triumph; the heart bursting as from excess of joy. The "Rejoice" which is his dying salutation to the Archons, and its consequent adoption in memory of the event, belong to the historic basis of the story. The Greek conception appears to us too strictly maintained in the first verse, where an invocation to Pan is perplexingly involved with an address to the other gods; while towards the end of the poem its rounded cadences here and there break up into pants, like the action of a mechanism of which the spring is broken. But on the whole the language is singularly little strained by its adaptation to classic thought; and its majestic body of sound conveys a simplicity of meaning very rarely found under like conditions. Mr. Browning's known dramatic faculty of so paving the way to his climax that our utmost surprise has in it a sense of the inevitable, has a ready-made expression in this series of incidents, creating as they do a tension of feeling to which the catastrophe is at once a shock and a relief; but it makes its own subjects in the other Idylls, and is the more apparent in proportion as their psychological interest is more pronounced. The most striking instance of this kind of effect occurs in "Martin Relph." "Martin Relph" is the confession of an old man guilty in his youth of witnessing a judicial murder, which a signal from him might have prevented, and who ever since has striven to exorcise the memory of the fact by rehearsing it publicly at the place and on the anniversary of its occurrence. This rehearsal, sobbed forth in a mingled stream of narrative, ejaculation, and protest, is the echo of an anguish deeper even than its ostensible cause; and its last words flash a sudden, yet expected meaning upon it. The man's soul is wrestling, not with the memory of a deed, but with the phantom of a motive. He brands himself as fool and coward for what he has done; but the terms fool and coward are only the weapons with which he fights off the thought, too clamorous to be silenced, too terrible to be distinctly expressed, that he was something more. He liked, perhaps loved, the condemned girl. Living, she would have belonged to another man. That very man was flying towards the place of execution, NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXX., No. 1 staggering, stumbling, straining every nerve, waving aloft the signal of her attested innocence; without voice to cry, without an eye to see him but his who faced the assembled crowd. Was it simple horror which struck that one witness dumb within sight of the pinioned victim, and the terrified lookers-on, the levelled muskets, and the already present reprieve, through the brief, breathless, ultra-conscious moment which determined the destiny of two lives? From head to foot in a serpent's twine am I tightened: I touch ground? No more than a gibbet's rigid corpse which the fetters rust around! Can I speak, can I breathe, can I burst-aught else but see, see, only see? And see I do-for there comes in sight-a man, it sure must be ! Who staggeringly, stumblingly, rises, falls, rises, at random flings his weight On and on, anyhow onward—a man that's mad he arrives too late! Else why does he wave a something white high-flourished above his head? Why does not he call, cry,-curse the fool !— why throw up his arms instead? O take this fist in your own face, fool! Why does not yourself shout "Stay! Here's a man comes rushing, might and main, with something he's mad to say?" And a minute, only a moment, to have hell-fire boil up in your brain, And ere you can judge things right, choose heaven,-time's over, repentance vain! Mr. Browning has thrown not only all his power into this situation, but all his subtlety into the open verdict which is our final impression of it. He does not indeed imply that the jealousy at once confessed and disclaimed is what the narrator tries to think it-a figment of his own brain, born of the ingenuity of a terrified remorse; but he allows the very circumstances of the event to justify a doubt if that feeling could be held responsible. We may at least imagine that the latent motive triumphed, if triumph it did, through the fact of its indistinctness; though memory, which knows no perspective but its own, might reject the compromise. The episode refers to some troublous period of the last century, of which one or two passages reflect the coarse moral tone, as well as the social and political disorder which rendered it possible. A regiment is quartered in a village. Its intended movements have become known to the 4 enemy. Treason is suspected; an example, in other words, a victim required. This is found in the person of an innocent girl whose letter to her affianced husband is captured, and distorted into an evidence of guilt. She is sentenced to die unless her loyalty be established within a week. The burden of proof falls on the lover, and no figure in the drama is so pathetic as this man struggling against every hindrance which selfishness and stupidity can devise for the official acknowledgment of that which nobody disbelieves; and whose maddest endeavors only bring him to the side of the woman he would have saved in time to die with her. When the smoke of the united volley clears away, the frantic figure has disappeared. It is found face downwards in a field still half a mile distant; the hand clenching its signed and sealed paper; some blood about the lips. The mortal agony of this retrospect is nowhere more fully expressed than in the lines which tell us that it is over. So, coward it is and coward shall be! There's a friend, now! Thanks! A drink Of water I wanted and now I can walk, get home by myself, I think. Like "Martin Relph," Ivàn Ivànovitch and "Ned Bratts" read backwards with singular dramatic effect; but with this distinction, that in the latter the event is foreshadowed by natural circumstance; in the former by an artistic device. The picturesque and rapid action of the Russian Idyll is symbolised by an axe, the description of which stands as a literary frontispiece to it. This axe, which is spoken of as in use among Russian workmen at the present day, is a peculiar instrument, combining with its own special properties those of many other carpenter's tools, and loses something of dramatic suitability by the practised skill implied in such a construction. But the versatility thus suggested is part of its dramatic use. It can do all kinds of carpenter's work. It can on occasion do more. Iván Ivanovitch is wielding such an axe. mighty strokes are shaping a tree-trunk into a mast. He stands before us with the blue eyes and "honey-colored" beard of the northern giant he is intended to be. The time is that of Peter the Great. The place, a Russian village, His told. for which space has been barely rescued from the forest solitudes extending on either side of the road from Petersburg to Moscow. The ice and snow of a Russian winter are on the ground. Suddenly there is a "burst of bells;" a trampling of hoofs; and a sledge bearing what looks like the dead body of a neighbor's wife dashes up to the spot; the horse stumbling and falling in the act. The neighbors gather around. The woman has only fainted; a longdrawn scream announces her return to consciousness; by degrees her tale is They were about to return together-she, her husband and her three children, from the distant village to which he was summoned perhaps a month ago to help in building a church. But fire broke out; all hands were needed to suppress it; and Dmitri must needs despatch his wife and little ones homeward in all haste and alone. The infant in her arms, the two elder boys warmly packed at her feet; old Droog to carry, and a rising moon to light them on the well-known way-what harm could come to them? The good horse gallops bravely; for the moment he is young again. But presently there is a sound-a soughing. Droog's ears fly back to listen. It is the wind-he knows it, and plunges on again. But there is no wind; the breath goes straight up from their lips; and there is still the sound! Low, less low, louder, not to be mistaken; the tread of wolves' feet in the snow. And now they are in sight. They press onwards, line upon line, a wedge-like mass widening in the advance; through the unnatural daylight born of the moon and snow; through the cruel pines which bend no branch to hinder or conceal; distant still, but still gaining on their prey. And now one has reached the sledge. Her life shall be yielded before her children's. They are safe if they will only lie still. But Stepan will not be still. He was always the naughty one; sullen and puny; the worst of her little brood. She has loved him with heart and soul. But how save him in spite of himself? He will not be advised. He is mad with fear. And now his brother is shrieking. She tugs, she struggles. If she must lose one, it is the strong, not the weak whom the Tsar requires. Perhaps her hands relax. Perhaps they get entangled. Stepan is gone. But she escapes with two. She is still a rich mother. Some have no boy. Some have, and lose him. God knows which haps herself blinded by the sophistries which have covered her escape; and with the retrospect comes also a reaction. Sheltered, revived, with kindly faces beaming upon her, regret itself is melting away in the sweet consciousness Is worse: how pitiful to see your weakling of her security. She weeps, relieving, pine And pale and pass away! almost happy tears. It is to Ivan Ivanovitch that her narrative has been espeShe is all but content. But hark cially addressed. His knee has propped the tramp again-not the band,-no- Now ripping, tooth and claw-plucked, pulled A prize indeed! I saw-how could I else but My precious one-I bit to hold back-pulled from me! But the babe is safe! He will grow into a man. He will wreak vengeance She outwits upon the whole brood. them yet. Day dawns on the farthest snow. Its rosy light is upon it. Home is all but reached. Yet again-nothank Heaven-not the band; butyes; one is in pursuit! She sees him in the distance one speck, one spot, one ball growing bigger at every bound. It is the same again. She plucks him by the tongue; she will tear at it till she wrenches it out. It has but given him a fresh taste of flesh. She falls on the infant's body. She covers it with her whole self. The teeth furrow her shoulder. They grate to the very bone. What more could a mother do? The babe is scooped from under her very heart. At that moment sense forsakes her. This, then, is the upshot of the story. She has surrendered her children to be devoured, and lives to tell it; yet she scarcely perceives the extent of her revelation. Recalling, rather than relating, the horrors of the night, she is per her head. His large paternal hands have smoothed her hair as she lay. In one mixed impulse of yearning gratitude and benediction she has slipped on to her knees before him. Solemnly Iván rose, raised his axe,-for fitly, as she knelt, Her head lay well-apart, each side, her arms hung,-dealt Lightning-swift thunder-strong one blow—no need of more! Headless she knelt on still that pine was sound at core (Neighbors were used to say)-cast-ironkerneled-which Taxed for a second stroke Ivan Ivanovitch. The man was scant of words as strokes. "It had to be: I could no other: God it was bade Act for me ! Then stooping, peering round-what is it now he lacks? A proper strip of bark wherewith to wipe his axe. Which done, he turns, goes in, closes the door behind. The others mute remain, watching the bloodsnake wind Into a hiding-place among the splinter-heaps. A woman not devoid of feeling, but in whom even maternal feeling is trampled out by the fear of suffering and death, belongs, like the axe of Ivàn Ivanovitch, rather to modern times; but there are all the elements of ancient tragedy in the conception of such a woman, flying from the death she dare not face, to the Nemesis which awaits her in the uplifted arm of a friend; and we must ascend to the annals of the Greek gods to find an attitude of moral simplicity at once so childish and so sublime as that in which the blow is dealt. The second scene in which Ivan Ivanovitch appears is a natural sequel to the first; but Mr. Browning has invested it also with the conditions of a complete dramatic surprise. The body is removed to the village court of justice, an open space in front of the church, from which the snow has been cleared; and the Pope, the Starost, and the Pomeschik (Lord), come forth to pass judgment on the transaction. The Lord unhesitatingly pronounces it murder. He doubts the woman having been guilty from a legal point of view, though she stood condemned by the higher standards of virtue; and if she had been so, he denies its justifying an arbitrary assumption of the right to punish her. He takes the side of social order and educated common sense. The Pope reverses this judgment. He is an aged man; so old, he says, that the number of his years escapes him; and if he were true to fact instead of to poetry, he would certainly confirm it. Both the wisdom and the weakness of age would place him on the side of social prescription, to which faith and custom would add all the dignity of moral sanction, and all the weight of Christian command. But Mr. Browning's purpose did not require this kind of truth. It needed not the stereotyped minister of any Christian church, but a priest of that primitive natural religion, of which Ivan Ivanovitch is the soldier; and this priest declares that he has lived from the dreams of youth into the visions of old age; through the forms of law to its essence in the great Spirit whence it flows; and that by that essential law of human duty the apparent murderer is justified. Life, he says, is God's supreme gift to man; maternity, its highest trust and its crowning responsibility. A mother bears a child: perfection is complete So far in such a birth. Enabled to repeat The miracle of life,-herself was born so just A type of womankind, that God sees fit to trust Her with the holy task of giving life in turn. Crowned by this crowning pride,-how say you, should she spurn, Regality-discrowned, unchilded, by her choice Of barrenness exchanged for fruit which made rejoice Creation, though life's self were lost in giving birth To life more fresh and fit to glorify God's earth? How say you, should the hand God trusted with life's torch Kindled to light the world-aware of sparks that scorch Let fall the same? Forsooth, her flesh a fireflake stings: The mother drops the child! Among what monstrous things Shall she be classed? Because of motherhood, each male And next-as mercy rules the hour-methinks 'twere well You signify forthwith its sentence, and dispel The doubts and fears, I judge, which busy now the head Law puts a halter round—a halo-you, in stead! Ivan Ivanovitch need no longer skulk in concealment— So, while the youngers raised the corpse, the elders trooped Silently to the house where halting, some one stooped, too. Listened beside the door; all there was silent Then they held counsel; then pushed door and, passing through, Stood in the murderer's presence. Ivan Ivanovitch Knelt, building on the floor that Kremlin rare and rich He deftly cut and carved on lazy winter nights. Some five young faces watched, breathlessly, as, to rights, Piece upon piece, he reared the fabric nigh complete. Stèscha, Ivan's old mother, sat spinning by the heat Of the oven where his wife Katia stood baking bread. Ivan's self, as he turned his honey-colored head, Was just in act to drop, 'twixt fir-cones, each a dome, The scooped-out yellow gourd presumably the Of Kolokol the Big: the bell, therein to hitch, a new platform, on which their old en- intention at a Special Assize which is ment of the Court-house are at their highest, the bulky couple force their way into it, book in hand, and Ned opens the catalogue of their joint transgressions. We can picture to ourselves some of the features of this double occasion its cynical cruelties, its riotous They told him he was free mirth; the fires of genuine religious passion smouldering beneath. But when to this are added the influences of As air to walk abroad. asked he. 66 How otherwise ?" The shortest and slightest of the six poems alone separates the thrilling excitements of "Ivàn Ivànovitch" from the grotesque tragedy and saturnine humor of Ned Bratts," which latter composition carries with it a full taste of the author's quality, not only in that humor itself, but in the fact that he has chosen to make it, as far as outward arrangement goes, the last impression of the book. Nothing indeed could surpass the ingenuity with which he contrives to scarify fastidious sensibilities without violating by a word the natural and historical consistency of a really edifying transaction; and his obvious delight in the achievement compels our sympathy. The subject belongs to a fertile and curious class of mental phenomena; the effects of religious conversian on natures, which religion cannot transform, but which simply adopt it as |