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 controversial objection; and the merits of such a book as _Aurora Leigh_ depend so much upon the arguing out of the general question whether what is practically a modern novel has any business to be written in verse, that they perhaps can receive no adequate treatment here. But as to the fatal fluency of Mrs. Browning there can be no question before any tribunal which knows its own jurisdiction and its own code. And that fluency extends to more than length. The vocabulary is wilfully and tastelessly unusual,--"abele" rhymed "abeel" for "poplar"; American forms such as "human" for "humanity" and "weaken" for a neuter verb; fustianish words like "reboant"; awkward suggestions of phrase, such as "droppings of warm tears."