It is really high time that this sort of thing should, if possible, be stopped. Here is another book of madness and mysticism--another melancholy specimen of power wantonly wasted, and talent deliberately perverted--another act of self-prostration before that demon of bad taste who now seems to hold in absolute possession the fashionable masters of our ideal literature. It is a strong case for the correctional justice of criticism, which has too long abdicated its proper functions. The Della Crusca of Sentimentalism perished under the _Baviad_--is there to be no future Gifford for the Della Crusca of Transcendentalism? The thing has really grown to a lamentable head amongst us. The contagion has affected not only our sciolists and our versifiers, but those whom, in the absence of a mightier race, we must be content to accept as the poets of our age. Here is Robert Browning, for instance--no one can doubt that he is capable of better things--no one, while deploring the obscurities that deface the _Paracelsus_ and the _Dramatic Lyrics_, can deny the less questionable qualities which characterized those remarkable poems--but can any of his devotees be found to uphold his present elaborate experiment on the patience of the public? Take any of his worshippers you please--let him be "well up" in the transcendental poets of the day--take him fresh from Alexander Smith, or Alfred Tennyson's _Maud_, or the _Mystic_ of Bailey--and we will engage to find him at least ten passages in the first ten pages of _Men and Women_, some of which, even after profound study, he will not be able to construe at all, and not one of which he will be able to read off at sight. Let us take one or two selections at random from the first volume, and try. What, for instance, is the meaning of these four stanzas from the poem entitled "By the Fireside"?-- My perfect wife, my Leonor, Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too, Whom else could I dare look backward for, With whom beside should I dare pursue The path grey heads abhor? For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them; Youth, flowery all the way, there stops-- Not they; age threatens and they contemn, Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops, One inch from our life's safe hem! With me, youth led--I will speak now, No longer watch you as you sit Reading by fire-light, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it Mutely--my heart knows how-- When, if I think but deep enough, You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme; And you, too, find without a rebuff The response your soul seeks many a time Piercing its fine flesh-stuff--