eful scrutiny might reveal
116 which an ordinary reader would require to read twice. Anything more
clear than the work as a whole it would be difficult to find. It is much
easier to follow than _Paradise Lost_; the _Agamemnon_ is rather less
easy to follow than _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.

That there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could
deny. But it is only the excuse of a misconception. Browning is a
thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom
superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift
as it is subtle. To a dull reader there is little difference between
cloudy and fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the
other is too dense. Of all thinkers in poetry, Browning is the most
swift and fiery. "If there is any great quality," says Mr. Swinburne, in
those noble pages in which he has so generously and triumphantly
vindicated his brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity--

"If there is any great quality more perceptible than another
in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive
faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception,
his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with
obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind,
or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire.
He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too
brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer
to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence
which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise
with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building
spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and
forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour,
springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to
circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living
thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his
perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his
imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate
of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a
railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to
that of a railway."[6]

Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he
is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to de