originality of Browning's nature, and interesting--not as a clew to
his life, which conformed to that of organized society--but as a
clew to his independence of classical and conventional forms in the
exercise of his art.

Creative energy Browning has in high degree. With the poet's insight
into character and motives, the poet's grasp of the essential laws of
human life, the poet's vividness of imagination, he has portrayed a
host of types distinct from each other, true to life, strongly marked
and consistent. With fine dramatic instinct he has shown these
characters in true relation to the facts of life and to each other. In
this respect he has satisfied the most exigent demands of art, and
has already taken rank as one of the great creative minds of the
nineteenth century.

True poet he is, also, in his depth of feeling and range of sympathy.
Beneath a ruggedness of intellect, like his landscape in _De
Gustibus_, there is always sympathy and tenderness. It is, indeed,
more like the serenity of Chaucer's emotions than like the tragic
fervor of Shakespeare's. Mrs. Browning's estimate of him in _Lady
Geraldine's Courtship_,--

"Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity,"

is true criticism.

His love of nature, and his sense of the joy and beauty of it, appear
often in his poetry; but not with the same insistence as in Wordsworth
and Burns, and seldom with the same pervasiveness, or with the same