the manner of poetry.  In a letter of Mrs. Browning’s she alludes to a friend’s “melodious feeling” for poetry.  Possibly the phrase was accidental, but it is significant.  To inhale the vital air of poetry we must love it, not merely find it “interesting,” “suggestive,” “soothing,” “stimulative”:  in a word, we must have a “melodious feeling” for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it.  Browning, who has so often educed from his lyre melodies and harmonies of transcendent, though novel, beauty, was too frequently, during composition, without this melodious feeling of which his wife speaks.  The distinction between literary types such as Browning or Balzac on the one hand, and Keats or Gustave Flaubert on the other, is that with the former there exists a reverence for the vocation and a relative indifference to the means, in themselves—­and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere means as well as for that to which they conduce.  The poet who does not love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his palette, or as the musician any vagrant tone evoked by a sudden touch in idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the sons of Apollo.  The writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes literature and art, without this heed—­without, rather, this creative anxiety:  for it is certainly not enough, as some one has said, that language should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick.  Of course, Browning is not persistently neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist.  He is often as masterly in this as in other respects.  But he is not always, not often enough, alive to the paramount need.  He writes with “the verse being as the mood it paints:”  but, unfortunately, the mood is often poetically unformative.  He had no passion for the quest for seductive forms.  Too much of his poetry has been born prematurely.  Too much of it, indeed, has not died and been born again—­for all immortal verse is a poetic resurrection.  Perfect poetry is the deathless part of mortal beauty.  The great artists never perpetuate gross actualities, though they are the supreme realists.  It is Schiller, I think, who says in effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful that things should first die in reality.  Thus Browning’s dramatic method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in Caliban’s analytical reasoning—­an initial absurdity, as Mr. Berdoe has pointed out, adding epigrammatically, ’Caliban is a savage, with the introspective powers of a Hamlet, and the theology of an evangelical Churchman.’  Not only Caliban, but several other of Browning’s personages (Aprile, Eglamour, etc.) are what Goethe calls schwankende Gestalten, mere “wavering images.”

[Footnote 28:  One account says ‘Childe Roland’ was written in three days; another, that it was composed in one.  Browning’s rapidity in composition was extraordinary.  “The Return of the Druses” was written in five days, an act a day; so, also, was the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon.”]