ERNEST. I did not say that.

GILBERT. Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so few
mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of
them. The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of
the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's Great
Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain
their divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was a
mystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.
Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have
proved that he had but little to reveal. But I speak merely of his
incoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not
belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could
sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he
passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still,
he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a
man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was
not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which
thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine
makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as
dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed,
did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised
language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow
hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands
of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of
metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion
also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of
ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some