olden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this
high priest of song. Rarely have imagination and intellect, ideal faith
and the sense which handles daily life, passion and quietude, the
impulse and self-mastery of an artist, the joy of nature and the fates
of men, grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled together more
fully--bells for the pleasure and fruit for the food of man.

Yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public. A few, however, loved
them, and all the poems were collected in 1849. _In Memoriam_ and this
Collected Edition of Browning issued almost together; but with how
different a fate and fame we see most plainly in the fact that Browning
can scarcely be said to have had any imitators. The groves and ledges of
his side of Apollo's mountain were empty, save for a few enchanted
listeners, who said: "This is our music, and here we build our tent."

As the years went on, these readers increased in number, but even when
the volumes entitled _Men and Women_ were published in 1855, and the
_Dramatis Personae_ in 1864, his followers were but a little company. For
all this neglect Browning cared as a bird cares who sings for the love
of singing, and who never muses in himself whether the wood is full or
not of listeners. Being always a true artist, he could not stop versing
and playing; and not one grain of villain envy touched his happy heart
when he looked across the valley to Tennyson. He loved his mistress Art,
and his love made him always joyful in creating.

At last his time came, but it was not till nearly twenty years after
the Collected Poems of 1849 that _The Ring and the Book_ astonished the
reading public so much by its intellectual _tour de force_ that it was
felt to be unwise to ignore Browning any longer. His past work was now
discovered, read and praised. It was not great success or worldwide fame
that he attained, but it was pleasant to him, and those who already
loved his poems rejoiced with him. Before he died he was widely read,
never so much as Tennyson, but far more than he had ever expected. It
had become clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height with
Tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets.

Their public fate, then, was very different. Tennyson had fifty years of
recognition, Browning barely ten. And to us who now know Browning this
seems a strange thing. Had he been one of the smaller men, a modern
specialist like Arnold or Rossetti, we could be