his matter of form--the beauty of poetry
lies. It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness
of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony
making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies
to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct
of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close
which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. This part
of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and
style--for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is
nothing but pleasant noise--secures also the continuous delight of men
and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who
gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet.
Browning was far too careless of his melody. He frequently sacrificed
it, and needlessly, to his thought. He may have imagined that he
strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. He did not, he
injured it. He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it,
like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his
parenthetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two with violent
clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets.
And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring
tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme,
in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates
melody on the altar of his own cleverness.

A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is
thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven
work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid
presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for
qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry.
And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there,
will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have
given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine
melody which Tennyson never disobeys.

It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the
whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of
style and composition belong to all his poetry.

There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which,
if there are discords, they are resolved int