rather than as a poet. Among them, and they comprised many well-known workers
in the several arts, were Charles Dickens and "Ion" Talfourd.
Mr. Fox, whom Browning had met once or twice in his early youth,
after the former had been shown the Byronic verses which had
in one way gratified and in another way perturbed the poet's father,
saw something more of his young friend after the publication of "Pauline".
He very kindly offered to print in his magazine any short poems
the author of that book should see fit to send -- an offer, however,
which was not put to the test for some time.

Practically simultaneously with the publication of "Pauline"
appeared another small volume, containing the "Palace of Art",
"Oenone", "Mariana", etc. Those early books of Tennyson and Browning
have frequently, and somewhat uncritically, been contrasted. Unquestionably,
however, the elder poet showed a consummate and continuous mastery of his art
altogether beyond the intermittent expressional power of Browning
in his most rhythmic emotion at any time of his life. To affirm that
there is more intellectual fibre, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work,
in the product of the younger poet, would be beside the mark.
The insistence on the supremacy of Browning over all poets since Shakespeare
because he has the highest "message" to deliver, because his intellect
is the most subtle and comprehensive, because his poems have
this or that dynamic effect upon dormant or sluggish or other active minds,
is to be seriously and energetically deprecated. It is with presentment
that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself.
If he cannot PRESENT poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet,
though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer. Browning's eminence
is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called
"the mere handiwork, the furnisher's business, of the poet."
It is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent