, love estranged.'

Whereat I woke--a twofold bliss:
Waking was one, but next there came
This other: 'Though I felt, for this,
My heart break, I loved on the same.'"

Not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only Browning
could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this
last volume of a poet preeminently subtle. This characteristic of
simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire,
in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of
_The Pope and the Net_, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish
of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it.

There are other light ballads, as different in merit as _Muckle-mouth
Meg_ on the one hand and _The Cardinal and the Dog_ and _The Bean-Feast_
on the other, with snatches of moralising story, as cutting as _Arcades
Ambo_, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging
as _The Lady and the Painter_, which is a last word written for love of
birds and of the beauty of nakedness. One among these poems, _The
Cardinal and the Dog_, indistinguishable in style from the others, was
written fifty years earlier. It is as if the poet, taking leave of that
"British public" which had "loved him not," and to whose caprices he had
never condescended, was, after all, anxious to "part friends." The
result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained.

So far I wrote in 1889, when Browning was only just dead, and I went on,
in words which I keep for their significance to-day, because time has
already brought in its revenges, and Browning has conquered. That
Browning, I said then, could ever become a popular poet, in the sense in
which Tennyson is popular, must be seen by everyone to be an
impossibility. His poetry is obviously written for his own pleasure,
without reference to the tastes of the bulk of readers. The very titles
of his poems, the barest outline of their prevailing subjects, can but
terrify or bewilder an easy-going public, which prefers to take its
verse somnolently, at the season of the day when the newspaper is too
substantial, too exciting. To appreciate Browning you must read with
your eyes wide open. His poetry is rarely obscure, but it is often hard.
It deals by preference with hard matter, with "men and the ideas of
men," with life and thought. Other poets before him have written with
equally independent aims; but