es and
halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of Caponsacchi,
as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness
of Browning's blank verse:--

"Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave
Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop,
My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench
Of minutes with a memory in each?"

His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the noble poem _Rabbi
Ben Ezra_, this jolting line appears:--

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

and in _Sordello_, Browning writes:--

"The Troubadour who sung
Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue,
Its craft his brain."

No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.

In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at
times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:--

"Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!"[15]

His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in _Saul_
or in these lines in _Abt Vogler_:--

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."

While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and
obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and
beautiful. He is one of the subtlest analysts of the human mind, the
most original and impassioned poet of his age, and one of the most
hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON. _From a photograph by Mayall._]

Life.--Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of
Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year
memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as
Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.

Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note
that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, _The
Palace of Art_:--

"...an English home,--gray twilight pour'd
On