ABSTRACT

Mr. Browning stands, with few rivals in the past and none in the present, at the head of what, in fault of a better phrase, may be called intellectual poetry. There are poets who rank him in imaginative lustre, there are more musical minstrels, there are-though these are few-warmer and more delicate colorists; but for clear, vigorous thinking, perfect sculpture of forms embodying thoughts (sculptures too tinted with the flush of life, with veins of blue and red), for the utterance of the right physiognomical word and phrase, he has no superior since Shakespeare. Yet intellectual as it is even to a Greek severity,—beyond even Landor1 here,—it would by no means express the charm of his writings to style them philosophical. No theory can quote him, nor is he at all ethical. His religious fervor shows in points of white fire on every page, and yet no work aims at a moral lesson or object. He writes neither fable nor allegory. The world of men and women, with their actual passions, hopes, and loves, and the vast arenas for their play opened by these as rivers cut their channels,—these are enough for him. His worship is for man; his faith must find its joy in a divine Man. The world of forms, the city of bodies, represents to him the scattered rays of this mysterious humanity; and his art is not to change them into any moral monotony, but to cultivate and guard them in their various vitality and meaning, and report their dramatic interplay.