oughness that comes from mismanagement or disregard of the
form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and quantity; and his
subordination to the laws of his metre is extraordinary in its
minuteness. Of ringing lines there are many; of broadly sonorous or
softly melodious ones but few; and especially (if one chooses to go into
details of technic) he seems curiously without that use of the broad
vowels which underlies the melody of so many great passages of English
poetry. Except in the one remarkable instance of 'How we Carried the
Good News from Ghent to Aix,' there is little onomatopoeia, and almost
no note of the flute; no "moan of doves in immemorial elms" or "lucent
sirops tinct with cinnamon." On the other hand, in his management of
metres like that of 'Love Among the Ruins,' for instance, he shows a
different side; the pure lyrics in 'Pippa Passes' and elsewhere sing
themselves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more
meditative poems, like 'By the Fireside.'

The vividness and vigor and truth of Browning's embodiments of character
come, it is needless to say, from the same power that has created all
great dramatic work,--the capacity for incarnating not a quality or an
ideal, but the mixture and balance of qualities that make up the real
human being. There is not a walking phantom among them, or a lay-figure
to hang sentiment on. A writer in the New Review said recently that of
all the poets he remembered, only Shakespeare and Browning never drew a
prig. It is this complete absence of the false note that gives to
certain of Browning's poems the finality which is felt in all consummate
works of art, great and small; the sense that they convey, if not the
last word, at least the last necessary word, on their subject. 'Andrea
del Sarto' is in its way the whole problem of the artist-ideal, the weak
will and the inner failure, in all times and guises; and at the other
end of the gamut, nobody will ever need again to set forth Bishop
Blougram's attitude, or even that of Mr. Sludge the Medium. Of the
informing, almost exuberant vitality of all the lyric and dramatic
poems, it is needless to speak; that fairly leaps to meet the reader at
every page of them, and a quality of it is their essential optimism.

"What is he buzzing in my ears?
Now that I come to die.
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I!"

The world was never a vale of tears to Robert Brownin