The present variety of civilizationthe civilization of coal and iron, and dust, and hurry, and an unprecedented growth of population-will probably begin to die out where it commenced. England gained its commercial and manufacturing supremacy through being the first modern State to set about the wholesale destruction of its forests and the utterly reckless using up of its irreplaceable coal- and iron-supplies. How long the coal and iron will last is a question on which no two authorities appear to agree. All that is really known is that the supply is not unlimited and that the demand grows larger daily. England, in its haste to be rich, also became the first country to depend almost wholly for its food and timber on foreign suppliers. And when the present suppliers reach, as previous ones have done, the point at which they want their own loaf and their own tree for local consumption, then the heaviest blow is likely to fall on the country which thereby has its resources most completely cut off. There will be first an era of high prices, which will be good for the countries with food to sell and bad for the buyers of food just in proportion to their degree of dependence. Then there will be the era of absolute scarcity. And finally, in all probability, will come the time of comThe National Review.

plete stoppage of supplies. And after that-when the loaf wars are over and done with-there will perhaps be a new civilization, with far less population, less commerce, less hurry, less motorcar, less luxury, less pounding of machinery, and much more hard agriculture.

All this may appear extravagant, but if the much- commended birth-rate is to continue, and the death-rate is not greatly accelerated, it also appears inevitable. All the schemes and devices for increasing the world's food-supply fall dead in view of that picture of England, some three centuries hence. trying to feed and clothe and house and supply with newspapers and picture shows a population exceeding two thousand millions.

This article must conclude without any attempt to suggest a remedy. It is merely a comment upon the birthrate fetich. That affair was a good fetich once, and in a few thinly peopled lands, which lack men for defence, it is an excellent one still. But in some of the older countries it has outlived its usefulness. "Multiply and replenish the earth" was a wise saying at the foot of Ararat in the days of the ninth chapter of Genesis. It has lost its application in Whitechapel and become, effete in Shoreditch.

James Edmond.

A devout admirer of Wordsworth from my youth upwards, I still recall the dismay I felt when a schoolfellow showed me Browning's lyric, The Lost Leader, and assured me that it was at once a portrait and an indictment of none other than Wordsworth himself. Having no understanding of politics, I was incapable of defending the revered name except on general principles. I felt as one might who has heard the

reputation of an absent friend traduced, wrongfully, he is sure, but cannot clear him. A dull ache of resentment long possessed me.

Of course, my schoolfellow was only partly right; but maturer heads than his had formed the same conclusion. It may be admitted that there was some ground for this. It was certainly an odd coincidence, if nothing more, that The Lost Leader first appeared in

between kings and ephors. If a poet touches upon politics at all, should he not confine himself to broad and national issues, which are, or ought to be, above the domain of party warfare? That was Browning's almost invariable practice. His sonnet Why I am a Liberal proclaims, in fact, truths which are the exclusive property of no party in the State. Freedom is his theme, and thus far no party dares openly avow itself the foe of freedom. He does but repeat and amplify the words of an older master:

Oh, freedom is a noble thing, Fredom makes a man to have liking, Freedom all blessings to man gives; He lives at ease who freely lives. His Italian in England, which voices the aspirations and patriotic endeavors of a people, may be put in the same category as Wordsworth's Sonnet to the Men of Kent and Tennyson's The Fleet. All three poems-and every reader can increase the list for himself-are as far above the din of party as Védrines or Paulhan, at their highest, are above the earth.

We have seen that Wordsworth was at least in Browning's thoughts when The Lost Leader was composed. In his correspondence during the next year, 1846, there occur two references to the elder poet whose significance is worth examining.

Great as Wordsworth was, his personality, in old age at any rate, appears to have been chilling and egoistical. Stories, very likely exaggerated, got abroad as to his self-absorption and his exacting demands on those about him. In commenting on these tales, Browning gives way to a characteristic outburst. If that is all he has become, after living for twenty years the kind of life he had deliberately chosen, and in the place where he desired to live it -why then, Browning says in effect, we had better shut our ears and read the Lyrical Ballads over again! Thus

"I

wisely does he separate the man from his productions, which by implication we perceive that he admired. That the man was unsympathetic to him we have further and explicit evidence. always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects," he writes a few months later. "I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion." (The writer of these words, be it remarked in passing, was in his thirty-fourth year; and it is good to remark how slow his manhood was to part company with his "hasty youth." Indeed, he never lost his youth, his surviving friends assure us.) "They seem," the passage continues, "to have their reward,' and want nobody's love or faith. Just one of those trenchant opinions which I found fault with Byron for uttering-as proving nothing!"

Now this quotation appears to me to be of extreme interest just now, when some of us, at this centenary of Browning's birth, are trying to figure to ourselves more clearly the manner of man he was. There he stands before us, impetuous, romantic, forming hasty judgments, which a moment later he half, but only half, inclines to slight. Indications are not lacking that in his later life Wordsworth's poetry meant more to him than Byron's; there is no evidence to prove that the opposite was the case in 1846, but there is a strong probability. It is known that Browning's earliest verses owed their inspiration to Byron's poetry; and he was an impressionable boy of twelve when the closing scene at Missolonghi. which must have stirred in many hearts "the late re

morse of love," deepened the devotion of his. "A few more years," wrote Lord Macaulay in 1830, six years after Byron's death, "will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron." Surely an inept prophecy! The death of a poet who was a great figure in Europe, whatever since has come to light, and who certainly sacrificed his last years to a great cause, could not fail to exercise a persistent glamour over the minds of those who in their youth read his poetry with enthusiasm, and heard the story of his death with awe and admiration. In Browning's case the personality of Byron never lost its fascination. More than thirty years after his utterance about Byronic relics, he actually did go on pilgrimage to the Villa Dicdati, being in its neighborhood, as readers of La Saisiaz will remember. Byron's instinct for "what flame and power in writing is" and the nobility of his death together made and retained a conquest over the romantic element in Browning's complex nature. But why so hard upon Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey? Surely not Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,

The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy?

No, Browning would never have gone to those Byronic lengths; but his "trenchant opinion" calls, all the same, for interpretation.

Wordsworth certainly might be said "to have his reward." He rode at anchor securely, was set above worldly cares, and recognition had come to him, though late; as, by the way, it came to Browning. As much might be said of Southey, who had passed away, respected by everyone, after a laborious and successful life. But surely the memory and the genius of poor Coleridge deserved something of the "love and faith" which were denied to him at no period of his strange and

mutable career.

Browning's indiffer

ence is indeed curious. One would have thought that the early years of Wordsworth and Coleridge, particularly their sojourn together among the Quantock Hills and the spiritual adventures there encountered, would have had an irresistible attraction for a youthful poet; but no trace of it appears. Hazlitt's enthralling account of those rapt days, days whose outcome was to exercise such a vital influence upon the trend of English poetry, had been printed in Leigh Hunt's Liberal in 1823. Browning was on friendly terms with Hunt, and might naturally have had his attention drawn to Hazlitt's paper. We are tempted to conjecture, however, for want of a better explanation, that he had not seen it.

II.

Forty years elapse, as the playbills have it. The borders of Wordsworth's kingdom are enlarged. Matthew Arnold has gathered his masterpieces into a small volume, and so has gained him fresh disciples. The Wordsworth Society has been founded "as a bond of union among those in sympathy with the general teaching and spirit of Wordsworth," and Browning is among its members; is, indeed, on its executive council. Professor Knight, its president, has suggested to him that he should draw up a list of those poems of Wordsworth which he considers most truly great and likely to endure. In putting the request aside, Browning writes as follows:

"It is quite another matter of interest to know what Matthew Arnold thinks most worthy of Wordsworth; but should anybody have curiosity to inquire which "fifteen or twenty of his poems have most thoroughly impressed such an one as myself," all I can affirm is that I treasure as precious every poem written about the first twenty years of the poet's life"-(this is an obvious slip:

he meant forty, which he afterwards, in conversation, corrected to thirtyfive); "after these the solution grows weaker, the crystals gleam more rarely, and the assiduous stirring-up of the mixture is too apparent and obtrusive. To the end crystals are to be come at; but my own experience resembles that of the old man in the admirable Resolution and Independence:

Once I could meet with them on every side,

But they have dwindled long by slow decay

Yet still I persevere and find them where I may.

that is, in the poet's whole work, which I should leave to operate in the world as it may, each recipient being his own selector."

Here, then, is Browning's mature attitude towards his great predecessor. He supplemented his letter, in conversation, by a list of some dozen poems which were special favorites with him, of which all but three fall within the period when "crystals were most plentiful." The Excursion, published when Wordsworth was forty-four, is excluded from his flowering time. Nevertheless, there remains a solid body of work which Browning "treasured as precious." The phrase implies high appreciation, higher, very likely, than he felt in earlier years; for the poetry of Wordsworth makes a stronger appeal to philosophic maturity than to energetic and pulsating youth.

Moreover, in those distant days the chief niches in Browning's poetical pantheon were already filled. Byron occupied a high place, but Memorabilia lets us see who was enthroned still higher. Shelley was then, as a friend put on record, "the god of his idolatry"; and Shelley's influence is admittedly perceptible in his early writings. Apparent in Pauline, it can also be discerned in Paracelsus; indeed, when the latter was published some people went

so far as to call it an imitation of Shelley. That, of course, is unfair, and even foolish; there is something of the spirit of Alastor in Paracelsus, but that is all. From its publication onwards there is no room for a charge of imitating Shelley or anyone else. Browning is among the least indebted of poets. He stands in a category by himself. There is no one before himonce we have done with Paracelsuswho in the least resembles him; nor has anyone since succeeded in writing like him, except, with obvious limitations, a parodist or two; indeed, I should hardly think that anyone has tried. Or, if any have, they have probably only reproduced "the contortions of the sibyl without her inspiration," and have remained unread except by a few much-enduring reviewers.

Into those rea

Long ago, in a preface to a collection of letters afterwards found to be spurious, Browning set forth at some length the reasons for his admiration of Shelley's genius, an admiration which he never lost. sons I do not here propose to enter fully, as the preface can, with a little trouble, be procured; but briefly to recur to them may assist us to form at least a tentative understanding of his attitude to Wordsworth also. In Shelley, then, he discerns, SO to say, a pair of poets; one the objective, who excels in the dramatic presentment of men and women, and as such is easily comprehended and readily admired; the other the subjective, whose essence is more intangible, more spiritual, who is above the heads of many readers, but to those who can soar upwards with him is infinitely greater and more precious than his earthly twin. It is his to show "the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal." This subjective gift Browning finds possessed by Shelley in a greater degree