phyria's Lover"--

"Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost
finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with
clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect
lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it
completely."

Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's
work. A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an
experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous. But in spite of the
dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists,
Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished
skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself--tender,
manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in his own proper person.
Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic
episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in
which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:--

"When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he debated
within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as
well as a poet. Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years,
he decided in the negative. But the latent qualities of painter and
musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest
and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the
language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.
No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. 'Abt Vogler' is
the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. It is not
the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the [47] musician, that
it speaks. 'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on
music, is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation: 'A
Toccata of Galuppi's' is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found
of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but 'Abt
Vogler' is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born."

It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
there is chilling of sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a poet (and
only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to
modern demands) will have his difficulties. They were a part of the