st of, or to depend on,
three things: (1) on a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition,
varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in
verse. These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its
whole. The other half is that the "matter"--that is, the deep substance
of amalgamated Thought and Emotion--should be great, vital and fair. But
both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak
or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are
faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections
poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble
or thoughtless matter. There was, for example, a whole set of poets
towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty
thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and
difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of
lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but
whom the poetical world does not read at all. And the reason is that
their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in
excellence their matter. Their stuff is good, their form is bad. The
judgment of the future gives them no high rank. They do not answer well
to the test of which I speak.

I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to
Browning. He rises far above these poets in style, composition and
melody, but he skirts their faults. And if we are asked to compare him
to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson at all these points of Form.

(1) His composition was rarely sufficiently careful. It was broken up,
overcrowded; minor objects of thought or feeling are made too remarkable
for the whole; there is far too little of poetical perspective; the
variety of the poem does not always grow out of the subject itself, but
out of the external play of Browning's mind upon things remotely
connected with the subject; too many side-issues are introduced;
everything he imagined is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid
aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of
strengthening the main impression. A number of the poems have, that is,
the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not
ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has
gone to sleep. Moreover, only too often, they have those faults of
composition which naturally belong to a poet when he