ABSTRACT
If banishment from England may be described as a misfortune for Mrs. Browning, who, it may be, in our trying English climate might never have been able to do any work at all, what was it for her husband? He, of all men, needed the English air, and he went away from it. His writings abound in faults which, perhaps, it never was in his power to get rid of; but his only chance of working himself free from them was in living among us, and learning to think more as we think, to feel as we feel, and to understand what language suits us best. How could he do so beside the Arno? We regret to say that the difficulties of his style are at present so great as to prevent him not only from being enjoyed, but even from being understood. Poetry is with him an occult science. All poetry has to do with occult associations, and meanings of words and thoughts which it is impossible to analyze, but on the surface it is generally simple and clear enough. Mr. Browning, however, having a strong sense of an occult power behind and within the language of the poet, is determined to be obviously occult, and by elliptical constructions, digressions, interpolations, dark hints and darker sayings, seems to talk riddles and to make poetry a game of hide and seek.… …Mr. Browning asks too much of his readers. He has no right to expect that for the sake of the good things which he has to bestow he will find readers to encounter the difficulties of his style which he deliberately sets in their way. It is sometimes as difficult to follow out the line of his thought as to keep up with an argument conducted by Kant, or Schelling, or Hegel.
