loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and style—­for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is nothing but pleasant noise—­secures also the continuous delight of men and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet.  Browning was far too careless of his melody.  He frequently sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought.  He may have imagined that he strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody.  He did not, he injured it.  He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it, like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his parenthetic phrases.  He breaks it sometimes into two with violent clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets.  And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme, in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates melody on the altar of his own cleverness.

A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry.  And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there, will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine melody which Tennyson never disobeys.

It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of style and composition belong to all his poetry.

There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which, if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their close.  There are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant, and capturing that their sound is never forgotten.  There are others the subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart.  And these will endure for the noble pleasure of man.

There are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the subject, like the Letter of Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make.  There are others, like Abt Vogler, in which the style is extraordinarily noble, clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important poems,