themselves so easily to parody--and some of the happiest parodies ever
written were devoted to her in _Bon Gaultier_ and other books--did not
serve her badly with the general, for a parody always in a way attracts
attention to the original. Although her expression was not always of the
very clearest, its general drift was never easily mistakable; and
though she was wont to enshrine her emotions in something of a mist of
mysticism, they were in the main simple and human enough. It must also
be admitted that pathetic sentiment is almost the surest of popular
appeals in poetry; and Miss Barrett--partly through physical suffering,
partly through the bereavements above referred to, but very mainly it
may be suspected by temperament and preference--was much more a visitant
of the House of Mourning than of the House of Mirth. She was, yet again,
profoundly and sincerely, if a little vaguely, religious: and her sacred
poems, of which the famous and beautiful "Cowper's Grace" is the chief
example, secured one portion of the public to her as firmly as the
humanitarianism of "The Cry of the Children," chiming in with famous
things of Hood and Dickens, did another; "Isobel's Child," a pathetic
domesticity, a third; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished
Romanticism of "The Duchess May" and "The Brown Rosary," a fourth; and
the ethical and political "noble sentiments" of "Lady Geraldine's
Courtship," a fifth.

But it would argue gross unfairness in an advocate, and gross
incompetence in a critic, to let it be supposed that these popular
attractions were the only ones that Mrs. Browning possessed. Despite and
besides the faults which will be presently noticed, and which,
critically speaking, are very grave faults, she had poetical merits of a
very high order. Her metrical faculty, though constantly flawed and
imperfect, was very original and full of musical variety. Although her
choice of words could by no means always be commended, her supply of
them was extraordinary. Before her imprisonment in sick-rooms she had
pored on nature with the eagerest and most observant eye, and that
imprisonment itself only deepened the intensity of her remembered
nature-worship. Her pathos, if it sometimes over-flowed into gush, was
quite unquestionable in sincerity and most powerful in appeal; her
sentiment was always pure and generous; and it is most curious to see
how in the noble directness of such a piece as "Lord Walter's Wife," not
only her