not the poets' poet. In the
_Transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault
of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he
fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately
illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him
at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book
and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to
deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who

"with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side."

The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it
Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular
misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of
the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the
speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but
unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and
makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We
see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper
and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the
alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who

"stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ...
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
If any cursed a woman, he took note,"--

and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get
no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his
famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of
popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its
critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _Pacchiarotto_. The
_Popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that
familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the
obstacles to his own.

There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime
poet,--the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty
imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition.

"He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.'"

This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and
absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion