ets to be a general feeling of
this kind, that there must be something in the works of an author, the
reviews are obliged to notice him, such notice as it is--but what poor
work, even when doing its best! I mean poor in the failure to give a
general notion of the whole works; not a particular one of such and
such points therein. As I begun, so I shall end,--taking my own course,
pleasing myself or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing
God.

'As I never did otherwise, I never had any fear as to what I did going
ultimately to the bad,--hence in collected editions I always reprinted
everything, smallest and greatest. Do you ever see, by the way, the
numbers of the selection which Moxons publish? They are exclusively
poems omitted in that other selection by Forster; it seems little use
sending them to you, but when they are completed, if they give me a
few copies, you shall have one if you like. Just before I left London,
Macmillan was anxious to print a third selection, for his Golden
Treasury, which should of course be different from either--but _three_
seem too absurd. There--enough of me--

'I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before
I die; for one reason, that I may help old Pen the better; I was
much struck by the kind ways, and interest shown in me by the Oxford
undergraduates,--those introduced to me by Jowett.--I am sure they would
be the more helpful to my son. So, good luck to my great venture, the
murder-poem, which I do hope will strike you and all good lovers of
mine. . . .'

We cannot wonder at the touch of bitterness with which Mr. Browning
dwells on the long neglect which he had sustained; but it is at first
sight difficult to reconcile this high positive estimate of the value of
his poetry with the relative depreciation of his own poetic genius which
constantly marks his attitude towards that of his wife. The facts
are, however, quite compatible. He regarded Mrs. Browning's genius as
greater, because more spontaneous, than his own: owing less to life and
its opportunities; but he judged his own work as the more important,
because of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its
production. He was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he
underrated the creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature,
while claiming primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he
overrated the amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife