ABSTRACT
Our poetry is in a very sorry kind of plight if it has to depend upon Tennyson and Browning for the hereditary honours of its existence. The Examiner will tell us ‘No!’ The Athenaeum will do the same; papers remarkable for the vigour of their articles, the excellence of their occasional criticism, and the general asperity of their manner. A page out of every ten in Herrick’s Hesperides is more certain of an hereafter than any one dramatic romance or lyric in all the Bells and Pomegranates of Mr. Browning. Not but what Mr. Browning is a poet. He is unquestionably a poet; but his subject has not unfrequently to bear the weight of sentiments which spring not naturally from it, and his numbers at times are overlaid with affectation, the common conceit of men who affect to tell common things in an uncommon manner. He clogs his verses, moreover, with too many consonants and too many monosyllables, and carries the sense too frequently in a very ungraceful manner from one line to the other. Here is a passage from the seventh number of his Bells and Pomegranates, which really is a torture to read: — …
[Quotes ‘The Englishman in Italy’, 11. 69-128.]
