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of mastery, and the enjoyment which be- | immense and inexhaustible intellectual anilongs to it, by acts not unfrequently some- mation, we come to speak of the power thing resembling caprice. Thus, the ran- with which the subject is treated, it is dom, boyish, and almost freakish account of what Mr. Browning did with his intellectual prize when he had got it, seems to us as remarkable a piece of exuberance of intellectual spirits as ever an imaginative writer of the first order indulged in: :

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By Wiseman, and we'll see or else we won't!
Thanks meantime for the story, long and strong,
A pretty piece of narrative enough,
Which scarce ought so to drop out, one would
think,

From the more curious annals of our kind.
Do you tell the story, now, in off-hand style,
Straight from the book? Or simply here and
there,

(The while you vault it through the loose and
large)

almost impossible to speak too highly. Always remembering that Mr. Browning's modes of thought never change as he passes from one point of sight to another; that, while rendering each new view, individual or local, or it may be a class or the style of discourse, the springy, sharp party view, with equal force and ability, definitions, the acute discriminations, the rapier-like thrusts of logic, are all the poet's own, and used by every one of his characters in succession, it is impossible to speak too highly of the power with which he paints one facet" after another of the tragedy he has taken for his theme. His own argument of what he is going to give us is itself, barring the puns and such oddities, as brilliant a picture in miniature of the social and moral conditions affecting the public view of such a crime as Count Guido Franceschini's in 1698, as was ever view taken by that half of Rome favourable drawn of the past. The sketch of the to Count Guido's pardon begins perhaps in a strain of thought somewhat too plebeian for the admirably intellectual characterizations in which the supposed speaker afterwards indulges. It seems to us, for instance, scarcely the same critic who was so eloquent about the fine effect presented by the bodies of the poor old murdered pair when laid out in the Church of San Lorenzo with a profusion of waxlights all round them, and who afterwards gives us this description of the Canon Caponsacchi, but whether it be or not, the description is not the less vivid:

-

"And lo

There in a trice did turn up life and light,
The man with the aureole, sympathy made flesh,
The all-consoling Caponsacchi, Sir!
A priest-what else should the consoler be?
With goodly shoulder blade and proper leg,
A portly make and a symmetric shape,
And curls that clustered to the tonsure quite.
This was a bishop in the bud, and now
A canon full-blown so far: priest, and priest
Nowise exorbitantly overworked,
The courtly Christian, not so much Saint Paul
As a saint of Cæsar's household: there posed he
Sending his god-glance after his shot shaft,
Apollos turned Apollo, while the snake
Pompilia writhed transfixed through all her
spires,"

Hang to a hint? Or is there book at all, And don't you deal in poetry, make-believe, And the white lies it sounds like?'"' Characteristic of Mr. Browning though they be, these extremely bad puns on Manning's, Newman's, and Wiseman's names do not seem to us fit element for a prologue which is to introduce us to so great a theme, although boldly, freely, and buoy- Or take the description in the same diviantly treated, as is usual with Mr. Brown- sion of the poem of how Count Guido's ing. When overlooking the irregularities passion was excited on hearing of the birth of style, the wilful caprices of the poet's of an heir whom he had supposed (or

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That morning when he came up with the pair
At the wayside inn, exacted his just debt
By aid of what first mattock, pitchfork, axe
Came to hand in the helpful stable-yard,
And with that axe, if Providence so pleased,
Cloven each head, by some Rolando-stroke,
In one clean cut from crown to clavicle, —
Slain the priest-gallant, the wife-paramour,
Sticking, for all defence, in each skull's cleft
The rhyme and reason of the stroke thus dealt,
To-wit, those letters and last evidence
Of shame, each package in its proper place,
Bidding who pitied undistend the skulls,

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He hesitates, calls Law, forsooth! to help.
And law, distasteful to who calls in law
When honour is beforehand and would serve,
What wonder if law hesitate in turn,
Plead her disuse to calls o' the kind, reply,
Smiling a little, 'Tis yourself assess
The worth of what's lost, sum of damage done:
What you touched with so light a finger-tip,
You whose concern it was to grasp the thing,
Why must law gird herself and grapple with?
Law, alien to the actor whose warm blood
Asks heat from law, whose veins run lukewarm
milk,-

What you dealt lightly with, shall law make

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Thus saintship is effected probably;

No sparing saints the process!—which the

more

Tends to the reconciling us, no saints, To sinnership, immunity and all.” -how powerful the description of Count Guido driving his wife, "hemmed in by her household bars," to destruction by chasing her "about the coop of daily life;" how grand and touching the picture of the battered mind of the old confessor who was so sure of Pompilia's innocence !

"Even that poor old bit of battered brass Beaten out of all shape by the world's sins, Common utensil of the lazar-houseConfessor Celestino groans,"Tis truth, All truth, and only truth: there's something else,

Some presence in the room beside us all, Something that every lie expires before: No question she was pure from first to last."" In short, the little volume, as a whole, contains perhaps more of Mr. Browning's brilliant intellectual flashes of many-coloured light than almost any of his hithertopublished works.

fire, there is no passage like that apostroFor pathos, and what comes near to lyric phe which ends the prologue, the first couplet of which is the most truly inspired in all the range of his poems; but why has he ended such a passage with three lines so utterly obscure, open to so many guesses and so little certainty, as those which conclude it::

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Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,

And bared them of the glory- to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—
This is the same voice: can thy soul know
change?

Hail, then, and hearken from the realms of help!

Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand-
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very
thought,

Some benediction anciently thy smile:
Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach yet

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Their utmost up and on,
- so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy
home,

Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes
proud,

Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may

fall!"

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Mr. Browning describes "the British public" in this poem as "ye who like me not, adding a grim "God love you," -somewhat as clergymen pray for their enemies, but if it does not like him, it is only because while, with so great a power of lucidity, he will spoil his finest poetry by careless hieroglyphics such as these, the mere shorthand of a poet, which to him, no doubt, recalls with sufficient precision what was in his own mind when he wrote it, but what certainly is not adapted to call it up for the first time in those who cannot know, from what is written, whether they have ever yet had it in their mind or not. But it is scarcely true that the British public love not Mr. Browning. They love him more and more, at all events. And the more they love him, the less they like the carelessness with which a poet of so much power of speech slurs over the great faults in his own style. Still, if the other three volumes of this poem are equal to the first, they will add greatly to the rich mines of intellectual wealth, full partly of gold ore, in less degree of sifted gold, to be found in Mr. Browning's writings.

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fect harbour, that is, a harbour which would, if conveniently near the great routes, hold ships of any size yet built, and is not too open to a dangerous sea; there is scarcely boasts only two or three; we know of only a perfect one on the continent; America two in Asia, and the remainder of the world offers only four or five. To put the case in its extreme form, art and nature being estimated together, there are not ten ports in the world in which the Great Eastern could conveniently refit. On the other hand, mountains have decidedly sunk in value. Very few of them are worth anything in a political sense. Most of the lonely mountain fortresses, once so impregnable, are now accessible to long-range artillery, and the advantage of cooping up a few soldiers in a place where nobody can get at them and they can get at nobody has become imperceptible. Mountain ranges have their importance, as they can be defended, and besides, impress the imagination, and they make invasion troublesome, though Bismarck entered Bohemia unchallanged, but we cannot recall an isolated hill in Europe for which an invader would be content to give thirty years' purchase as a "natural fortress." He would starve it, or shell it, or leave it alone, and it would never hold a modern army. There is not a hill capital left in the world, not a place on a mountain worth as a means of national defence ten Monsell guns or a little fleet of Mosquito ironclads. Even the great strategical points of the world, for which so much blood has been shed, are losing their hold over the imagination of mankind. Thirty years ago From The Spectator, 26 Dec. a public man who proposed to Englishmen CONSTANTINOPLE, THE QUEEN CITY. to give up Gibraltar, "fortress gate of ONE of the most curious of the many the Mediterranean," would have been oschanges which of late years have passed tracized as a fool beyond the range of seriover political thought, is the alteration in ous argument; and even now there are, we the political value attached to particular suspect, Englishmen who would think such a morsels of the world's territory. Harbours, cession almost a proof of lunacy. It would especially if very good indeed, have decid-be difficult, nevertheless, to find an Engedly increased in price. Ships have grown |lish statesman who valued the Rock at half bigger and deeper, and sea-borne trade the price of the sugar duty; and a general more essential, while the expense of con- officer, with an hereditary claim to be somestructing by artificial means safe shelters thing more than a soldier, has this week for the ships and convenient depots for openly proposed its exchange for Ceuta, goods has increased, till it daunts nations and nobody has pelted him yet, or will pelt who think of millions as people a few years him. Ceuta has a future, Gibraltar has not, ago thought of thousands of pounds. There and we are the people of the future. In is no overplus of first-class harbours now in Asia, owing to some difficulties about coal, the world, not by any means too many ports and perhaps to a little of the old leaven into which the Admiralty would like to send which lingers about Anglo-Indian opinion, a five or six-thousand-ton steamer, or in there is a place or two supposed to have which a modern navy could ride at ease, or some special value; but there are cool engiabout which trading persons with geograph-neers with military experience who have ical instincts would build up great cities. doubts about the value of Aden, and who In England Milford Haven is the only per- do not understand why Lord Palmerston

The general change which has passed over opinion makes one particular exception the more remarkable, and we have been asked this week by a friend, somewhat given to belief in the nineteenth century, why the world, which has rejected the worship of high places, and of little islands, and of spots supposed to command straits, should believe so very deeply in the importance of a third-rate city in South-Eastern Europe. Why think so much, or talk so much, or spend so much about Constantinople? What does it matter if Russia acquires the Turkish capital, or anybody else? The world will be where it was, or rather better than it was, and nations will be strong or weak according to their numbers, their spirit, and their " resources,' - that is, in less vague phraseology, their power of obtaining great quantities of the expensive material of modern war. It is a sensible question, and one which for many reasons we should be glad to answer by an assertion that Constantinople is of no importance at all to mankind, only that answer unfortunately would be the reverse of the truth. It is very important, so very important to certain people under certain circumstances, that its possession, if those people threatened it, and those circumstances occurred, might be worth a good, big, dangerous, costly, bothering fight.

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told so many fibs about the lighthouse_on of intellectual life. At least, the approach Perim. What will all those guns there do? to universal monarchy has hitherto produced Coaling stations are useful, and bonded very few men of the highest brain except warehouses, but beyond those two accident- for the exact sciences, and the resistance to it al and as it may be temporary necessities, has evolved a great many. Well, there the political world is not quite convinced are one or two races who seem to thoughtthat any place not producing revenue, or ful persons, reasoning about that as they affording room for man, or offering the ad- would about anything else, able if they sevantages of a natural dockyard, can be of cured certain geographical positions to asany particular political value. sume that attitude to the world at large. We will not quote Louis XIV., or Napoleon, or the ideas of their enemies about them, because of course a man's grandfather is a fool in the eyes of his grandson, and very properly, else we should always be listening instead of thinking, which would be wearisome, and we will talk to grandsons only. They will admit that a strong man standing in his own porch is more dangerous to passengers, if he wants to be dangerous, than inside his house. Well, Russia in possession of Constantinople would be in just that position; and so would Germany be, if she were suzerain from Pesth southwards; or, for that matter, England, if she had a railroad from Scutari to India. The specialty of Constantinople, the virtue for which men have fought for it for twelve hundred years, is just this, that any strong man who holds it and the territory immediately north of it can hit anybody he likes without being hit in return. He strikes out at ease, while his adversary hits his knuckles against pillars. That does not matter, if he is weak, like the later Greek, or a worn-out barbarian, like the Turk; but suppose he is at once strong and aggressive. A Romanoff master of Constantinople would have an unassailable depot, or fortress, with a huge dockyard, the Sea of Marmora, on the eastern side, inaccessible to any flag but his own; a huge close harbour, the Bosphorus, The old, old theory about "the balance in front; and a huge fortress, which he of power," which everybody nowadays ridi- would build at very slight expense, - for cules, more particularly and more easily if twenty 100-pounders on Monsell carriages, he has not, unlike Mr. Bright, any clear would shut the entrance against anything idea of what he is ridiculing, had, we take but a bird, upon the west. He could it, one sound idea at its basis. It would build fleets for ever which nobody would not do to let any one power found a univer-even see, and could strike any place in the sal monarchy, or granting that to be un- Mediterranean, without a chance of reprilikely, a monarchy so powerful that every sals. If engineers may be trusted, any nation which wished to keep its independ- man in the profession, with European workence, its own ways, its own prejudices, its own civilization, its own ideal, should be compelled to maintain a restless qui vive, to turn itself into an armed sentry-box or military cantonment. Life in that case would for the remainder of mankind be much more burdensome; there would be more taxes, a heavier conscription, more drill, less vividness in politics, less variety of development, and generally, we suspect, less vigour

and

men, a couple of millions, and absolute
power, could place Constantinople beyond
the reach of assault, making of it a fortress
to which Cronstadt would be a toy,
a British fleet with a Napier on board did
not take Cronstadt. Nobody would be
able to get near it, any more than to get
near Tobolsk, while its owner could get
near anybody, as the Viceroy of Tobolsk
cannot do. He would be a long armed-

From The Saturday Review. ALASKA.

boxer, master at once of the Mediterranean | eqnal advantages, and thus combine very and the Black Sea, of the mouths of the many modes of attack with very few necesDanube, the mouths of the Volga, and the sities for defence. The statesmen may be mouths of the Nile; would control or men- wrong in their opinions, -we by no means ace the Northern coast of the Mediterra- deny it, - but they are not wrong in their nean, where the present is so great; threat facts, namely, that Russia in getting Conening Marseilles, and Naples, and Athens, stantinople would get a hundred opportuniand Trieste all at once; and of the southern ties of attack without incurring one extra coast, where the future is so possible. More- liability for defence, that Constantinople is over he would be driven, partly by the the natural fortress of the world, the one prestige of his capital, which would make it position in which it might be possible to the resort of all the discontented in Western build up a power that would compel the reAsia, partly by his own natural hunger for mainder of mankind, if they liked independbeautiful properties easily acquired, for ence, to sleep always under arms. revenue, in fact, to conquer Asia Minor and Egypt, which would lie, as it were, at his doors; and, if he were decently prudent, would ask him to come in. The Fellahs would accept Satan if he rid them of the Pasha and let them have their lands as Russian villagers in the interior have their lands. THE author of this agreeable book of This would be to seize the fairest countries travel and adventure will perhaps be conof Asia and the only country in Africa worth founded by many persons with his brother, having; to possess regions which wisely whose name was brought so prominently governed would yield endless cash, and before the public in connection with the open routes to any conquest the Czar might, melancholy misadventure upon the Matterfrom judgment, or ambition, or even caprice, horn three summers ago. Mr. E. H. heartily desire. Behind, in the cold North, Whymper has since devoted his energies to would lie myriads of obedient soldiers; by an attempt to penetrate—with, we believe, his side, timid, though jealous enemies; in but moderate success-the unknown intefront, a rich population, ready to be serfs.rior of Greenland. These gentlemen have The Czar would be an armed man in a evidently much in common, as artists, porch ready to rob any passenger weaker lovers of adventure, and graphic delineators than himself, but almost unassailable by the of what comes in their way. We confess police of the world. He might not wish to that we are glad to see physical and mental assail anybody, that is a possible theory gifts like these find scope where they can about any politician, but he would have exercise themselves with greater safety to every temptation to do it, he could not be their owners, as well as with fuller profit to hurt if he did, and he would be very much mankind, than on the bare slope of some pressed by those around him to try, more simply dangerous precipice. For strength, pressed than the Indian Viceroy is to annibil-hardihood, and every resource of a trained ate the last vestiges of native independence. intellect to be staked upon the barren He would be surrounded, in fact, by races honour of rivalling the chamois in glacier who need strong order, to whom he could climbing, or of breathing strata of air too give strong order, and whose conquest would rare for the beat of anything heavier than therefore seem an act of mercy. No doubt the slight wings of the butterfly, seem to us he could, if too dangerous, be resisted in among the least warrantable of human the end. The rise of America has altered risks. It is, then, with satisfaction that we all European conditions, and it is difficult see the muscular prowess, the thirst for adto conceive the power to which the English-venture, and the artist's eye for what is speaking peoples, once united in offensive grand or picturesque in nature turned to and defensive alliance, could not dictate more practical and instructive pursuits than terms of peace, or rather the ultimate limits that which so commonly absorbs the enerBut the statesmen of Europe have ergies, and occasionally thins the ranks, of hitherto held it wiser not to let affairs arrive the Alpine Club. The region selected by at so extreme a point of tension, to insist Mr. Frederick Whymper for working off that no power should rise to such a height his superfluous energy-which was at the as to be unassailable, to lay down the pro- time, he tells us, lying fallow-is one viso that a nation which has natural advantages such as Russia has in her snows and size, and England in her insular position, should not be allowed to conquer other and

of war.

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* Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, formerly Russian America, and in various other Parts of the North Pacific. By Frederick Whymper. With Maps and Illustrations. London: John Murray. 1868.

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