Sir Philip's sport with words is so graceful and ordered as to subserve the utterance of the thought: his sister's fanciful convolutions appear to be there for their own sake--certainly are there to the obscuration of the sense.

The difficulty of the poem arises in part, I believe, from corruption, but chiefly from a certain fantastic way of dealing with thought as well as word of which I shall have occasion to say more when we descend a little further.

It is, in the main, a lamentation over our Saviour's sufferings, in which the countess is largely guilty of the very feminine fault of seeking to convey the intensity of her emotions by forcing words, accumulating forms, and exaggerating descriptions.

This may indeed convince as to the presence of feeling, but cannot communicate the feeling itself.

_The_ right word will at once generate a sympathy of which all agonies of utterance will only render the willing mind more and more incapable.
The poem is likewise very diffuse--again a common fault with women of power; for indeed the faculty of compressing thought into crystalline form is one of the rarest gifts of artistic genius.