f his wit had the upper hand, it
tended to drive out both imagination and passion. Intellectual play may
be without any emotion except its delight in itself. Then its mere
cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased
pleasure. When a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure,
imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he
produces resembles, but is not, poetry. And Browning, who had got
perilously near to the absence of poetry in _Bishop Blougram's Apology_,
succeeded in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, in losing poetry altogether. In
_The Ring and the Book_ there are whole books, and long passages in its
other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by
brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a
combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion,
no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these
qualities into the glow of poetry. The indefinable difference which
makes imaginative work into poetry is not there. There is abundance of
invention; but that, though a part of imagination, belongs as much to
the art of prose as to the art of poetry.

Browning could write thus, out of his intellect alone. None of the
greater poets could. Their genius could not work without fusing into
their intellectual work intensity of feeling; and that combination
secured poetic treatment of their subject. It would have been totally
impossible for Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Vergil, or even the great
mass of second-rate poets, to have written some of Browning's so-called
poetry--no matter how they tried. There was that in Browning's nature
which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without
passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet. And
his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with
dazzling power in part of _The Ring and the Book_, he was carried away
by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of
what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever
analysis to tyrannise over him--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, _The Inn
Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and a number of shorter poems in
the volumes which followed. In these, what Milton meant by passion,
simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only
as it exists in a prose writer.

This condition was slowly arrived at. It had not been fully reached when
he wro