A second result of Browning’s preoccupation with dramatic psychology is the close concentration and “alleged obscurity” of his style. Here again I evade the critical question whether the obscurity is real, or whether it is only a natural and admirable profundity to which an indolent reviewer has given a bad name. That is a question which Posterity must answer. But for us the fact remains that some of his poetry is hard to read; it demands close attention and strenuous effort; and when we find a piece of it that goes very easily, like _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_, _How They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, _Hervé Riel_, or the stirring _Cavalier Tunes_, we are conscious of missing the sense of strain which we have learned to associate with the reading of Browning. One reason for this is the predominance of curiosity over harmony in his disposition. He tries to express the inexpressible, to write the unwritable. As Dr. Johnson said of Cowley, he has the habit “of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality.” Another reason is the fluency, the fertility, the haste of his genius, and his reluctance, or inability, to put the brakes on his own productiveness. It seems probable that if Browning had been able to write more slowly and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. There was a time when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. It is doubtful whether the story of _The Ring and the Book_ gains in clearness by being told by eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility. Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is singularly condensed in the matter of language. He seems to have made his most arduous effort in this direction. After _Paracelsus_ had been published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault of too great terseness in the style. But a letter from Miss Caroline Fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then very young,) took the opposite view and asked “doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for his sonnet.” Browning appears to have been impressed by this criticism; but he set himself to work upon it, not so much by way of selecting words as by way of compressing them. He put _Sordello_ into a world where many of the parts of speech are lacking and all are crowded. He learned to pack the largest, possible amount of meaning into the smallest possible space, as a hasty traveller packs his portmanteau. Many small articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. He adopted a system of elisions for the sake of brevity, and loved, as C. S. Calverley said, “to dock the smaller parts of speech As we curtail th’ already curtailed cur.”