One wonders why women cannot write poetry?--or rather, to speak with more exactness--are never poets. Once or twice in their lives, perhaps, they may speak with sacred fire, but they are never, in the full meaning of the word, poets. They cannot rise out of themselves. Gosse says of Mrs. Browning: "She was not striving to produce an effect; she was trying with all the effort of which her spirit was capable to say exactly what was in her heart." There is the whole secret of the feminine failure in art. It always degenerates into an attempt to express, not humanity, but the individual woman. Woman is inevitably personal. She still sits alone at the door of her wigwam. Of humanity, she is ignorant, and to it is, moreover, indifferent. Mrs. Browning was only once shaken out of herself--when she wrote that fine plaint "De Profundis"--voicing the griefs of the many in telling of her own. After all, a portrait of one's self only is not art, or is art in its most limited form. Aurora Leigh and all the rest are simply Elizabeth Barrett masking under other names. However much the hand may resemble Esau's, the voice is always the voice of Jacob. Byron had these same feminine limitations--"dressing up" (as the children say) as a Pirate, a Turk, or the like, and reciting a rhymed Baedeker for the benefit of the untravelled; but whether Pirate or Giaour, always unmistakably Byron. What the women with poetic gifts _can_ do is to translate delightfully. Mrs. Browning's translations of Heine are quite the best in existence. Emma Lazarus made an English version of "_Une Nuit de Mai_" that is almost more delightful than the original. She might have enriched our treasury of verse with priceless transferences; instead of which she wasted her gifts upon unimportant "expressions of herself." November 20. Two Siegfrieds. A---- says there is no definite, abstract standard of beauty or perfection. We were talking of Jean de Reszke's _Siegfried_. A---- was completely satisfied with it. I explained that he was so only because he had not seen Alvary in the part. A---- was sure that even if he had done so de Reszke might still be best to his taste; asserting again that there was no ideal good in art, but only preference. Of course he does say this for the very reason that I advanced--because he had not seen Alvary. Poor beautiful young creature! He died recently in Germany in horrible, useless, ridiculous pain. Wagner, I am sure, would have thought him the ideal _Siegfried_, for he never made vocal gymnastics a fetish, but demanded satisfaction for the eye as much as for the ear.