“Our times are in His hand
       Who saith, ’A whole I planned,
  Youth shows but half; trust God:  see all, nor be afraid!’
       * * * * *
  “Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 
       What entered into thee,
       That was, is, and shall be: 
  Time’s wheel runs back or stops:  Potter and clay endure.”

General Characteristics.—­Browning is a poet of striking originality and impelling force.  His writings are the spontaneous outpourings of a rich, full nature, whose main fabric is intellect, but intellect illumined with the glittering light of spiritual hopefulness and flushed with the glow of deep human passion.

The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul.  While he possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestiveness, he nevertheless does not excel in setting off character against character in movement and speech, but rather in a minute, penetrating analysis, by which he insinuates himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters, and views life through their eyes.

He is a pronounced realist.  His verse deals not only with the beautiful and the romantic, but also with the prosaic and the ugly, if they furnish true pictures for the panorama of real life.  The unconventionality and realism of his poetic art will be made manifest by merely reading through the titles of his numerous works.

Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but to stimulate thought and to “sting” the conscience to activity.  The meaning of his verse is, therefore, the matter of paramount importance, far overshadowing the form of expression.  In the haste and carelessness with which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he laid himself open to the charge of obscurity.

His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is marked far more by strength than by beauty.  The bare and rugged style of his verse is often made profoundly impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its burning intensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and halting, interrupted rhythm.  The following utterance of Caponsacchi, as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness of Browning’s blank verse:—­

  “Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave
  Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop,
  My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench
  Of minutes with a memory in each?”

His lines are often harsh and dissonant.  Even in the noble poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, this jolting line appears:—­

  “Irks care the crop-full bird?  Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?”

and in Sordello, Browning writes:—­

  “The Troubadour who sung
  Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue,
  Its craft his brain.”

No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.

In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:—­