d person of the perfect-indicative,
and 'wert' for the present-potential, simply to be understood; as I
should hardly be if I substituted the latter for the former, and
therewith ended my phrase. 'Where wert thou, brother, those three days,
had He not raised thee?' means one thing, and 'Where wast thou when He
did so?' means another. That there is precedent in plenty for this and
many similar locutions ambiguous, or archaic, or vicious, I am well
aware, and that, on their authority, I _be_ wrong, the illustrious poet
_be_ right, and you, our critic, _was_ and shall continue to be my
instructor as to 'every thing that pretty _bin_.' As regards my
objection to the slovenly 'I had' for 'I'd,' instead of the proper 'I
would,' I shall not venture to supplement what Landor has magisterially
spoken on the subject. An adverb adds to, and does not, by its omission,
alter into nonsense the verb it qualifies. 'I would rather speak than be
silent, better criticize than learn' are forms structurally regular:
what meaning is in 'I had speak, had criticize'? Then, I am blamed for
preferring the indicative to what I suppose may be the potential mood in
the case of 'need' and 'dare'--just that unlucky couple: by all means go
on and say 'He need help, he dare me to fight,' and so pair off with 'He
need not beg, he dare not reply,' forms which may be expected to
pullulate in this morning's newspaper.

"VENICE, Oct. 25, 1885."

"R. B."
]

I.

INTRODUCTORY GROUP.

"PAULINE," "PARACELSUS," "SORDELLO."

These three poems are Mr. Browning's first, and they are also, as I have
said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his
work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them
from the remainder of it. Each is in its different way the study of a
human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence,
and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. This
ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with Mr.
Browning's mind--young and untutored by experience as it then was, full
of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been--that it is
difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life.
But if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much
more in fancy than in fact. His sympathy with the ambition of Paracelsus
and Sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are
only