As we have now seen him engaged in the duty of criticising others, it will not be out of place to cite in this connection, though they belong to other periods, some criticisms of himself.  As far back as 1853, he had observed, with characteristic lucidity, that the great fault of his earlier poems was “the absence of charm.”  “Charm” was indeed the element in which they were deficient; but, as years advanced, charm was superadded to thought and feeling.  In 1867, he said in a letter to his friend F.T.  Palgrave:  “Saint Beuve has written to me with great interest about the Obermann poem, which he is getting translated.  Swinburne fairly took my breath away.  I must say the general public praise me in the dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton, James Montgomery, and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other hand—­Browning, Swinburne, Lytton—­praise me as the general public praises its favourites.  This is a curious reversal of the usual order of things.  Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own unpopularity and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be astonished at Swinburne’s praising me, and to think it an act of generosity.  Also he picks passages which I myself should have picked, and which I have not seen other people pick.”

In 1869, when the first Collected Edition of his poems was in the press, he wrote to Palgrave, who had suggested some alterations, this estimate of his own merits and defects,—­

“I am really very much obliged to you for your letter.  I think the printing has made too much progress to allow of dealing with any of the long things now; I have left ‘Merope’ aside entirely, but the rest I have reprinted.  In a succeeding edition, however, I am not at all sure that I shall not leave out the second part of the ‘Church of Brou.’  With regard to the others, I think I shall let them stand—­but often for other reasons than because of their intrinsic merit.  For instance, I agree that in the ‘Sick King in Bokhara’ there is a flatness in parts; but then it was the first thing of mine dear old Clough thoroughly liked.  Against ‘Tristram,’ too, many objections may fairly be urged; but then the subject is a very popular one, and many people will tell you they like it best of anything I have written.  All this has to be taken into account.  ‘Balder’ perhaps no one cares much for except myself; but I have always thought, though very likely I am wrong, that it has not had justice done to it; I consider that it has a natural propriety of diction and rhythm which is what we all prize so much in Virgil, and which is not common in English poetry.  For instance, Tennyson has in the Idylls something dainty and tourmente which excludes this natural propriety; and I have myself in ‘Sohrab’ something, not dainty, but tourmente and Miltonically ampoulle, which excludes it....  We have enough Scandinavianism in our nature and history to