burden
comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess.

"Beati! beati mortui."

"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four
parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her
lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and
purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body
has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a
brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the
bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these
ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in which the heroine rides
off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain.
Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapelle_, _chambere_,
_ladie_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not
quite the genuine accent of folk-song.

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate
spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the
Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not
rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in
spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would classify Arnold's
clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was
an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last
Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have
welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to
legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval
grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one
romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in
this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show
Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct
and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest
imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat
unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at
everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and
the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry":

"Well hast thou cried, departed Burke,
All chivalrous romantic work
Is ended now and past!