and his commands. His reflections are as
profuse and as metaphysical as anything in Browning, and yet all is
clear,--all is so managed that it lends magic. The characteristic and
unfathomable significance of this particular character Prospero comes
out of it.

"_Prospero_. My brother and thy uncle, called Antonio--
I pray thee mark me,--that a brother should
Be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself,
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state; as at that time
Through all the seignories it was the first,
And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed
In dignity and for the liberal arts,
Without a parallel: those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle--
Dost thou attend me?"

It is unnecessary to give examples from Browning of defective verse, of
passages which cannot be understood, which cannot be construed, which
cannot be parodied, and which can scarcely be pronounced. They are
mentioned only as throwing light on Browning's cast of mind and methods
of work. His inability to recast and correct his work cost the world a
master. He seems to have been condemned to create at white heat and to
stand before the astonishing draft, which his energy had flung out,
powerless to complete it.

We have a few examples of things which came forth perfect, but many of
even the most beautiful and most original of the shorter poems are
marred by some blotches that hurt us and which one feels might have
been struck out or corrected in half an hour. How many of the poems are
too long! It is not that Browning went on writing after he had completed
his thought,--for the burst of beauty is as likely to come at the end as
at the beginning,--but that his thought had to unwind itself like web
from a spider. He could not command it. He could only unwind and unwind.

Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous as a Correggio, but not finished.
Caliban upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond
all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. In the poems
which he revised, as, for instance, Herve Riel, which exists in two or
more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the
same fierce haste with which the poems were written.

We must not for an instant imagine that Browning was indolent or
indifferent; it is kn