Extremely interesting—­and for myself I cannot find “The Two Poets of Croisic” to be anything more than “interesting”—­it is as a poem distinctly inferior to “La Saisiaz.”  Although detached lines are often far from truly indicative of the real poetic status of a long poem, where proportion and harmony are of more importance than casual exfoliations of beauty, yet to a certain extent they do serve as musical keys that give the fundamental tone.  One certainly would have to search in vain to find in the Croisic poem such lines as

     “Five short days, scarce enough to
      Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain ash.”

Or these of Mont Blanc, seen at sunset, towering over icy pinnacles and teeth-like peaks,

    “Blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green,
     Horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne.”

Or, again, this of the sun swinging himself above the dark shoulder of Jura—­

     “Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to
          gold.”

Or, finally, this sounding verse—­

     “Past the city’s congregated peace of homes and pomp of spires.”

The other poems later than “The Ring and the Book” are, broadly speaking, of two kinds.  On the one side may be ranged the groups which really cohere with “Men and Women.”  These are “The Inn Album,” the miscellaneous poems of the “Pacchiarotto” volume, the “Dramatic Idyls,” some of “Jocoseria,” and some of “Asolando.”  “Ferishtah’s Fancies” and “Parleyings” are not, collectively, dramatic poems, but poems of illuminative insight guided by a dramatic imagination.[23] They, and the classical poems and translations (renderings, rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that nearness of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful “Balaustion’s Adventure,” “Aristophanes’ Apology,” and “The Agamemnon of Aeschylus,” and the third group, which comprises “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,” “Red Cotton Nightcap Country,” and “Fifine at the Fair”—­these three groups are of the second kind.

[Footnote 23:  In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote:—­“I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah’s Fancies] will make its sense clear enough.  Above all, pray allow for the Poet’s inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions.  There was no such person as Ferishtah—­the stories are all inventions. ...  The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality put forth as discoveries of their own.”]