ly in places where they
are dramatically appropriate. His use of harsh words and sound-blendings
is also often to be justified on the ground of their appropriateness to
the idea. Compare, for instance, the flowing, easy words, the musical
linking of sounds, in the first stanza of "Love Among the Ruins" with
the harsh words, harshly combined, in the twelfth and thirteenth stanzas
of "Childe Roland." Both effects are artistic because each sort of
combination is in response to the nature of the thought. It is true that
sometimes, perhaps not infrequently, the verse is rugged or uncouth
where the sense does not call for such form, and there are lines that
not only remind us of De Quincey's dictum that certain words should be
"boiled before they are eaten," but which have no metrical flow at all;
they defy any sort of scansion and read like rough prose. But a poet
has a right of appeal to the sum of his manifest excellencies rather
than to his defects, and if we take Browning's best work we find a
harmony of movement superior in musical effect to a more technically
regular meter. In many poems the meter is indissolubly fused with the
pictures, the ideas, the events. Take, for instance, "The Pied Piper of
Hamelin," where the hurry-skurry of the verse is in complete harmony
with the quaint, rapid tale. The hoof-beats of galloping horses is heard
all through "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." The slow
march, the stately chant, are rhythmically present throughout "A
Grammarian's Funeral." In "The Flight of the Duchess" the change from
the rough servitor's narrative to the incantation of the gypsy-queen is
as exquisitely marked in the metrical movement and in the rhymes as it
is in the diction and tone of thought. Many other examples might be
cited. Mr. Brinton, who has made a detailed and competent study of
Browning's verse, gives his final opinion in these words: "In the
volumes of Browning I maintain that we find so many instances of
profound insight into verbal harmonies, such singular strength of poetic
grouping, and such a marvelous grasp of the rhythmic properties of the
English language that we must assign to him a rank second to no English
poet of this century."[8]

A third charge brought against Browning's art is that he makes all his
characters talk "Browningese"; that is, that he endows all of them with
the power to use such words and sentences and thought processes as are
natural to him and to him on