LONDON.

[Aurora Leigh, after the death of her aunt, and her rejection of her cousin Romney's offer of marriage, goes to London to realize her great ideal of the poet-artist. In the following passage she speaks of London as a source of poetic inspiration:]

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,
I took a chamber up three flights of stairs
Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,
And, in a certain house in Kensington,

Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work
In this world, 'tis the best you get at all;

For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction. God says, "sweat

For foreheads;" men say "crowns;" and so we are crowned,

Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work; get work;

Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude,

I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun
On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,
Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass,

With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,
In which the blood of wretches pent inside
Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—

Push out through fog with his dilated disk
And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots
With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it

Alive, and draw it off into the void,

Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the South,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai; on Parnassus mount,
You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,
Except in fable and figure: forests chant

Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.
But sit in London, at the day's decline,

And view the city perish in the mist

Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,-
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence-then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel's other singing girls,

Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

[It is interesting to compare with the preceding passage from "Aurora Leigh," what a great German poet, Heinrich Heine, says of London, in the same relation. The following passage is from his Reisebilder, (Pictures of Travel,) as translated by Charles G. Leland:]

1

I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the astonished spirit; I have seen it and am still astonished-and still there remains fixed in my memory the stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces of living men with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of hunger, and of hatred I mean London. Send a philosopher to London, but, for your life, no poet! Send a philosopher there, and stand him at the corner of Cheapside, where he will learn more than from all the books of the last Leipsic fair; and as the billows of human life roar around him, so will a sea of new thoughts rise before him, and the Eternal Spirit which moves upon the face of the waters will breathe upon him; the most hidden secrets of social harmony will be suddenly revealed to him; he will hear the pulse of the world beat audibly, and see it visibly; for, if London is the right hand of the world—its active, mighty right hand-then we may regard the route which leads from the Exchange to Downing street as the world's pyloric artery. But never send a poet to London! This downright earnestness of all things, this colossal uniformity, this machine-like movement, this troubled spirit in pleasure itself, this exaggerated

London, smothers the imagination and rends the heart. And should you ever send a German poet thither — a dreamer, who stares at everything, even a ragged beggar woman, or the shining wares of a goldsmith's shop-why then, at least, he will find things going right badly with him.

THE SONG OF DEBORAH AND BARAK. BOOK OF JUDGES, CHAP. V.

HEN sang Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam on that day, saying,

Praise ye the Lord for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves. Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes; I, even I, will sing unto the Lord; I will sing praise to the Lord God of Israel. Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedest out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from before the Lord God of Israel.

In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through by-ways. The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel. They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: was there

a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel? My heart is toward the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless ye the Lord.

asses, ye that sit in

Speak, ye that ride on white judgment, and walk by the way. They that are delivered from the noise of archers in the places of drawing water, there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the Lord, even the righteous acts toward the inhabitants of his villages in Israel: then shall the people of the Lord go down to the gates.

Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song: arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.

Then he made him that remaineth have dominion over the nobles among the people: the Lord made me have dominion over the mighty. Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek; after thee, Benjamin, among thy people; out of Machir came down governors, and out of Zebulun they that handle the pen of the writer. And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah; even Issachar, and also Barak: he was sent on foot into the valley. For the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of heart.

Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleatings of the flocks? For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his