of Northern Antiquities. If Browning has taken a few strong shreds of the traditional romance as warp, and has woven in with them his own wondrously subtle but consistent woof, let us take it so first, as north-country people and children delight in repeating a ballad. Apply to it what Hazlitt says of the Faerie Queene, to which this is so similar: "Some people may say this is all very fine, but they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them. They look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think that it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If you do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with you. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pikestaff." Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, p. 70. Taking the romance then only as such, notice the remarkable subtle consistency, the continuity, the essential sequence of each verse and thought, however independently valuable, and through the most rapid changes of scene. For the sake of the romance, and still more for the interpretation to be put upon it, we must discern the three-fold harmony which prevails through so many sensations. 1. The consistent structure as the Romance of Childe Roland. 2. The strict naturalness of the sequences from any one to the next sensation, as a dream or allegory of some sort. 3. The fitness of each emblem as obedient to the key-note of the whole. Childe Roland may very probably have more than one meaning; one it must have, and that one must needs be something in human experience. "Take some great end which men have proposed to themselves in life, which seemed to have truth in it and power to spread freedom and happiness on others; but as it comes in sight it falls strangely short of preconceived ideas, and stands up in hideous prosaicness." That is Mr. Nettleship's chief suggestion. Others have suggested 1. Love. 2. The search after Truth. These, in common with all other suggested solutions, allow the set purpose which triumphs over all difficulties and survives. The second has more colour in it, but does not yield light along the course; nor is it other than flagrantly inapplicable at various points. With one variation, however, we may allow this: you are sure to arrive at Truth, travelling "Alone, alone, to where he sits, The Shadow, cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds." There are overwhelming reasons for concluding that this poem describes, after the manner of an allegory, the sensations of a sick man very near to death. Browning, who has thrown his whole individuality into so many varieties of human life and development of souls, throws himself with all the placid, almost unsuspected, might of his most subtle genius into the final stage of human development. Dying must be the last romance for all of us. Ben Ezra and Prospice are the two angels that lead us to Childe Roland. Ben Ezra gives us the noblest estimate of human life, and points onward. "Thou waitedst age; wait death, nor be afraid." There is the most close resemblance between Prospice and Childe Roland. They are constructed upon the same key-note. One might be called a prologue to the other. Perhaps Edgar babbles his snatch of the ballad with a shrewd and bitter consciousness of its double meaning, as he goes with Lear into the hovel when the storm and all its dire significance, and things generally, have blown him to the worst, and there is only one way for poor mad Lear to go. As to internal evidence, v. 5 and 6 are the only ones untouched by the romance. In a most ingenious way they actually suggest the hidden meaning. The rare and tender pathos is most exquisite here. Those necessary trifles which the heavenly might of love makes so important as love's last duties, are so supremely unimportant and impertinent to the dying man, when the greatness of death has dwindled them away into indifference. There must have been cases more or less resembling this known to Browning, as Edmund Burke's son, &c. Childe Roland is remarkably capable of elucidation by a large number of parallel passages, quotations from similar compositions where the same thought is expressed. These are all very beautiful in themselves, efficient for illustration, and cumulative as evidence. For how can so many and such impressive harmonies be possible in succession from beginning to end, unless there be some fuguelike law of one dominant theme under which they can come ? Great stress must be laid on the fact that the line taken from Edgar which forms the title, is also the last line of the poem. There is a good deal besides to which it is our duty to allude, which Browning leaves, or dimly suggests only; especially to that part of the traditional lore involved in the other two lines quoted by Edgar. We shall see how essential to his moral purpose is his judiciousness in respect of leaving them out. There is something infinitely more serious than a snatch of a northern ballad; however true it may be that the scene is laid in Faerie Land, that is, says Coleridge, "in mental space." Childe Roland takes up the threads of the old ballad at a certain point, and without discontinuity weaves them into a sort of continuance of the fairy tale. The little tributary rivulet runs on, without losing its traceable identity, and is glorified by "the light that never was on land or sea, the consecration or the poet's dream." In the original story Childe Roland goes in search of his sister, who has been captured by the king of Elfland, and shut up in the Dark Tower. His two elder brothers, not having followed the instructions of Merlin, have failed. Childe Roland girts on his father's good sword "Excalibur" (changed into a spear in v. 21, and that used as a staff rather than a weapon of offence), and repairs to Merlin's cave, who instructs him to kill every person he meets, and never to eat or drink what is offered in that country. He sets off on his journey, finds the king of Elfland's horseherd (v. 1), asks his way of him, and kills him. The same encounter is repeated with the cowherd, swineherd, shepherd, goatherd, till he is referred to the henwife, who directs him to "go on till he come to a round gray hill surrounded with rings from the bottom to the top; to go round it three times and say thrice" open door." He does so; the door opens, and he goes in (v. 23). It immediately closes behind him. He goes up the long passage where the air is "soft and wan," till he comes to a large and spacious hall where sits his sister Burd Ellen, who offers him a golden bowl of bread and milk which, remembering Merlin's instructions, he refuses. Immediately the doors open with great violence, and the king of Elfland comes in with "Fi, fo, fum! I smell the blood of a Christian man. After a furious contest the Elfking is felled to the ground, his life being spared on the condition that the two elder brothers and Burd Ellen should be restored. So all four returned in triumph to merry Carlisle. It is clear enough that Browning has taken up some threads of this story. He continues it from Childe Roland's resolution to go in search of his sister. He describes the terrible steady journey afoot through a strange, weird, bewildering, natural, super-natural, real Elfland country, and Childe Roland's inflexible purpose to reach the Dark Tower. It is hardly necessary to draw attention to the artistic omission of preposterous details. True system and the severest possible repression are among the essential qualities of the poem. We must not lose sight of one omission of primary importance, marked by the title being the last line too. There is no fantastic pretence of lifting the veil which hides the untraceable and the unknown. Of all subjects of thought which combine the lights of science and religion, we need healthy thought upon Death. Physiologists give us the physical aspect of it; divines for the most part retain the erroneous view of it as the king of terrors, ignoring it as the necessary result of organization. The moral aspect of it is reduced neither to moral system, to peace, nor to practicability. The death of the soul is altogether confounded with the physical dissolution of the body, as by the conventional perversion of such phrases as "the wages of sin is death." In this unsatisfactory state of things a great philosophical poem must tend to effect immeasurable benefit both to those who meditate upon it, and to the general tone of thought that is capable of change for the better. As a romance we may compare it with Spenser's Faerie Queen, to which it bears a close resemblance in structure, method, and inner meaning. Withdraw the difference of stages in life's progress, and the conflict of active life in the Faerie Queen and the passive conflict of death in Childe Roland are but as one continuing till it passes into the other. One of the most remarkable powers displayed in Childe Roland is the succession of strokes by which objects in nature are deprived of sublimity and pleasantness. The poem traces the dying man under the images selected, the sensations and thoughts he goes through, without losing his self-consciousness or trust. The perceptions, active thinking, and sense of bodily energy have melted away into the sensations of sickness, weakness, and death. The cycle of Browning's teaching would be incomplete without some great work on the subject of death. Among comparisons the most obvious is with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Childe Roland resembles Christian in his resolution to arrive at the end proposed, triumphantly it may be, somehow certainly, under the invisible guardianship of a higher power. In both the eternal polarity of the soul is never lost. Bunyan has transgressed his own knowledge by the confusion through which Christian and Hopeful cross the stream of death in company. Childe Roland has no fellowtravellers. You may or may not have companionship in any enterprise of life: die alone you must. Death is solitude. On the whole, the resemblance between the prose and poetical allegory of a pilgrim's progress from this world to another is too strong to be accidental, or to be accounted for except on the theory of a similar intention. Childe Roland is a religious as well as a philosophical, psychological, and romantic poem. Mr. Kirkman compared Childe Roland also with Chaucer's Pardonere's Tale, and contrasted it with Newman's Dream of Gerontius. Speaking of Childe Roland he said, he could hardly extol this unique poem more than by commending it as the only philosophical account of death, free from the poor perishable stubble of conventional phraseology, except perhaps by comparing it with the Roman Catholic ideal as carefully embodied in another poem, constructed like this for the purpose of “telling what it is to die." The Dream of Gerontius is invaluable as a representative poem. There is no allegory. It is a plain, though poetical account of the dying of Gerontius, and his admission into the realms of bliss, going infinitely beyond the full-stop at the end of came in Browning's poem. The one point now to be noticed is that Gerontius is utterly destitute of the one secret of Childe Roland's dauntless progress to victory. All his life, his faith, his religious services and penitential exercises have not imparted the mighty nucleus of inward strength. His soul is as helpless as his body on the bed. Every successive thought and mysterious sensation takes him captive. Childe Roland on the contrary is the possessor of each sensation or thought. Gerontius is at the mercy of each visitant, angel, demon, or bodily change. He differs from Childe whom? Roland almost as an air-ball would from an eagle if the two were caught in a tempest. "I do not," said Mr. Kirkman in conclusion, "touch the omnipotent security of the final consummation; but I only trace the one intrinsic contrast between the English or Protestant ideal and the Catholic, as expressed in these two poems on the mystery of death. But I should trace this far more elaborately into details, were I writing a sufficient volume on the subject." THE CHAIRMAN rose to propose a vote of thanks to Mr. Kirkman for his suggestive and eloquent paper. The solution Mr. Kirkman had given of Childe Roland was one that commended itself to the Chairman; the resemblance between the Dark Tower and Death was very striking. Still, he thought the meaning of such a poem should not be limited, for the creations of genius were infinite in suggestion. He thought there was something to be said for Gerontius as against Mr. Kirkman's interpretation of Childe Roland, since it inculcates a wise passiveness and humility in the face of the inevitable, of the mystery of death, which, no less than brave determination, is needed. MR. FURNIVALL said that he must begin the discussion by applying a charge of dynamite to Mr. Kirkman's theory. With regard to the hidden meaning of the poem, he (Mr. Furnivall) had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had, on three separate occasions, received an emphatic "no"; that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakspere's. Browning had written it in one day in Paris as a vivid picture suggested by Edgar's line. The horse was suggested by the figure of a red horse in a piece of tapestry in Browning's house. Mr. Garnett had said to Mr. F. that at Swanage he felt convinced Mr. Browning had taken the idea of the Dark Tower from Corfe Castle, the scenery around was so like that in the poem. But it so happened that Browning had never been near the place. Mr. F. felt sure too that the poet never meant to connect his poem with the Ballad of Burd Helen. Just as Shakspere, when he wrote his King Lear, had no notion that a Browning would arise and catch an inspiration from his drama, so Browning had no idea that any one would put a different interpretation than his own on his poem. Still, Mr. F. thought it was quite justifiable that any one should use the poem to signify whatever image it called up in his own mind. But he must not confuse the poet's mind with his. The poem was not an allegory, and was never meant as one. Yet if anything was to be made out of the poem, he felt that nothing finer could be made than Mr. Kirkman had brought out in his paper, with which he was greatly pleased. There was a sense of mysteriousness about Childe Roland, and Mr. Kirkman had suggested a great deal in his interpretation of it. The poem would never have suggested to his own mind the same ideas as those given to Mr. Kirkman. He (Mr. F.) decidedly preferred fighting to dying, in which he faild to see any use until all a man's work was done. No knight in the old Romances with which so much of his own life had been spent, ever thought of dying as soon as he'd blown a castle horn. He meant fighting, and winning. So Childe Roland went to fight, not his last fight, but to set free whomever he might find in the Dark Tower. Still, he felt that Mr. Kirkman had made a fine imagining on the subject; and Browning might be well satisfied that his poem had called forth so much thought. MR. NETTLESHIP said he felt very grateful for the new interpretation put upon the poem by Mr. Kirkinan. Whether Mr. Browning knew of the origin of the legend on which the poem was founded, he did not know; but he could not help thinking that an attempt had been made to get a psychological study out of what was a mere romance. MR. MATTHEW felt that Mr. Kirkman had not told them after all whether his key really did fit; he could not accept his interpretation of the poem. It seemed to him that a fair meaning of the poem (even if not the idea in Browning's mind) was, that a man, finding his troubles and anxieties increasing about him, and his friends fast falling away, still keeps his heart firm, and faces the end steadfastly. MR. SARGENT had read the poem carefully, and had come to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with death. The idea in the poet's mind was suggested by the ballad. It is simply the story of a man setting out on an adventure, who is going to do something which is not clear to himself. After many adventures he finds himself in a horrible country, and, when least expecting it, suddenly sees the Dark Tower, unlike anything of which a notion pre-existed in his mind, and far less beautiful than he thought. It occurred to him that the central idea might be that of a man who, finding after a great labour the result was not what he expected or hoped for, yet goes on bravely all the same; a man who, coming to the work of life, and finding it neither grand nor romantic, yet goes on unfalteringly: this was the grandeur of the poet's teaching; and this it was that made us the better for the allegory. MR. RADFORD had never heard anything to equal the descriptive power in this poem; and Mr. Browning had certainly great powers of imagination. He did not think, however, that Mr. Furnivall's statement, that Browning had no second idea in the poem, in any way damaged the value of the paper. The works of poetical imagination had usually a second idea, though hard to discover. The value of all such work was that it had a different value for each reader. It did not seem clear that Childe Roland was an allegory of death-yet it does arrive at death in the end. He did not think it a cheerful poem upon death; but rather a sad work, the hero of which goes all through life with revolting experiences. Arriving at length at the goal, he finds it unlike anything he had previously thought a fearful description of the end of life. His friends who had failed he saw as "in a sheet of flame "; and it seemed that after a life of sad toil he found extinction. He saw no lively hope in the poem. MISS DREWRY, as far as she could say, looked upon the poem as an allegory of life. She thought the Dark Tower meant Truth. She could not follow Mr. Kirkman in his argument, yet she felt it was a most interesting paper. Still, she was convinced the poem was an allegory-whether Browning meant it as such or not. She hardly thought Browning could work out a poem unless he had some other meaning than the one on the surface. It seemed to her that Truth must be the end of the search. The Dark Tower being so unsatisfactory in appearance, he would be the more ready to go on to something else. Browning could not help writing with more than one meaning. MR. KIRKMAN, in a few words in reply, deprecated Mr. Furnivall asking Mr. Browning the meaning of his poems, and remarked that by so doing there would be no need of the Browning Society. He still thought the poem had no such probable solution as that of death, and that if it didn't mean that, it ought to do so. A vote of thanks to the Chairman closed the meeting. NOTE BY MRS. ORR. "I feel some compunction in tacking on these written words to the report of the verbal discussion of the 24th, as I thus seem to put myself on a par with those who have shown themselves my superiors, by the very fact of speaking, when I was unable to do so. I hope, however, that the natural diffidence of a person who has never spoken in public may this time plead my excuse. I see much truth and justice in most of the opinions which have been elicited by Mr. Kirkman's paper; but I sympathize especially in what Miss Drewry has said: that so new an interpretation of the poem, presented as it has been under circumstances prejudicial to its clearness, both suspends the listener's judgment upon itself, and' gives stronger relief to his own view. And I confess that in my mind the feeling of perplexity and the feeling of opposition are heightened by a decided sense of pain; for Mr. Kirkman has done full justice to Mr. Browning's power of transposing an old theme, but none to his power of working altogether without one; and in all the tissue of apparent analogies and presumed intentions, which testifies |