ng either to the one or to the other.
Browning has said something in his arch way on this point. In effect,
he remarks, Italian prose can render a simple thought more sweetly
to the ear than either Greek or English verse. It seems clear
from many other of his critical remarks that he considers the demand
for music in preference to thought in poetry, as the symptom
of a false taste.

"Browning's poetry is to be gazed at, rather than listened to
and recited, for the most part. It is infinitely easier to listen
for an hour to spiritual music than to fix one's whole attention
for a few minutes on a spiritual picture. In the latter act of mind
we find a rich musical accompaniment distracting, while a slight
musical accompaniment is probably helpful. And perhaps
we may characterize Browning's poetry as a series of spiritual pictures
with a faint musical accompaniment.

"For illustration by extreme contrast, Milton may be compared
with Browning. Milton was a great hearsay poet, Browning repeats
no hearsay. In reading Milton, the difficulty is to keep up
the mental tension where there is so little thought, strictly speaking.
With Browning the highest tension is exacted.

"He is pre-eminently the looker, the seer, the `maker-see';
the reporter, the painter of the scenery and events of the soul.
And if the sense of vision is our noblest, and we instinctively
express the acts of intelligence in terms drawn from physical vision,
the poet who leans most towards the `SEER of Power and Love
in the absolute, Beauty and Goodness in the concrete',
takes the higher rank. This is no matter for bigotry of taste.
Singers and seers, musicians and reporters, and reproducers
of every degree, who have something to tell us or to show us
of the `world as God has made it, where all is beauty',
we have need of all. But of singers there are many,
of seers there are few, that is all."

In the most difficult form of verse, namely, blank verse,
Browning has shown himself a great master, and has written some
of the very best in the literature. And great as is the extent
of his blank verse, the `Ring and the Book' alone containing 21,116 verses,
it never entirely lapses into prose.

One grand merit of blank verse is in the SWEEP of it; another,
in its pause-melody, which can be secured only by a skilful recurrence
of an unbroken measure; without this, variety of pause
ceases to be variety, and results in a metrical chaos;
a third is i