public generally agrees with him. It is because he has ministered
with such marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine skill to this
interest, that he is the most modern, to modern people the most
important, of poets.

So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These
extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola"
and "Porphyria's Lover"--

"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an
almost finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities
with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in
perfect lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders
it completely."

Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
work. A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent
an experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous. But in spite of
the dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the
true and native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or
monologists, Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the
grace, the finished skill, the music, native and ever ready to the
poet himself--tender, manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in
his own proper person. Music herself, the analysis of the musical
soul, in the characteristic episodes of its development is a wholly
new range of poetic subject in which Mr. Browning is simply unique.
Mr. Symons tells us:--

"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated