Ye rigid Ploughmen, bear in mind Your labour is for future hours: Advance--spare not--nor look behind-- Plough deep and straight with all your powers! Poetry was merely an occasional occupation to Alfred Domett; he was, nevertheless, professedly a disciple of Browning, who made him the Waring of the poem, a fact which gives him, perhaps, a moment’s factitious interest in a brief study of Victorian poetry. His poetic gift was real but slightly tended, and fell into neglect in a life of politics. His _Flotsam and Jetsam_, however, deserves some remembrance, and the following will serve to show that his discipleship to the great poet who was his friend was not wholly a vain one. INVISIBLE SIGHTS “So far away so long--and now Returned to England?--Come with me! Some of our great ‘celebrities’ You will be glad to see!” * * * * * Carlyle--the Laureate--Browning--_these!_ These walking bipeds--Nay, you joke!-- Each wondrous power for thirty years O’er us head-downward folk Wrapt skylike, at the Antipodes,-- Those common limbs--that common trunk! ’Tis the Arab-Jinn who reached the clouds, Into his bottle shrunk. The flashing Mind--the boundless Soul We felt ubiquitous, that mash Medullary or cortical-- That six-inch brain-cube!--Trash! The third of the poets mentioned, T. E. Brown, is of a wider popularity and a more distinguished talent than the others. His poems have remained in print and still find many readers, and the reputation of his best work is likely rather to be increased than diminished by time. A shy and scholarly figure, he was a good democrat in his poetry and wrote of humble lives without condescension and yet rather from a sympathetic seclusion than as a poet of the people. Perhaps his mind was the one of his generation in which Browning’s influence worked to most considerable purpose, though it would be at least as true to say in justice to a genuine but limited poet that his was a striking instance of a smaller poetic endowment working under the same technical instincts as the greater. In his work we find a rhapsodic note of lyricism, a sense of dramatic antithesis, a fondness for elliptical argument, all of which are in Browning’s habit. Brown’s touch in his longer poems may not be as firm as the master’s, which is merely to say unnecessarily that he was not as great a poet as Browning, but in his shorter pieces he could often score a success in a manner that Browning himself could hardly have used more effectively, in evidence of which _Salve_ may be given. To live within a cave--it is most good; But, if God make a day, And some one come, and say, “Lo! I have gather’d faggots in the wood!” E’en let him stay, And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood!