ual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is
better, as _Development_, with its recollections of Browning's
childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the
combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend
his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral
philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and
by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.

The general impression left by _Asolando_ is that of intellectual and
imaginative vigour. The series of _Bad Dreams_ is very striking and
original in both pictorial and passionate power. _Dubiety_ is a poem of
the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos,
proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of
passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled
_Speculative_, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine
passion of memory. _White Witchcraft_ does in truth revive the manner of
earlier volumes. The

Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn

told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it
from its own excess in the admirable _Inapprehensiveness_. The speaker
who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he
gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled
passion:--

"No, the book
Which noticed how the wall-growths wave," said she,
"Was not by Ruskin."
I said "Vernon Lee."

And in the uttered "Vernon Lee" lies a vast renunciation half comical
and wholly tragic. There are jests in the volume, and these, with the
exception of _Ponte dell' Angelo_, have the merit of brevity; they buzz
swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of
voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of
mirth. There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill.
In _Beatrice Signorini_ the story-teller does justice to the honest
jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from
the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart.
Cynicism grows genial in the jest of _The Pope and the Net_. In
_Muckle-Mouth Meg_, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a
woman's art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy.
_The Bean-Feast_ presents us with the latest transformation of the
Herakles ide