an aside, and the events swing their arms and strike fiery and cruel blows with Sordello absent.  Considering Mr. Browning’s intent, there is a fine poetic success in this very fault of the poem, but it is not a plain one, and is an after-thought of the critic.  The numerous splendid pages in “Sordello” do nothing towards making one complete impression which cannot be evaded.  Naddo, the genius-haunter, would complain, that, in struggling out towards these aisles of beauty, he had seriously compromised his clothing in the underbrush.

But the faults which characterize “Sordello” are not prevalent in the subsequent writings which are loosely accused of them.  They become afterwards exceptional, they vein here and there the surface, and Mr. Average stumbles over them and proceeds no farther.  Still, Mr. Browning’s verse is not easy reading.  He is economical of words to the point of harmony; but what a hypocrite he would be, if he used more!  He brings you meaning, if you bring him mind; and there is Tupper outside, if you don’t care to trouble yourself.  In saying this we are not arrogant at all, for there is a large and widening sympathy with Mr. Browning’s thought.  Perhaps a whole generation of readers will fretfully break itself upon his style, and pass away, before the mind hails with ease his merits.  But is Shakspeare’s verse easy reading?  Not to this day, in spite of his level of common sense, the artlessness of his passion, and the broad simplicity of a great imagination, that causeth its sun to shine on the evil and the good.  It was easy reading to Ben Jonson, to Milton, and to Chapman; it took “Eliza and our James”; it had more theatrical success than the scholarly plays of Jonson:  but two or three centuries have exhausted neither his commentators nor the subtile parts that need a comment.  A good deal of Shakspeare is read, but the rest is caviare to the multitude.  We need not comfort ourselves on the facility with which we take his name in vain.  We venture to say that the whole of Shakspeare’s thought is inwardly tasted by as many people as enjoy the subtilty of Robert Browning.  Shakspeare has broader places over which the waters lie, sweet and warm, to tempt disporting crowds, and places deep as human nature, upon whose brink the pleasure-seekers peer and shudder.  But if Mr. Browning had a theatrical ability equal to his dramatic, and were content to exhibit a greater number of the stock-figures of humanity, men would say that here again they had love that maddened and grief that shattered, murdering ambition, humorous weakness, and imagination that remarries man and Nature.