Reviews

E630521A.  Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (New York).

The New-York Times, 21 May 1863, p. 2.

Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369.

The papers comprised in this volume appeared in the Athenæum, twenty years ago, and are now collected to complete the uniform edition of the writer’s works. So rare is the combination of scholar and poet in one person, in a degree equal to that displayed by Mrs. Browning, that the subject of the first essay is still as new to the literary world as when it was originally written. The Greek Christian poets are unknown to the general reader—

Within that circle none has walked but she.

There is much loving and reverent criticism, many passages of ornate and almost cumbrously rich eloquence in the Essay, but the writers are too entirely out of all the scope of our ordinary acquaintance to excite much sympathy. The paper on the Poets of England will be more generally read. It is a rapid and glowing characterization of all the great names of our poetical literature from Chaucer to Wordsworth. The critical judgments evince much of that inner sense, that divine faculty, which makes a poet the best appreciator of poetry, and great power of expression, which stamps out unmistakably the writer’s meaning in a few “words of power.” We regret to learn by the prefatory note that nothing more is to be emparted from the papers of our poetess, too early lost. She has left, however, enough to fix her place among the intellectual leaders of her sex.

Reviewed:

Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1863.

___________________