ozen characters; it tells the same
story from ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of
every kind and description: you are let off nothing." But he adds
later:--"If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for
the style, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception
of the speeches of counsel, eloquent and at times superb: and as for the
matter--if your interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost
professional; if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or
suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for
you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you
will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great
contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology."

This is the key of the matter: the reader who has learned, through his
greater work, to follow with interest the very analytic exercises, and
as it were _tours de force_ of Browning's mind, will prize 'The
Ring and the Book' and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'; even he will
prize but little the two 'Adventures of Balaustion,' 'Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau,' 'The Inn Album,' and one or two others of the
latest works in the same _genre_. But he can well do without them, and
still have the inexhaustible left.

The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Browning's
poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and is not easy
to comprehend even now for those who have the whole body of his work
before them. It is intelligible enough that the "crude preliminary
sketch" 'Pauline' should have given only the bare hint of a poet to the
few dozen people who saw that it was out of the common; that
'Paracelsus' should have carried the information,--though then, beyond a
doubt, to only a small circle; and especially that 'Sordello,' a clear
call to a few, should have sounded to even an intelligent many like an
exercise in intricacy, and to the world at large like something to which
it is useless to listen. Or, to look at the other end of his career, it
is not extraordinary that the work of his last period--'The Ring and the
Book,' 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country,'--those wonderful minute studies of
human motive, made with the highly specialized skill of the psychical
surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the reader's
following power--should always remain more or less esoteric literature.
But when it is remembered that between th