ABSTRACT
I have read all Browning’s new book since we parted; and while quite holding to all I said and say about his work as a poet I must also say-Ihave even had the candour to say to Rossetti-that I fully recognize the unique and most admirable power of ‘Sludge’ and ‘Caliban’. I want to send you my full acknowledgment of this: because we talked enough about the matter, and because I have really derived such rare and keen pleasure, in the teeth of all personal or artistic feelings of dislike, from these two poems (if poems they are to be called) that I don’t want you to suppose me insensible to their delightful qualities. I class both these above Blougram-not as intellectual exercises, but as samples of good work done. They are as good as Swift-i.e. not so good here, and better there; incomparably above Thackeray-and I think only a little below Chamfort and Stendhal. This last with me is higher praise than all the rest. Not less noble is the opening of St. John [‘A Death in the Desert’]—but long before the end the poem is swamped in controversial shallows, and the finer features effaced under a mask of indurate theological mud. In all the rest of the book I see much that is clever and nothing that is good-much that is ingenious and nothing that is right.
