52, 
this. This poem is a mine of wealth for the student of human 
nature. If the charge of obscurity made against the poem be 
examined, it will be found that profundity rather than obscurity 
is its characteristic. 
Some of Browning’s dramas are ‘closet plays,’ others were 
written for the stage, and have been successfully placed on the 
boards by such actors as Macready, Phelps, and Helen Fancit. 
More recently his ‘‘ Blot on the Scutcheon’’ has been given in 
New York with great success. 
Browning is the most prolific poet since Shakespeare. The 
variety and extent of his knowledge are remarkable. What 
Swinburne has aptly named ‘the inexhaustible stores of his 
perception ” are still more marvellous. He drinks in the living 
world at every pore. With him, as with all great poets, the 
matter of the song is the primary object, its music only second- 
ary. Harshness, if there be any in his works, is to be attributed 
to that affectation which in the case of a great artist like 
Browning simply means naturalness. His passion is as intense, 
noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle ; it is of 
utter self-sacrifice, self-annihilation, self-vindicated by its irresist- 
ible intensity, as it is found in “‘ Time’s Revenges,” the ‘‘ Statue 
and the Bust,” ‘‘In a Balcony,” ‘‘One Way of Love,” and in 
many other of his works. Never surely was nobler love through 
life and death than that which inspired in the man the lines to 
his Wife in ‘‘ Men and Women,” or the fervent invocation to her 
when dead which open and close the ‘‘ Ring and the Book,’’ and 
in the Woman the ‘‘ Sonnets from the Portuguese.”’ Browning 
is one of the few men who with most cordial energy and in- 
vincible resolution have lived thoroughly throughout the whole 
of their being to the uttermost verge of all their capacities—in 
his case truly colossal. He has lived and wrought thoroughly 
in sense and soul and intellect. He lives at home in all realms 
of Nature and human nature, of art and literature. 
Selections illustrating the points in the paper were read from 
« Pauline,” ‘‘Sordello,” ‘‘ Rabbi ben Ezra,” ‘Xmas Eve,” 
“‘One Word More,” ‘‘ Evelyn Hope,” ‘“ Ferishtah,” and several 
other poems. 
