speeches, besides being frequently of immoderate length, are difficult from extreme condensation. As a playwright, Browning lacked acquaintance with theatrical conditions and verisimilitudes,1 which even such a born dramatist as Shakspere could ill have spared. It may be said of Browning that, adjectively dramatic, he is not substantively a dramatist. Urged, at first, to drama by the qualities in him which were dramatic, with time he wisely forsook the limitations of the theatre, and created for himself a fitter instrument in the dramatic monologue, the form of so many of his greatest poems. Mental debates in character, both debates and characters being extremely interesting in themselves, they are properly independent of stage and footlights.

7. Defects and Difficulties.-Browning has not an infallible metrical ear. His metres are frequently unsuited to his themes. Christmas-Eve contains doggerel rhymes that give to their great argument an alien air of burlesque, as if a seer broke off in the midst of his vision to turn wheels like a street arab. Sordello would have been ennobled and liberated by blank verse. The Prologue to Parleyings has a falsely archaic air from being a conversation arranged in stanzas, recalling some old Mystery or Miracle Play. It is an altogether anomalous metrical arrangement. In these examples, and wherever his rhymes and fancies pour out in pell-mell confusion, Browning shows a want of the selectiveness of fine art. 'Mind

1 See Song in A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.

Freaks' is an expression used by Browning which fits many passages in his own writings, where the liberty of power degenerates into licence. After the poetical line in Popularity,

“The sea has only just o'erwhispered !” 2

one shrinks from

"As if they still the water's lisp heard”

as from an unexpected, intentional rudeness. Browning's rhymes often coerce his ideas, leading him off after them into some parenthesis or congested allusion from which he re-emerges, with great cleverness, no doubt, but with cleverness that seems a blot on genius. If in some places Browning makes mere rhyme the pivot of the sense, in others he neglects rhythm. His blank verse is sometimes regardless of scansion, and not true blank verse at all. His poetry is often unpoetic by reason of its crabbedness and harshness, its lack of grace and melody, as in

“Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the mawcrammed beast?" 3

Browning perpetually makes polysyllabic superlatives, for compression's sake, as 'portentousest,' 4 'sagaciousest.' A crudity disfigures the close of Furini in

5

A string of 'possessives' is not rare, as

"The strong fierce heart's love's labour's due." 1

Browning's works are professedly not meant for a slothful or inattentive reader. Browning's intellectual processes are performed so rapidly, his turns of thought are so abrupt, that a less leaping, less impetuous brain is apt to consider the expression of such velocity incoherent. Stringent reasoning, of which there is so much in Browning, is necessarily hard to follow, and demands considerable stress of attention. But most of his verbal difficulties proceed from condensation. Sordello's sources of feeling are no more remote than Hamlet's, but the expression of them is infinitely more crumpled. As a specimen of close packing, see

"Etrurian circlets found.

alive

Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-roots,
That roof old tombs at Chiusi." 2

At first, the reader's comprehension seems often to be balancing on a tight-rope, where the slightest touch would be dangerous, and, if it comes, in the shape of an additional difficulty, does indeed precipitate the already faltering comprehension into an abyss of bewilderment. Comparative ease in reading Browning being due to familiarity with his peculiarities, the following notes may prove useful finger

1 XV. 196. Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli.
2 VIII. 1. The Ring and the Book.

posts. There is in Browning's sentences a frequent omission . . . of relatives, e.g.

"Hold her tottering ark [that or which] had tumbled else”1

of 'pronominal' adjectives, e.g.

"Doff [your] spectacles, wipe [your] pen, shut [your] book "2

of to with the infinitive, e.g.

“Mend matters peradventure God loves [to] mar?" 3 Readers have to become used to a general scarcity of prepositions, as well as of conjunctions, e.g.

66

'The gap 'twixt what is, [and] what should be."4

Pronouns sometimes precede by several lines the nouns for which they stand. Dialogues within dialogues are another source of difficulty. Readers have often to look several lines forward to help their notion of the sense by finding whether the expected note of interrogation ends the sentence. Notes of interrogation are very frequent, especially in the poems of internal debate, or where casuistry meets casuistry. Inversions are characteristic, e.g.

"Of joy were it fuller, of span because ampler?” 5

Any dozen pages of Browning contain a volume's references to history and biography, and question and research are being continually aroused. Brown1 VIII. 9. The Ring and the Book. 2 XI. 207. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 3 VIII. 221. The Ring and the Book. 4 IX. 102. The Ring and the Book.

5 XVI. 101. Apollo and the Fates.

ing loves to go off at a tangent. He follows up a branch line with as much interest as though it were his main theme. He is a 'creeper into wormholes,' and the obscurities and unknowns of the past are more to him than its great events and trampling conquerors. Yet Browning's hardest lines are no harder to subject. to grammatical analysis than many in Paradise Lost. The worst that can be said of his roughness and difficulty is as much as to say: here is pure gold, but it is uncoined and must be dug for, and certain fragments of rock are sticking to the nuggets.

There is another valid charge brought against Browning, a charge which the reputation of many a leading poet has encountered and survived, that of inequality of poetic inspiration. Large portions of Browning's works are, from the poetic stand-point, comparatively sterile. Good sense and pungency are rarely, if ever, lacking to a single line, but these are the virtues of the prosaist, not the wonder-work of emotion and word without which great poetry is not. Much of La Saisiaz is too polemical for poetry. Those 'five facts' and 'six facts' (XIV. 193, 194), are not poetry, but 'divinity.' The Pope's meditation in The Ring and the Book is poetically finer, partly because the theology is subordinated to the character of the Pope, and consequently the presentment is more imaginative. Mere serpentinings of thought and hair-splittings cannot of themselves reach that incandescent point at which poetry is struck from the anvil. Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau's