The subject is clearly a worthy one but the treatment doesn't grab me, I have to admit - though the image of “some juice /Of God's distilling dropt into the core / Of all her life” is an interesting one. I'm intrigued by the fact that W. H. Auden, in his anthology of 19th-century minor British poets, doesn't find room for a single poem of Brown's - and Auden had very catholic tastes. I've often seen Brown's collected poems in second-bookshops and thought of buying them but somehow never have. Are the dialect poems more interesting, by any chance? Could you post an example?
By the way, from the dates you attribute to him, he lived to a ripe old age. Manx air must be very salubrious
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