SOURCE: "Aurora Leigh," in The National Review, Vol. 4, No. VIII, April, 1857, pp. 239-67.

In the following excerpt, Roscoe claims that Aurora Leigh shows great poetic promise, but faults its excessive length, finding the work filled with unnecessary detail and its characters vague and indistinct.

If we rightly understand her, [Elizabeth Parrett Browning] tells us that Aurora Leigh is her attempt in a poem "unscrupulously epic" to "represent the age" in which she lives. She admits that to most men their own age, being too close, is as ill-discerned, as would be the lineaments of that colossal statue into which Xerxes proposed to carve Mount Athos to the peasants "gathering brushwood in his ear." But, she says,

Poets should
 Exert a double vision; should have eyes
 To see near things as comprehensively
 As if after they took their point of sight,
 And distant things as intimately deep
 As if...