"When do I see thee most, beloved one? When in the light the spirits of mine eyes Before thy face, their altar, solemnize The worship of that Love through thee made known? Or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone), Close-kiss'd and eloquent of still replies Thy twilight--hidden glimmering visage lies, And my soul only sees thy soul its own? O love, my love! if I no more should see Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,-- How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope, The ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" Browning's criticism of painting was evidently much influenced by the pre-Raphaelites. Their admiration for the painters who preceded Raphael, revealing as it did to them an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human life, is echoed in his "Old Pictures in Florence," which was written but six years after Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti formed their brotherhood. In poetry, they did not eschew classical subjects, as Browning did for the most part, but they treated these subjects in a romantic spirit, and so removed them from the sort of strictures that Browning made upon the perfection of Greek art. From this summary of the chief lines of literary development in the nineteenth century it will be seen, not only what a marvelous age it has been for the flowering of individualism in literary invention, but how Browning has surpassed all the other poets of note in the wideness of his departure from accepted standards, and how helpless the earlier critics were in the face of this departure, because of their dependence always upon critical shibboleths--in other words, of principles not sufficiently universal--as their means of measuring a poet's greatness. Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites won their popularity sooner among critics because they followed logically in the line of development inaugurated by the earlier poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc., whose poetry had already done some good work in breaking down the school of Dryden and Pope, though it succeeded only in erecting another standard not sufficiently universal to include Browning. The evolution of art forms, a principle so clearly understood, as we have shown by Browning, has never become a guiding one with critics, though Mr. Gosse in his "Modern English Literature" has expressed a wish that the principle of evolution might be adapted to criticism. He has evidently felt how hopeless is the task of appraising poets by the old individualistic method, which, as he says, has been in favor for at least a century. It possesses, he declares, considerable effectiveness in adroit hands, but is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory of the unalterable type, merely substituting for the one authority of the ancients an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern instances.