A BROWNING ANTHOLOGY.
Bell. 2s. net.)—There is really no need to say more about this little Browning anthology than is told by its title. It is a collection of thoughts all tending towards the optimism of a vivid and vigorous faith wrung out of the experience of life. Browning is a poet who gains by being treated in this way. his work is certainly voluminous if not certainly obscure, and it is not always easy to remember where the lino came t hat flashed a light. One finds, again, many dimly remembered passages in looking through these modest pages, and sometimes, with a start, one realises how pro- foundly true was some thought not so much common property thirty years ago, when Browning put it into somebody's mouth, as it now is. For example, this from "The Soul's Tragedy" :—" A philosopher's life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms ; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others ; and so he restates it, to the confusion of some- body else in !r;,..1 time."
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