of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room.
Yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber. In
the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are
making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and
then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet
effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.

The poems are, it is true, original. We cannot class them with any
previous poetry. They cannot be called didactic or satirical. The
didactic and satirical poems of England are, for the most part,
artificial, concise, clear. These poems are not artificial, clear or
concise. Nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured,
intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden and
Pope addressed. The natural man is in them--the crude, dull, badly-baked
man--what the later nineteenth century called the real man. We see his
ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or
Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban. The representations are then human enough,
with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.
Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous
lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art. Realism
of this kind is not art, it is science.

Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument.
Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on
league after league of high grasslands. When one has a fancy to follow
them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there
are livelier employments. Their chief interest is the impression they
give us of a certain side of Browning's character. They are his darling
debauch of cleverness, of surface-psychology. The analysis follows no
conventional lines, does not take or oppose any well-known philosophical
side. It is not much more than his own serious or fantastic thinking
indulging itself with reckless abandon--amusing itself with itself. And
this gives them a humanity--a Browning humanity--outside of their
subjects.

The subjects too, though not delightful, are founded on facts of human
life. _Bishop Blougram_ was conceived from Cardinal Wiseman's career,
_Mr. Sludge_ from Mr. Home's. _Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_ explains and
defends the expediency by which Napoleon III. directed his political
action. _The Inn Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_,