"How sad and bad and mad it was-- But then, how it was sweet!" I must also quote what seems to me a very vital tribute to his genius: "Browning is one of the very few men--Mr. Meredith excepted--who can paint women without idealization or degradation, not from the man's side, but from their own; as living equals, not as goddesses or as toys." His poetry has been described as "superb landscape painting in verse." Swinburne differentiates Browning's work as marked by decisive and incisive faculty of thought, sureness and intensity of perception, rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. 'The Ring and the Book' is the masterpiece of this great Victorian master. If then it be remembered that Browning ranks high as a humorist, that he has brilliant and subtle qualities, that he could appreciate and translate into poetry the stirring events of both sacred and profane history; that he drew Religion in all shapes to his side, that Mythology and Orientalism were his boon companions; that he moulded Art to his purpose, allured Music by his call, won Philosophy by his gaze, looked Truth in the eyes; there can be little or no doubt that he was the greatest of all the poets of the Victorian School and in his single person united all the highest characteristics of his literary contemporaries. Through him the Victorian School was raised to a height and deepened to a depth that without him it never would have had. _Mary M. Cohen._ * * * ----Is there anything that so forcibly brings home to us the foreign point of view or rather the point of tongue and point of ear that makes a Frenchman's expression alien to ours, than to see how he explains the proper English pronunciation of English? Here is the way, for example, that he elaborately spells out the sound of 'Much Ado About Nothing' in a dictionary of Foreign Names and Phrases: "Meutch a-dou a-boutt' neuth' igne." And of course our point of ear is quite as droll to him. FOOTNOTE: [Footnote 1: In 'The Broken Heart,' John Ford, 1633, Calantha, addressing the dead body of her betrothed husband, says: "Now turn I to thee, thou shadow Of my departed lord." Antony refers to his dead body as "a mangled shadow"; 'Antony and Cleopatra,' iv., 2, 27. Shakespeare elsewhere refers to disembodied spirits as "shadows"; as in 'Richard III,' i, 4, 53; _Ibid_., v, 3, 216; 'Cymbeline, v, 4, 97; and 'Titus Andronicus,' I, 1, 126.] [Footnote 2: For 'I. A Group of British Poets' see _Poet-lore_, Vol. III. (New Series), End Year Number 1899. Pp. 610-612.] End of Project Gutenberg's The Three Heron's Feathers, by Hermann Sudermann