"_Prospero_. My brother and thy uncle, called Antonio-- I pray thee mark me,--that a brother should Be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself, Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put The manage of my state; as at that time Through all the seignories it was the first, And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed In dignity and for the liberal arts, Without a parallel: those being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother, And to my state grew stranger, being transported And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle-- Dost thou attend me?" It is unnecessary to give examples from Browning of defective verse, of passages which cannot be understood, which cannot be construed, which cannot be parodied, and which can scarcely be pronounced. They are mentioned only as throwing light on Browning's cast of mind and methods of work. His inability to recast and correct his work cost the world a master. He seems to have been condemned to create at white heat and to stand before the astonishing draft, which his energy had flung out, powerless to complete it. We have a few examples of things which came forth perfect, but many of even the most beautiful and most original of the shorter poems are marred by some blotches that hurt us and which one feels might have been struck out or corrected in half an hour. How many of the poems are too long! It is not that Browning went on writing after he had completed his thought,--for the burst of beauty is as likely to come at the end as at the beginning,--but that his thought had to unwind itself like web from a spider. He could not command it. He could only unwind and unwind. Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous as a Correggio, but not finished. Caliban upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. In the poems which he revised, as, for instance, Hervé Riel, which exists in two or more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the same fierce haste with which the poems were written. We must not for an instant imagine that Browning was indolent or indifferent; it is known that he was a taskmaster to himself. But he _could_ not write other than he did. When the music came and the verse caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer, then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of beauty to the earth. But the occasions when he did this are a handful of passages in a body of writing as large as the Bible. Just as Browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. His way of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and write down the first sentence. "She should never have looked at me, If she meant I should not love her!" "Water your damned flowerpots, do--" "No! for I'll save it! Seven years since." "But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!"