To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: "Loved Once," and "Catarina to Camoens." The former of these deals with the permanence of a worthy love; and the refrain, "Loved Once," is dismissed as being the mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning's life. "Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of _Ionica_, "I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains. "The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling. "The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences--the necessity of dissembling suffering: I have a smiling face, she said, I have a jest for all I meet, I have a garland for my head, And all its flowers are sweet-- And so you call me gay, she said. Behind no prison-grate, she said, Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile, Live captives so uncomforted As souls behind a smile. God's pity let us pray, she said. If I dared leave this smile, she said, And take a moan upon my mouth, And twine a cypress round my head, And let my tears run smooth, It were the happier way, she said. And since that must not be, she said, I fain your bitter world would leave. How calmly, calmly, smile the dead, Who do not, therefore, grieve! The yea of Heaven is yea, she said. It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter--critics may say what they will--goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.