receive is a fair one. It is nothing to him how the vendor's share is divided, whether he gives away half, or all, or none. The Act of 1900 has surely made an extraordinary precedent in legislation by professing to decree how the vendor of a property shall dispose of his purchase money. Neither the articles of association, nor the prospectus, nor the directors, can prevent the vendor, so far as I can see, from paying any commission he pleases to guarantors of the capital. This part of the Act seems altogether ill-drawn and illconsidered. The Act has done one or two good things. By requiring a fixed minimum subscription before allotment, it checks one great cause of failure, viz. commencing business upon insufficient capital; and by requiring practically the disclosure of all dealings with the property for three years previous to the issue of the prospectus, it should put a stop to the scandalous increase of the original price of properties by transfers from hand to hand of which we have had striking instances disclosed lately. The absurd 38th clause of the Act of 1867 is substituted by a more rational provision. On the other hand, by the cumbersome, complicated, and often unintelligible provisions of the new Act, fresh pitfalls are provided for the honest director, who is thus further discouraged in favour of the irresponsible guinea pig. Most of the real causes of the failure of companies, particularly mining companies, are unaffected by the Act, partly because some of them are intangible by legislation, partly because the framers of the Act have no real knowledge of these causes, and do not seem to care to learn them. It is especially disheartening to find that a high legal authority like Judge Emden, who has evidently taken great interest in the subject and with whose objects in this matter all honest men sympathise, can devote an article of sixteen pages to the matter without having acquired more practical knowledge of the causes of failure and the possible remedies. The discussion of these causes and remedies must be deferred to some other occasion. R. GERVASE ELWES, M.Inst.C.E. ROBERT BROWNING THE MUSICIAN What's poetry except a power that makes That who sees painting seems to hear as well Peopled at once.-Balaustion's Adventure. IN the history of mankind there have surely been few men endowed with such gifts, or even with such promise, that they might fairly ask themselves, in early life, 'Shall I train myself to become a poet, an artist, or a musician?" Such a one, however, was Robert Browning, and though, owing partly to choice and partly to circumstance, the poet in him triumphed, the others were not lost. The poet, as such, made abundant use of his knowledge of art and music in his own characteristic manner; seldom, indeed, as the subjects of poetry, but frequently as accessories in the dramatic background. Browning has himself shown us his canon of poetic structure in the often quoted preface to Sordello, a poem which, it will be remembered, appeared originally in 1840, being preceded only by Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835), and which may therefore be regarded as expressing a standard which he placed before himself at an early stage of his poetic career. 'The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.' It is as contributing to that development that the background is worth study too. It is, after all, a part of the mighty whole. The background to the soul is life and its mysteries, time and its labours, humanity and its passions, and the poet's voice is never so loud nor so clear as in the interpretation of whatever sets forth these. Browning never gives us what Gray has so well called 'the lowest degree of poetry, namely the descriptive'; but our appreciation of the loneliness of James Lee's wife is deepened by the wailing wind and the barren shore; and the Infinite passion, and the pain come to us with all the more significance, borne upon the silence of the Campagna, with its endless fleece of feathery grasses,' and its 'everlasting wash of air.' Shelley has been called 'the poet of poets.' Robert Browning is surely the poet of musicians. A few scenes in Shakespeare, a few lines in Milton, a single poem of Rossetti, comprise nearly all that has been uttered by the greater English poets about music. The odes of Pope or Dryden or Collins, whatever their merits from other points of view, are no more sympathetic to the true musician than are the descriptive pieces' of music which have but lately ceased to be a terror in our drawing-rooms. No other poet has presented music in what is surely its highest aspects, that of a means of expression, as poetry is a means of expression, of the soul's deepest communings with itself. Browning, in short, uses poetry as only the musician can. He was, we know, a performer on the piano, but he was far more. He was no mere 6 man of music with notes, and nothing else, to say.'1 Mrs. Ireland has told us how Browning said to her, 'You have been writing on my poem A Toccata of Galuppi's, and that's very interesting to me, as I was learning the grammar of music when other little boys were learning their multiplication table'; and Mrs. Sutherland Orr, in giving an account of his education, tells us: The study of music was also serious, and carried on under two masters; Mr. John Relfe ['master of mine, learned, redoubtable '], author of a valuable book on counterpoint, was his instructor in thorough bass; Mr. Abel, a pupil of Moscheles, in execution. He wrote music for songs which he himself sang, among them Donne's Go and catch a falling star; Hood's I will not have the mad Clytie; Peacock's The mountain sheep are sweeter; and his settings, all of which he suosequently destroyed, were, I am told, very spirited. Browning tells us in his Parleyings with Certain People (1887), how he came to select for discourse Charles Avison, organist of Newcastle : And on this 'Grand March' he hangs much argument as to the place of music in the interpretation of the emotions. But the great musical influence of his life seems to have been his early friendship with that gifted woman, Eliza Flower-like himself, in her degree, a poet and a musician-a friendship which, as Mrs. Bridell Fox, the intimate friend of both, has testified, profoundly modified his life. About 1824, when Robert Browning was twelve years old, he conceived a boyish passion for this beautiful girl, nine years his senior. The Last Ride Together, viii. The occasion was one, in itself, of deep interest. He was then, as we may readily suppose, in the Byronic stage-the Shelley worship had not begun and the immediate result was the production of a volume of short poems which he called Incondita, and for which, naturally, no publisher could be found. His mother showed the volume to her acquaintance, Miss Flower, whose admiration was so great as to induce her to copy the poems to show to her friend, Mr. W. J. Fox, in whose possession it remained till his death, when, his daughter, Mrs. Bridell Fox, tells me, she herself restored it to the poet at his own request. One must have a keen recollection of the early teens, when one wrote verses, to realise all that such sympathy meant for a boy sensitive, full of ambition, leading a retired suburban life. Miss Flower's interest in the young poet led also to that of Mr. Fox, the friend to whom he wrote in 1833, the year of the publication of Pauline, ‘I can only offer you my simple thanks, but they are of the sort that one can give only once or twice in a lifetime. I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured.' An intimacy was soon established with the family of Mr. Fox, in whose household the Misses Flower (to whom, since their father's death in 1829, he had acted as guardian) were permanent residents. Mrs. Bridell Fox gives us a charming picture of a day in her own childhood-the 7th of May, 1835-when, her elders being out, she, a shy little girl, received young Robert Browning alone in her father's drawing-room. 'It's my birthday to-day,' he explained; 'I'll wait till they come in. If it won't disturb you, I'll play till they do.' We can fancy him, as he sat there, in all the charm of his twentythree years, waiting for the musician whose music was so dear to him, pleasing and careful (Mrs. Bridell Fox hints a little over-careful) in his dress, playing perhaps in the fashion Mrs. Blomfield Moore2 has described for us: He possessed the gift of improvising on the piano. To listen was to be entranced as by the rapt strains of Beethoven's compositions, or by Mendelssohn's glorious melodies, as the poet's hands swept the keys, passing from one theme to another; but you could listen only once to the same strains; the inspiration came and went; the poet could never repeat his melodies. Few there were who knew of this divine gift; for only to those who were most intimate with him did he reveal himself in this way. During this period of his friendship with the Flowers he must have lived in the very atmosphere of music. Eliza and Sarah Flower are the heroines of Miss Martineau's story Five Years of 2 Lippincott's Magazine, 1889-90. Youth, and among various pictures which help to vivify our interest in these early friends of Robert Browning is this of the way in which music pervaded the household. Mary [whom we may take as equivalent to Eliza Flower] had been well taught, but she had that natural taste for music-the ear and the soul for it-without which no teaching is of any avail. She sang much and often, not because she had any particular aim at being accomplished, but because she loved it, or, as she said, because she could not help it. She sang to Nurse Rickham's children, she sang as she went up and down stairs; she sang when she was glad and when she was sorry, and when her papa was at home because he liked it; when he was out, because he could not be disturbed by it. In the woods at noonday she sang like a bird, that a bird might answer her; and if she woke in the dark night, the feeling of solemn music came over her with which she dared not break the silence. Everything suggested music to her. Every piece of poetry which she understood and liked formed itself into melody in her mind without an effort; when a gleam of sunshine burst out she gave voice to it; and long before she had heard any cathedral service the chaunting of the Psalms was familiar to her by anticipation. Such was the musician whose friendship was a part of Browning's life for twenty years, to whom he wrote on her deathbed in 1845, ten years later: I never had another feeling than entire admiration for your music-entire admiration. I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for. Of your health I shall not trust myself to speak; you must know what is unspoken. I should have been most happy to see you if but for a minute—and if next Wednesday I might take your hand for a moment. But you would concede that, if it were right, remembering what is now a very old friendship. May God bless you for ever. ... Mrs. Sutherland Orr tells us that even in latest life he never mentioned Eliza Flower's name with indifference, . . . and if, in spite of his denials, any woman inspired Pauline, it can have been no other than she. . . . What he afterwards called 'the few utterly insignificant scraps of letters and verse which formed part of his correspondence,' were preserved by her as long as she lived. But he recovered and destroyed them after his return to England, with all other reminiscences of those early years. It would be indeed difficult not to see some reference to Miss Flower and her music in the following passages in Pauline, written, it is to be remembered, in 1833, when his intimacy with her was at its height. Mrs. Bridell Fox, who remembers vividly each circumstance of this period of Browning's frequent visits to her father's house, where he made one of a brilliant group whose names are familiar to us all, assures me that she can feel no question on this point. The passages are their own best testimony. Pauline, my soul's friend, thou dost pity yet How this mood swayed me when that soul found thine, |