l the critics she had every reason to be as
content as her letters show her to have been. Only two criticisms
rankled: the one that she was a follower of Tennyson, the other that
her rhymes were slovenly and careless. And these appeared, in varying
shapes, in nearly all the reviews.

The former of these allegations is of little weight. Whatever
qualities Miss Barrett may have shared with Tennyson, her substantial
independence is unquestionable. It is a case rather of coincidence
than imitation; or if imitation, it is of a slight and unconscious
kind. The second criticism deserves fuller notice, because it is
constantly repeated to this day. The following letters show how
strongly Miss Barrett protested against it. As she told Horne,[105]
with reference to this very subject: 'If I fail ultimately before the
public--that is, before the people--for an ephemeral popularity does
not appear to me to be worth trying for--it will not be because I have
shrunk from the amount of labour, where labour could do anything. I
have _worked_ at poetry; it has not been with me reverie, but art.'
That her rhymes were inexact, especially in such poems as 'The Dead
Pan,' she did not deny; but her defence was that the inexactness was
due to a deliberate attempt to widen the artistic capabilities of the
English language. Partly, perhaps, as a result of her acquaintance
with Italian literature, she had a marked fondness for disyllabic
rhymes; and since pure rhymes of this kind are not plentiful in
English, she tried the experiment of using assonances instead. Hence
such rhymes as _silence_ and _islands_, _vision_ and _procession_,
_panther_ and _saunter_, examples which could be indefinitely
multiplied if need were. Now it may be that a writer with a very
sensitive ear would not have attempted such an experiment, and it is a
fact that public taste has not approved it; but the experiment itself
is as legitimate as, say, the metrical experiments in hexameters and
hendecasyllabics of Longfellow or Tennyson, and whether approved
or not it should be criticised as an experiment, not as mere
carelessness. That Mrs. Browning's ear was quite-capable of discerning
true rhymes is shown by the fact that she tacitly abandoned her
experiment in assonances. Not only in the pure and high art of the
'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' but even in 'Casa Guidi Windows,' the
rhetorical and sometimes colloquial tone of which might have been
thought to lend itself to su