Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/94

78 but the heart never throbs with hope nor thrills with terror for the poetic phantasmata whose weeping and wailing fill so many pages of the drama. There are, it is true, some magnificent passages of poetry in the work, notably Lucifer's description of the effect of the curse upon animal creation. Reminding Adam of "when the curse took us in Eden," he says—

This is a magnificent picture most grandiloquently portrayed, but it is the finest passage in the Drama. Its author appears to have felt that there was something wanting in her work, and, therefore, strives to explain away what might be objected to, and to deprecate criticism, by a lengthy Preface.

"The Vision of Poets," the second longest poem in the collection, is referred to by her as an attempt to express her view of the poet's mission, "of the self-abnegation implied in it, of the great work involved in it, of the duty and glory of what Balzac has