n his work. It would have been surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets who inspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of Hell. Browning was the gr

because he did not experience sorrow and indigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, e

at the food was healthful. "My father was a man of bonne fourchette," said Barett Browning to me "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all ki

ents with ingenuous humour of a kind r

on, the other great optimist of the c

nduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every

er was aliv

lked along our

o inquiring

ed in d

impartially and eagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to whether he can have led so reputable a life

heart, but the love of the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of love from the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there never was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love and so little of the obsession

readers, even to-day. Some people cannot read Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throw themselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artistic sense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled by the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are reborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramati

orth of Pauline

n

that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular exampl

of the circumstances that

lights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of t

e one's breath away, as when, discussing The Lost M

s to make the awkward situation easier for the girl

derstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has written w

ell as a commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short poems like Meeting at Night, but long poems, such as An

cerned with ideas rather than with things-with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulli

Mage like him

hings Boehme wro

ustifies the poet of "things" as compar

you!" vents a

reaks the sudd

er, round us

ut the tables

umes, Boehme'

h a glory, yo

into this poo

Browning is the splendid aestheticism with which he lig

, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain. No doubt his phrases are often

yonder be no

the ro

n far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep unde

e Dark Tower Came is a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing-a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's genius, one has only to read Childe Roland again to restore one's fait

tower, blind as

courage as in the verses that follow in which

se of night pe

in for that!

set kindled t

ke giants at

d, to see the

end the creatu

noise was every

ke a bell. Na

ost adventur

was strong, and

fortunate, ye

moment knelled t

, ranged along t

last of me,

picture! in a

d I knew them

slug-horn to

e Roland to the

ant music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expr

ders are bewildered by his respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in Apparent Failure than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers in The Statue and the Bust. There was at least a hint of heroism in the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age. Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those two great energies of the spirit-love and heroism. For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it