ABSTRACT
Robert Browning, as a poet of promise, was regarded by some as equalling Tennyson. In his Paracelsus, from out a cloudy tabernacle were darted tongues of flame; but the smoke has never cleared away. In it we had much of mysticism, affectation, obscurity, nay, utter incomprehensibility, mixed up with many fine aspirations, and a variety of magnificent outlines, although no separate scene could be said to satisfy. We had abundance of bold rough draughts, some in the manner of Turner, and others in the manner of Martin,1 all ‘dark with excessive bright;’ but no single picture filled up and coloured. Sordello, which followed it, was the strangest vagary ever submitted to the world in the shape of verse, and as incomprehensibly mysterious as the riddles of the Sphinx. Some recondite meaning the book probably may have; but I am not aware that any one has ever been able to discover it, although I think Mr. Horne, the author of Orion, once made a guess.2 At all events its intelligibility does not shine on the surface, nor in any twenty consecutive lines. In the Bells and Pomegranates, we have now and then glimpses of poetic sentiment and description, like momentary sunbeams darting out between rifted clouds; but straightway the clouds close, and we are left to plod on in deeper twilight. The truth is, that with an ill-regulated imagination, Mr Browning has utterly mistaken singularity for originality-the uncommon for the fine. Style and manner he despises; indeed, he may be said to have none-for these are with him like the wind blowing where it listeth; or, as extremes meet, he may be said to have all kinds, from the most composite and arabesque to the most disjointed and Doric. Even in his serious and earnest themes, he thinks nothing of leaping at once from the Miltonic to the Hudibrastic; and to poetry as an art, such as it
Pedants shall not tie my strains To our antique poets’ veins; Being born as free to these, I shall sing as I shall please.
