Mrs. Browning is on the whole happiest as a sonnet-writer. The sonnet form restrained that tendency to diffuseness which was her besetting sin, and so the fetters proved, as they so often do, to be the means whereby she moved more freely. Her purpose however frequently required the use of other forms. Thus, she sometimes aimed at romantic effects. She did so with no great success in _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_, a kind of _Lord of Burleigh_ from the other side, spoilt by excessive length. _The Rhyme of the Duchess May_ is much better. _The Romaunt of Margret_ altogether fails to catch the weird effect aimed at, while _The Lay of the Brown Rosary_ succeeds. But apart from the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ and some of the miscellaneous sonnets, her truest note is pathos. _Bertha in the Lane_, a simple story, sentimental but not weak, is an example of one aspect of it; _A Child's Grave_, already mentioned, of another; and, perhaps highest of all, _The Cry of the Children_ of a third. Mrs. Browning had a dangerous facility of composition, and much that she wrote is poor. Few poets gain more by selection. A small volume of pieces judiciously chosen would convince the reader that he was listening to the voice of a true and even a great poet; but his sense of this is lost in the flatness and weariness of the five superfluous volumes. [Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883).] There remains one very remarkable poet, Edward FitzGerald, whom it is difficult to place. Formally, he ought to be classed merely as an interpreter of other men's thoughts; but in reality he is an original poet of no mean rank, and his friendship with Tennyson, together with the strong intellectual quality of his principal work, gives him an affinity to the group now under discussion. His first noteworthy publication was a fine prose dialogue, _Euphranor_ (1851), but his principal work was the translation of poetry. He translated six dramas of Calderon (1853), the _Rubáiyát_ of Omar Khayyám (1859), _Salámán and Absál_ (1856), and the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, which, having been first privately printed, was published anonymously in 1876. Probably no other translator ever showed equal originality. As a rule, the reader of a version of poetry, even if he be unacquainted with the original, feels a sense of loss. Pope's Homer is 'a pretty poem;' but not only is it not Homer, we feel that it is not worthy of the great reputation of Homer; and there is not one of the numerous versions of _Faust_ but falls far short of the force and suggestiveness of the original. It is not so with FitzGerald. To some extent in the case of all his poems, but eminently in the case of the _Rubáiyát_, we feel that we are in the presence of a man of native power; and some Persian scholars hold that in this instance the order of merit is reversed, and that FitzGerald is greater than Omar.