She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like _Sibrandus_ or _The Spanish Cloister_, which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly fragile woman is too rarely credited.

_Pippa Passes_ she could find in her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other works--a preference in which he agreed.

Few more brilliant appreciations of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845 and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" looking out on the garden at New Cross.

But she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also.

"I do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room.