BOOKS.

ROUEN STIE L -S C H WAN GAU.* Tkus poetical exposition of the sort of argumentative controversy' which the great Saviour of Society ' in a neighbouring realm may have held with himself 'concerning his own aims, and the means he used to attain them, bears internal evidence of having been chiefly written soon after the Italian war, and before the period of decline set in. It is hardly, even in design, a picture' of the character of the great enigma of modern Europe, for it limits itself to the discussion of means and ends, and does not touch' on the characteristic gifts and deficiencies of him who wielded the one and strove after the other. Indeed, what little touches of persona character there may be, —like the hinted preference for disreput-

able society involved in the very framework of this potentate's-

dreamt confessions to an unfortunate of Leicester Square,—are half cancelled and neutralized by the serious tone of his avowal of

a mission, and of bib deep sense of responsibility to God for the fulfil-

ment of that mission. The Prince does not attempt to explain how' this deep feeling of responsibility is compatible with the pleasure- loving, self-interested life of which he half avows himself a votary,--

he makes no effort after an apology for his own feeble and voluptuous: career amidst the high ends he proposed to himself,—he goes into no,

analysis of his own slow-brooding temperament, his long hesitations and delays and half-irresolute action ;—the poem is not in any sense a portrait, real or ideal, of the personality of the Carbonaro- Conservative, the Imperial adventurer, the star-ruled gambler, the' superstitious sceptic, the seedy sage, the enthusiast cynic, though. for this we had ventured to hope ; it is solely an exposition of the

public motives, good, bad, and ambiguous,—clear, questionable, andk confused,—which probably asserted themselves in his mind by way of justification of, and criticism on, his own public acts. The man himself, his curious mixture of fanaticism and sense, a dreaminess and cunning, of timidity and daring, of indolence and

enterprise, of selfishness and public spirit, are not delineated at all by Mr. Browning. We have instead a number of subtle and sometimes very finely expanded apologies for what he did and did.

not do, intended evidently to show how closely the fibres of self-deception and self-gratification are entwined, how hopeless it is to try to disentangle them, and yet, on the whole, how fair a general defence may be made for the policy of social conservatism in a time when no great constructive genius, who can breathe a now order into the life of nations, is to be found. We are a little disappointed that there is not more of the individual por- trait, and less of the general criticism on a policy ; but that is, perhaps the more in accordance with the conception of the soliloquy, —a dream in which the only-in-imagination-dethroned and exiled ruler makes a clean breast of hie general designs to an imaginary member of the London demi-monde.

Most of the idealisms as well as of the realising of the suggested apologies and attacks are likely enough to have been actual ele- ments in such a self-debated controversy. But there are also- touches in which we do not recognize any gleam of the sort of superstitious enthusiasm and cynical philanthropy which we may fairly suppose to have been part of the political adventurer's moral perspective. For example, does this sound at all like the dreaming,. demi-monde-loving ruler on a throne?-

* Prince 1Iohoot1.el-8c1mwanyait, Saviour of 'Soddy. By Robert Browning. London:' Smith, Elder, and Qo.

"I'll tell you: all the more I know mankind, The more I thank God, like my grandmother, For making me a little lower than

The angels, honor-clothed and glory-crowned : This is the honor,—that no thing I know, Feel or conceive, but I can make my own Somehow, by use of hand or head or heart: This is the glory,—that in all conceived, Or felt or known, I recognize a mind Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy,— Making all things for me and me for Him. There's folly for you at this time of day !

I suppose Heaven is, through Eternity, The equalizing, ever and anon, In momentary rapture, great with small, Omniseience with intelligeney, God With man,—the thunder-glow from pole to polo Abolishing, a blissful moment-space,

Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire—

As sure to ebb as sure again to flow When the new receptivity deserves The new completion. There's the Heaven for mo. And I say, therefore, to live out one's life I' the world hero, with the chance,—whether by pain Or pleasure be the process, long or short The time, august or mean the eircumstance To human eye,—of learning how sot foot Decidedly on some one path to Heaven, Touch segment in the circle whence all lines Lead to the centre eq,ually, red lines

Or black lines, so they but produce themselves— This, I do say,—and here my sermon ends,—

This makes it worth our while to tenderly Handle a state of things which mend we might, Mar we may, but which meanwhile helps so far.

Therefore my end is—save society!"

'That is what Mr. Browning would have thought, had he been Saviour of Society ;' it does not recommend itself to us as at all like what the Prince of Hohenstiel.Schwangau would have thought -on the same matter. There he has substituted poetic idealism for the seedy, gambling idealism of him of whom be was writing.

On the other hand, the delight expressed in recalling the fierce -threats of the former Italian Carbonaro, and the fear they inspire in the minds of the ecclesiastical statesmen of the States of the

Church, now that the dreamer is on a throne, is not only full of Mr. Browning's highest power, but seems to us in the truest sense dramatic. The Prince is rebuilding in imagination those castles in the air of policy which he had built while yet he was powerless to construct any policy except in the air, and congratulating him. self on the terrors those same castles in the air still have the power to disseminate :— "Ay, still my fragments wander, music fraught,

Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For over ! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there Imparting exultation to the hilts Sweep of the swathe when only the winds walk And waft my words above the grassy sea

Under the blinding blue that basks o'er Rome,—

Hear ye not still—' Be Italy again?' And ye, what strikes the panic to your heart?

Decrepit council-chambers,—where some lamp

Drives the unbroken black three paces off From whore the greybeards huddle in debate, Dim cowls and capes, and midmost glimmers one Like tarnished gold, and what they say is doubt, And what they think is fear, and what suspends The breath In them is not the plaster-patch Time disengages from the painted wall Where Rafael moulderingly bids adieu, lior tick of the insect turning tapestry To dust, which a queen's finger traced of old; But some word, resonant, redoubtable,

Of who once felt upon his head a hand Whereof the head now apprehends his foot. 4 Light in Rome, Law in Rome, and Liberty 0' the soul in Rome—tho free Church, the free State

Stamp out the nature that 's best typified By its embodiment in Peter's Dome, The soorpion-body with the greedy pair Of outstretched nippers, either colonnade Agape for the advance of heads and hearts! There's There's one cause for you! one and only ono, For I am vooal through the universe, I' the work-shop, manufactory, exchange And market-place, sea-port and custom-house 0' the frontier."

'That is fine, and in the true key of the ambitious dreamer and cautious doer. Fine, too, is the part of the reverie in which the Prince muses on the tendency of the masses to be held together by the common physical waets and loves and hatreds which are at the very basis of the facts of life,—and on the tendency of culture to separate those who achieve it from the mass in want and love and hate, and to tempt them to live for individual ends, high and

valuable in themselves, but of little relative value when compared with the urgent necessities of the crowd. Such thoughts might well have come to the great advocate of the plaiscite, the man who kept a strong hand on the press for the sake of the multitude, —who subordinated the political training of statesmen to the quiet and comfort of the people,—who preferred to make a com- mercial treaty favourable to the mass of consumers over the heads of the Parliamentary debaters, rather than let his Parlia- ment find out the rationale of political wisdom by committing blunders and then sifting them in reiterated discussion. This, too, is a fine picture of the craft which was probably at the bottom of that professed readiness for war, and that professed preference for

peace, which gave rise to the very ambiguous and variable declara- tions as to the pacific meaning of the Empire :—

"You come i' the happy interval of peace,

The favourable weariness from war : Prolong it!—artfully, as if intent On ending peace as soon as possible.

Quietly so increase the sweets of ease And safety, so employ the multitude, Put hod and trowel so in idle hands, So stuff and stop the wagging jaws with broad, That selfishness shall surreptitiously Do wisdom's office, whisper In the ear

Of Hottenstiel-Sehwangau, there 's a pleasant feel

In being gently forced down, pinioned fast To the easy arm-chair by the pleading areas 0' the world beseeching her to there abide Content with all the harm done hitherto, And let herself be petted in return, Free to re-wage, in speech and prose and verse, The old unjust wars, nay—in verso and prose And speech,—to vaunt new victories, as vile A plague o the future,—so that words suffice For present comfort."

But we doubt, again, if Mr. Browning be not painting his own thoughts, and not even the thoughts of his Prince of Hohenstiel- Schwangau any longer, when he depicts him as aspiring to make hia people as a whole an image of his better self, and truly "the Great Nation,"—and describes that people in these eloquent lines, not without truth, but certainly not after the fashion of the slow fanatic and cynical philanthropist into whose heart lie is diving :—

4t The people hero,

Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride Above her pride i' the race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great,

The incommensurably Beautiful—

Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too passionate For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous In Art, the—more than all—magnetic race To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind liohenstiel-Sehwangau-fashion."

—a flue and, in its way, true description, but surely not the description of what entered into any one political principle of the singular ruler who temporarily tamed his people's ardour, but never showed any appreciation of its creative power.

On the whole, this poem of Mr. Browning's, with all its mixture of harsh and grand, of rude and glowing, of intricate parenthetical explanations and terse pictorial images, miist be regarded as a mere fragment, not as exhausting even the apology which such a ruler as he is describing could make for the policy he had aimed at,— for there would be much selfish, and of its kind vigorous, argu- ment of which Mr. Browning has taken no notice at all,—still less as even attempting to paint this ruler's own estimate of his own character and capacity,—but as simply discussing, and discussing finely, the controversy likely to have taken place in his own mind between that view of government which makes the physical com- fort of the masses its main object., and that which aims at encouraging the development of a higher culture and a more refined freedom. As a fragment it is powerful. As an exhaustive discussion, even of this question in relation to the genius of any one nation, it would be obviously very incomplete.