"and fair florid women, to whom he could indite joyous or pensive poems about their comeliness, adoring it while it lasted, regretting it when it faded. He has not the same intimate love of detail as Herrick; we miss in his poetry those realistic touches that give such wonderful freshness to the verses of the younger poet; but the habit of the two men's minds was very similar. Both were pagans, and given up to an innocent hedonism; neither was concerned with much beyond the eternal commonplaces of bodily existence, the attraction of beauty, the mutability of life, the brevity and sweetness of enjoyment."
These things are quite enough, however, to make exceedingly good poets, Mrs. Browning to the contrary, notwithstanding. "I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet," wrote the authoress of "Aurora Leigh," and we quail before the deadly earnestness of the avowal. But pleasure and leisure between them have begotten work far more complete and artistic than anything Mrs. Browning ever gave to an admiring world. Pleasure and leisure are responsible for "L' Allegro" and "Il Penseroso,"
