instance of the combination of these antagonisms is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs. Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;" and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy.

But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic power of the English bards. Robert Browning is so dramatic that he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph.

One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a Gondola"—as it first appeared—two lovers are happily conversing, until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair, and they bid each other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed." This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to drop upward.

If we think of our own poets whose names are usually connected,—Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,—we shall easily see which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully ripened,—I mean Edgar Allan Poe.

In foreign literature we may trace the same tendency of men of genius to arrange themselves in couplets. Take, for instance, in Italy, Dante and Petrarch; in France, Voltaire and Rousseau; in Germany, Goethe and Schiller. Dante is dramatic, losing himself in his stern subject, his dramatic characters; his awful pictures of gloomy destiny. Petrarch is lyrical, personal, singing forever his own sad and sweet fate. Again, Voltaire is essentially dramatic,—immersed in things, absorbed in life, a man reveling in all human accident and adventure, and aglow with faith in an earthly paradise. The sad Rousseau goes apart, away from men; standing like Byron, among them, but not of them; in a cloud of thoughts that are not their thoughts. And, once more, though Goethe resembles Shakespeare in this, that some of his works are subjective, and others objective,—though, in the greatness of his mind he reconciles all the usual antagonisms of thought,—yet the fully developed Goethe, like the fully developed Shakespeare, disappears in his characters and theme. Life to him, in all its forms, was so intensely interesting that his own individual and subjective sentiments are left out of sight. But Schiller stands opposed to Goethe, as being a dramatist devoid of dramatic genius, but full of personal power; so grand in his nobleness of soul, so majestic in the aspirations of his sentiment, so full of patriotic ardor and devotion to truth and goodness, that he moves all hearts as he walks through his dramas,—the great poet visible in every scene and every line. As his tried and noble friend says of him in an equally undying strain:—

Goethe's characters and stories covered the widest range: Faust, made sick with too much thought, and seeking outward joy as a relief; Werther, a self-absorbed sentimentalist; Tasso, an Italian man of genius, a mixture of imagination, aspiration, sensitive self-distrust; susceptible to opinion, sympathetic; Iphigenia, a picture of antique calm, simplicity, purity, classic repose, like that of a statue; Hermann and Dorothea, a sweet idyl of modern life, in a simple-minded German village with an opinionated, honest landlord, a talkative apothecary, a motherly landlady, a sensible and good pastor, and the two young lovers.

This law of duality, or reaction of genius on genius, will also be found to apply to artists, philosophers, historians, orators. These also come in pairs, manifesting the same antagonistic qualities.

Some artists are lyric; putting their own souls into every face, every figure, making even a landscape alive with their own mood; adding—

In every landscape of Claude we find the soul of Claude; in every rugged rock-defile of Salvator we read his mood. These artists are lyric; but there are also great dramatic painters, who give you, not themselves, but men and women; so real, so differentiated, characters so full of the variety and antagonism of nature, that the whole life of a period springs into being at their touch.

Take for instance two names, which always go together, standing side by side at the summit of Italian art,—Michael Angelo and Raphael. Though Raphael was a genius of boundless exuberance, and poured on the wall and canvas a flood of forms, creating as nature creates, without pause or self-repetition, yet there is a tone in all which irresistibly speaks of the artist's own soul. He created a world of Raphaels. Grace, sweetness, and tenderness went into all his work. Every line has the same characteristic qualities.

Turn to the frescoes by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. As we look up at those mighty forms—prophets, sibyls, seers, with multitudes of subordinate figures—we gradually trace in each prophet, king, or bard an individual character. Each one is himself. How fully each face and attitude is differentiated by some inward life. How each—David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Persian and the Libyan sibyl—stands out, distinct, filled with a power or a tenderness all his own. Michael Angelo himself is not there, except as a fountain of creative life, from whose genius all these majestic persons come forth as living realities.

Hanging on my walls are the well-known engravings of Guido's Aurora and Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. One of these is purely lyrical; the other as clearly dramatic.

The Aurora is so exquisitely lovely, the forms so full of grace, the movement of all the figures so rapid yet so firm, that I can never pass it without stopping to enjoy its charms. But variety is absent. The hours are lovely sisters, as Ovid describes sisters:—

But when we turn to the Last Supper, we see the dramatic artist at his best. The subject is such as almost to compel a monotonous treatment, but there is a wonderful variety in the attitudes and grouping. Each apostle shows by his attitude, gesture, expression, that he is affected differently from all the others. Even the feet under the table speak. Stand before the picture; put yourself into the attitude of each apostle, and you will immediately understand his state