little faults of _sensiblerie_, but her errors of diction, are
burnt and smelted out by the fire of the expressed impression. Her
verse-pictures--for instance those in the "Vision of Poets"--vie, in
beauty if not in clearness of composition and definition, with
Tennyson's own. The Romantic pieces already glanced at, obnoxious and
obvious as are their defects, unite the pathos and the picturesqueness
just assigned to her in a most remarkable manner. And when, especially
in the Sonnet, she consented to undergo the limitations of a form which
almost automatically restrained her voluble facility, the effect was
often simply of the first order. The exquisite "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" (which are not from the Portuguese, and are understood to
have been addressed to Mr. Browning), especially that glorious one
beginning--

If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only--

(which is not far below Shakespeare's or the great thing which was
published as Drayton's), rank with the noblest efforts of the 16th-17th
century in this exquisite form. And if this, instead of having to
conform to the requirements of a connected history, were a separate
study of Mrs. Browning, it would be necessary to mention scores of
separate pieces full of varied beauty.

But in no poet, perhaps not even in Byron, are such great beauties
associated with such astonishing defects as in Mrs. Browning; some of
these defects being so disgusting as well as so strange that it requires
not a little critical detachment to put her, on the whole, as high as
she deserves to be put. Like almost all women who have written, she was
extremely deficient in self-criticism, and positively pampered and
abused her natural tendency towards fluent volubility. There is hardly
one of the pieces named above, outside the sonnets, with the exception
certainly of "Lord Walter's Wife" and possibly of "Cowper's Grave,"
which would not be immensely improved by compression and curtailment,
"The Rhyme of the Duchess May" being a special example. In other pieces
not yet specified, such as "The Romaunt of Margret," "Bianca among the
Nightingales," and especially "The Poet's Vow," the same defect is
painfully felt. That the poetess frequently, and especially in her later
poetical work, touches subjects which she does not very well comprehend,
and which are very doubtfully suited for poetical treatment at all, is a
less important because a more controvers