does not fall far short of Shakespeare.

‘Aurora Leigh’ gives rise to the old question, Is it advisable to turn a three-volume novel into verse?  Yet Landor wrote about it:—­“I am reading a poem full of thought and fascinating with fancy—­Mrs. Browning’s (Aurora Leigh.) In many places there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare....  I am half drunk with it.  Never did I think I should have a good draught of poetry again.”  Ruskin somewhere considered it the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, “with enough imagination to set up a dozen lesser poets”; and Stedman calls it “a representative and original creation:  representative in a versatile, kaleidoscopic presentment of modern life and issues; original, because the most idiosyncratic of its author’s poems.  An audacious speculative freedom pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old....  ‘Aurora Leigh’ is a mirror of contemporary life, while its learned and beautiful illustrations make it almost a handbook of literature and the arts....  Although a most uneven production, full of ups and downs, of capricious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains poetry as fine as its author has given us elsewhere, and enough spare inspiration to set up a dozen smaller poets.  The flexible verse is noticeably her own, and often handled with as much spirit as freedom.”  Mrs. Browning herself declared it the most mature of her works, “and the one into which my highest convictions upon life and art have entered.”  Consider this:—­

     “For ’tis not in mere death that men die most: 
     And after our first girding of the loins
     In youth’s fine linen and fair broidery,
     To run up-hill and meet the rising sun,
     We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
     While others gird us with the violent bands
     Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
     Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
     Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
     Head downwards on the cross-sticks of the world. 
     Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross. 
     God, set our feet low and our foreheads high,
     And teach us how a man was made to walk!”

Or this:—­

     “I’ve waked and slept through many nights and days
     Since then—­but still that day will catch my breath
     Like a nightmare.  There are fatal days, indeed,
     In which the fibrous years have taken root
     So deeply, that they quiver to their tops
     Whene’er you stir the dust of such a day.”

Again:—­

     “Passion is
     But something suffered after all—­
     . . . . .  While Art

     Sets action on the top of suffering.”

And this:—­