nd thereby,
brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate _a tout propos_,
lacked the interest.

Detached I have mentioned that I had become, and it was doubtless at
such a rate high time for that; though I hasten to repeat that with the
close of the incident I was happily able to feel a new sense in the
whole connection established. My critical reaction hadn't in the least
invalidated our great man's being a Bard--it had in fact made him and
left him more a Bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as
not before what a Bard might and mightn't be. The character was just a
rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which
supplied nothing outside of itself, and which above all was not
intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be
of its intrinsic breadth and weight. On two or three occasions of the
aftertime I was to hear Browning read out certain of his finest pages,
and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the
expressive particularisation, so to speak, that I had missed on the part
of the Laureate; an observation through which the author of Men and
Women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration,
as little as possible a Bard. He particularised if ever a man did, was
heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed
some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these
were brought home; so that he had to _prove_ himself a poet, almost
against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the
character he could use. Was not this last in especial, the character, so
close to the surface, with which Browning fairly bristled, what was most
to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius? It
came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read
showed extraordinary life. During that audition at Aldworth the question
seemed on the contrary not of life at all--save, that is, of one's own;
which was exactly not the question. With all the resonance of the chant,
the whole thing was yet _still_, with all the long swing of its motion
it yet remained where it was--heaving doubtless grandly enough up and
down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long
self-consciousness. By all of which I don't mean to say that I was not,
on the day at Aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a Bard
consisted of; for that came as soon as