absurd to assert that from the very outset of his poetic career he was
met by nothing but neglect, if not scornful derision. None who knows the
true artistic temperament will fall into any such mistake.

It is quite certain that neither Shakspere nor Milton ever met with such
enthusiastic praise and welcome as Browning encountered on the
publication of "Pauline" and "Paracelsus." Shelley, as far above
Browning in poetic music as the author of so many parleyings with other
people's souls is the superior in psychic insight and intellectual
strength, had throughout his too brief life not one such review of
praiseful welcome as the Rev. W.J. Fox wrote on the publication of
"Pauline" (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham's equally kindly but
less able review in the _Athenæum_), or as John Forster wrote in _The
Examiner_ concerning "Paracelsus," and later in the _New Monthly
Magazine_, where he had the courage to say of the young and quite
unknown poet, "without the slightest hesitation we name Mr. Robert
Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth." His plays even
(which are commonly said to have "fallen flat") were certainly not
failures. There is something effeminate, undignified, and certainly
uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not failure in
literature. So enthusiastic was the applause he encountered, indeed,
that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation
any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become
spoilt--so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged
counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous
mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of
the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued
eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part
of those who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one
among the high gods of our fathers.