perilously near to the absence of poetry in Bishop Blougram’s Apology, succeeded in Mr. Sludge, the Medium, in losing poetry altogether.  In The Ring and the Book there are whole books, and long passages in its other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion, no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these qualities into the glow of poetry.  The indefinable difference which makes imaginative work into poetry is not there.  There is abundance of invention; but that, though a part of imagination, belongs as much to the art of prose as to the art of poetry.

Browning could write thus, out of his intellect alone.  None of the greater poets could.  Their genius could not work without fusing into their intellectual work intensity of feeling; and that combination secured poetic treatment of their subject.  It would have been totally impossible for Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Vergil, or even the great mass of second-rate poets, to have written some of Browning’s so-called poetry—­no matter how they tried.  There was that in Browning’s nature which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet.  And his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with dazzling power in part of The Ring and the Book, he was carried away by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever analysis to tyrannise over him—­Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, The Inn Album, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and a number of shorter poems in the volumes which followed.  In these, what Milton meant by passion, simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only as it exists in a prose writer.

This condition was slowly arrived at.  It had not been fully reached when he wrote The Ring and the Book.  His poetic powers resisted their enemies for many years, and had the better in the struggle.  If it takes a long time to cast a devil out, it takes a longer time to depose an angel.  And the devil may be utterly banished, but the angel never.  And though the devil of mere wit and the little devils of analytic exercise—­devils when they usurp the throne in a poet’s soul and enslave imaginative emotion—­did get the better of Browning, it was only for a time.  Towards the end of his life he recovered, but never as completely as he had once possessed them, the noble attributes of a poet.  The evils of the struggle clung to him; the poisonous pleasure he had pursued still affected him; he was again and again attacked by the old malaria.  He was as a brand plucked from the burning.