Brownings Shorter Poems | Page 5

In this respect he has
satisfied the most exigent demands of art, and has already taken rank as
one of the great creative minds of the nineteenth century.
True poet he is, also, in his depth of feeling and range of sympathy.
Beneath a ruggedness of intellect, like his landscape in _De Gustibus_,
there is always sympathy and tenderness. It is, indeed, more like the
serenity of Chaucer's emotions than like the tragic fervor of
Shakespeare's. Mrs. Browning's estimate of him in _Lady Geraldine's
Courtship_,--
"Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the
middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity,"
is true criticism.
His love of nature, and his sense of the joy and beauty of it, appear
often in his poetry; but not with the same insistence as in Wordsworth
and Burns, and seldom with the same pervasiveness, or with the same
beauty, as in Tennyson. He was rather the poet of men's souls. When he
does use nature, it is generally to illustrate some phase or experience of
the soul, and not for the sake of its beauty. He has, however, some
nature-descriptions so exquisite that English poetry would be the
poorer for their loss. Witness De Gustibus_, Up at a Villa_, Home
Thoughts from Abroad_, _Pippa's Songs_, and _Saul.
It is too early to guess at Browning's permanent place in our literature.
But his vigor of intellect, his insight into the human heart, his
originality in phrase and conception, his unquenchable and fearless
optimism, and his grasp of the problems of his century, make him
beyond question one of its greatest figures.
APPRECIATIONS

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,
Therefore, on him no
speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and
hale
No man has walked along our roads with step
So active, so
inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse. But warmer climes

Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
Of Alpine heights
thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
--WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency of
law....
Browning vividly feels the importance, the greatness and beauty of
passions and enthusiasms, and his imagination is comparatively
unimpressed by the presence of law and its operations.... It is not the
order and regularity in the processes of the natural world which chiefly
delight Browning's imagination, but the streaming forth of power, and
will, and love from the whole face of the visible universe....
Tennyson considers the chief instruments of human progress to be a
vast increase of knowledge and of political organization. Browning
makes that progress dependent on the production of higher passions,
and aspirations,--hopes, and joys, and sorrows; Tennyson finds the
evidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress in the universal
presence of a self-evolving law. Browning obtains his assurance of its
truth from inward presages and prophecies of the soul, from
anticipations, types, and symbols of a higher greatness in store for man,
which even now reside within him, a creature ever unsatisfied, ever
yearning upward in thought, feeling, and endeavour.
... Hence, it is not obedience, it is not submission to the law of duty,
which points out to us our true path of life, but rather infinite desire and
endless aspiration. Browning's ideal of manhood in this world always
recognizes the fact that it is the ideal of a creature who never can be
perfected on earth, a creature whom other and higher lives await in an
endless hereafter....
The gleams of knowledge which we possess are of chief value because

they "sting with hunger for full light." The goal of knowledge, as of
love, is God himself. Its most precious part is that which is least
positive--those momentary intuitions of things which eye hath not seen
nor ear heard. The needs of the highest parts of our humanity cannot be
supplied by ascertained truth, in which we might rest, or which we
might put to use for definite ends; rather by ventures of faith, which test
the courage of the soul, we ascend from surmise to assurance, and so
again to higher surmise.--Condensed from EDWARD DOWDEN,
_Studies in Literature_.
... Browning has not cared for that poetic form which bestows perennial
charm, or else he was incapable of it. He fails in beauty, in
concentration of interest, in economy of language, in selection of the
best from the common treasure of experience. In those works where he
has been most indifferent, as in the _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_,
he has been merely whimsical and dull; in those works where the
genius he possessed is most felt, as in Saul_, A Toccata of Galuppi's_,
Rabbi Ben Ezra_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, The Bishop Orders his
Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church_, _Hervé Riel_,