poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of them:--

"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I never
mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the
hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer
such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
dominoes to an idle man."

"Moreover, while a writer who deals with [48] easy themes has no excuse
if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say with Bishop
Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that
some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or,
if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone
are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have
been put in a plainer manner.'"

In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is Mr. Browning's most perfect
piece of work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical outline: and he is very
likely right. He is certainly right in thinking Mas they formerly
stood, Mr. Browning's most delightful volumes. It is only to be
regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those
two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other
headings. We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
more than justice to The Ring and the Book. The Ring and the Book is
at once the largest and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point more
decisively than Dramatis Personae of his style. Yet just here he
rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's manner:--

"Not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the
style and versification have undergone a change. I might point to the
profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic,
or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness
of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality
for scenes and situations