such roots is marvellous. It is the Body blossoming into Soul. Such I conceive is Robert Browning and his work.-STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1871, Robert Browning, Appleton's Journal, vol. 6.

He

Robert Browning is a poet who does not understand that the drama is a poetical form which does not suit his genius. possesses a great mind and much imagination, but he has no idea of dramatic technicalities. He is a philosophical poet; but on the stage philosophy must be translated into action, and that is what Browning has not been able to do. His poetry much resembles Shelley's, but he has never succeeded, as the latter has in the "Cenci," in replacing his visionary ideas by plastic forms. SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature, tr. M. V., p. 268.

If there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraph wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it lives along the animated line of its labour, springs from thread to thread and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination.-SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1875, George Chapman, a Critical Essay.

It was Procter who first in my hearing, twenty-five years ago, put such an estimate on the poetry of Robert Browning that I could not delay any longer to make acquaintance with his writings. I remember to have been startled at hearing the man who in his day had known so many poets declare that Browning was the peer of any one who had written in this century, and that, on the whole, his genius had not been excelled in his (Procter's) time. "Mind what I say," insisted Procter: "Browning

will make an enduring name, and give another supreme great poet to England.". FIELDS, JAMES T., 1875, "Barry Cornwall" and some of his Friends, Harper's Magazine, vol. 51, p. 782.

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But

While Browning's earlier poems are in the dramatic form, his own personality is manifest in the speech and movement of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused, as if by metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself. Bass, treble, or recitative, whether in pleading, invective, or banter, the voice still is there. while his characters have a common manner and diction, we become so wonted to the latter that it seems like a new dialect which we have mastered for the sake of its literature. This feeling is acquired after some acquaintance with his poems, and not upon a first or casual reading of them.. His style is that of a man caught in a morass of ideas through which he has to travel,wearily floundering, grasping here and there, and often sinking deeper until there seems no prospect of getting through.. One whose verse is a metrical paradox. I have called him the most original and the most unequal of living poets; he continually descends to a prosaic level, but at times is elevated to the Laureate's highest flights.STEDMAN, EDMUND CLARENCE, 1875-87, Victorian Poets, pp. 296, 301, 338.

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He has shown us, in his earlier works, that he can write with a noble simplicity and clearness. Let us, however, grant all the scope demanded by his manner of conceiving and representing characters, all the freedom necessary to an ideal of the dramatic art so severe that it scorns introduction, explanation, or expected sequence;still, with the exercise of the friendliest tolerance, we cannot excuse the reckless disregard of all true poetic art in his later works. At the line where the ethical element enters into the best composition of an author's nature, he seems to fail us. We find personal whim set above impersonal laws of beauty; the defiance of self-assertion in place of loving obedience to an ideal beyond and above self; and even petulant exaggeration of faults, simply because others. have detected and properly condemned them.-TAYLOR, BAYARD, 1876, Three Old and Three New Poets, The International Review, vol. 3, p. 403.

Nothing is straight, and simple, and easy with that poet. Everything is doubled, and twisted, and knotted at both ends, and the mere mechanical effort of the mind, so to speak, in getting at his meaning, is very great.-BURROUGHS, JOHN, 1876, What Makes the Poet, The Galaxy, vol. 22, p. 56.

How to make an Imitation of Mr. Browning. Take rather a coarse view of things in general. In the midst of this place a man and a woman, her and her ankles, tastefully arranged on a slice of Italy, or the country about Pornic. Cut an opening across the breast of each, until the soul becomes visible, but be very careful that none of the body be lost during the operation. Pour into each breast as much as it will hold of the new strong wine of love; and, for fear they should take cold by exposure, cover them quickly up with a quantity of obscure classical quotations, a few familiar allusions to an unknown period of history, and a half destroyed fresco by an early master, varied every now and then with a reference to the fugues or toccatas of a quite-forgotten composer. If the poem be still intelligible, take a pen and remove carefully all the necessary particles.-MALLOCK, W. H., 1878, Every Man his own Poet, or the Inspired Singer's Recipe Book, p. 20.

Browning is the very reverse of Shelley in this respect; both have written one fine play and several fine dramatic compositions; but throughout Shelley's poetry the dramatic spirit is deficient, while in Browning's it reveals itself so powerfully that one wonders how he has escaped writing many good plays besides the "Blot in the "Scutcheon" and that fine fragmentary succession of scenes, "Pippa Passes."-KEMBLE, FRANCES ANN, 1879, Records of a Girlhood, p. 384.

In strength and depth of passion and pathos, in wild humor, in emotion of every kind, Mr. Browning is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The Poet Laureate is the completer man. Mr. Tennyson is beyond doubt the most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria's time. No one else has the same combination of melody, beauty of description, culture and intellectual power. He has sweetness and strength in exquisite combination. If a just balance of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then undoubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest English poet of our time. The reader's estimate of Browning

and Tennyson will probably be decided by his predilection for the higher effort or for the more perfect art. Browning's is surely the higher aim in poetic art; but of the art which he essays Tennyson is by far the completer master.-MCCARTHY, JUSTIN, 1879, A History of Our Own Times from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the Berlin Congress, ch. xxix.

On Mr. Browning's new volume, ["Dramatic Idyls"] criticism can find little to remark. Since "The Ring and the Book," the poet's style and spirit have crystallized themselves, and every fresh installment can only give us a little more of the well-known matter and manner. We have all made up our minds upon the subject beforehand, and are hardly likely to form any new opinion at this time of day. Those who admire Mr. Browning will admire the present idyls; those who find him incomprehensible will find the latest addition to his incomprehensibles more incomprehensible than ever. Probably no poem which he has ever written will prove a sorer stumbling-block to bewildered spellers-out of his meaning than the all but inarticulate story of "Ned Bratts."-ALLEN, GRANT, 1879, Some New Books, Fortnightly Review, vol. 32, p. 149.

In knowledge of many things he is necessarily superior to Shakespeare; as being the all-receptive child of the century of science and travel. In carefulness of construction, and especially in the genius of constructing drama, he claims not comparison with Shakespeare. But his truly Shakespearian genius pre-eminently shines in his power to throw his whole intellect and sympathies into the most diverse individualities; to think and feel as one of them would, although undoubtedly glorified by Browning's genius within. Goethe's canon is; "The Poet should seize the particular, and he should, if there be anything sound, thus represent the universal." In this Browning is infallible: but he is, as Shakespeare often is, perceptible through the visor of his assumed individuality. Notice the great number of persons, the wide range of characters and specialities, through which he speaks.-KIRKMAN, REV. J., 1881, Introductory Address to the Browning Society, Browning Studies, ed. Berdoe, p. 2.

Robert Browning in his "Paracelsus" showed the failure of one who desired at a bound to reach the far ideal; in "Sordello, showed the poet before Dante, seeking his

true place in life, and finding it only when he became leader of men in the real battle of life, and poet all the more.-MORLEY, HENRY, 1881, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria.

Browning's prose and poetry are alike in this. He writes like a man who has a simple thought and a simple end in view, but every step he takes suggests some associated thought and he is perpetually sweeping these side thoughts into the path he is making. The main thought is so clear to him, and the end in view so distinct, that he is hardly aware how much he confuses his expression by catching at everything on one side and the other as he goes.-SCUDDER, HORACE E., 1882, Browning as an Interpreter of Browning, Literary World, vol. 13, p. 78.

It is this love of mankind, even in its meanest and most degraded forms, that accounts for the almost entire absence of bitterness and cynicism in Mr. Browning's works. Blame and rebuke he can, and that in no measured terms; but sneer he cannot. Sin and suffering are serious things to him, and he is lovingly tender to weakness. He knows nothing of the craving for telling paradoxes, and stinging hits, which besets the inferior writers who make pertness and smartness supply their want of finer qualities. Humour he possesses in no small degree, but he employs it on legitimate subjects. Ruined lives are grievous to him, sore hearts are sacred, pettiness and vanity are deplorable; he has no wish to transfix them on pins' points, and hold them up to the world's ridicule.-LEWIS, MARY A., 1882, Some Thoughts on Browning, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 46, p. 210.

These early poems owe much of their fascination to a trait which is characteristic of all Browning's works and rather puzzling at first sight, namely, that preference for giving any one's thoughts and feelings rather than his own which makes him one of the least subjective poets of the century. He almost always begins by setting the reader face to face with some total stranger, but previous to 1861 it is sure to be some one well worth being known. . . . His earliest works will always be most read; but even what seems only a tangled mass of briars will be found to have its rose-buds, and to form the hedge around a fairy palace where beauty slumbers, ready to bless him who dares achieve the entrance.-HOL

LAND, FREDERIC MAY, 1882, Browning Before and After 1861, Literary World, vol. 13, p. 79.

You ask me to "describe the Browning Society, and set forth its work to date."

. . Our main reasons for starting the Society were, that the manliest, strongest, deepest, and thoughtfullest Poet of our time had had nothing like due study and honour given him; that he needed interpreting and bringing home to folk, including ourselves; that this interpretation must be done during his life-time, or the key to it might be lost; and that we could not get together the workers that we wanted, except by forming a "Browning Society."FURNIVALL, FREDERICK JAMES, 1882, The Browning Society, Literary World, vol. 13, p. 77.

Robert Browning is the poet of Psychology.-CARPENTER, H. BERNARD, 1882, Robert Browning, Literary World, vol. 13, p. 79.

Browning's first principle or absolute Truth is Love: that which abideth one and the same, the subject and substance of all change, the permanence by which alone change is possible, whose sum ever "remains what it was before," in short, God or Truth; for, as he tells us in "Fifine, "falsehood is change," and "truth is permanence." "In the whole realm of thought, including the laws of nature, and the course of history, and especially the lots of souls, Browning has essayed to pierce through the phenomenal exterior, and the abiding reality that he reaches and brings back tidings of is Love; Love is the Truth.-BURY, JOHN, 1882, Browning's Philosophy, Browning Studies, ed. Berdoe, p. 31.

The obscurity of Browning does not proceed, as with Hugo and Tennyson, in their latest period, from the vague immensity of the subjects considered, from the indefiniteness of his ideas, from the predominance of metaphysical abstractions, but, on the contrary, from the very precision of the ideas and sentiments, studied in their remotest. ramifications, in all their varied complications, and then presented in a mass of abstractions and metaphors, now with the infinite minuteness of scholastic argument, now with sudden leaps over abysses of deeper significance. Browning is, par excellence, the psychological poet.-DARMESTETER, JAMES, 1883, Essais de Littérature Anglaise.

A poet real and strong is always phenomenal, but Browning is the intellectual phenomenon of the last half-century, even if he is not the poetical aloe of modern English literature. His like we have never seen before. He is not what he is by mere excelling. No writer that ever wrought out his fretted fancies in English verse is the model of him, either in large, or in one trait or trick of style. Of the poets of the day we can easily see, for example, that Will iam Morris is a modern Chaucer; that Tennyson has kindred with all the great English verse-makers, and is the ideal maker of correct, high-class English poetry of the Victorian era, having about him something of the regularity and formality and conventional properness of an unexceptional model-a beauty like that of a drawingmaster's head of a young woman, but informed and molded by the expression of noble thoughts; that pagan Swinburne is Greek in feeling and Gothic in form, and so forth; but we cannot thus compass or classify Browning. Were his breadth and his blaze very much less than they are, we should still be obliged to look at him as we look at a new comet, and set ourselves to considering whence he came and whither he is going amid the immensities and the eternities. . . . In purpose and in style Browning was at the very first the Browning he has been these twenty years. He has matured in thought, grown richer in experience, and obtained by practice a greater mastery over his materials, without, however, as I think, using them of late in so pleasing or even so impressive a manner as of old; but otherwise he is now as a poet, and it would seem as a man, much the same Robert Browning whose first writings were received with little praise and much scoffing and were pronounced harsh, uncouth, affected, and obscure.-WHITE, RICHARD GRANT, 1883, Selections from the Poetry of Robert Browning, Introduction.

To read Landor one must exert himself, and the exertion is to some purpose. The same is true, in even a higher degree, of Browning, subtle and penetrating, eminently a thinker, exercising our thought rather than our emotion; concrete in presentation, and, when most felicitous, dramatic, but capricious in expression, and greatly deficient in warmth and music; original and unequal; an eclectic, not to be restricted. in his themes, with a prosaic regard for de

tails, and a barbaric sense of color and form.-WELSH, ALFRED H., 1883, Development of English Literature and Language, vol. II, p. 368.

Browning is a dramatist for the one and sufficient reason that he is, above all, the student of humanity. Humanity he draws with a loving and patient hand, but on the one condition that it shall be humanity in active and passionate exercise. Not for him the beauty of repose; the still quiet lights of meditation, removed from the slough and welter of actual struggle, make no appeal to him; the apathetic calm of a moral human being, exercised on daily uninteresting tasks, is to him well-nigh incomprehensible; storms and thunder, wind and lightning, passion and fury, and masterful strength, something on which he can set the seal of his own rugged, eloquent, amorphous verse; something which he can probe and analyse and wrap up in the twists and turns of his most idiomatic, most ungrammatical style-these are the subjects which he loves to handle. And so those whose eyes are dazzled by this excess of light, or who lose their breath in this whirl of hurrying ideas, call him unintelligible; while those quiet souls who look for form and measure and control in verse deny that such uncouth and turgid lines are poetry at all. That Browning should have essayed two transcripts from Euripides is a fact not without significance for the critic, for he has thereby opened to us the secrets of his own dramatic aptitudes.-COURTNEY, W. L., 1883, "Robert Browning, Writer of Plays,' Fortnightly Review, vol. 33, p. 888.

It is not too much to say that Mr. Browning has not only ignored the general practice verted it. The pleasure which we derive of the great poets, but has designedly infrom poetry in general arises from the beauty his work. But the prevailing impression of its form; we forget the workman in created by "Jocoseria" is formlessness, together with the constant presence of Mr. Browning. Several of the poems in the volume are so obscure that it is impossible to discover the poet's intention. In others, if the track of his idea is momentarily visible, it is almost immediately withdrawn behind a cloud of words; he sets us down in the middle of a monologue, from which, if we surrender our imagination to him, he will construct us a drama; or he plunges us into a labyrinth of metaphysics in which

"panting thought toils after him in vain.” -COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1883, "Jocoseria," National Review, vol. 1, p. 552.

No other English poet, living or dead, Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as has Robert Browning. . . . No poet has such a gallery as Shakespeare, but of our modern poets Browning comes nearest him. . . . The last quotation shall be from the veritable Browning-of one of those poetical audacities none ever dared but the Danton of modern poetry. Audacious in its familiar realism, in its total disregard of poetical environment, in its rugged abruptness: but supremely successful, and alive with emotion. It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning's later method and style for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it. The method, at all events, has an interest of its own, a strength of its own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it, you must leave it alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down your Spenser and qualify yourself to join "the small transfigured band" of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their "Faerie Queen" all through. The company, though small, is delightful.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1884, Obiter Dicta, pp. 70, 71, 81, 88.

The wide range of his work is one of his strongest characteristics, and he is remarkable for the depth and versatility of his knowledge of human nature. No poet was ever more learned, more exact, and more thorough. Ruskin has said that he is simply unerring in every line. Of all the poets, except Shakspeare, he is the most subjective-a thinker, a student, and an anatomist of the soul. This is the chief reason why he has not been more recognized. Both he and Wordsworth see the infinitethe latter in nature, the former in the soul. Browning looks into the soul, and loves to see it as God sees it. No poet has more completely merged his own individuality in his work.

It is not from any lack of power of melody that the poet lays himself open to the charge of harshness, nor is his roughness due to carelessness nor defiance. He can use melody both varied and exquisite. The strength of his poetry, however, is in its sense, and not in its form. As to the charge of obscurity, this may be explained by the fact that his thoughts are deep and he deals often with the terrible

and grotesque. He is full of strange phrases and recondite allusions, but he is a writer on obscure subjects, not an obscure writer. He does not write down to the level of the society journal or the fashionable romance. Many of his pieces of word-painting, on the other hand, stand comparatively with those of Tennyson himself.. He is essentially the poet of humanity. . . In all of Browning's poems there is something, as Mr. Lowell has said, that makes for religion, devotion, and self-sacrifice. His teaching is better, braver, manlier, more cheerful, more healthy and more religious than all that has ever before passed for poetry. He is preeminently a poet of conscience, a poet of love, and a poet of true religion.-FARRAR, FREDERIC WILLIAM, 1885, Lecture on Robert Browning.

Mr. Browning can construct a mind, as the geologist does a skeleton. And this simile gives us the clue to all his poetry; he is a mental anatomist. His power and his skill, in his own peculiar province, are undeniable; and among his English contemporaries unequalled. Though, in spite of his unrivalled power of describing character, we cannot call him a great dramatist; that is, if we mean by dramas, complete plays, because Mr. Browning's anatomical instincts, the minuteness of his dissection of individual characters, spoil his plays as wholes. His dramas, like most of his lyrics, are revelations of individual minds; and his searching power of showing single characters prevents him from completing his plays; he is a subtle dramatic poet, then, but not a great dramatist. . . . His admirers cannot, in much of his work, call him beautiful; the wildest of them cannot, in much of his work, call him musical; so that two important qualities of good poetry are not found always in his. It is undoubtedly far better to have thought like Mr. Browning's, than the most exquisite wording if it is empty of meaning; and it takes a greater man to give us such thought. But when we concede this to the enthusiasts of the Browning Society we should remind ourselves that those poets whom the world considers the greatest are conspicuous for their form, for their splendid workmanship. All their mental powers might remain, but had they expressed their minds less well, we should certainly not rank them so high as artists.-GALTON, ARTHUR, 1885, Urbana Scripta, pp. 59, 66.