time "consider" which of two courses she prefers: to bestow her flowers
on one who will accept their sweetness, or use her lightnings to kill
the spider who is weaving his films about them.


"SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS" is apparently the name of an old pedant
who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form
the subject of the poem. Some wag relates how he read it a month ago,
having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself
by dropping it through a crevice in a tree, and enjoying a picnic lunch
and a chapter of "Rabelais" on the grass close by. To-day, in a fit of
compunction, he has raked the "treatise" out; but meanwhile it has
blistered in the sun, and run all colours in the rain. Toadstools have
grown in it; and all the creatures that creep have towzed it and browsed
on it, and devoted bits of it to their different domestic use. It is
altogether a melancholy sight. So the wag thinks his victim has
sufficiently suffered, and carries it back to his book-shelf, to
"dry-rot" there in all the comfort it deserves.


DESCRIPTIVE POEMS.

Mr. Browning's poems abound in descriptive passages, and his power of
word-painting is very vivid, as well as frequently employed. But we have
here another instance of a quality diffused throughout his work, yet
scarcely ever asserting itself in a distinct form. The reason is, that
he deals with men and women first--with nature afterwards; and that the
details of a landscape have little meaning for him, except in reference
to the mental or dramatic situation of which they form a part. This is
very apparent in such lyrics or romances as: "By the Fire-side," "In a