Page:Books and men.djvu/148

 138 peremptorily commanded to recognize a true poet. Miss Mary Robinson, who, in common with most female biographers, is an enthusiast rather than a critic, never wearies of praising the "splendid and vigorous movement" of Emily Brontë's poems, "with their surplus imagination, their sweeping impressiveness, their instinctive music and irregular rightness of form." On the other hand, Mr. Gosse, while acknowledging in them a very high order of merit, laments that such burning thoughts should be "concealed for the most part in the tame and ambling measures dedicated to female verse by the practice of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon." So far, indeed, from recognizing the "vigorous movement" and "irregular rightness of form" which Miss Robinson so much admires, he describes A Death Scene, one of the finest in point of conception, as "clothed in a measure that is like the livery of a charitable institution." "There's allays two 'pinions," says Mr. Macey, in Silas Marner; but we cannot help sometimes wishing, in the cause of perspicuity, that they were not so radically different.