fabula_ of most of his talking. These
unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means
life, not art. Posterity will want only art. We needed doctrine. If he
had not preached, we would not have listened to him. But posterity
evades the preachers and accepts only singers. Posterity is so dainty
that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. It will cull such out of
the body of Browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already,
and will leave the great mass of him to be rediscovered from time to
time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century.

There is a class of persons who claim for Browning that his verse is
really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. This cannot be
admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due
to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it.

The rules of verse in English are merely a body of custom which has
grown up unconsciously, and most of which rests upon some simple
requirement of the ear.

In speaking of the power of poetry we are dealing with what is
essentially a mystery, the outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and
complex forces.

The rhythm of versification seems to serve the purpose of a prompter. It
lets us know in advance just what syllables are to receive the emphasis
which shall make the sense clear. There are many lines in poetry which
become obscure the instant they are written in prose, and probably the
advantages of poetry over prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse
for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the
matter. Rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been
reached. It punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our
attention from the strain of suspended interest. All of the artifices of
poetical form seem designed to a like end. Naturalness of speech is
somewhat sacrificed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uniformity
of speech which rests and exhilarates. We need not, for the present,
examine the question of euphony any further, nor ask whether euphony be
not a positive element in verse,--an element which belongs to music.

The negative advantages of poetry over prose are probably sufficient to
account for most of its power. A few more considerations of the same
negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or
verse, may be touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, why
Browning is hard to unders