shed. The theaters were prosperous, but they
brought out only old plays or new ones of inferior rank. In poetry, too,
if we set aside the great names of Tennyson and Browning, the period was
neither rich nor varied. During Browning's first great productive
period, 1841-46, the only other poems of note were Tennyson's two
volumes in 1842. In the nine years from 1846 to _Men and Women_ in 1855,
the chief poems were Tennyson's _The Princess_, _In Memoriam_, and
_Maud_, for though Wordsworth's _Prelude_ was one of the greatest
publications of the mid-century, it was written years before, and can
hardly be counted as belonging to this era. There are, during the
decade, many poems of secondary rank, the most important of them being
Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ and _Aurora Leigh_, but
besides Tennyson and Browning, the only poet of high rank is Matthew
Arnold, whose slender volumes voice the doubts and difficulties of the
age as Browning's poems voice its optimism. In the fourteen years
between _Men and Women_ and _The Ring and the Book_ poets of a new kind
appear; William Morris's _Defense of Guinevere_, _The Life and Death of
Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_, and Swinburne's early poems are alien
to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact
is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary
environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was _sui generis_
among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the intensity
of the poet and the strong social sense of the prose writer.

It seems also wise to glance at the outset at a few of the main
criticisms that have been made on Browning's poetry, for the result of
his marked originality is that no poet of the time has been so greatly
praised and blamed.

A natural first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity
is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost
unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of
speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of
confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double
parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure
defying analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these
points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is
sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the
difficulties in his poems come less fro