period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to
it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the
most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the
_Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and
Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these
youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so
innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance
for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of
Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but
inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss
Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that
everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly
by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846;
May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and
Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which
would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor,
cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into
their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose."
[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.]

Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as
yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him
into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a
yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take
an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the
_Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory,
as in the lines,

There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,
I like the lassies--Gude forgie me.