Among these more gracious idyls, one of singular rough power tells the ghastly tale of the mother who gave up her little children to the wolves to save herself.  Browning liked this poem, and the end he added to the story—­how the carpenter, Ivan, when the poor frightened woman confessed, lifted his axe and cut off her head; how he knew that he did right, and was held to have done right by the village and its pope.  The sin by which a mother sacrificed the lives of her children to save her own was out of nature:  the punishment should be outside of ordinary law.  It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning equal the horror of the mother’s vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it.  Nor does he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader.

The other idyls in these two volumes are full of interest for those who care for psychological studies expressed in verse.  What the vehicle of verse does for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness in the rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected turns of thought and feeling, and especially of conscience.  Yet the poems themselves cannot be called concise.  Their subjects are not large enough, nor indeed agreeable enough, to excuse their length.  Goethe would have put them into a short lyrical form.  It is impossible not to regret, as we read them, the Browning of the Dramatic Lyrics.  Moreover, some of them are needlessly ugly. Halbert and Hob—­and in Jocoseria—­Donald, are hateful subjects, and their treatment does not redeem them; unlike the treatment of Ivan Ivanovitch which does lift the pain of the story into the high realms of pity and justice.  Death, swift death, was not only the right judgment, but also the most pitiful.  Had the mother lived, an hour’s memory would have been intolerable torture.  Nevertheless, if Browning, in his desire to represent the whole of humanity, chose to treat these lower forms of human nature, I suppose we must accept them as an integral part of his work; and, at least, there can be no doubt of their ability, and of the brilliancy of their psychological surprises. Ned Bratts is a monument of cleverness, as well as of fine characterisation of a momentary outburst of conscience in a man who had none before; and who would have lost it in an hour, had he not been hanged on the spot.  The quick, agile, unpremeditated turns of wit in this poem, as in some of the others, are admirably easy, and happily expressed.  Indeed, in these later poems of character and event, ingenuity or nimbleness of intellect is the chief element, and it is accompanied by a facile power which is sometimes rude, often careless, always inventive, fully fantastical, and rarely imaginative in the highest sense of the word.  Moreover, as was not the case of old, they have, beyond the story, a direct teaching aim, which, while it lowers them as art, is very agreeable to the ethical psychologist.