Move, move, O world, on all your brazen hinges; The art which depicts the darkening course of Balder's mind, down towards the crime with which this first part concludes, exhibits a dramatic insight which even the promise of The Roman' had not led us to anticipate. The brief remark of Balder, when her pain and her insanity return on Amy after a brief sunny interval, 'The sun shines This flower is the same colour, the bird sings, The clouds, the plain, the mountains, are not changed,'— is admirable in this way, almost in itself a key to her character. An inferior workman would have inserted here much raving volubility. So we have again perfect truth to nature where Balder, in the very midst of his mental agony, watches for hours the birds bringing food to the nest. Similarly, where he reasons down conscience under the name of conventionalism; reconciles himself to sin as a holy necessity; draws from his misery, to which the heavens are dumb, sanctions for defiant transgression. The heavy trial which crushes him could only have been borne by the very love which has been withered; and wrong leads to wrong, finding, after the first distortion, inducements or palliatives on every side, even in that very quarter which should have made him pause. The songs and poems inserted in the course of the action (among which the ballad in the twenty-eighth scene, the veiled scroll to Amy, and the vast apocalyptic impersonations of War and Tyranny, are especially remarkable), so far from really marring its progress, or overloading the fabric of the work, like ill-joined purpurei panni, are all, in fact, subservient to the main end. It has been truly said, that no man can draw a character beyond the range of his own. A writer may tell us that one of his personages was very profound or very witty, but unless he himself has the depth or the art he attributes to his creation, he cannot make him speak or act, and all his description will not vitalize the mute abstraction. Our author, by showing us Balder at work, and imparting to us scraps from his poetical portfolio, not merely tells us he had great powers, and talks of what he desired or might accomplish, but shows us what he actually does; and by specimens of his workmanship gives life and reality to the character as a whole; while, at the same time, these very samples, by their peculiar character, are rendered, most of them, indicative of the ultimate issue. In bidding us await a farther development, possibly some restoration of the same character, in a second part, Mr. Yendys has committed himself to a task yet more arduous than that which he has already so ably accomplished. There is always some disadvantage in such division where, as in this case, there is an essential unity of plan. The design of the first part will be misconceived by those who forget that it is only the first, and take the close of an act as the catastrophe of the piece. Mr. Yendys is very seldom obscure, is too wise to veil his meaning under allegorical conceits, or to lodge a purpose too deep for the discovery of those who read with ordinary attention; but it will be important for him to remember how large is that class of readers upon whom a design must be almost intruded if it is to be seen at all. The more guides or finger-posts he can introduce for such readers (though contrivances so prosaic may be little to his own taste), the wider will be the diffusion of the pleasure and the profit he has it in his power to communicate. We would speed him on his way with our best wishes, feeling that he has already won for himself every augury of success. Poems. By Matthew Arnold. Nor a little of our modern poetry has trusted for success to luxuriance of fancy, to a multitude of individual beauties of thought and expression, rather than to grandeur of action or unity of purpose in the work taken as a whole. The principle of Mr. Arnold's poetry is a reaction against excess in this direction. He would have us retrace our steps towards the severer simplicity of Sophocles. Poems like those before us, and the 'Festus' of Mr. Bailey, stand at opposite extremes. The admirers of the former will be tempted to account Bailey's work a gorgeous incoherence—a mass of materials for poetry rather than a poem; while those who are enthusiastic for 'Festus' will complain of tameness in Mr. Arnold, will object that the statuesque repose he covets is a conventionalism; that nature is complex, even grotesque, in her startling varieties of affluencecertainly not limited, like the Greek ideal. For our own part, we are catholic enough heartily to enjoy both. Mr. Arnold's preface does not convince us that he is right; but we like his poetry for all that. His poems abound in genuine felicities of expression, always rigorously subordinated to the dominant impression in view. 'Sohrab and Rustum' is an epic adventure' which may worthily take rank not far beneath Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur.' 'Tristam and Iseult' is unequal and faulty, according to the author's own canon, but redeemed by some descriptive passages of great excellence. The occasional pieces and the sonnets we think inferior. It is generally the cast of a writer's own temperament and culture that determines his theory, and Mr. Arnold is altogether objective. He succeeds best where he has to deal with action; and, with all his admiration for the Greek drama, is least happy when lyrical, most so when following Homer. The best passages in the 'Strayed Reveller' are those which possess the same beauty for which the 'Forsaken Merman' is so remarkable the power the poet has of identifying himself, and making us identify ourselves, with a certain phase or province of the external world. Whatever view he may take of the old quarrel between classicist and romanticist, the reader of taste will find in this little volume of Mr. Arnold's very much that will give him pleasure. 'Aurora Leigh.' THIS is a poem in nine books-some four hundred pages of blank verse, and yet not such that any reasonable person would wish it shorter. It tells a story of these nineteenth century days, with incidents and characters that might have furnished forth an ordinary three-volume novel. But Mrs. Browning, being a poetess, has thrown the materials of a tale which embodies the result of much reflection on some of the most anxious questions of our time, into the form most congenial to her nature. In her blank verse she has endeavoured to approach as nearly to the language of daily life as was possible without becoming prosaic or colloquial. The rhythm is free and varied, without any reflection of that classic stateliness so appropriate to the lofty theme of Milton. The conception of the poem as a whole is original, because natural-for originality is but nature—a genuine spontaneity. Living with broad and genial sympathies in these times, Mrs. Browning desires to speak of them and to them in her own chosen language. Hence the apparent incongruity of a modern novel in the form of an epic poem. Goethe has represented in his Tasso the conflict between those antipathetic natures-the shrewd and polished diplomatist, the simple-minded and impulsive poet. In Antonio and in Tasso the real and the ideal are brought together in necessary hostility, while each is unable to apprehend the other. Aurora Leigh represents, in a province of its own, another form of that old hereditary feud between the imaginative mind and the practical, between the genius which creates in art and the talent which combines in administration. The antithesis of the poem is not so much that which exists between a worldly-wise conventionalism and the idealism of a poet; it depicts rather the inevitable divergence between the intellectual theorist who desires to elevate men by a superior external organization, and the artist who believes that the best expression of his own truest culture will constitute his most serviceable contribution to the sum of general well-being. The difference here is not irreconcileable, and the poem does not close without indicating the ultimate harmony in which these rival forms of beneficence, or types of duty, may be combined. Aurora has a cousin, Romney Leigh, who devotes life and fortune to schemes for social improvement. She, on the other hand, feels within her the stirring of the poetic gift. He sees only a vast sum of human misery, against which he is commissioned to fight. He looks down, discerning worms and corruption everywhere. She looks upward, and sees the sun and feels the summer time, and makes song and praise her service. But Aurora, too, is not free from an excess on her side. She is bent on attaining a position of her own above that commonly assigned to woman. She will be no mere subordinate help-meet in the work of any man, but achieve a task of her own, not inferior. His theories break to pieces when put in practice. She reaches the height of her ambition to find it barrenness, for she is not in her place; woman's happiness is not hers, and the heart's void is not filled. Then, at last, the two begin better to understand each other, and better to comprehend what is possible and what is duty for themselves. In their union that just medium is indicated which abstains, in the conduct of life, from excess of generalization on the one side, and excessive individualism on the other. The impatience which would attempt too much, and is for reforming all wrong at a stroke, receives its due lesson. Aurora refuses to join Romney Leigh in his schemes of Christian socialism. He rates lightly the art to which she turns-above all, that art as handled by a woman, incapable by nature of generalization. Women, he says, care nothing for the vast sum of misery, only for the individual sorrows visible within their home circle, or not beyond its reach. He says— 'Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, |