or of Keats by remembering that he once addressed a young lady as follows:—­

     “O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
     The riches of Flora are lavishly strown: 
     The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
     The west is resplendently clothed in beams.”

The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their greatest works.

The second period of Mr. Browning’s poetry demands a different line of argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed.  No doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read ’The Ring and the Book’ for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do well not to believe them.  These poems are difficult—­they cannot help being so.  What is ‘The Ring and the Book’?  A huge novel in twenty thousand lines—­told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of view.  It is loaded with detail of every kind and description:  you are let off nothing.  As with a schoolboy’s life at a large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into it, and care intensely about everything—­so the reader of ’The Ring and the Book’ must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.

If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the style, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception of the speeches of counsel, eloquent and at times superb; and as for the matter, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost professional—­if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection—­you will prize ‘The Ring and the Book’ as the surgeon prizes the last great contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.

But this sort of work tells upon style.  Browning has, I think, fared better than some writers.  To me, at all events, the step from ’A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ to ‘The Ring and the Book’ is not so marked as is the mauvais pas that lies between ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Daniel Deronda.’  But difficulty is not obscurity.  One task is more difficult than another.  The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get mixed, and to confuse us all—­man and woman alike.  ‘Prince Hohenstiel’ something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.—­in whom the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably mixed—­and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of Gladstone claret in a tavern at Leicester Square, you cannot expect that the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry Patmore’s admirable ‘Angel in the House.’