ist and realist, we shall have read him
in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as
when the mourners are made to say in _A Grammarian's Funeral_:--

Look out if yonder be not day again.
Rimming the rock-row!

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners
had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And
yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he
uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may
often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the
poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river.
His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in
smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of
Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an
exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who,
echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of
the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half
of his poems. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ is a fable of life
triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile
thing--a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish
hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's
genius, one has only to read _Childe Roland_ again to restore one's
faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid
which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is
added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of
all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of
apprehension and the Tower itself appears:--

The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses
that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:--

Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay--
"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
Of all the lost adventurers my peers--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And