ou have your songs endure?
Build on the human heart!--why, to be sure
Yours is one sort of heart.--But I mean theirs,
Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares
To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,
That's father of...."

This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass. Nevertheless, though Naddo
makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as
well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth. And,
of course, Browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his
work. Even in _Sordello_ he tells us how he gave himself up to recording
with pity and love the doings of the universal soul. He strove to paint
the whole. It was a bold ambition. Few have fulfilled it so well. None,
since Shakespeare, have had a wider range. His portraiture of life was
so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and
detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is
not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always
in danger of tending to prose. And Browning, picturing human life,
deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex
forms. It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed
it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully. Only, it is not
to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet. For the
representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the
analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet
away from art. He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes,
and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose. Again and
again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem
how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under
the sway of another, cease to be a poet. At this point his inferiority
to Tennyson as a poet is plain. Tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line
which was not unmistakably poetry, while Browning could write pages
which were unmistakably not poetry.

I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that
which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that
he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson. Browning is often simple,
lovely and universal. And when he speaks out of that emotional
imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the
legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will w