A wide survey may be made from a fixed centre.

"Universal sympathies," Miss Barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent.

A church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ...

_as_ different as a willow tree from a church tower."[63] The fifty poems of _Men and Women_, with a few exceptions, fall into three principal groups--those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts--painting, poetry, music--and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, _A Grammarian's Funeral_; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of religions.

Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, "_De Gustibus_--," which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness.