deep and subtle thinker, but he was also a very eccentric writer; abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness, as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities. There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces like the _Glove_ and the _Lost_ _Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the _Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, which appeal to the most conservative reader. He seldom deals directly in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tenderness comes over the strong verse as sheathes A film the mother eagle's eye When her bruised eaglet breathes. Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning's mental vigor is the huge composition, entitled _The Ring and the Book,_ 1868; a narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines in which the same story is repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one Count Guido for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the tale himself; then he tells what one half the world said and what the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of the pope. So wonderful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and so cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at each repetition of the tale. He studied the Middle Age carefully, not for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in _Fra Lippo Lippi, The Heretic's Tragedy,_ and _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church._