he nevertheless possessed one important dramatic faculty—­the power of creating detached scenes of interest and beauty.  The scene in which the half-crazed Leonora imagines to herself, beside the couch on which her dead daughter lies, that the child is really living after all, is dramatic in the highest sense of the word; the situation, with all its capabilities of pathetic irony, is conceived and developed with consummate art and absolute restraint.  Leonora’s speech ends thus: 

          ...  Speak, I pray thee, Floribel,
    Speak to thy mother; do but whisper ‘aye’;
    Well, well, I will not press her; I am sure
    She has the welcome news of some good fortune,
    And hoards the telling till her father comes;
    ...  Ah!  She half laughed.  I’ve guessed it then;
    Come tell me, I’ll be secret.  Nay, if you mock me,
    I must be very angry till you speak. 
    Now this is silly; some of these young boys
    Have dressed the cushions with her clothes in sport. 
    ’Tis very like her.  I could make this image
    Act all her greetings; she shall bow her head: 
    ‘Good-morrow, mother’; and her smiling face
    Falls on my neck.—­Oh, heaven, ’tis she indeed! 
    I know it all—­don’t tell me.

The last seven words are a summary of anguish, horror, and despair, such as Webster himself might have been proud to write.

The Brides’ Tragedy was well received by critics; and a laudatory notice of Beddoes in the Edinburgh, written by Bryan Waller Procter—­better known then than now under his pseudonym of Barry Cornwall—­led to a lasting friendship between the two poets.  The connection had an important result, for it was through Procter that Beddoes became acquainted with the most intimate of all his friends—­Thomas Forbes Kelsall, then a young lawyer at Southampton.  In the summer of 1823 Beddoes stayed at Southampton for several months, and, while ostensibly studying for his Oxford degree, gave up most of his time to conversations with Kelsall and to dramatic composition.  It was a culminating point in his life:  one of those moments which come, even to the most fortunate, once and once only—­when youth, and hope, and the high exuberance of genius combine with circumstance and opportunity to crown the marvellous hour.  The spade-work of The Brides’ Tragedy had been accomplished; the seed had been sown; and now the harvest was beginning.  Beddoes, ‘with the delicious sense,’ as Kelsall wrote long afterwards, ‘of the laurel freshly twined around his head,’ poured out, in these Southampton evenings, an eager stream of song.  ’His poetic composition,’ says his friend, ’was then exceedingly facile:  more than once or twice has he taken home with him at night some unfinished act of a drama, in which the editor [Kelsall] had found much to admire, and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor.  Of several of these very striking fragments, large and grand in their aspect as they each started into form,