great quality more
perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive
and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of
perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim.... The very
essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the ripest
fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies above all other things
the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity--a faculty of
spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which
brings to bear upon its object by way of direct and vivid illustration
every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing."
Browning has himself a word to say on this topic. He wrote to a friend:

"I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard
for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never
designedly tried to puzzle people as some of my critics have supposed.
On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should
be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So,
perhaps, on the whole, I get my deserts, and something over--not a crowd
but a few I value more."

A second charge not infrequently brought against Browning's verse is
that it is harsh, and at times even ugly. This charge, like that of
obscurity, cannot be wholly denied. The harshness results from incorrect
rhymes, from irregular movement of the verse, or from difficult
combinations of vowels and consonants. No reader of Browning's poems can
fail to have been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd
rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in
Butler's _Hudibras_ and Lowell's _Fable for Critics_. We find in
_Pacchiarotto_, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish,
most grotesque character--"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued,"
"stubborn, cub-born," "_was_ hard, hazard," all occur in a single
stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in
"Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without
forcing of the sense thirty-six words rhyme with "ride." It cannot be
denied that this remarkable facility led Browning occasionally into the
use of odd rhymes in poems where no light or comic effect was intended;
but a detailed study of his rhymes[7] shows that the proportion of
incorrect rhymes is really small, that the grotesque rhymes are more
striking than numerous, and that they are usual