ABSTRACT
He has piped to children, like his own Pied Piper, and they have followed him as willingly as they of Hamelin. All these poems, and scores of others, need no interpreter, no commentator; any boy of sixteen who cares for verse can read them as easily as he can read Longfellow. This later generation is in danger of forgetting the real poet in the multitude of dissertations about poems which need explaining. It is for this reason that one has attempted, however weakly, to praise that in Mr. Browning’s work which is divine and imperishable. It is not that one undervalues The Ring and the Book, or
1 they are poetry. They can hardly survive, as Theocritus hoped one of his idyls would do, ‘on the lips of all, and chiefly on those of the young.’ There is, however, no reason why the central and perfect poems of Mr. Browning should not survive thus, in men’s pockets, not only on their shelves; in men’s hands, not only in scholar’s libraries. But there is at present this danger, that young readers, just waking to poetry, may be lost in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, and may emerge with difficulty, as from a Sleepy Hollow haunted by nightmares-may emerge and may never again choose to enter even that demesne which is peopled by Men and Women. In that event great would be their loss, nor less great if, by way of approving themselves clever and ‘cultured,’ they try to heat themselves into an enthusiasm for the poems commended by commentators, and for the riddles which are their despair and delight.
