Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1 December 1849: 'We have had the sight of Clough & Burbidge, at last. Clough has more thought, Burbidge more music .. but I am disappointed in the book as a whole. What I like infinitely better, is Clough's "Bothie of Topernafuosich" a "long-vacation pastoral" written in loose & more-than-need-be unmusical hexameters, but full of vigour & freshness, & with whole passages & indeed whole scenes of great beauty & eloquence. It seems to have been written before the other poems [...] Oh, it strikes both Robert & me as being worth twenty of the other little book, with its fragmentary, dislocated, inartistic character. Arnold's volume has two good poems in it .. "The Sick King of Bokhara" [sic] & "The deserted Merman" [sic]. I liked them both -- But none of these writers are [italics]artists[end italics] whatever they may be in future days.'