By Thomas Woolner: "My Beautiful Lady," and "Of My Lady in Death."
These compositions were, I think, nearly the first attempts which Mr.
Woolner made in verse; any earlier endeavours must have been few and
slight. The author's long poem "My Beautiful Lady," published in
1863, started from these beginnings. Coventry Patmore, on hearing the
poems in September 1849, was considerably impressed by them: "the
only defect he found" (as notified in a letter from Dante Rossetti)
"being that they were a trifle too much in earnest in the passionate
parts, and too sculpturesque generally. He means by this that each
stanza stands too much alone, and has its own ideas too much to
itself."
By Ford Madox Brown: "The Love of Beauty: Sonnet."
By John L. Tupper: "The Subject in Art." Two papers, which do not
complete the important thesis here undertaken. Mr. Tupper was, for an
artist, a man of unusually scientific mind; yet he was not, I think,
distinguished by that power of orderly and progressive exposition
which befits an argumentation. These papers exhibit a good deal of
thought, and state several truths which, even if partial truths, are
not the less deserving of attention; but the dissertation does not
produce a very clear impression, inasmuch as there is too great a
readiness to plunge, _in medias res_, checked by too great a tendency
to harking back, and re-stating some conclusion in modified terms and
with insecure corollaries.
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