inspiration as passion has her laws; that sweet waters, perhaps the sweetest, might flow from the 'depth, and not the tumult, of the soul. And amid greater difficulties-and therefore perhaps with success less incontestable-a similar example has been set by Mr. Browning.
Mr. Browning is, above all things, the poet of intellect. In saying this, however, it is important that we should know exactly what we mean. There is a sense in which the same remark could fitly be made of the other great poets who, since the revolution of last century, have marked out the way in which poetry should move; there is a sense in which Goethe and Hugo, Shelley and Mr. Tennyson, may be truly conceived to have built up for our time a poetry of the reason. Moving often, perhaps by preference, in the world of ideas, these poets differ widely among each other; they differ yet more widely from Mr. Browning. Their manner is abstract, Mr. Browning's concrete; they express themselves directly, he indirectly; they are lyric, he (by his own confession) is dramatic.' Dramatic, however, as Mr. Browning may in outward semblance be, few so unweariedly as he have dealt and charmed with thoughts: none perhaps have so persistently crystallized their thoughts in clear-cut shape, or turned them in such numerous facets on the world. Light upon light, the same yet not the same, they flash upon us from every page of at least the early and central periods of his literary life. In one of his most important smaller poems he rebukes a brother' for speaking naked thoughts, instead of draping them in sights and sounds.' So indomitable is his own tendency to make use of thoughts that it is hard not to see in the rebuke a reminder, in the first instance, to himself. Mr. Browning's thoughts are clothed, not naked thoughts; they are sung, not spoken; they spring naturally, not wrung perforce (like Boehme's) from the soil. But, in the last resort, they are indeed thoughts; it is the essence of his poetry to be the poetry of reason; and it is just this that gives Mr. Browning his unique position among poets. Others before him have bade thought take shape in art; others, though but few, have penetrated as deeply into the windings of love and hate, of truth and hypocrisy, in the heart of man. But things which have existed only apart in others in Mr. Browning are united. He is as familiar with the vapours, now dark, now luminous, of the old world as with the transparent ether of the new. If he has affinities on the one side with Goethe or Shelley, on the other side he is no less of kin with Shakespeare or with Balzac. How