side if the poet has endowed his precious blackguard with a dialectical head hardly to be expected on such shoulders; if, in short, he has made him nearly as clever as himself.  When the critics complain that the characters of a novelist are too witty, the characters of a poet too profound, one cannot but feel thankful that it is once in a while possible for such strictures to be made.  The style of Mr. Sludge is the very acme of colloquialism.  It is not “what is commonly understood by poetry,” certainly:  but is it not poetry, all the same?  If such a character as Sludge should be introduced into poetry at all, it is certain that no more characteristic expression could have been found for him.  But should he be dealt with?  We limit our poetry nowadays, to the length of our own tether; if we are unable to bring beauty out of every living thing, merely because it is alive, and because nature is beautiful in every movement, is it our own fault or nature’s?  Shakespeare and his age trusted nature, and were justified; in our own age only Browning has wholly trusted nature.

Scarcely second in importance to the dramatic group, comes the group of lyrical poems, some of which are indeed, formally dramatic, that is, the “utterance of so many imaginary persons,” but still in general tone and effect lyrical and even personal. Abt Vogler for instance, and Rabbi ben Ezra, might no doubt be considered instances of “vicarious thinking” on behalf of the modern German composer and the mediaeval Jewish philosopher.  But in neither case is there any distinct dramatic intention.  The one is a deep personal utterance on music, the other a philosophy of life.  But before I touch on these, which, with Prospice, are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, I should name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little elegy of love and mourning, May and Death; A Face, with its perfect clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the vignettes of Palma in Sordello, or as a real picture of the “Tuscan’s early art”; the two octaves (not in the first edition) on Woolner’s group of Constance and Arthur (Deaf and Dumb) and Sir Frederick Leighton’s picture of Eurydice and Orpheus; and the two semi-narrative poems, Gold Hair:  a Story of Pornic, and Apparent Failure, the former a vivid rendering of the strange story told in Brittany of a beautiful girl-miser, the latter a record and its stinging and consoling moral ("Poor men, God made, and all for that!”) of a visit that Browning paid in 1850 to the Morgue.

Abt Vogler[39] ("after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention”) is an utterance on music which perhaps goes further than any attempt which has ever been made in verse to set forth the secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts.  Only the wonderful lines in the Merchant of Venice come anywhere near it.  The wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and beauty of a sky, of a sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first, become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing.  Life, religion and music, the Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen of existence, are combined in threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential spirit.