These three poems are soliloquies; Dis aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours, a poem closely akin in sentiment and style, recurs to the more frequent and perhaps preferable manner of speech to an imagined listener.  It is written in that favourite stanza of five lines, on which Browning has played so many variations:  here, perhaps, in the internal rhyme so oddly placed, the newest and most ingenious of all.  The sentiment and situation are the exact complement or contrast of those expressed in By the Fireside.  There, fate and nature have brought to a crisis the latent love of two persons:  the opportunity is seized, and the crown of life obtained.  Here, in circumstances singularly similar, the vital moment is let slip, the tide is not taken at the turn.  And ten years afterwards, when the famous poet and the girl whom he all but let himself love, meet in a Paris drawing-room, and one of them tells the old tale over for the instruction of both, she can point out, with bitter earnestness and irony (and a perfect little touch of feminine nature) his fatal mistake.

Youth and Art is a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat similar moral.  It has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and ballad-like simplicity.  Still more perfect a poem, still more subtle, still more Heinesque, if it were not better than Heine, is the little piece called Confessions.  The pathetic, humorous, rambling snatch of final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful irony, to the attendant clergyman, has a sort of grim ecstasy, and the end is one of the most triumphant things in this kind of poetry.

      “CONFESSIONS.

      I.

      What is he buzzing in my ears? 
        ’Now that I come to die. 
      Do I view the world as a vale of tears?’
        Ah, reverend sir, not I!

      II.

      What I viewed there once, what I view again
        Where the physic bottles stand
      On the table’s edge,—­is a suburb lane,
        With a wall to my bedside hand.

      III.

      That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
        From a house you could descry
      O’er the garden wall; is the curtain blue
        Or green to a healthy eye?

      IV.

      To mine, it serves for the old June weather
        Blue above lane and wall;
      And that farthest bottle labelled ‘Ether’
        Is the house o’er-topping all.

      V.

      At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper,
        There watched for me, one June,
      A girl:  I know, sir, it’s improper,
        My poor mind’s out of tune.

      VI.

      Only, there was a way ... you crept
        Close by the side, to dodge
      Eyes in the house, two eyes except: 
        They styled their house ‘The Lodge.’

      VII.