strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he
has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of
significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its
slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its
object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has
illustrated this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more
inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a
solitary one. His genius[3] removed him from the first from that sphere
of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been
corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was
self-increasing.

It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style;
and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not
defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of
obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with
being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion
because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would
never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true
principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a popular
point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment,
however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.

"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared
"unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and
concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too
concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was
forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer
stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled
by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he know
that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the
single word that is the one fit for his sonnet_?"

Mr. Browning was not personally acquainted with either John Sterling or
Caroline Fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his
mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. Still, he gave the
joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it
deserved in the case of Miss Fox, whom he imagined, from her
self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl
some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the
peri