The sin by which a mother sacrificed the lives of her children to save her own was out of nature: the punishment should be outside of ordinary law.
It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning equal the horror of the mother's vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it.

Nor does he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader.
The other idyls in these two volumes are full of interest for those who care for psychological studies expressed in verse.

What the vehicle of verse does for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness in the rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected turns of thought and feeling, and especially of conscience.

Yet the poems themselves cannot be called concise.

Their subjects are not large enough, nor indeed agreeable enough, to excuse their length.