Page:Poet Lore, volume 1, 1889.djvu/200

184 Lippi." The reader endeavored, by a series of contrasts as to the form of the works as well as their verbal characteristics, to throw into relief the faults of "Sludge" against the artistic background of "Fra Lippo Lippi," arriving at the conclusion that we can dispense with Browning's metaphysics and still claim for him illustrious rank as a poet in the artistic sense. At the close of this paper Dr. Frances Emily White read some notes on the spiritualistic ideas in "Sludge" in which she took the scientific view that spiritualism is a purely subjective phenomenon. Mr. John Durham further discussed the subject, making the suggestion that Sludge was used by the poet neither as a medium for the expression of his own views nor as a type, but as a medium through whom we see the effect of spiritualism on Sludge's audiences.

HE —This of course does not refer to the time of the action (compare "The Winter's Tale," that is, a tale "for winter," not of winter), which is the closing days of April and the first of May. The word midsummer does not occur in the text of the play. In choosing the title Shakespeare not improbably had in mind the many superstitions connected with Midsummer Eve (the evening of June 23, preceding the festival of the Nativity of John the Baptist), to which Brand, in his "Popular Antiquities" (vol. i. pp. 298-337) devotes some forty pages. See also Chambers's "Book of Days," vol. i. p. 816, and Dyer's "Folk-lore of Shakespeare," p. 318. Steevens remarks that as "this season was anciently thought productive of mental vagaries, to this circumstance the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' might have