modern writers' fault." Will she, or any one else tell us the
meaning of the second line in this stanza? Or, will she maintain that it
has any meaning at all? Lady Geraldine's possessions are described--

"She has halls and she has castles, and the resonant steam-eagles
_Follow far on the directing of her floating dove-like hand_--
With a thund'rous vapour trailing, underneath the starry vigils,
So to mark upon the blasted heaven, the measure of her land."

We thought that steam-coaches generally followed the directing of no
hand except the "stoker's;" but _it_ certainly is always much liker a
raven than a dove. "Eagles and vigils" is not admissible as a rhyme;
neither is "branch and grange." Miss Barrett says of the Lady Geraldine
that she had "such a gracious coldness" that her lovers "could not
_press their futures_ on the present of her courtesy." Is that human
speech? One other objection and our carpings shall be dumb. Miss
Barrett, in our opinion, has selected a very bad, dislocated, and
unmelodious metre for the story of Lady Geraldine's courtship. The poem
reads very awkwardly in consequence of the rhymes falling together in
the alternate lines and not in couplets. Will Miss Barrett have the
goodness to favour the public with the sequel of this poem? We should
like to know how the match between the peasant's son and the peer's
daughter was found to answer.

Those among our readers who may have attended principally to the
selections which we made from these volumes before we animadverted on
the "Drama of Exile," may perhaps be of opinion that we have treated
Miss Barrett with undue severity, and have not done justice to the
vigour and rare originality of her powers; while others, who may have
attended chiefly to the blemishes of style and execution which we have
thought it our duty to point out in our later quotations, may possibly
think that we have ranked her higher than she deserves. We trust that
those who have carefully perused both the favourable and unfavourable
extracts, will give us credit for having steered a middle course,
without either running ourselves aground on the shoals of detraction, or
oversetting the ship by carrying too much sail in favour of our
authoress. And although they may have seen that our hand was sometimes
unsteady at the helm, we trust that it has always been when we felt
apprehensive that the current of criticism was bearing us too strongly
towards the former o