ts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.
It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and
turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him
out of the window. These reversions to some far off Browning in the
past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life,
enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he
escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not
seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover,
he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it,
sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. At least so I read what he
means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece
of analysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution
of the question by passion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm of
this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could
always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination;
and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and
natural truth of youth. It is the melancholy tendency of some artists,
as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal
temptation it is. There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole
matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive title,
"_Transcendentalism_: A Poem in Twelve Books."

He speaks to a young poet who will give to men "naked thought, good,
true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery,
without emotion."

Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.

It is "quite otherwise," Browning tells him, and he illustrates the
matter by a story.

Jacob Boehme did not care for plants. All he cared for was his mysticism.
But one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he
heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved
them and knew what they meant. Imagination had done more for him than
all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to collating theory with
theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake "and
find life's summer past."

What remedy? What hope? Why, a brace of rhymes! And then, in life, that
miracle takes place which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We feel
like a child; the world is new; every bit o