MR. GOSSE'S LITERARY PORTRAITS.* " WE are familiar," the author

writes, " with pure criticism and pure biography, but what I have here tried to produce is a combination of the two, the life illustrated by the work, the work relieved by the life." And he observes that this class of literature is, " it is strange to find, somewhat neglected in this country." We do not think this is true in our day, or that

it has been true since Johnson wrote his Lives of the Poets, but we entirely agree with Mr. Gosse that no literary essays are so attractive as those which link the author with his works, more especially when those works have their source in imagination. One does not greatly care to learn how a.

famous mathematician or logician has ordered his life, but when heart as well as intellect have united in the creation of a famous book the lover of literature asks to know something of the man who wrote it. This healthy curiosity Mr. Goose has endeavoured to satisfy. In these half-length portraits he has brought us into some very agreeable company, and has been able to tell as new what few of his readers are likely to know.

All the world, to judge from some recent remarks by a well- known man of letters, has yet to learn that Mrs. Browning's. wonderful series of love-sonnets are not translated from the Portuguese, and by Mr. Gosse the full story about them appears to be told for the first time. After their honey- moon, he relates, the poet couple settled at Pisa, and each took up his or her separate work :—

" Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write alone and not to show each other what they had written. This was a rule which he sometimes broke through, but she never. He bad the habit of working in a downstairs room where their meals were spread, while Mrs. Browning studied in a room on the floor above. One day, early in Is 7, their breakfast being over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of some one behind him, although the servant was gone_ It was Mrs. Browning who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, • Critical Kit-Kats. By E.'mund Gosse. London : W. Heinemann. and to tear it up if he did not like it ; and then she fled again to her own room. Mr. Browning seated himself at the table, and unfolded the parcel. It contained the series of sonnets which have now become so illustrious. As be read his emotion and delight may be conceived. Before he had finished it was impos- sible for him to restrain himself, and, regardless of his promise, he rushed upstairs and stormed that guarded citadel. He was early conscious that these were treasures not to be kept from the world. 'I dared not reserve to myself,' he said, `the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's.' "

Who the friend was who beard this interesting story from Mr. Browning we are not told. It was to Browning that

Gosse was indebted in the first instance for the Beddoes papers, from which he was afterwards able to print that

melancholy poet's correspondence three years ago. Mr. Gosse did not, it is needless to say, know Beddoes personally, but from Mrs. Procter he received a graphic account of the poet. "She told me that bis eccentricities were so marked that they almost gave the impression of insanity, but that closer observation showed them to be merely the result of a peculiar fancy." Peculiar indeed ! for on one occasion Beddoes was arrested by the police at Drury Lane Theatre on the charge of trying to set the place on fire. He bad been burning a five-pound note. All suicides are in a sense in- sane, but the tortures inflicted on himself by poor Beddoea mark a type of madness of the most painful kind. He in- flicted a frightful wound on his leg, and on being removed to the hospital "stealthily tore off the bandages." It is pleasant to turn to an eccentric man of genius who, instead of finding life melancholy, had a genuine love of it. It is not necessary to exalt Walt Whitman as a poet in order to appreciate his cheerful independence and loyalty to his con- victions. Whitman lived and died in what most of us would consider abject poverty; but "no man is poor," says Jeremy Taylor, "who does not think himself so," and Whitman was not discontented with his solitary chair and carpetless floor. Mr. Gosse, who went a long distance out of his way to visit the old man, had to find a seat for himself as best he might by clearing some papers away from off a bor. Here is a vivid picture of the American rhapsodist :-

" He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown back- ward, as if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards.

So he would remain, immovable for a quarter of an hour at a time, even the action of speech betraying no movement, the lips hidden under a cascade of beard. If it be true that all remarkable batman beings resemble animals, then Walt Whitman was like a cat,—a great old grey Angora Tom, alert in repose, serenely blinking under his combed wares of hair, with

eyes inscrutably dreaming Whitman sat there with his grey head tilted back, smiling serenely, and he talked about him- self. He mentioned his poverty, which was patent, and his paralysis ; those were the two burdens beneath which he crouched like Issaehar ; be seemed to be quite at home with both of them, and scarcely heeded them. I think I asked leave to move my box, for the light began to pour in at the great uncurtained window ; and that Whitman said that some one had promised him a gift of curtains, but he was not eager for them, he thought they kept out some of the light.' Light and air, that was all he wanted ; and through the winter he sit there patiently waiting for the air and light of summer, when be would hobble out again and bask his body in a shallow creek he knew back of Camden.' "

The whole picture is a curious one, and curious too, and not without originality, is Mr. Gosse's critical estimate of this strangely gifted man. He regards him as "a maker of poems in solution" who, "for want of a definite shape, is doomed to sit for ever apart from the company of the Poets," and it is easy for those of us who have never suffered from the disease of Whitmanomania to tolerate Mr. Gosse's belief that we have just missed receiving from the New World one of the greatest of modern poets, since he does not hesitate to say that we have missed it.

Every reader who loves noble poetry will be attracted by Mr. Gosse's half-critical, half-biographical " Kit-Kat " of

Christina Rossetti, and all competent students will agree with him that this true woman, who in her sacred verse has put on the mantle of Herbert and of Vaughan, is "one of the most perfect poets of the age." She is also one of the moat original, for she has appropriated nothing which she has not transmuted, and in her there is rarely any discord between expression and thought. Indeed, although in her verse there are trivial lapses, more obvious, perhaps, to her lovers than to casual admirers, Miss Rossetti is, so far as we know, the only woman-poet whose art is as consummate as her genius. Reserved and sequestered though she was, Mr. Gosse was happy enough to draw from her some interesting communications. He met her about a dozen times in the winter of 1870-71, and afterwards corresponded with her. His sketch, or the portion of it which we can find room to transfer, is highly characteristic, and may be of more value some day than it is to Christina Rossetti's contemporaries :—

" She is known to the world, and very happily known, by her brother's portraits of her, and iu particular by the singularly beautiful chalk drawing in profile dated 1866. I think that tasteful arrangement of dress might have made her appear a noble and even a romantic figure so late as 1870, but, as I suppose, an ascetic or almost methodistic reserve caused her to clothe her- self in a style, or with an absence of style, which was really dis- tressing; her dark hair was streaked across her olive forehead, and turned up in a chignon ; her high stiff dress ended in a hard collar and plain brooch, the extraordinarily ordinary skirt sank over a belated crinoline, and these were inflictions hard to bear from the high-priestess of Preraphaelitism. When it is added that her manner from shyness was of a portentous solemnity, that she had no small talk whatever, and that the common topics of the day appeared to be entirely unknown to her, it will be un- derstood that she was considered highly formidable by the young and the flighty. I have seen her sitting alone in the midst of a noisy drawing room, like a pillar of cloud, a Sybil whom no one had the audacity to approach. Yet a kinder or simpler soul, or one less concentrated on self, or of a humbler sweetness, never existed. And to an enthusiast who broke the bar of conventional chatter and ventured on real subjects her heart seemed to open like an unsealed fountain. The heavy lids of her weary-looking, bistred, Italian eyes would lift and display her ardour as she talked of the mysteries of poetry and religion."

It is impossible to do justice to Mr. Gosse's biographical criticisms without quotations, and for quotations we have no further space. We must be content, therefore, to leave the volume, and yet we do it with reluctance, for we should like to have done more than call attention to the essay on Torn Dutt, the wonderful Hindoo maiden who died at twenty-one, after mastering French, and to a great extent English, and writing English verses, such as no other Oriental has ap- proached. There are also from Mr. Gosse's band notable portraits and personal memories of Lord de Tabley, of Louis Stevenson, and of Walter Pater, so that the volume is rich in details which belong to literary history. It labours, accord- ing to the custom of the time, under the disadvantage of being

reprinted from reviews.