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
Your true life-story?
How utter, if they cannot guess--not feel
Your crowning glory?
This way. Attend my words. The rich, we know,
Do into heaven
Enter but hardly; to the poor, the low,
God's kingdom's given.
Well, there's another heaven--a heaven on earth--
(That's love's fruition)
Whereto a certain lack--a certain dearth--
Gains best admission.
Here, too, she was too rich--ah, God! if less
Love had been lent her!--
Into the realm of human happiness
These look--not enter.

Well, here we have, if not quite an echo, at least a reminiscence of the
metre of The Grammarian's Funeral; and the peculiar blending together of
lyrical and dramatic forms, seems essentially characteristic of Mr.
Browning's method. Yet there is a distinct personal note running all
through the poem, and true originality is to be found rather in the use
made of a model than in the rejection of all models and masters. Dans
l'art comme dans la nature on est toujours fils de quelqu'un, and we
should not quarrel with the reed if it whispers to us the music of the
lyre. A little child once asked me if it was the nightingale who taught
the linnets how to sing.

Miss Chapman's other poems contain a great deal that is interesting. The
most ambitious is The New Purgatory, to which the book owes its title. It
is a vision of a strange garden in which, cleansed and purified of all
stain and shame, walk Judas of Cherioth, Nero the Lord of Rome, Ysabel
the wife of Ahab, and others, around whose names cling terrible memories
of horror, or awful splendours of sin. The conception is fine, but the
treatment is hardly adequate. There are, however, some good strong lines
in it, and, indeed, almost all of Miss Chapman's poems are worth reading,
if not for their absolute beauty, at least for their intellectual
intention.

* * * * *

Nothing is more interesting than to watch the change and development of
the art of novel-writing in this nineteenth century--'this so-called
nineteenth century,' as an impassioned young orator once termed it, after
a contemptuous diatribe against the evils of modern civilisation. In
France they have had one great genius, Balzac, who invented the modern
method of looking at life; and one great artist, Flaubert, who is the
impeccable master of style; and to the influence of these two men we may
trace almost all contemporary French fiction. But in England we have had
no schools worth speaking of.