James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[245] gaze too closely. We have certainly a right to ask that crime of this sort, if introduced into a work of the imagination, shall be so veiled as neither to shock our taste nor wound our sensibilities.

But, notwithstanding all the faults which disfigure “Aurora Leigh,” it is full of genius and power. It is not a great poem, but many of its passages are great. It contains much vigorous thought; many profound spiritual truths delicately and forcibly expressed; much noble description of natural scenery. It is a book to be read by detached passages rather than as a single work of art; and to one reading it thus it is full of interest and profit. Though not worthy of being the great work of Mrs. Browning's life, it must hold a high rank among the poems which the present century has produced.

In 1859 Mrs. Browning published a little book entitled “Poems before Congress.” These poems, which contained eulogies upon Louis Napoleon for the assistance which he had rendered to Italy in her struggle for independence, and blamed England for lukewarmness toward the new nation struggling into freedom, were severely criticised by the English press. She was called disloyal to her native land, and was said to have prostituted her genius to eulogizing a tyrant and usurper. How far her opinions as to Napoleon's character and motives in assisting Italy to freedom were correct is a question into which we will not enter here. Had she been living in the fall of 1867, she would probably have found occasion to modify her opinion. But of the nobility of the motives which actuated her to write as she did, the following extract from a letter which she wrote to a friend affords ample evidence:--

“My book,” she wrote, “has had a very angry reception in my native country, as you probably observe; but I shall be ”