There has been a careful overhauling of the punctuation, with benefit to the text.  Many lines have been altered, sometimes to the comfort of the reader; and about a hundred fresh lines have been interpolated here and there, to the weakening, we think, of the dramatic vigor of nearly every place that is thus handled.  Many readers will, however, find this compensated by an increased clearness of the sense.  On page 131 (page 152, first edition) there is an improved manipulation of the simile of the dwarf palm; and four lines before the last one on page 147 (page 171, first edition) lighten up the thought.  So there are eight lines placed to advantage after “Sordello, wake!” on page 152 (page 176).  But, on the whole, what Mr. Browning first imagined cannot be tampered with, and he must generously trust the elements of his own fine genius to do justice to his thought with all people who would not thank him to furnish an interpreter.

One day we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,—­he could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,—­all the profit was expended in mental gymnastics,—­in short,

    “The man can’t stoop
    To sing us out, quoth he, a mere romance;
    He’d fain do better than the best, enhance
    The subjects’ rarity, work problems out
    Therewith:  now, you’re a bard, a bard past doubt,
    And no philosopher; why introduce
    Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use
    In poetry,—­which still must be, to strike,
    Eased upon common sense; there’s nothing like
    Appealing to our nature!”

Find the rest of Mr. Average’s argument on page 67.

These objections to the poetry of Mr. Browning, which the dense, involved, and metaphysical treatment of “Sordello” first suggested to the public, are made to apply to all his subsequent writings.  We concede that “Sordello” over-refines, and that, after reading it, “who would has heard Sordello’s story told,” but who would not and could not has probably not heard it.  The very time of the poem, which is put several centuries back amid the scenery of the Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, as if to make the struggle of a humane and poetic soul to grow, to become recognized, to find a place and purpose, seem still more premature, puzzles the reader with remote allusions, with names that belong to obscure Italian narrative, with motives and events that require historical analysis.  The poem is impatient with those very things which make the environment of the bard Sordello, and treats them in curt lines.  A character is jammed into a sentence, like a witch into a snuff-box, the didactic parts grow metaphysical, and the life of Sordello does not fuse the events of the poem into one long rhythm.  He thinks and dreams apart, and Palma’s ambition for him is