that led her straight to the heart of things. Then the harshness and cruelty for which he was noted belonged to the exigencies of war, which is never merciful. It was easy to malign him there. At all events, it is certain that the faults of this brilliant cavalier of very flexible honor were swept away in a flood of happy memories and imperishable love. Many were the suitors who presented themselves to the gifted, rich, and beautiful princess, who was scarcely past thirty-five; but she had gathered the wealth of her affections in a vase that was broken, and for her there was no second gathering. The spirit that held captive her own still shone in the heavens as a sun that lighted the inner temple of her soul and made its hidden treasures luminous. When she rallied a little from the first stunning blow, she began to write. This had been one of the diversions of her youth, and she had often sent tender verses to her husband. Now it offered an outlet to her sorrows, and, at the same time, a tribute to his memory. Never was such a monument dedicated to a man as this series of more than a hundred sonnets. Her love colored all her thoughts, and gave to her clear, strong intellect a living touch that comes only from the heart. If one misses in these verses the fire of Sappho, one is conscious of coming in contact with a pure and lofty soul in which earthly passion has been transformed into a glow of divine tenderness. But the note of longing and loneliness is always there. Laura was no more idealized by her poet lover than was this unworthy man by his desolate wife. For seven years her poems were a series of variations on the same theme. The sun shone no longer for her; there was no more beauty in tree, or flower, or sparkling waves; the birds were mute, and nature was draped in gloom. In death only there was hope; but even here was the dreadful possibility that she might not be perfect enough to meet this paragon of all noble qualities in heaven. So Mrs. Browning might have written. She had the same tendency to transfigure her idols in the light of the imagination, the same meditative quality, the same fine idealism. But she lived and died a happy wife, while her sister poet spent lonely years in the companionship of a memory. Time, however, which tempers all things, if it does not change them, brought a new element into her thoughts, and her elegiac songs rose to cathedral hymns. In her religious sonnets she reveals the intrinsic quality of her mind and its firm grasp of spiritual things. Some of them touch on forbidden questions, and wander among the dangerous heresies of the new age. Theology and poetry are not quite in accord, and these are of value mainly as showing the liberal drift of her opinions. Others are the spontaneous outpouring of a full and ardent soul. Rich in thought, alive with feeling, and lighted with hope, they soar on the wings of an exalted faith far above the heavy and sin-laden air of her time.