never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true
principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a popular
point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment,
however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.

"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared
"unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and
concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too
concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was
forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer
stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled
by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he know
that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the
single word that is the one fit for his sonnet_?"

Mr. Browning was not personally acquainted with either John Sterling or
Caroline Fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his
mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. Still, he gave the
joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it
deserved in the case of Miss Fox, whom he imagined, from her
self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl
some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the
period immediately following, he contented himself with two words where
he would rather have used ten. The harsh and involved passages in
"Sordello," which add so much to the remoteness of its thought, were the
first consequence of this lesson. "Pauline" and "Paracelsus" had been
deeply musical, and the music came back to their author's verse with the
dramas, lyrics, and romances by which "Sordello" was followed. But the
dread of being diffuse had doubly rooted itself in his mind, and was to
bear fruit again as soon as the more historical or argumentative mood