Page:Poet Lore, volume 1, 1889.djvu/23

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What forgiveness she received, what result her test attained, you may remember, or you may care to look up.

The idea is not foreign to our poet's other studies. He recurs to it in several places, notably in that ghastly piece, "The Inn Album," whose every character is mean, or weak, or vile. The villain, the old roué, the man-about-town, speaks:

Not always so, not by any means always so. In the poem called "The Worst of It," we have, if not the same, a close adjoining facette of love's injury turned to our gaze, and weak human nature could scarce sound a higher note:

Here you may take me to task, and claim that the laxity which I and the poet seem to admit for the one sex in Fifine comes with ill