Browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification.  Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention.  In one very important matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious.  His lyrical poems contain more structural varieties of form than those of any preceding English poet, not excepting Shelley.  His blank verse at its best is more vital in quality than that of any modern poet.  And both in rhymed and in blank verse he has written passages which for almost every technical quality are hardly to be surpassed in the language.

That Browning’s style should have changed in the course of years is only natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in the best) direction.  “The later manner of a painter or poet,” says F.W.H.  Myers in his essay on Virgil, “generally differs from his earlier manner in much the same way.  We observe in him a certain impatience of the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects.”  These tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle.  We find as a consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work, while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered him liable become more and more frequent and prominent.  But, good or bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with Aurora Leigh,

      “So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
      The course I took, the work I did.  Indeed
      The academic law convinced of sin;
      The critics cried out on the falling off,
      Regretting the first manner.  But I felt
      My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show
      It lived, it also—­certes incomplete,
      Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
      But even its very tumours, warts and wens,
      Still organised by and implying life."[4]

It has been, as a rule, strangely overlooked, though it is a matter of the first moment, that Browning’s poems are in the most precise sense works of art, and this in a very high degree, positive and relative, if we understand by a “work of art” a poem which attains its end and fulfils its purpose completely, and which has a worthy end and plain purpose to attain.