in sentiment and style, recurs to the
more frequent and perhaps preferable manner of speech to an imagined
listener. It is written in that favourite stanza of five lines, on which
Browning has played so many variations: here, perhaps, in the internal
rhyme so oddly placed, the newest and most ingenious of all. The
sentiment and situation are the exact complement or contrast of those
expressed in _By the Fireside_. There, fate and nature have brought to a
crisis the latent love of two persons: the opportunity is seized, and
the crown of life obtained. Here, in circumstances singularly similar,
the vital moment is let slip, the tide is _not_ taken at the turn. And
ten years afterwards, when the famous poet and the girl whom he all but
let himself love, meet in a Paris drawing-room, and one of them tells
the old tale over for the instruction of both, she can point out, with
bitter earnestness and irony (and a perfect little touch of feminine
nature) his fatal mistake.

_Youth and Art_ is a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat
similar moral. It has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and
ballad-like simplicity. Still more perfect a poem, still more subtle,
still more Heinesque, if it were not better than Heine, is the little
piece called _Confessions_. The pathetic, humorous, rambling snatch of
final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful irony, to the
attendant clergyman, has a sort of grim ecstasy, and the end is one of
the most triumphant things in this kind of poetry.

"CONFESSIONS.

I.

What is he buzzing in my ears?
'Now that I come to die.
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
Ah, reverend sir, not I!

II.

What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.

III.

That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden wall; is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?

IV.

To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled 'Ether'
Is the house o'er-topping all.

V.

At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune.