But that he will “stand out gigantic” in mass of imperishable work, in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit.  His poetic shortcomings seem too essential to permit of this.  That fatal excess of cold over emotive thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his.  It is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled obscurity of much of Browning’s work—­miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought.  His is that “palace infinite which darkens with excess of light.”  But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic.  Browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any writer.  It is a ruinous process—­for the poet.  “He so well repays intelligent study.”  That is it, unfortunately.  There are many, like the old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle’s French Revolution, who think they have become “daft” when they encounter a passage such as, for example,

                               “Rivals, who ... 
      Tuned, from Bocafoli’s stark-naked psalms,
      To Plara’s sonnets spoilt by toying with,
      ’As knops that stud some almug to the pith
      ’Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse
      ’Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse
      ‘Sunning himself o’ the slime when whirrs the breeze—­
      Gad-fly, that is.”

The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days, found “she was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author.”  What would even that indomitable student have said to the above quotation, and to the poem whence it comes?  To many it is not the poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction.  They rejoice, after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in remote depths, touch bottom.  Enough ‘meaning’ has been educed from ‘Childe Roland,’ to cite but one instance, to start a School of Philosophy with:  though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day.  Worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence, but by ’a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet’s drawing-room.’[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse:  most obvious in “Sordello,” in portions of “The Ring and the Book,” and in so many of the later poems.  These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths:  soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves.  Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to