“There was a bad poet named Clough,
    Whom his friends all united to puff. 
    But the public, though dull,
    Has not quite such a skull
    As belongs to believers in Clough.”

The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning’s life and critical attitude.  He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who sneered at him.  He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled against Mill.  He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled interminable curses against Napoleon.  He admired all the cycle of great men who all contemned each other.  To say that he had no streak of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no justification for attributing any of these great men’s opinions to envy.  But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others.  He admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring leaf.  He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or greener than the leaf of spring.  He was naturally magnanimous in the literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers.  In this spirit Browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett.

That impression was indeed amply justified.  In a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured.  When she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a straining after violent metaphors.  With her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and of brazen paradox and antithesis.  We find this hot wit, as distinct from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare.  We find it lingering in Hudibras, and we do not find it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:—­

    “Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—­sooth,
    But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
    And high-rayed light.  He was a despot—­granted,
    But the [Greek:  autos] of his autocratic mouth
    Said ‘Yea’ i’ the people’s French!  He magnified
    The image of the freedom he denied.”