own that he was a taskmaster to himself. But he
_could_ not write other than he did. When the music came and the verse
caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer,
then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of
beauty to the earth. But the occasions when he did this are a handful
of passages in a body of writing as large as the Bible.

Just as Browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. His way
of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and
write down the first sentence.

"She should never have looked at me,
If she meant I should not love her!"

"Water your damned flowerpots, do--"

"No! for I'll save it! Seven years since."

"But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!"

"Fear Death? to feel the fog in my throat."

Sometimes his verse fell into coils as it came, but he himself, as he
wrote the first line of a poem, never knew in what form of verse the
poem would come forth. Hence the novel figures and strange counterpoint.
Having evolved the first group of lines at haphazard, he will sometimes
repeat the form (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in order to have
any organic effect, would have to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and
repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be judge of his success in
these experiments. Sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt to trace
the logic of the rhymes which are concealed by the rough jolting of the
metre. Sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the first verse, but
continues in irregular improvisation.

Browning never really stoops to literature; he makes perfunctory
obeisance to it. The truth is that Browning is expressed by his defects.
He would not be Robert Browning without them. In the technical part of
his art, as well as in his spirit, Browning represents a reaction of a
violent sort. He was too great an artist not to feel that his violations
of form helped him. The blemishes in The Grammarian's Funeral--_hoti's
business, the enclitic de_--were stimulants; they heightened his
effects. They helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater
than art. These savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of
smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking
up of the ice. Men loved Browning not only for what he was, but also for
what he was not.

These blemishes were, under the circumstances, and for a limited
audience, strokes o