is indicated in a letter to Mrs.
Frank Hill, of January 31, 1884.

Dear Mrs. Hill,--Could you befriend me? The 'Century' prints a little
insignificance of mine--an impromptu sonnet--but prints it _correctly_.
The 'Pall Mall' pleases to extract it--and produces what I enclose:
one line left out, and a note of admiration (!) turned into an I, and
a superfluous 'the' stuck in--all these blunders with the correctly
printed text before it! So does the charge of unintelligibility attach
itself to your poor friend--who can kick nobody. Robert Browning.

The carelessness often shown in the most friendly quotation could hardly
be absent from that which was intended to support a hostile view; and
the only injustice of which he ever complained, was what he spoke of
as falsely condemning him out of his own mouth. He used to say: 'If a
critic declares that any poem of mine is unintelligible, the reader
may go to it and judge for himself; but, if it is made to appear
unintelligible by a passage extracted from it and distorted by
misprints, I have no redress.' He also failed to realize those
conditions of thought, and still more of expression, which made him
often on first reading difficult to understand; and as the younger
generation of his admirers often deny those difficulties where they
exist, as emphatically as their grandfathers proclaimed them where they
did not, public opinion gave him little help in the matter.

The second (unspoken) request was in some sense an antithesis to the
first. Mr. Browning desired to be read accurately but not literally. He
deprecated the constant habit of reading him into his work; whether in
search of the personal meaning of a given passage or poem, or in the
light of a foregone conclusion as to what that meaning must be. The
latter process was that generally preferred, because the individual mind
naturally seeks its own reflection in the poet's work, as it does in the
facts of nature. It was stimulated by the investigations of the Browning
Societies, and by the partial familiarity with his actual life which
constantly supplied tempting, if untrustworthy clues. It grew out of the
strong personal as well as literary interest which he inspired. But the
tendency to listen in his work for a single recurrent note always struck
him as analogous to the inspection of a picture gallery with eyes blind
to every colour but one; and the act of sympathy often involved in this
mode of judgment was neutral