4. Activity and Rapidity.-Let us now consider some of the dominant characteristics of this wonderful genius, as manifested in its slowly developed, long-enduring maturity.

First, one cannot help remarking the restless activity and almost unique rapidity of his intellect. Swift and keen as are his perceptions, his thoughts are swifter and keener yet. We ordinary readers are soon breathless in trying to keep up with them, and must be content to travel with relays, by easy stages, the journeys he makes at a single rush. As Mr. Swinburne excellently puts it, "He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway." As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, these analogies are peculiarly felicitous, inasmuch as the railway train not only runs ten times faster than the waggon, but also carries more than ten times the weight; the telegraph is not only incomparably swifter than the railway, but also incomparably more subtle and pregnant with intellect and emotion. The restless activity and rapidity and subtlety of intellect which confound the "general reader" (who has been termed the laziest and haziest of human animals), accustomed to the too-easy sauntering through popular novels and periodicals, are apt at first to perplex even the student, as perturbing the exquisite calm of the simply idyllic conceptions with which he has been familiarised by less intellectual poets. As our French neighbours say, "one must have the defect of one's qualities;" and in Browning these mental

qualities or faculties are so pre-eminently rare and valuable, so delightful and informing and suggestive, that an intelligent and athletic student soon willingly surrenders the serenest tranquillity in order to pursue their subtle and multiplex workings, finding this pursuit an intellectual gymnastic of the most exhilarating as well as bracing character. But it must be always remembered that when Browning sets himself to a task of pure and lofty imaginativeness—as in the "Saul," the "Serenade at the Villa," the "Childe Roland," "Any Wife to Any Husband," "One Word More," or on a larger scale in the prevision of the tragedy of "The Ring and the Book," or the Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and Pope sectionshis imagination, kindling in the measure of the greatness of its theme, and so (as I have said) kindling and glorifying his style, is as intense, solemn, steadfast, irresistibly dominant, I will dare to assert, as the noblest in all our noble literature.

Heine says in one of his rough jottings, "Shakespeare's big toe contained more poetry than all the Greek poets, with the exception of Aristophanes. The Greeks were great Artists, not Poets; they had more artistic sense than poetry." The same may be fairly said of many modern distinguished writers of verse, if poetry be regarded as the reflection at once intelligent and beautiful of the whole world of nature and human nature; or, lyrically, of the singer's whole inner nature in relation to the outer world, and not merely of certain choice "bits" or dreamy moods. Now, this comprehensiveness, this sleepless intimate interest in the whole world of life around him, both the interior and exterior life, in all their kinds and

degrees, which we find supreme in Shakespeare, is to my apprehension equally supreme in Browning; and it embraces the past no less than the present, and, what is even more rare in one so learned, the present no less than the past. For the present, he himself specially notes it in "How it strikes a Contemporary;" and Landor long since noted it in the keen-eyed genial observer :

"Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walkt along our roads with step

So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse."

For the past, Browning early avowed it in the personal digression in "Sordello" :

"... Beside, care-bit erased

Broken-up beauties ever took my taste
Supremely" (p. 101).

And as to the interior life, we have also his own avowal in the letter of dedication prefixed to "Sordello," twenty-five years after the poem was written:

"The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study."

But we need neither the testimony of others nor his own avowals on these points, so conspicuously illustrated throughout his books. For the past, besides the greatest, from Paracelsus through "The Ring and the Book" to "Aristophanes' Apology," we

have in addition to poems already mentioned such pieces as "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" (in which Ruskin finds embodied the very spirit of the Renascence;-I would modify, of one phase, and that the least noble, of it), "The Grammarian's Funeral" (embodying another and far nobler phase), "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "Pictor Ignotus," "Old Pictures at Florence," "The Heretic's Tragedy"-which, as the cheerful case of burning the Grand Master of the Templars alive, an astonishing Edinburgh reviewer complained was not rendered in a pleasing manner! For the present, we have such pieces as "The Lost Leader," "The Italian in England" and "The Englishman in Italy," the noble "Home Thoughts from the Sea," "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr,” the unique "Waring," "Mesmerism," "Bishop Blougram," "Caliban on Setebos," "Sludge the Medium," in addition to such longer works as "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day," "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red-Cotton Nightcap-Country," "The Inn Album." And throughout all we have ever the dominant theme of the development or revelation of human souls; naturally most wonderful, and to myself simply overwhelming, in his immense masterpiece, "The Ring and the Book." In his power of transcendent analysis interfused with the power of synthetic exposition, so that we have no dissection of corpses, but an intellectual and moral vivisection, whose subjects grow the more living in their reality the more keenly the scalpel cuts into them, the more thoroughly they are anatomised, I know not of any contemporaries who can be compared with him save Balzac, Victor Hugo,

Gustave Flaubert (in "Madame Bovary"), George Meredith (as in "Emilia in England," and "The Egoist"). Carlyle, in his "French Revolution," delights in sneering at "Victorious Analysis;" here is Victorious Analysis in a very real sense commanding the extreme opposite of sneers.

5. Manliness. Further, Browning's passion is as intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion, which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos, which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited has defined passion as noble strength on fire; and this is the true passion of great natures and great poets; while sentimentalism is ignoble weakness dallying with fire; and mere lust, even in novels written by "ladies" for Society with the capital S, is mere brutishness. Browning's passion is of utter self-sacrifice, self-annihilation, self-vindicated by its irresistible intensity. So we read it in "Time's Revenges," so in the scornful condemnation of the weak lovers in "The Statue and the Bust," so in "In a Balcony," and "Two in the Campagna," with its

"Infinite passion, and the pain
of finite hearts that yearn."

Is the love rejected, unreturned? No weak and mean upbraidings of the beloved, no futile complaints; a solemn resignation to immitigable Fate; intense gratitude for inspiring love to the unloving beloved.