That Browning's style should have changed in the course of years is only
natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in
the best) direction. "The later manner of a painter or poet," says
F.W.H. Myers in his essay on Virgil, "generally differs from his earlier
manner in much the same way. We observe in him a certain impatience of
the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use
his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." These
tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as
they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality
always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we
may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle. We find as a
consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less
attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work,
while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered
him liable become more and more frequent and prominent. But, good or
bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with
Aurora Leigh,

"So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. Indeed
The academic law convinced of sin;
The critics cried out on the falling off,
Regretting the first manner. But I felt
My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also--certes incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its very tumours, warts and wens,
Still organised by and implying life."[4]