Fire-flies that suspire In short soft lapses of transported flame Across the tingling dark, while overhead The constant and inviolable stars Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls (If music had but one note and was sad, 'Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl Of bats that seem to follow in the air Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome To which we are blind; and then the nightingales Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall, (When walking in the town) and carry it So high into the bowery almond-trees We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if The golden flood of moonlight unaware Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth, And made it less substantial. It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest--the expression of a single overruling mood--the parable without the explanation--the burst of irrepressible feeling. I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced--characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are: "Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens," "Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly "Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each. The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense--whatever it be, for there is no defining it--to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there varied.