ABSTRACT
Now, the real truth is, that the British Public do not know Mr. Browning. There is no question of liking or disliking in the matter. Ten years ago he was quite unknown except to a select few. We distinctly remember hearing in the winter of 1860 a well-known author, and editor of one of the most influential reviews of the day, declare, that he had never read a word of Mr. Browning’s poetry. And the declaration struck nobody present as at all surprising. The exception, then, was to have read him. Such a declaration, however, in the year 1869 would be a confession of ignorance. But the British public at large still know no more about Mr. Browning than they did about Mill before he became member for Westminster. The Ring and the Book will, however, we venture to say, introduce Mr. Browning to the British public. Hitherto Mr. Browning’s admirers have been few though fit. His present poem will do much to make him popular, no bad test, even remembering Mr. Martin Tupper’s position, of the real worth of any poet.1 In The Ring and the Book we so far meet fewer of those wilful extravagances, crabbedness verging to obscurity, and carelessness of expression, which looks like contempt for the reader. The blank verse, too, has a sustained roll and harmony. There is less of that ruggedness of expression which in Mr. Browning’s earliest poems so marred the form of the thought. We are constantly arrested by lines of exquisite grace, full of that nameless beauty which, as
which is as suggestive as Keats’ picture of Autumn:
Sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
