use of Luria's mere physical courage and strategic skill, even Not one of you, and so escape the thrill And even after Luria is aware of the treachery meditated to him, there remains a chord in his mind which answers to the cold proud claim of the wily Florentine who lays it down that the republic has a right to break hearts and ruin heads, however liberally, in her own service: "And when the fresh heart breaks, Of Man, which men's deficiencies refuse; She binds so many, that she grows out of them Stands steady o'er their numbers, though they change As, see, yon hanging city, in the sun, Of shapely cloud substantially the same! Before she grant him her reward, I say !" This mighty shadow of an omniscient cunning, this earthly edition of the celestial craft of secret government by unattainable knowledge, produces on Luria's far higher nature much the same kind of irresistible impression which, in the reverse direction, the simplicity and fidelity of a peasant's faith had made on the accomplished physician. In the one case faith penetrates worldly knowledge with a sense of its own deficiencies; in the other, wide and worldly knowledge penetrates a generous and sensitive nature with a still profounder sense of its own deficiencies. All knowledge, Mr. Browning thinks,-even the mean diplomatic cunning,-has in it a sort of shadow, however faint, of divine fulness, which gives an excuse if not a justification for its magic spell over human nature. If not really a hem of the divine garment of omniscience, it is at least so striking a forgery that the idolatry may be almost noble. In Luria's nature certainly it is infinitely noble, and is mingled with every thing short of Christian virtue. The picture is worthy of Mr. Browning's genius, and constitutes the essence of quite his finest drama. We must conclude with a few words in review of Mr. Browning's genius. Its most striking characteristic is the great vigour of his intellectual and spiritual imagination, and of his carnal imagination (if we may be permitted a technical Scripture phrase to express the imagination of all the passions and perceptions), and the almost complete absence of the intermediate psychical or sentimental imagination, which is with most poets the principal spring of all their poetry, and perhaps the only spring of lyrical poetry. We do not know a poem of Mr. Browning's which can be said to express a mood, as Shelley expresses so vividly moods of passionate yearning, Wordsworth of meditative rapture, Tennyson of infinite regret. Mr. Browning has no moods. His mind seems to leap at once from its centre to its surface without passing through the middle states which lie between the spirit and the senses. Hence we may see from another side why Mr. Browning's women are so imperfect, for their truest life is usually in this middle region, which seems totally absent from his poems. The nearest approach to a sentiment which he has drawn is, on the one side a passion, which he has drawn repeatedly and powerfully,-on the other a spiritual affection, "the devotion the heart lifts above and the heavens reject not," such as he has so finely painted in that love of David for Jonathan, which comes flowing in in great waves, like a spring-tide, till it pours on into his love for God; and this he has drawn as scarcely any other man could draw it. But both these are essentially different from what is properly denoted by sentiment, which is apt to lean upon the occasional, lives on memory and association, tinges every thing around it with a secondary glow of its own, and has neither the immediate physical origin of a passion, nor that absolute independence both of circumstance and instinct, which characterises what is here called a spiritual affection. It is, as we have said, in sentiment that the tempering moods are rooted which give rise to so much of our highest poetry, and touch with a sort of illuminating magic so much more which would otherwise have no intrinsic charm. Gray's Elegy, for instance, is popular solely for the tender melancholy that hangs around it, and almost constitutes it an incarnation of evening regret. Now, of those sentiments which tune the imagination Mr. Browning's poems seem destitute, and the consequence is that he is apt to plunge us from cold spiritual or intellectual power into the fever of passion, and back again from this fever into the cold. But we suspect that his dramatic intellect has gained through this hiatus in his imagination. Sentiment, because it is lyrical, because it tempts the mind into dwelling on its own moods, is a great hindrance to that strategic activity of the intellect which enables it to pass easily from one intellectual and moral centre to another. A great dramatist is in some sense a great intellectual and spiritual ventriloquist, and nothing should, one would think, more interfere with the ease of spiritual ventriloquism than the clinging personal sentiments, which never leave the creative mind really free and solitary. For it must require a habit not merely of physical, but, if we may so speak, of spiritual solitude, to migrate rapidly in this way from your own actual centre in the world of intellect and feeling to a totally different centre, where you not only try to speak an alien language, but to think unaccustomed thoughts and feel unaccustomed passions. Mr. Browning says very finely in one of his dramas, "When is man strong until he feels alone? It was some lonely strength at first, be sure, Took sword and shield and sceptre-each a man!" This seems to us to describe a dramatic poet's work not much less powerfully than it describes the royally creative thought of the divine administration. Mr. Browning's intellectual and spiritual strength has apparently been much braced in this cold solitude. And it has been perhaps easier to him, from the absence of that refracting atmosphere of personal sentiment, which, even when we are alone, creates a kind of twilight of customary influences, and environs us with crowds of associations which are apt to fritter away the creative powers of the mind, and to diminish its power to issue those sharplydefined imaginative decrees which may be said to originate 66 proprio motu, as the papal language of absolute free-will aptly expresses it. To a dramatic intellect (unless the imagination be of the very highest spontaneous fertility) the power of completely controlling the thoughts and images, of saying to one go," and to another "come," must be of the first moment. No poet of modern days gives us more distinctly this sense of an imagination which acts proprio motu than Mr. Browning. It is one reason why his poems have a cold air; for that resisting medium of restraint, the atmosphere which surrounds the dramatic intellect, though it may hamper the practice of intellectual migration, will, if it does not prevent it, lend a warmth and natural ground-colour of harmonising feeling to the new creations which will blend them into a more perfect work of art. Mr. Browning's mind appears somehow to travel in vacuo, and therefore with greater rapidity than almost any part of his genius; but he carries no vestige of his former self about with him, which necessitates, therefore, a perfectly new plunge for the reader into quite a new world in every new poem. But hence also the bracing effect which his masculine and rugged poetry has on the intellect. Poetry is apt to be enervating, producing the effect of intellectual luxury; or if, like Wordsworth's, it is as cool and bright as morning dew, it carries us away from the world to mountain solitudes and transcendental dreams. Mr. Browning's-while it strings your intellect to the utmost, as all really dramatic poetry must, and has none of the luxuriance of fancy and wealth of sentiment which relaxes the fibre of the mind-keeps you still in a living world,-not generally the modern world, very seldom indeed the world of modern England, but still in contact with keen, quick, vigorous life, that, as well as engaging the imagination, really enlarges the range of one's intellectual and social, sometimes almost of one's political, experience. Mr. Browning cannot, indeed, paint action; but of the intellectual approaches to action he is a great master. And in spite of more grating deficiencies in the power of expression than any eminent English poet perhaps ever laboured under, these poems cannot fail to win for him slowly a substantial and an enduring fame. ART. VIII. THE EFFECTS OF THE GOLD DISCOVERIES. A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold ascertained, and its Social Effects set forth, with two Diagrams. By W. Stanley Jevons, M.A., formerly of the Sydney Royal Mint. London: Stanford. THE meeting of the British Association has once more recalled public attention to the effect of the gold discoveries, and the discussion opened in section F has been continued in the columns of the Times. We cannot say that we think much light has been thrown on the complicated question of monetary depreciation by the recent contributions to the controversy; nor do we think that the exhibitions of economic dialectics which it has called forth, if these are to be taken as an indication of the present state of economic knowledge in the country, afford us much reason for self-congratulation upon this head. Far from political economy being, as we have been accustomed to regard it, an established science, resting on solid foundations of fact and reasoning, with recognised principles applicable to the solution of practical questions, its most elementary doctrines seem still to be open to dispute: each speculator excogitates a theory for the nonce, apparently in entire ignorance that his sudden inspirations conflict directly with principles which have been wrought out by the labours of a series of able thinkers, and verified by a long course of experience. One writer, for example, in the recent discussion (and he merely gave distinct expression to what appeared to be the latent thought of many more) denies point-blank that an increase in the precious metals has any tendency to lower their value: it did not do so in the sixteenth century; it will not and cannot do so now. "The new gold and silver have been so much new capital added to the wealth of the world; they have acted as a stimulus to industry, and caused the production of commodities equal in value to themselves. The world is, in fact, richer than it was fifteen years ago by the whole amount, not only of the precious metals, but by all the property they represent." "I can discover nothing in this," he naïvely adds, "contravening the acknowledged principles of political economy." Another writer qualifies this position: he admits that increased supply may lower value, but gold, he informs us, distributes itself, not according to the principles expounded by Ricardo, but after the analogy of water:* it runs first to the lower levels, and does not touch *The writer referred to thus explains his meaning: "England is in the very centre of the mouth of a very wide and very long estuary, and as the water rises it extends over a constantly increasing area in length and width; but the quan |