Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and 1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to rank among the first of English poets.  Manifestly, it is impossible and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points of a later general consideration.

Finally, to complete the list of Browning’s works, reference is necessary to the group of books of his later years:  the two self-called narrative poems, ‘The Ring and the Book,’ with its vast length, and ’Red Cotton Nightcap Country,’ its fellow in method if not in extent.  Mr. Birrell (it is worth while to quote him again, as one who has not merged the appreciator in the adulator) calls ‘The Ring and the Book’ “a huge novel in 20,000 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.”  But he adds later:—­“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.”

This is the key of the matter:  the reader who has learned, through his greater work, to follow with interest the very analytic exercises, and as it were tours de force of Browning’s mind, will prize ’The Ring and the Book’ and ‘Red Cotton Nightcap Country’; even he will prize but little the two ‘Adventures of Balaustion,’ ’Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,’ ‘The Inn Album,’ and one or two others of the latest works in the same genre.  But he can well do without them, and still have the inexhaustible left.

The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Browning’s poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and is not easy to comprehend even now for those who have the whole body of his work before them.  It is intelligible enough that the “crude preliminary sketch” ‘Pauline’ should have given only the bare hint of a poet to the few dozen people who saw that it was out of the common; that ‘Paracelsus’ should have carried the information,—­though then, beyond a doubt, to only a small circle; and especially that ‘Sordello,’ a clear call to a few, should