"the evectator," Januarp 28th, 1851
MRS. BROWNING'S POEMS
IT is no easy task to read through Mrs. Browning's collected poems ; and the accomplishment of it is not likely to result in a heightened sense of her poetical abilities. Such reputation as she has gained under her maiden name of Elizabeth Barrett must have been founded on particular lines or stanzas, which. in the midst of general crudity of thought and marked faults of style, seemed to show glimpses of undeveloped power, and to give promise of better things to come, when experience should have matured her mind and practice corrected her uncertainty of execution. This promise has never been fulfilled. The defects which crowd her opening pages are equally numerous and glaring up to the close of her second volume. Representing, as these volumes do, a poetical career of many years, they show far less progress than might have been expected from the mere habit of writing: and it is quite certain that, to say nothing of the natural growth of intellect, had Mrs Browning really felt that reverence for the calling of the poet which she is constantly talking of claiming from mankind, she could not have con- tinued to send forth in her maturity first draughts of poems which, if the jingle of rhyme had not deluded her, she must have felt to be disgraceful to a schoolgirl.... She can neither write the English that befits the lofty mood of serious poetry nor the graceful mood of sportive verse, nor mould the language she does write into pleasing metrical forms ; while in what a painter would call composition she is both ineffective and unnatural. Till she has mastered these preliminary diffi- culties—the notes and scales of the music, so to speak, of her art—however much she may flatter herself, or other folks may flatter her, with the possession of the " deep poetic heart," to " poetic fame' she must abandon all pretension. The " mute Milton " perforce remains inglorious ; and even muteness is ill-exchanged for a " torrens eloquium" of solecisms in grammar, prosody and sense.
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