that seem most remote from classical life, such as Aurora Leigh, for instance, it is not difficult to trace the fine literary influence of a classical training.  Since Mrs. Browning’s time, education has become, not the privilege of a few women, but the inalienable inheritance of all; and, as a natural consequence of the increased faculty of expression thereby gained, the women poets of our day hold a very high literary position.  Curiously enough, their poetry is, as a rule, more distinguished for strength than for beauty; they seem to love to grapple with the big intellectual problems of modern life; science, philosophy and metaphysics form a large portion of their ordinary subject-matter; they leave the triviality of triolets to men, and try to read the writing on the wall, and to solve the last secret of the Sphinx.  Hence Robert Browning, not Keats, is their idol; Sordello moves them more than the Ode on a Grecian Urn; and all Lord Tennyson’s magic and music seems to them as nothing compared with the psychological subtleties of The Ring and the Book, or the pregnant questions stirred in the dialogue between Blougram and Gigadibs.  Indeed I remember hearing a charming young Girtonian, forgetting for a moment the exquisite lyrics in Pippa Passes, and the superb blank verse of Men and Women, state quite seriously that the reason she admired the author of Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country was that he had headed a reaction against beauty in poetry!

Miss Chapman is probably one of Mr. Browning’s disciples.  She does not imitate him, but it is easy to discern his influence on her verse, and she has caught something of his fine, strange faith.  Take, for instance, her poem, A Strong-minded Woman: 

   See her?  Oh, yes!—­Come this way—­hush! this way,
      Here she is lying,
   Sweet—­with the smile her face wore yesterday,
      As she lay dying. 
   Calm, the mind-fever gone, and, praise God! gone
      All the heart-hunger;
   Looking the merest girl at forty-one—­
      You guessed her younger? 
   Well, she’d the flower-bloom that children have,
      Was lithe and pliant,
   With eyes as innocent blue as they were brave,
      Resolved, defiant. 
   Yourself—­you worship art!  Well, at that shrine
      She too bowed lowly,
   Drank thirstily of beauty, as of wine,
      Proclaimed it holy. 
   But could you follow her when, in a breath,
      She knelt to science,
   Vowing to truth true service to the death,
      And heart-reliance? 
   Nay,—­then for you she underwent eclipse,
      Appeared as alien
   As once, before he prayed, those ivory lips
      Seemed to Pygmalion.

* * * * *

   Hear from your heaven, my dear, my lost delight,
      You who were woman
   To your heart’s heart, and not more pure, more white,
      Than warmly human. 
   How shall I answer?  How express, reveal