dle
And bite at man's heel as goose-wont is,
Never felt plague its puny os frontis--
You'd know, as you hissed, spat and sputtered,
Clear `quack-quack' is easily uttered!"

In a letter written to Mr. W. G. Kingsland, in 1868,
Mr. Browning says:--

"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." *

--
* `Browning Society Papers', III., p. 344.
--

It was never truer of any author than it is true of Browning,
that `Le style c'est l'homme'; and Browning's style is an expression
of the panther-restlessness and panther-spring of his
impassioned intellect. The musing spirit of a Wordsworth
or a Tennyson he partakes not of.

Mr. Richard Holt Hutton's characterization of the poet's style,
as a "crowded note-book style", is not a particularly happy one.
In the passage, which he cites from Sordello, to illustrate
the "crowded note-book style", occurs the following parenthesis:--

"(To be by him themselves made act,
Not watch Sordello acting each of them.)"

"What the parenthesis means," he says, "I have not
the most distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have said,
`to be by him her himself herself themselves made act', etc.,
for any vestige of meaning I attach to this curious mob
of pronouns and verbs. It is exactly like the short notes of a speech
intended to be interpreted afterwards by one who had heard
and understood it himself." *

--
* `Essays Theological and Literary'. Vol. II., 2d ed., rev.
and enl., p. 175.
--

At first glance, this parenthesis is obscure; but the obscurity
is not due to its being "exactly like the short notes of a speech",
etc. It is due to what the "obscurity" of Mr. Browning's language,
as language, is, in nine cases out of ten, due, namely,
to the COLLOCATION of the words, not to an excessive economy
of words. He often exercises a liberty in the collocation of his words
which is beyond what an uninflected language like the English
admits of, without more or less obscurity. There are difficult
passages in Browni