ng able to understand what others find obscure. But this
attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.

Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer is
that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made out
by a person of average intelligence who will read them as hard as, for
example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic" of Hegel. There
is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse "Sordello," and
corresponded with each other about their progress. "Somebody is dead in
'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to her friend. "I don't quite know _who_
it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run." Alas!
a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of
"Sordello." It is hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton
Night Cap Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by
posterity. But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery of
portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs,
princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, while
civilization and literature last, while men care to know what is in men.

No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of style,
can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like them in the
letters of the past, and must remain without successful imitators in the
future. They will last all the better for a certain manliness of
religious faith--something sturdy and assured--not moved by winds of
doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainly one of Mr.
Browning's attractions in this fickle and shifting generation. He cannot
be forgotten while, as he says--

"A sunset touch,
A chorus ending of Euripides,"

remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a thousand
hopes and fears."

If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most
that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should place Mr.
Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason and
reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not
quite there.

Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile
mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the microscopic
glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which tears the life
out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from the victim.
We know