and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”: no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects, made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except, perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers, appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular. The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow. The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the poetry. Such early pieces as _Excelsior_ and _The Psalm of Life_ yield odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the _Queen of the May_, and for parts of _The Miller’s Daughter_. In these is a marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet, in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in _Evangeline_, and that excellent experiment _Hiawatha_, where the measure of the Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in France and England. It is not the famous _Raven_, but such pieces as _To Helen_, _the Sleeper_, and at most a dozen others which give Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas, but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except in a few places, as in such as his _Commemoration Ode_, Mr. Lowell is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West, blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.