The commercial worth of Pauline was exactly zero.

And:—­

Their (the Brownings’) love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia.

And, again, in the story of the circumstances that led to Browning’s death:—­

In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him, he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him.  Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice.

Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one’s breath away, as when, discussing The Lost Mistress, Professor Phelps observes that the lover:—­

     instead of thinking of his own misery ... endeavours to make the
     awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the
     sparrows and the leaf-buds.

When one has marvelled one’s fill at the professor’s phrases and misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in existence.

Professor Phelps’s book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements.  One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a commentary.  It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning quoted in the body of the book.  And these include, not merely short poems like Meeting at Night, but long poems, such as Andrea del Sarto, Caliban on Setebos, and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. This is the right kind of introduction to a great author.  The poet is allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.

At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full Transcendentalism and How it Strikes a Contemporary as Browning’s confession of his aims as an artist.  The first of these is Browning’s most energetic assertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things—­with abstractions rather than with actions.  His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child’s in adventures and in the passion for the detailed and the concrete.  In Transcendentalism he bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme with his subtle meanings:—­

    Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
    John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.

With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of “things” as compared with the philosopher of “thoughts":—­