The voice of the poet of _Paracelsus_ and of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes earth in his _Rephan_, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is better, as _Development_, with its recollections of Browning's childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain. The general impression left by _Asolando_ is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. The series of _Bad Dreams_ is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. _Dubiety_ is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled _Speculative_, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. _White Witchcraft_ does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. The Infinite passion and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable _Inapprehensiveness_. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble rôle in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:-- "No, the book Which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she, "Was not by Ruskin." I said "Vernon Lee."