at he once addressed a young lady as
follows:--

"O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
The riches of Flora are lavishly strown:
The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
The west is resplendently clothed in beams."

The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but
poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their
greatest works.

The second period of Mr. Browning's poetry demands a different line of
argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late
years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed. No
doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read 'The Ring and the
Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do
well not to believe them. These poems are difficult--they cannot help
being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in twenty
thousand lines--told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it
tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from
ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and
description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a
large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into
it, and care intensely about everything--so the reader of 'The Ring and
the Book' must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the
fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of
Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and
that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.

If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the
_style_, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception
of the speeches of counsel, eloquent and at times superb; and as for the
_matter_, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost
professional--if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or
suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for
you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you
will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great
contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.

But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared
better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is the
_mauvais pas_ that lies between 'Amos Bart