With cares and vigils turned thee pale, And scorned thee when thy strength did fail, Forgive! forgive!-thy task doth cease, force, check my Or, trifling, stay mine upward course, Well hast thou in my service wrought? Thy hands my prompted deeds have done; The dread turn of the night is very brightly presented in the following: Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; Life! we've been long together 'Tis hard to part when friends are dearPerhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me good morning. Mrs. A. L. Barbauld. Now, as parable conveys that which cannot be adequately conveyed save by parable, let us forget any formal interpretations that have been suggested, and dwell on the symbols themselves without any commentary but that which our awakened instincts may attach to them, and without any argumentative support but that which crowding analogies, drawn from our experience link finding link through all the world-will suggest to us. The scholiast, the paraphraser, the commentator is but as the lion's provider in the forest, spurned when he has brought his tribute to the king of beasts. When once we are made to understand the poet or the prophet, and are held by him, it is the poet we love, not the man who has pointed him out to us. When we have been brought to the poet, it is his power that we feel, and within his grasp that we remain. And with the parable, mystic brother of the poem, it must be the same. K. C. CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS. NEW SERIES.-No. 15. ROBERT BROWNING. WHEN we offer a photograph of a poet, we need not lay ourselves open to suspicion of raillery if it were accompanied by such lines as Ben Jonson, perhaps with some spice of humorous underthought, said in his own day of a contemporary portrait : This figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut. That well-known figure is such a staring parody that we feel “the graver had a strife with nature" of disastrous ending; for, instead of outdoing the life, the life outdid him by slipping away altogether. If we could produce an authentic and exact portrait to which Robert Browning's satirical adaptation would not apply— it would be eagerly bought at the cost of as many diamonds as would cover it. Apart from any question of the beauty of art, to have before us the features of the man-to note the form of his brow, the nobility or character of his facial outlines, to dwell on the lines thought has marked upon him, the gentle curves and contours that denote a benevolent spirit or a mind at ease, and the sundry characteristics of significance, cannot but help us to come nearer to him, and with a readier sympathy and a heightened appreciation to looke Not on his picture, but his booke. In the case of the portrait before us, possibly few of Mr. Browning's admirers will go out of their way to get it, for others of earlier dates have been published, and the photograph dealers say that portraits of eminent men have been out of vogue with the public for the last year or two, ladies in hammocks and swings and snowstorms being at present the fashion. But in ten years or thereabouts the silver prints that represent so much of cherished physiognomy will have faded, and in twenty years the subject of the present portrait will be a little older than his father was when he passed out of reach of the sun's actinic touch, and no new portrait of him in his strength as now will be possible. In a century, again, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning will be floating as a rare double star of magical colour among the constellations of heroes; then will the virtuoso and the collector search after the scarce and worn back numbers of this decrepit periodical, and wring from this photograph, then grown precious-for ours do not fade-some kind of knowledge of what manner of man was Robert Browning. The present Robert Browning is the son, grandson, and great grandson of Robert Browning; nor there does the series end. He was born at Camberwell on the 7th of May, 1812-a date which future biographers will do well to take note of, for it is omitted in most notices, and incorrectly given in some others. He is an only son, and has but one sister. When he was born, his father, who was born 6th July, 1782, was near the end of his thirtieth year of age; when his father was born his grandfather was thirty-three, and when his son was born he was thirty-seven, the years of the three generations in passing on the torch of life being one hundred exactly. A strong, steady race this, one would argue. The Browning family comes from Dorsetshire. The grandfather of the poet was a landed proprietor, the father a clerk in the Bank of England, who, like Charles Lamb in the office which he used to enter late and therefore leave early, was by no means a clerk and nothing more. This Browning was one of a class that is becoming smaller and smaller, under the pressure of modern life and its sciences. He was a scholar of the old-fashioned classical kind. His knowledge was extensive, and of out-of-the-way subjects; he was not like the new generation-eternally posing for the market. His friends knew that he was an authority on the Letters of Junius, the best-informed man upon the pictures of Hogarth, and upon many another special thing. A reference to him now and then naturally crept into print; but he kept his life his own, and steadily embodied in himself, in its best sense, the maxim, bene vixit qui bene latuit. He had verse power, though he did not publish. He was fond of the classic poets, and used to carry his son in his arms, singing him to sleep with Anacreon in the original, to the tune of " A Cottage in a Wood." He was a man of singular high-mindedness, the action of which quality once decided his path in life, and away from a more lucrative career than a clerkship in the Bank of England. He died not very long ago (14th June, 1866), never having had a day's illness until the last. His wife, the mother of the present Robert Browning, was of Scotch family. The boy was precocious in the extreme, and at four years old, when constrained by his mother to take some medicine against the grain, as the |