Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/48

xxxvi Is it dreary comfort that it is "a book of surface pictures the worse done," as Aurora says again, "for being not ill done?" Then take the spirit and dash animating the boldness, the skill in the tool's true play so early manifest in the little aping hand busied in shaping out the pygmy epic, and the dreary comfort has in it a heart of cheer. It is clear, none the less, that in metrical form, poetic diction, material, and structure there is not in it that "true expression of a mind" without which, our poet herself said, she disesteemed "everything bearing the shape of a book." In it she "went away among the buried ages," and laid the pulses of her heart beneath the touch of a borrowed minstrelsy.

Disesteem of it on this account, however, implies the trying of this poet in her teens by a higher standard than that by which many a mature one is praised. It is the standard of originality in genius which "The Battle of Marathon" does not satisfy. It is the vigor and success of the workmanship which leads the attentive reader to look at the next production for a plainer indication of the individuality behind those qualities.

The "Essay on Mind" is even more thoroughly book-begotten. It is "pedantic and in some things pert," says the author's best critic—the author herself—in a letter to Robert Browning, "such as, to do myself justice, I was not in my whole life."

It follows Pope's lead again in theme and manner both, but it carries in its catholic embrace a library far beyond his easy-going classic ruts. The comprehensive grasp gives a sense of thorough-going power; the incisive criticisms convey conviction not only of alert intelligence but of rapidly unfolding independence. It is not surprising, therefore, that towards the close