of elderly, port-imbibing gentlemen, and are descanted on by sombre professors, whose appearance in a ball-room would strike the fiddles dumb. All this one learns to submit to with philosophy, for the past will not be the present, and the question always and only is, when the past is used up and done with. But it is still more tantalising to be obliged to confess that German, French, or Italian poetry-the poetry which is sung, and loved, and rejoiced in by men and women living in Europe-cannot, in the essence and magic of it, be translated. The elixir vite always escapes; and the escape is the more vexing because sometimes it is possible, almost to within a hairsbreadth, to transfuse the German, French, or Italian poem into an English mould, and render it word for word. Some cadence will not be echoed-some tint cannot be caught-some bitter which gives piquancy to the sweet vanishes away-some tone of liquid and melting harmony which depends upon the peculiar genius of the language, and has not a phonetic equivalent in any other tongue, is lost; and so the melody and the life of the original exhale. When you first glance at this Amelia's song in German, your impression is that it will be easy to throw it into an exactly corresponding shape in English. Whole lines come right, sense for sense, tone for tone. some of the lines will not transfuse, do what you like, and in the end you prefer prose to a half success.

But

There is a love-poem about the lotus by Heine, the most popular poet of Germany since Goethe. It is complete, and beautiful as a pearl; in the following version, though the rendering is closely literal, the pearl will prove to be melted down in water, and will merely show some of its colours in the glass. Heine takes the lotus-flower as the type of the absorption and rapture of love, availing himself of the belief which then prevailed that the Egyptian lotus sleeps with folded flowers during the day, and awakens under the beams of the moon. Naturalists now inform us that this is a fable; that it is, in fact, the reverse of the

truth, the lotus folding itself up, or even drawing itself under water, after sunset, and coming up at dawn. Heine took the common idea, and applied it to his purpose. It is ne

cessary to premise, further, that the moon presents itself to the German imagination as a young man, and that Heine here personifies it as an impassioned lover.

The lotus shrinks and fainteth

Beneath the sun's fierce light;
With head drooped low, and dreaming deep,
She waits the coming night.

The Moon, he is her lover,

He wakes her with his rays,
And to him unveils she friendly
Her holy flower-face.

She blooms, and glows, and lightens,
And stares right into the sky;
She pants, and weeps, and trembles,
For love and love's agony.**

The temptation which most frequently proves fatal to even an approximate correspondence between a translated poem and the original, is that of producing a piece which will in itself be beautiful and charming. Every reader of Goethe knows the wild, gay, bright gush lyric melody entitled, Heiden-Röslein,'t literally, 'The Little Rose of the Heath.' We cannot say roselet-the more's

of

the pity-as we can say streamlet and leaflet; so we must content ourselves with rosebud of the heath or moorland. Goethe's poem might have been sung by Zephyr to Aurora, when he met her once a-maying.' It has been rendered

by Sir Theodore Martin, a felicitous and masterly translator, and a very pretty piece Sir Theodore's is. Readers shall judge of it for themselves

THE WILD ROSE.
A boy espied, in morning light,
A little rosebud blowing;
'Twas so delicate and bright.
That he came to feast his sight,
And wonder at its growing.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud brightly blowing!
"I will gather thee," he cried,

"Rosebud brightly blowing!"
"Then I'll sting thee," it replied,
"And you'll quickly start aside,
With the prickle glowing."
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud brightly blowing!

'But he plucked it from the plain,

The rosebud brightly blowing!
It turned and stung him, but in vain,
He regarded not the pain,

Homewards with it going.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,

Rosebud brightly blowing!'

Really a bright little ditty, which one could sing with enjoyment. But it belongs quite as much to Sir Theodore Martin as to Goethe. The locality of the flower, the heath or moorland, on which, in its own tender loveliness, the rosebud blows -where is it? A rosebud might blow brightly in any place between Calcutta and Copenhagen; but Goethe's grew upon the moorland; and, at the close of each stanza, Goethe repeats that it grew upon the moorland. In the next place, the boy of Goethe's lyric does not come to feast his sight' in a dignified, elderly fashion; he runs to look at the rose, and without any wonder, philosophical or otherwise, ' at its growing,' he gazes on it in a

'Und der wilde Knabe brach 's Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach Hilf ihr doch kein Weh und Ach Musstes eben leiden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth, Röslein auf der Heiden.'

tumult of joy. When the boy threatens to break it from the stalk, it does not comment upon the probability of his starting aside, but says that, if he breaks it, it will sting him, and so make him think of it for ever. The thought of course is that the quick return of love at first sight will enslave the heart irrecoverably; and from this to 'the prickle glowing' is something of a descent. The homeward with it going' of the last stanza is simply an alteration of Goethe's line; there is nothing in the original to stand for it, nothing to suggest it. Goethe's thought is, that the coy resistance of the loved one, while it insures her conquest over her lover, is yet no security to herself, but throws her all the more into the possession of sovereign love. It may have been in homage to a sensitive propriety that Sir Theodore Martin converted Goethe's arch, brilliant, and keen thoughted love-song into pretty commonplace. If Milton in his austere youth dared to write L'Allegro, Sir Theodore might, have ventured to translate Goethe's Heiden-Röslein. Following its course, line by line, and altering no idea, hardly a word, I find it impossible to give the rhymes exactly as Goethe gives them; but I think that even with this serious defect, an all but literal rendering conveys a more vivid conception of the original than the more polished and elaborate performance of Sir Theodore.

'Saw a boy a rosebud rare,

Rosebud on the moorland,
'Twas so young and morning-fair,
Swift he ran to see it there,

Saw 't with joy abounding
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,

Rosebud on the moorland.

"Said the boy, "Now pluck I thee,

Rosebud on the moorland;"
Rosebud said, "Then sting I thee,
That thou ever think'st on me,
And I'll not endure it."
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud on the moorland.
'So the wild young madcap plucked
Rosebud on the moorland;
Rosebud turned her round and stung
Woe is me! and ah! she sung,
Yet she must endure it:
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud on the moorland!'

The moral of all this digression is that right education in these days ought to embrace a clear and fluent command of the living languages of cultivated Europe, French, German, Italian, and perhaps Spanish. The languages of the past have held us captive for two thousand years; their day is now drawing to its close.

Adieu, however, for the present, to the love-poetry written by men. Let us wind up with a glance at the love-poetry of a great poetic woman.

Neither poet or poetess ever wrote more nobly of love than Mrs. Barrett Browning. Reference has already been made to Shakespeare's high estimate of woman. He puts into the mouth of a man an express and deliberate confession that women love more nobly than men.

For howsoever we may praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more fickle and infirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost than won,
Than women's are.'

In man's capacity to love purely and unselfishly Mrs. Browning had little faith. Her decision on that head is that, exacting from woman entire, enraptured, and eternal love, man can give no better promise in return than this

'I will love thee-half a year

As a man is able.'

But in describing the love of woman -the passion of the maiden, the devotion of the wife- Mrs. Browning,' it has been justly remarked, 'has given us the counterpart to all the poetry of chivalry. Troubadour and minstrel sang for ages in homage to woman; knights and monarchs waited upon the smile of beauty: the imagination of Europe exhausted itself in devising heroic adventures, in which, penetrating through dark woods, crossing tempestuous seas, fighting giants and monsters, breaking enchantments and prison walls, the bold soldier forced his way to his ladye-love. But the counterpart in this picture, the devotion of the woman to him she loves, was wanting; and we stand in unfeigned astonishment as Mrs. Browning reveals to us what a woman's passion means. Here she had the field

almost to herself. We feel her words to be true: they come on us with the authoritative emphasis of nature. coined in the mint of the heart, and accepted by the heart at once. Yet none but a woman could have had the right to assert that passion so intense and self-annihilating could be inspired by man in the heart of woman.'

Is there any point wherein the ideal of love as conceived by a man differs from that of a woman? I pretend not to be able to answer the question decisively, nor would I pronounce it absolutely certain that the man and the woman do not take radically the same view of the matter. Yet I have some confidence in suggesting, by way of provisional opinion on the point, that the man sees the climax of love's bliss in the triumph, the conquest, the crowning moment when he clasps his bride, whereas the woman's deepest thought settles on the idea of wifehood, the abiding joy of married life. The su

preme wish of the man is to have, not a wife, but a bride; the supreme wish of the woman is to have, not a bridegroom, but a husband. As a general rule the ardour of the woman increases after marriage, or concentrates itself into a quiet but intense and steadyburning flame of wifely devotion; the most fiery lovers almost invariably contrive to step composedly enough as husbands. Byron, I fear, was right in his notion that, if Laura had become Petrarch's wife, Petrarch would not have written sonnets all his life; but I am quite sure that, if Laura's husband had died and she had married Petrarch, she would have been as glowingly affectionate as a wife as she was calm, chaste, and dignified as mistress. Diderot brought himself to death's door by the consuming vehemence of his passion for a woman who did not want him. At last, to save his life, she married him. was a loving and faultless wife; and he, a very man, as Mrs. Jameson would say, had been her husband for but a few months when he was tired of her and went philandering after other women. Have we an

She

indication of all this in that ancient fable in which the intensest passion exhibited in the whole range of Greek mythology comes before us? No love in ardour could exceed that of Apollo for Daphne; but Apollo has only, for reward, the excitement and rapture of the chase. As if to show that such love as flamed in his breast could never be attempered to the mild atmosphere of nuptial happiness, his Daphne, the moment he seizes her, is changed into a tree.

Be this as it may, the province in which the genius of Mrs. Barrett Browning attained superlative and unique perfection is that of the delineation of love in the married woman. The love of wedded souls,' this, next to God's love, is for her the central heart of life, the solar fount of all those loves which are the light of the world, 'loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbourloves and civic.' In Lady Geraldine's Courtship' it is the passion of lovers she depicts; but with instinctive truth to the woman's ideal, she puts the narrative of the courtship into the mouth of the lover, not of Lady Geraldine. A man, she felt, must be the describer of courtship, for man's part is to struggle for the prize and win it. But in the Romaunt of the Page' and the Rhyme of the Duchess May,' works in which the utmost force of her genius is displayed, the heroism, the self-sacrifice, the passionate, death-scorning devotion of wifely love afford the theme. In the one the love of the wife bears her to the battle-field to share the peril of the husband and to guard his life. The luxurious delicacy and

daintiness-the refined yet cruel selfishness of man's conception of what woman's love should be then reveals to her that, by the mere grandeur and intrepidity of her love, she has forfeited the supreme regard of her husband. Life has now become intolerable for her, and she dies; but her love for him never wavers, and her last words are in his praise. The Duchess May is one of the finest female characters in the whole range of literary art. All the strength and all the tenderness, all the womanly pride and the still more womanly humility, all the capricious fascination and wild, splendid, witching ways which breathe enchantment round the female form, are hers. She announces with princely disdain that she will not marry the man she does not love; with calm and dauntless decision she places her hand at the altar in the hand of the man she does love; and once his, she can smile out into the night of calamity, still and fearless as a star. In the hour of extreme need she will die with her husband; such is her right, and she asserts it; dying with him, she dies victorious and content. I believe that Mrs. Browning was capable of that death and of that devotion. With a thrill of sympathy she threw the crimson of a smile upon the lip of that wife as she sank to death in her husband's arms. Woman's love can make the chariot of death a car of triumph and convert the flames of the funeral pyre into clasping roses. In the person of the Duchess May, standing to us for Mrs. Browning, we witness what love can be in a woman of genius.