cy has led her to illustrate. A man that can be a poet is so much
the more a man in becoming such, and is the more fitted for a man's
best work. Nothing is destroyed, and in preparing the instrument for
the touch of the musician the gods do nothing for which they need
weep. The idea however is beautiful, and it is beautifully worked."

Then follows some verbal criticism which need not be transcribed.
Going on to the seventh stanza he says, "In the third line of it, she
loses her antithesis. She must spoil her man, as well as make a poet
out of him--spoil him as the reed is spoilt. Should we not read the
lines thus:--

"'Yet one half beast is the great god Pan
Or he would not have laughed by the river.
Making a poet he mars a man;
The true gods sigh,' &c."?

In justice to my brother's memory I must say that this was not
written to me with any such presumptuous idea as that of offering his
criticism to the poetess. But I showed the letter to Isa Blagden, and
at her request left it with her. A day or two later, she writes to me:
"Dear friend,--I send you back your criticism and Mrs. B.'s rejoinder.
She _made_ me show it to her, and she wishes you to see her answer."
Miss Blagden's words would seem to imply that she thought the
criticism mine. And if she did, Mrs. Browning was doubtless led to
suppose so too. Yet I think this could hardly have been the case.

Of course my only object in writing all this here is to give the
reader the great treat of seeing Mrs. Browning's "rejoinder." It is
very highly interesting:--

* * * * *

"DEAREST ISA,--Very gentle my critic is; I am glad I got him out of
you. But tell dear Mr. Trollope he is wrong nevertheless" [here it
certainly seems that she supposed the criticism to be mine]; "and
that my 'thought' was really and decidedly _anterior_ [_sic_] to my
'allegory.' Moreover, it is my thought still. I meant to say that the
poetic organisation implies certain disadvantages; for instance an
exaggerated general susceptibility, ...[1] which may be shut up,
kept out of the way in every-day life, and must be (or the man is
'_marred_' indeed, made a Rousseau or a Byron of), but which is
necessarily, for all that, cultivated in the very cultivation of art
itself. There is an inward reflection and refraction of the heats
of life ...[1] doubling pains and pleasures, doubling therefore the
motives (passions) of life. I have said something of this in A