Mr. Crane’s lecture was most interesting and instructive.  On one point only we would differ from him.  Like Mr. Morris he quite underrates the art of Japan, and looks on the Japanese as naturalists and not as decorative artists.  It is true that they are often pictorial, but by the exquisite finesse of their touch, the brilliancy and beauty of their colour, their perfect knowledge of how to make a space decorative without decorating it (a point on which Mr. Crane said nothing, though it is one of the most important things in decoration), and by their keen instinct of where to place a thing, the Japanese are decorative artists of a high order.  Next year somebody must lecture the Arts and Crafts on Japanese art.  In the meantime, we congratulate Mr. Crane and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson on the admirable series of lectures that has been delivered at this exhibition.  Their influence for good can hardly be over-estimated.  The exhibition, we are glad to hear, has been a financial success.  It closes tomorrow, but is to be only the first of many to come.

ENGLISH POETESSES

(Queen, December 8, 1888.)

England has given to the world one great poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  By her side Mr. Swinburne would place Miss Christina Rossetti, whose New Year hymn he describes as so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language, that there is none which comes near it enough to stand second.  ‘It is a hymn,’ he tells us, ’touched as with the fire, and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.’  Much as I admire Miss Rossetti’s work, her subtle choice of words, her rich imagery, her artistic naivete, wherein curious notes of strangeness and simplicity are fantastically blended together, I cannot but think that Mr. Swinburne has, with noble and natural loyalty, placed her on too lofty a pedestal.  To me, she is simply a very delightful artist in poetry.  This is indeed something so rare that when we meet it we cannot fail to love it, but it is not everything.  Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the consecration of the priest.

Mrs. Browning is unapproachable by any woman who has ever touched lyre or blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess.  But Sappho, who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a pillar of shadow.  Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain.  Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness