“Prize Poems.”

Dining one day last year at Trinity College, Cambridge, with that enthusiastic young Browning scholar, Mr. E. H. Blakeney (himself a poet of great promise), we discu ed the question of the comparative popularity of Browning’s shorter poems, and it was decided that he should ask the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette to put it to the vote in his columns. A prize was offered for the list of fifty poems which came nearest to the standard list obtained by collating the lists of all the competitors. The fifty “prize poems” selected by the plébiscite as Browning’s best, arranged in the order of the votes they severally received, were the following:— | 1. | How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. | | 2. | Evelyn Hope. | | 3. | Abt Vogler. Saul. | | 5. | Rabbi Ben Ezra. | | 6. | The Lost Leader. | | 7. | The Pied Piper of Hamelin. | | 8. | Pro spice. | | 9. | Hervé Riel. | | 10. | Andrea del Sarto. | | 11. | The Last Ride Together. | | 12. | A Grammarian’s Funeral. | | 13. | Home Thoughts from Abroad. | | 14. | The Boy and the Angel. | | 15. | Epilogue to A solan do. | | 16. | By the Fireside. Fra Lippo Lippi. | | 18. | Caliban upon Setebos. | | 19. | One Word More. | | 20. | Any Wife to Any Husband. | | 21. | An Epistle of Karshish. | | 22. | Incident of the French Camp. | | 23. | The Guardian Angel. | | 24. | Love among the Ruins. | | 25. | Apparent Failure. A Forgivene . | | 27. | A Death in the Desert. A Woman’s Last Word. | | 29. | Count Gismond. | | 30. | In a Gondola. | | 31. | The Patriot. | | 32. | A Toccata of Galuppi’s. | | 33. | My Last Duche . | | 34. | The Worst of It. Truth and Art. | | 36. | The Statue and the Bust. | | 37. | The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church. | | 38. | Cristina. | | 39. | Clive. | | 40. | Confe ions. | | 41. | Two in the Campagna. | | 42. | Summum Bonum. | | 43. | After. | | 44. | Holy Cro Day. The Italian in England. | | 46. | Up at a Villa. | | 47. | Before. | | 48. | James Lee’s Wife. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. | | 50. | Old Pictures in Florence. |