SOURCE: "Mrs. Browning's Poems" in North British Review, Vol. XXVI, No. LII, November 1856—February 1857, pp. 443-62.

In the following excerpt, Patmore gives a mixed review of Aurora Leigh, summarizing the "novel in verse" and assessing the poetic imagery as it advances Browning's opinions on life and art.

Aurora Leigh is the latest, and Mrs. Browning tells us, in the dedication, "the most mature" of her works; the one into which her "highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." It was not well judged to prejudice the reader, at the very outset, with the inevitable doubt, "Is a poem the right place for 'highest convictions upon Life and Art?'" This poem is two thousand lines longer than "Paradise Lost." We do not know how to describe it better than by saying that it is a novel in verse,—a novel of the modern didactic species, written chiefly...