ng stones. His
curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun
to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In
Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if
anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of
setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it
is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun
presupposes that you _do_ rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under
persecution, that "Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us" does not rhyme to
it.

The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was,
curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the
deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it
was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and
he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the
fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes
flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are
the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true
things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply.
Thus he really did want to say that God had indeed made man and woman
one flesh; that the sex relation was religious in this real sense that
even in our sin and despair we take it for granted and expect a sort of
virtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband about the good wife, for
instance, are about as subtle and entangled as any matter on this earth;
and Browning really had something to say about them. But he said it in
some of the plainest and most unmistakable words in all literature; as
lucid as a flash of lightning. "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
Or again, he did really want to say that death and such moral terrors
were best taken in a military spirit; he could not have said it more
simply than: "I was ever a fighter; one fight more, the best and the
last." He did really wish to say that human life was unworkable unless
immortality were implied in it every other moment; he could not have
said it more simply: "leave now to dogs and apes; Man has for ever." The
obscurities were not merely superficial, but often covered quite
superficial ideas. He was as likely as not to be most unintelligible of
all in writing a compliment in a lady's album. I remember in my boyhood
(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading