Miss Robinson’s critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way.  The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it necessary to talk of ‘blawing’ and ‘snawing.’  As for the garden play, Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike snatches of song that break in here and there—­as the singing does in Pippa Passes—­form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss Robinson’s real power lies.  Not a poet in the true creative sense, she is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and richer song.  When she essays such themes, she certainly fails.  Her instrument is the reed, not the lyre.  Only those should sing of Death whose song is stronger than Death is.

* * * * *

The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely life.  They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was young—­’Philip, my King,’ as she called him in the pretty poem of that name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora was considered a very romantic name.

   Leonora, Leonora,
   How the word rolls—­Leonora. 
   Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,
   Marching o’er the metric ground,
   With a tawny tread sublime. 
   So your name moves, Leonora,
   Down my desert rhyme.

Mrs. Craik’s best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her true medium of expression.  But some of the rhymed poems have considerable merit.  These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik’s style: 

   A SKETCH

   Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
   In whose large store the very meanest coin
   Would out-buy my whole wealth?  Yet here thou comest
   Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
   Uprising, who for pity cannot sleep,
   But goes forth to the stranger at her gate—­
   The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate—­
   And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.