of its labour, springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination.  He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man’s as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway."[6]

Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with Bishop Butler, in answer to a similar complaint:  “It must be acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or, if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided—­those only who will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been put in a plainer manner."[7]

There is another popular misconception to which also a word in passing may as well be devoted.  This is the idea that Browning’s personality is apt to get confused with his characters’, that his men and women are not separate creations, projected from his brain into an independent existence, but mere masks or puppets through whose mouths he speaks.  This fallacy arises from the fact that not a few of his imaginary persons express themselves in a somewhat similar fashion; or, as people too rashly say, “talk like Browning.”  The explanation of this apparent paradox, so far as it exists, is not far to seek.  All art is a compromise, and all dramatic speech is in fact impossible.  No persons in real life would talk as Shakespeare or any other great dramatist makes them talk.  Nor do the characters of Shakespeare talk like those of any other great dramatist, except in so far as later playwrights have consciously imitated Shakespeare.  Every dramatic writer has his own style, and in this style, subject to modification, all his characters speak.  Just as a soul, born out of eternity into time, takes on itself the impress of earth and the manners of human life, so a dramatic creation, pure essence in the shaping imagination of the poet, takes on itself, in its passage into life, something of the impress of its abode.  “The poet, in short, endows his creations with his own attributes; he enables them to utter their feelings as if they themselves were poets, thus giving a true voice even to that intensity of passion which in real life often hinders expression."[8] If this fact is recognised (that dramatic speech is not real speech, but poetical speech, and poetical speech infused with the individual style of each individual dramatist, modulated, indeed,