, however you might illustrate, those "pungent passionings."

"And Shelley, in his white ideal

All statue blind."

That, too, is marvellous: in philosophy profound, in pathos genuine, in poetry perfect. There are few such examples of condensation in the language.

"And visionary Coleridge, who

Did sweep his thoughts as angels do

Their wings with cadence up the Blue.”

It is little to say that these lines contain a biography.

"And poor, proud Byron, sad as grave,

And salt as life: forlornly brave,

And quivering with the dart he drave.”

This is very bold, and in almost any case might be pronounced towering presumption. But Mrs. Browning had a right to say it; she whose intellectual and imaginative powers are to the full as great as those of Byron, and who has never stained, by one foul image or impure emotion, the gold and azure of her genius.

The Poet's Vow is one of those poems in which there is exhibited a certain mode or habit of poetic representation, of so frequent occurrence in the pages of Mrs. Browning, that it may be pronounced a principal part of her manner, or mannerism. At first, you are merely astonished and bewildered. You know not who are the actors, what is the subject, at what point the narrative is commenced. But there comes gleam after gleam of backward-falling light; and when finally you open on the full meaning of the poem, and when the cataract of its passion flashes on your eye, the light streams along the whole avenue by which you have approached. To illustrate this peculiarity in detail would occupy too much space; but no better example of it than this poem could be cited. I must content myself, however, with quoting one or two stanzas, not illustrative of this point, though individually remarkable. The poet speaks thus:

"Hear me forswear man's sympathies,

His pleasant yea and no—

His riot on the piteous earth

Whereon his thistles grow!

His changing love—with stars above!

His pride — with graves below!"

This expresses his determination to put away from him all that can break the serenity of self-culture, to abandon men and seek the grand solitudes of nature. The thought in the

two last lines in Goethe's, and has been made familiar to all by the iteration of Mr. Carlyle. But I do not remember a case in which it was more finely applied.

The solitary divides his wealth among his friends, and bids a determined adieu to his brothers who "love him true as brothers do," and to Rosalind, his betrothed, who loves him as no brother can. The following words are spoken by Sir Roland, whom the poet would fain have the accepted lover of his forsaken Rosalind. Both she and Sir Roland, of course, scorn the union, as well as the dower which the poet offers; and Sir Roland addresses him thus:

There is here another illustration of the way in which the