Browning is animated by a robust optimism, turning fearless somersaults upon the brink of the abyss. . . . And then Browning loomed on the horizon, surely the brawniest neo-Elizabethan Titan whom our age has seen, and whom it has latterly chosen to adore.-SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1890, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, vol. II, pp. 246, 262.

When Browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day -an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues-shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain. -SHARP, WILLIAM, 1890, Life of Robert Browning (Great Writers), p. 200.

If his creations were ill-clothed in their bodies of clay, the breath that he blew into their nostrils was life of the most concentrated and passionate sort. As works of art his poems are abnormal and altogether unclassifiable; but as emanations they are strangely and superbly influential with the imagination of a sympathetic reader (that is whenever they are comprehensible at all), and there is that in them which leaves no question of the man's uncommon genius. All through, from first to last, the optimism of a sane and hopeful soul shines with fascinating intensity. . . . He was surcharged with song, but his vocal organ was not of the singing sort. In this he and Emerson were alike to a degree; they forgot the tune in the tremendous struggle with the meaning of the words, and they lost the words. too often in the overwhelming rush of the thought. Minds thus constituted can create dramas, but they cannot limit the creations so as to bring them within a unit of expression. . . . A great man he was, with an imagination and a poetic vision of absolute power; this must, I think, be the final word; but he lacked the supreme gift of artistic expression through verse, an expression which, first of all, is luminous, direct and simple.-THOMPSON, MAURICE, 1890, Browning as a Poet, America, Jan. 2.

His work is related to the ideal life of the nation as Carlyle's is related to its practical life; and if his influence has not been wielded over quite so long a period as was that of the author of "Sartor Resartus" it has, on the other hand, extended over a more feverishly active time. . . . That he That he was a real poet in the sense of having writ

ten real poetry will be admitted by every competent critic. But it will have, I fear, to be added that no poet so eminent as Mr. Browning has ever left behind him so large a body of brilliant, profound, inspiring literature, wherein the essential characteristics of poetry will be sought in vain.TRAILL, HENRY DUFF, 1890, Robert Browning, National Review, vol. 14, pp. 593, 597.

Nay, when he died the most fashionable of the London daily papers wrote of him in a tone of supercilious patronage, with a sort of apology to its butterfly readers for asking their attention to a writer so remote from their world as Browning. That is behind the time and foolish, yet I suspect that Browning's poetry was far less known to the world of London than Browning himself. So far as he was read in society-which reads little-he was read by the younger generation of fashionable people; to the older he was, I might almost say, unknown: He was literally unknown to some. I have heard the mention of his name followed by the remark: "Browning? Is he not an American novelist." The lady who put that question is an ornament of society, full of every kind of social intelligence, and it was not many years ago. I doubt whether he has ever been the poet of the classes. The masses, or some of them, were probably those who read him most. The critics have praised him with very large reservations. But there was a class of readers neither literary or smart who found in Browning something they wanted, and who for the sake of the kernel were willing to prick their fingers with the husk or bruise their joints over the shell. They are the people to whom the problems of life are everything, and what drew them to Browning was his penetration and power in handling these problems. - SMALLEY, GEORGE W., 1890, London Letter, New York Tribune.

Robert Browning wrote the sonnet rarely, possibly because he disliked its restraints; possibly he purposed to let no lesser light of his shine by the side of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese." The "Helen's Tower" is graceful complimentary and occasional verse, but would not be quoted save for its personal interest. Any one, however, who studies Browning's poetry will see how inapt the sonnet form is for the wilful, eccentric orbits in which his genius loved to move.-CRANDALL, CHARLES H., 1890, ed.

Of almost any one of Emerson's essays you can remember some notable phrases, a general atmosphere of that peculiar purity which we find only in New England, but no such thing as organic unity. In fact, I take it, Emerson himself could often have been found at fault, had he tried to explain exactly what he meant. Emerson's obscurity comes, I think, from want of coherently systematic thought. Browning's, on the other hand, as some recent critic has eagerly maintained, is only an "alleged obscurity.' What he meant he always knew. The trouble is that, like Shakspere now and then, he generally meant so much and took so few words to say it in, that the ordinary reader, familiar with the simple diffuseness of contemporary style, does not pause over each word long enough to appreciate its full significance. What reading I have done in Browning inclines me to believe this opinion pretty well based. He had an inexhaustible fancy, too, for arranging his words in such order as no other human being would have thought of. Generally, I fancy, Browning could have told you what he meant by almost any passage, and what relation that passage bore to the composition of which it formed a part; but it is not often that you can open a volume of Browning and explain, without a great deal of study, what the meaning of any whole page is.

Emerson's indubitable obscurity to ordinary readers I take to be a matter of actual thought; Browning's seems rather to be a matter of what seems-even though it really were not-deliberate perversity of phrase.-WENDELL, BARRETT, 1891, English Composition, p. 208.

Browning's writing goes best in the bulkit is the general result that we enjoy, being oftener rather distracted than attracted by the component parts. Browning's work is shut out, not only from the presence of poetry but, from the precincts of "good utterance." Browning need follow no predecessor in the application of the fixed laws of poetic utterance, but he must apply these laws in some way; he must establish the kinship. Where he does this, he is a poet; where he does not do this, whatever else he may be, he is not a poet. The judgment here formed is, that he often fails in this particular; hence, that only a part, the smaller part, of his writing can be called

"just," "legitimate, poetry.-CHENEY, JOHN VANCE, 1891, The Golden Guess, pp. 133, 148.

Browning is obscure, undoubtedly, if a poem is read for the first time without any hint as to its main purport: the meaning in almost every case lies more or less below the surface; the superficial idea which a careless perusal of the poem would afford is pretty sure to be the wrong one. Browning's poetry is intended to make people think, and without thought the fullest commentary will not help the reader much.-BERDOE, EDWARD, 1891-98, The Browning Cyclopædia, Preface, p. vii.

The most marked literary characteristic of the poetry of Browning is its intellectuality. This gives it a twofold recommendation. It invites the study of the thoughtful. It rewards them with that for which they seek, their object being not to gain the passing pleasure of a pious sentiment, but the permanent possession of a spiritual conviction. There are other religious poets who have written psalms of life, songs of devotion, hymns of aspiration, which men have made the channels of their prayers and the marching music of their lives. There are none who can surpass or even rival Browning in the chastened beauty, the restrained but earnest enthusiasm, the catholic and genuine sympathy of those of his poems which deal directly or indirectly with the religious life.-EALAND, F., 1892, Sermons from Browning, p. 3.

He is a stronger and deeper man than Tennyson; an incompleter artist, but a greater poet; and his method of approaching doubt wholly differs from Tennyson's. He loves to assault it with sardonic humor, to undermine it with subtle suggestion, even to break out into grim laughter as it slowly disintegrates and falls into a cloud of dust before his victorious analysis. But not the less does he sympathize with what ever there may be of spiritual yearning, of earnest but baffled purpose in it; and no poet has ever been quicker than he to place in the fullest light of tender recognition the one redeeming quality there may be latent in the thing he hates. For faith, in Robert Browning, is a spiritual fire that never burns low. Through whatever labyrinth of guilt or passion he may lead his readers, God is ever the attending presence.-DAWSON, W. J., 1892, Quest and Vision, p. 96.

His best work, the work which will last

when the noises are done, is as simple as it is sensuous and passionate; and it is entirely original. It stands more alone and distinct than the work of any other English poet of the same wide range. There is a trace of Shelley in "Pauline," but for the rest Browning is like Melchizedek: he has neither father nor mother in poetry; he is without descent; and he will be-but this belongs to all great poets-without end of days. "Whole in himself and owed to none" may well be said of him, and it is a great deal to say.-BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1892, Impressions of Browning and his Art, Century Magazine, vol. 45, p. 244.

Mr. Browning had a style, a very remarkable one, but of Style he is absolutely destitute, for his literary manner is one of rapid volubility and constant eagerness-qualities eternally opposed to dignity, to Style, whose very essence is its proud way of never pressing itself upon you.-WATSON, WILLIAM, 1893, Excursions in Criticism, p. 106.

Here at last was the second Shakespeare, but with no audience yet prepared.... Thus forty years after Browning seemed to himself and the world to have been forgotten, he is rediscovered as one of the world's great seers, hailed as the prophet of a new era, and vindicated as the chief poet of the century. No man longer calls in question his greatness or his mission. As fast as men and women attain the capacity to interpret his concentrative figures and appreciate his types, they are drawn to him.

Until eye and ear have been prepared, Raphael and Mozart mean less than their inferiors. Each mind must overtake in its own development the progress of the race at large, or it will declare the best thought and sentiment of its times meaningless-though it thereby but publish its own inchoate and arrested culture. Not so very long ago it was popular to decry the symphonies of Beethoven, but little by little the presumption has become general, even among those unversed in music, that the fault is not with Beethoven, but with the undiscerning hearer. Similarly, within the last five years the once frequent girds at Browning have disappeared from public print. What with clubs, societies, and college study, what with the ever-increasing output of primers, handbooks, and commentaries, the persuasion is abroad that this poet evinces the loftiest ideals yet revealed in our literature, as well as fulfills its long delayed and often

repeated prophecy of power.-SHERMAN, L. A., 1893, Analytics of Literature, pp. 101, 102.

If Browning's genius has remained long unrecognized and unhonoured among his contemporaries, the frequent harshness and obscurity of his expression must not bear the whole responsibility. His thought holds so much that is novel, so much that is as yet unadjusted to knowledge, art, and actual living, that its complete apprehension even by the most open-minded must be slow and long delayed. long delayed. No English poet ever demanded more of his readers, and none has ever had more to give them. Since Shakespeare no maker of English verse has seen life on so many sides, entered into it with such intensity of sympathy and imagination, and pierced it to so many centres of its energy and motivity. No other has so completely mastered the larger movement of modern thought on the constructive side, or so deeply felt and so adequately interpreted the modern spirit. preted the modern spirit. . . . Of all English poets he is the most difficult to classify, and his originality as a thinker is no less striking. It is true of him, as of most great thinkers, that his real contribution to our common fund of thought lies not so much in the disclosure of entirely new truths as in fresh and fruitful application of truths already known; in a survey of life complete, adequate, and altogether novel in the clearness and harmony with which a few fundamental conceptions are shown to be sovereign throughout the whole sphere of being. It is not too much to say of Browning that of all English poets he has rationalized life most thoroughly. In the range of his interests and the scope of his thought he is a man of Shakespearian mould. — MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1893, Essays in Literary Interpretation, pp. 103, 110.

He is less thoroughly an artist than Tennyson, but not necessarily on that account less a poet. I recall only one poem of Browning which is absolutely without thought. I may raise a clamor of protest when I say that this one is "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." In this we have simply a picture. We may put a meaning into it, but to ask what the poet meant by it is to apeal to the fancy. I do not say that the poet had not an allegory in his mind when he wrote; I simply say that the allegory is not in the poem.-EVERETT, CHARLES CARROLL, 1893, Tennyson and

Browning as Spiritual Forces, New World, vol. 2, p. 241.

Browning seems destined to take the place of Pope and to vex the minds of future generations (for a very different reason, however) with the query, "Is he a poet?" Whatever Pope's deficiency in matter may be, no one ever questioned his supremacy in words. He sent his verbal shafts with the accuracy of Ulysses through all the rings of opinion until they fastened firmly in his target, the human mind. But it would take an order of the King to put any of Browning's phrases into general circulation.-MOORE, CHARLES LEONARD, 1893, The Future of Poetry, The Forum, vol. 14, p. 774.

Browning, though never popular, was an indefatigable writer, who bore the neglect of his countrymen with serene good-humour, and persisted in the choice of recondite subjects, an eccentric method of treatment, a style of versification generally harsh and abrupt, and a style of language now pedantic and now familiar, and frequently obscure. His rhymes, too, are often Hudibrastic, without being effective. His philosophical reasonings, and even his narratives, are difficult to follow; the reader arises from several perusals with only a vague idea of the author's plan or meaning. One who runs cannot read Browning; he demands the study of a specialist. Yet specialists assure us that if he is difficult to understand, the delight of understanding him is ample compensation for all the toil which the difficulties he interposes entail, and that he is inferior only to Shakespeare in the richness, subtlety, and suggestiveness of his thought. That he could be intelligible and forcible on a first reading when he chose is well proved by such pieces as "The Pied Piper," "Hervé Riel, ""How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," etc.-ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE, 1894, A History of English Literature, p. 315.

The humour of Robert Browning was not a dominating constituent in his intellectual endowment, but it was certainly an essential one.

Were we to remove from his work the passages in which its presence is obvious, even to the hasty, careless reader, and those still more numerous passages where it eludes the pointing finger or the frame of quotation marks, and yet, like the onion in Sydney Smith's salad, "unsusspected, animates the whole," the result

would be, not merely impoverishment, but transformation. We should feel not merely that something had gone, but that what remained had lost a certain indefinable quality of interest and charm. . . . A large proportion of Browning's humour-witness such characteristic poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology" and "Sludge, the Medium"-takes the form of delicate irony, where the something said is delicately poised against the something implied, and we are made to feel the attraction of both. Browning's satirical irony always preserves the geniality which is of the essence of true humour; it may be mordant, but it is never scarifying; like summer lightning it illuminates, yet does not burn.-NOBLE, JAMES ASHCROFT, 1894, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Humour, Society, Parody, and Occasional Verse, ed. Miles, pp. 337,

339.

Browning's style may be compared to a Swiss pasture, where the green meadows which form the foreground of a sublime landscape are yet combered with awkward blocks and boulders-things not without a certain rough dignity of their own, but essentially out of place.-BENSON, ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER, 1894, Essays, p. 298.

Robert Browning is the one poet who has taken human life for his exclusive province; and his method has for its very soul the tracing of development. . . . The vigorous spirit of Browning roams over all the world, scanning the island off the coasts of Lebanon as the wolf-haunted forests of Russia. From "Paracelsus," more full of the spirit of Luther's Germany than the casual reader dreams, and "Sordello," more full of the spirit and facts of pre-Dantean Italy than the casual reader likes, on through dramas and monologues and epics to the mobile and vivid Hellenic studies of his later years, Browning shows a more frankly human and unæsthetic interest in the past and a wider sympathy than any other poet.... The immense vitality and wide productiveness of Browning demand classification, but the classification is not yet found. Optimist, realist, mystic we may call him if we will, yet all the while we know that the epithet touches only one side of his great and placid nature. His robust versatility serenely defies compression into a phrase. Yet if, with the fatuous affection of mortal man for labels, we insist on knowing by whose side he is to be put, we shall find, I believe, his

truest abiding-place if we name him with the great masters of Ionic Art. Humor, and humor tinged with irony, is the most distinctive, if not the most important, element in his genius. Its bitter aroma is never long absent. We believe that we breathe the pure air of the sublime, and a gust of satire slaps us sharply in the face. We feel ourselves wrapt in religious ecstasy; hey! presto! We are in the coarsest region of grotesque.-SCUDDER, VIDA D., 1895, The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets, pp. 25, 148, 202.

It is almost too hackneyed to call Browning a Gothic man, but it is irresistibly true. The typical Greek loved life for its own sweet sake, fully enjoyed it, wished it no other, only unending. Browning, as another great Englishman has frankly confessed, could not have endured heaven itself under such conditions. Struggles, ascent, growth, were sweet to him. To be still learning was better than to know.LAWTON, WILLIAM CRANSTON, 1895, The Classical Element in Browning's Poetry, The Boston Browning Society Papers, p. 336.

It is impossible for any intelligent admirer to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hard-gallop, in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly, abused. . . . Even his longer poems, in which his faults. were most apparent, possessed an individuality of the first order, combined the intellectual with no small part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not otherwise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an ordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The pathos, the power, at times the humor, of the singular soul-studies which he was so fond of projecting with little accessory of background upon his canvas, could not be denied, and have not often been excelled.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 273, 274.

Browning is a poet who very frequently

mentions God, and who a number of times has elaborately written concerning his nature and his relations to man. The arguments in question are frequently stated in dramatic form, and not as Browning's own utterances. Paracelsus, Caliban, David in the poem "Saul," both Count Guido and the Pope in "The Ring and the Book," Fust in the "Parleyings," and Ferishtah, are all permitted to expound their theology at considerable length. Karshish, Abt Vogler, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Ixion, and a number of others, define views about God which are more briefly stated, but not necessarily less comprehensible. On the other hand, there are the two poems, "Christmas Eve," and "Easter Day,' which, without abandoning the dramatic method, approach nearer to indicating, although they do not directly express, Browning's personal views of the theistic problem. These poems are important, although they must not be taken too literally. Finally, in "La Saisiaz," and in the "Reverie" in "Asolando," Browning has entirely laid aside the dramatic form, and has spoken in his own person concerning his attitude towards theology.-ROYCE, JOSIAH, 1896, Browning's Theism, The Boston Browning Society Papers, p. 15.

From first to last Browning portrayed life either developing or at some crucial moment, the outcome of past development, or the determinative influence for future growth or decay. His interest in the phenomena of life as a whole, freed him from the trammels of any literary cult. He steps out from under the yoke of the classicist, where only gods and heroes have leave to breathe; and, equally, from that of the romanticist, where kings and persons of quality alone flourish. Wherever he found latent possibilities of character, which might be made to expand under the glare of his brilliant imagination, whether in hero, king, or knave, that being he chose to set before his readers as a living individuality to show whereof he was made, either through his own ruminations or through the force of circumstances.-PORTER, CHARLOTTE, AND CLARKE, HELEN A., 1896, ed. Poems of Robert Browning, p. 26.

To sum up our imperfect sketch of this strangely interesting poet, perplexing, disappointing, and fascinating, Browning is confessedly and above all a teacher, whether directly, or when he offers us his superb