s
are at least passable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious
poems, _The Lady of La Garaye_, has a sustained respectability. To a few
fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Bronte has seemed worthy of
such high praise that only mass of work would appear to be wanting to
put her in the first rank of poetesses if not of poets. Part of this,
however, it is to be feared, is due to admiration of the supposed
freedom of thought in her celebrated "Last Lines," which either in
sincerity or bravado pronounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and
declare for a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the
world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have produced more
than a mere handful of verse, and its best things should be independent
of polemical partisanship either for or against orthodoxy. As a matter
of fact, her exquisite "Remembrance," and the slightly rhetorical but
brave and swinging epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims
than the "Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a
remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure.

The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), who wrote a
good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was not poetry, or hold
up a much-quoted passage, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," which,
like the far superior piece just referred to, is only a hymn on the side
which generally dispenses with hymns; and not a very good one, though
couched in fair Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge
in derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne Procter,
daughter of "Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied to Miss Bronte and
Miss Evans; and it must be admitted that Miss Procter never did anything
so good as "Remembrance." On the other hand, she was quite free from the
"sawdust" and heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was
akin to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, though
of a somewhat later fashion, and like those of her father, her songs,
especially the famous "Message," had the knack of suiting composers.
Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, a respectable pair, somewhat
older than Miss Procter (she was born in 1825 and died in 1864),
considerably outlived her, Miss Stedley's life lasting from 1820 to
1877, and Miss Greenwell's from 1821 to 1882. Both were invalids, and
soothed their cares with verse, the latter to the better effect, though
both