divergence--nothing more: since he is too deeply a musician to be
indifferent to sound in verse, and since no other poet deserving the
name would willingly sacrifice sense to it. But while all agree in
admitting that sense and sound in poetry are the natural complement of
each other, each will be practically more susceptible to one than to the
other, and will unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. With
all his love for music, Mr. Browning is more susceptible to sense than
to sound. He values though more than expression; matter, more than form;
and, judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his
balance in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one.
He has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for
significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so, in
the exercise of strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he
has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of
significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its
slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its
object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has
illustrated this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more
inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a
solitary one. His genius[3] removed him from the first from that sphere
of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been
corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was
self-increasing.

It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style;
and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not
defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of
obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with
being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion
because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would