er hence.

One is incisive, corrosive--
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant--
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive--
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant--
Five ... O Danaides, O Sieve!

Now, they ply axes and crowbars--
Now they prick pins at a tissue
Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's
Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue?
Where is our gain at the Two-bars?

_Est fuga, volvitur rota!_
On we drift. Where looms the dim port?
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota--
Something is gained, if one caught but the import--
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha!

What [with] affirming, denying,
Holding, risposting, subjoining,
All's like ... it's like ... for an instance I'm trying ...
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying?

So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the dickens?
Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens,
Blacked to the stoutest of tickens?"

Do our readers exclaim, "But where's poetry--the dickens--in all this
rigmarole?" We confess we can find none--we can find nothing but a set
purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of
Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom
of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly nonsensical book.
Hudibras Butler told us long ago that "rhyme the rudder is of verses;"
and when, as in his case, or in that of Ingoldsby Barham, or
Whims-and-Oddities Hood, the rudder guides the good ship into tracks of
fun and fancy she might otherwise have missed, we are grateful to the
double-endings, not on their own account, but for what they have led us
to. But Mr. Browning is the mere thrall of his own rudder, and is
constantly being steered by it into whirlpools of the most raging
absurdity. This morbid passion for double rhymes, which is observable
more or less throughout the book, reaches its climax in a long copy of
verses on the "Old Pictures of Florence," which, with every disposition
to be tolerant of the frailties of genius, we cannot hesitate to
pronounce a masterpiece of absurdity. Let the lovers of the Hudibrastic
admire these _tours de force_:--

Not that I expect the great Bigordi
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;