like the crumpled gossamer of a spider's web hastily detached and more than half-ruined by the touch of carelessness.

There are beautiful thoughts and passages in "Sordello," but they savour so much of bookishness, and demand so much antiquarian knowledge in the reader, that few are likely to disinter and appreciate them. For instance, take this passage from Book the Third: "Factitious humours" fall from Sordello, and turn him pure

As some forgotten vest
Woven of painted byssus, silkiest,

Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip,
Left welter where a trireme let it slip

I' the sea and vexed a satrap: so the stain

O' the world forsakes Sordello: how the tinct
Loosening escapes, cloud after cloud.

Now what is the picture painted here? Analyze it, and this is the result: An eastern satrap, sailing upon a galley or trireme, wears a vest of byssus, dyed with Tyrian purple. He lets it fall overboard, and as he looks down through the clear sea sees the purple dye escaping and clouding the water. So Sordello is cleansed from the stain of the world. It is a very beautiful illustration; but its beauty is not perceived till we recollect that purple is taken from the tuft of the "whelk's pearl-sheeted lip," and that a garment so dyed, if cast into the sea, throws off its colour in tremulous clouds. Does any one see the meaning at first sight? And how many might read it and never see any meaning in it at all? This is an example of Browning in his worst mood; and we cannot wonder, when we consider it, that simple-minded poets like Charles Mackay called him the "High Priest of the

Unintelligible;" or that Browning societies have had to be invented to reduce his recondite fancies to lucidity.

These, then, are the two main sources of all that is obscure in Browning's writings. The very fact that for many years he was a solitary worker, writing almost for his own pleasure, naturally confirmed the defects of his style. The obscurity is never of the thought; that, indeed, is so clear and luminous to him that he seems incapable of conceiving it as confused in the vision of his reader. The thought is clear as the sun; but the atmosphere of words through which we perceive it is murky, and the body of the thought looms through it dim and strange. And so Mr. Swinburne has spoken with equal felicity and truth of Browning's faculty of "decisive and incisive thought," and has said, "He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready readers of a ready writer." The case cannot be better put than in the words of one of his most earnest and intelligent students: "He has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so in the striving after strength. He never intended to be obscure, but he has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of significance and strength." This should constantly be remembered, if we are to approach Browning's poetry with the intelligence which interprets, and the sympathy which appreciates.

Were Browning not a great poet it would be difficult to forgive him such defects as these. We should be inclined to dismiss him with the brief aphorism of the Swedish poet, Tegner, who said, "The obscurely uttered is the obscurely thought." But Browning is

one of the greatest of poets, and has so profoundly affected the thought of his time, that however the ordinary reader may be repelled by the grotesqueness of his style, it is eminently worth the while even of that distinguished individual to endeavour to understand him. We freely grant that poets should not need interpreters; but where there is something of infinite moment to be interpreted it is well to set aside fixed rules and habitual maxims. Genius is so rare a gift that we must take it on its own terms, and we cannot afford to quarrel with the conditions it may impose on us. It speaks its own language, and is indifferent alike to the reproach or desire of those whom it addresses. The only question for us is, I whether it is worth our while to endeavour to penetrate the meaning and ascertain the teaching of any writer who, through natural limitations or wilful indifference, renders the study of his works difficult and perplexing? In the case of Browning I reply that no more remunerative study can be found than in the careful reading of his works. He embodies some of the most curious and pervasive tendencies of nineteenth-century literature, and in subsequent chapters I shall endeavour to show what Browning's teaching is, and to estimate his influence in literature.

CHAPTER XXVII.

BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.

NE of the most interesting facts about Robert Browning is that he has no touch of the recluse about him; he is the child of cities, not of solitudes. In the writings of Wordsworth and Tennyson, dissimilar as they are in many respects, there is this bond of likeness-they breathe the air and silence of seclusion. With the one it is the silence of the mountains, with the other the ordered calm of English rural life. All that Wordsworth has written is steeped in the very spirit of solitude, and the mighty silence of the hills has lent a majesty to his conceptions-an atmosphere, as it were, of dignified simplicity. In Tennyson, also, one is always conscious of the presence of Nature. The wind that blows across his page is full of the dewy freshness of green lawns and rustling trees. The city, with its moil and grime, its passionate intensity of life and action, is far away. He sees its distant lights flaring like a dusky dawn: but he has little care to penetrate its mysteries. And in most modern poets the same remoteness from the passionate stress of life is felt. What is true of Wordsworth and Tennyson is equally true of Keats and Morris. The fundamental idea in each seems to be that the life of the recluse is alone favourable to poetry, and that the life of action.

in the great centres of civilisation is fatal to works of imagination.

common.

To this temper Browning furnishes a spendid exception. Born a Londoner, and proud to own himself a citizen of the greatest city upon earth, it is with London, Florence, and Venice that his name is imperishably interwoven not the Lake district of Wordsworth, nor the Geneva of Byron, nor the Spezzia of Shelley. In continental travel he is evidently more familiar with the bookstalls of Florence than the snow-solitudes of the high Alps. He was a familiar figure in society for many years. He does not shun the crowd: he seeks and loves it. The sense of numbers quickens his imagination. The great drama of human life absorbs him. The glimpses of pure nature he gives us are curiously few. He can describe a lunar rainbow: but he saw it not among the Alps, but from the dull greensward of a London Practically, he has little to say about Nature as such. When he does describe any bit of scenery he does it with scientific accuracy. His pictures of Italy are full of the very spirit of Italian scenery, and have an almost photographic exactitude. But they are the mere by-play of his mind. It is Italian life which fascinates him, not Italian scenery. It is life everywhere that moves him to utterance, and in the crowd of men, and in the tangled motives of men, and the constant dramas and tragedies bred by the passions and instincts of the human heart, Browning has found the food upon which his genius has thriven. In this respect Browning occupies an entirely unique position among modern poets. He concerns himself so little with the message of nature, and so much with the soul of man, that his whole poetry may be called the Poetry of the Soul: its