that at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who
showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one--as in the old
tale--crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist i' the
neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a
marvellous tortuous passage. Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words
won't, and can't, come straight. A hitch and a sharp crook in every
sentence bring you up with a shock. But what a shock it is! Did you
ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? In a
thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and
whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is
directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch
him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you. The first sixty or
seventy pages of _The Ring and the Book_ are altogether the most
doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the English
language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, that of
Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini, are
unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, _me judice_.
Here Browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect. You get
lightning glimpses--and, as one naturally expects from lightning,
zigzag glimpses--into the intense night of the passion of these souls.
It is entirely wonderful and without precedent." [1]

One of the most admirable things about Browning's admirable career
as poet and man is that he wrote not to please the critics, as
Tennyson often did, not to please the crowd, as the vast horde of
ephemeral writers do, but to please himself. The critics and the
crowd professed that they could not understand him; but he had no
difficulty in understanding them. He knew exactly what they wanted,
and declined to supply it. Instead of giving them what he thought
they wanted, he gave them what he thought they needed. That