enough of Browning as an artist to point it out.  It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty of Pippa Passes to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself.  The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.  To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa.  Having done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married.  Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle.  But its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and neglects him as a poet.  But a better test was coming.  Browning’s poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in Dramatic Lyrics, published in 1842.  Here he showed himself a picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner.  And the two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse.  Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators.  But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and almost unexpectedly otherwise.

Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of Browning’s poetry run through the actual repertoire of the Dramatic Lyrics.  The first item consists of those splendid war chants called “Cavalier Tunes.”  I do not imagine that any one will maintain that there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them.  The second item is the fine poem “The Lost Leader,” a poem which expresses in perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned indignation.  It is the same, however far we carry the query.  What theory does the next poem, “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” express, except the daring speculation that it is often exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium?  What theory does the poem after that, “Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr,” express, except that it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa?  Then comes “Nationality in Drinks,” a mere technical oddity without a gleam of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite “Garden Fancies,” the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis that a book