he was met by nothing but neglect, if not scornful derision.
None who knows the true artistic temperament will fall into any such mistake.

It is quite certain that neither Shakespeare nor Milton
ever met with such enthusiastic praise and welcome as Browning encountered
on the publication of "Pauline" and "Paracelsus". Shelley,
as far above Browning in poetic music as the author of so many
parleyings with other people's souls is the superior in
psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life
not one such review of praiseful welcome as the Rev. W. J. Fox wrote
on the publication of "Pauline" (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham's
equally kindly but less able review in the `Athenaeum'),
or as John Forster wrote in `The Examiner' concerning "Paracelsus",
and later in the `New Monthly Magazine', where he had the courage
to say of the young and quite unknown poet, "without the slightest hesitation
we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth."
His plays even (which are commonly said to have "fallen flat")
were certainly not failures. There is something effeminate, undignified,
and certainly uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not
failure in literature. So enthusiastic was the applause he encountered,
indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation
any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt --
so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged
counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass
only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century,
we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium,
and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those
who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one
among the high gods of our fathers.