which would have consigned to deserved damnation, any poet who did not possess sufficient genius to retrieve his reputation. In his best works, Browning appears as a poet gifted with a large reason and a wide-wandering imagination; but his reason and imagination do not seem to work genially together—are sometimes in each other’s way—and in their operation they sometimes strangle each other. He thinks broadly and deeply, and he shapes finely; but the thought does not commonly seem born in music, but rather born _with_ music; and he often gives the idea and the illustrative image, instead of the idea in the illustrative image. Sometimes, in reading him, we wish he would abandon poetry for metaphysics, so sure and clear is his analysis and statement of mental phenomena; and then again some magnificent comparison, metaphor or image, or some exquisite touch of characterization, makes us wish that he would abjure metaphysics, and cling to poetry. Compared with Tennyson, his nature would be called hard, and be said to lack mellowness and melody. That sensuous element in poetry, which proceeds from fusing thought, sensation, and imagination—the spiritual and physical—into one sweet product, “felt in the blood,” and felt along the brain, he does not appear to have reached; but then the burning words, struck off like sparks from the conflict of flint and steel, which come from him in his periods of real excitement, seem to the reader sufficient compensations for his comparative absence of softness and harmony. He may not delight so much as Tennyson, but he gives the mind a wider field to range in, inspires a manlier feeling, and indicates a greater capacity. The very fact that all his works are cast in a dramatic form, even though the dramatic element is often more formal than real, shows that his mind has a healthy affection for objects, and steadily resists its own subjective tendencies. The first poem in the collection is “Paracelsus.” This is an attempt to exhibit the influence on character of knowledge disjoined from love, by a delineation of an aspiring and noble nature, smitten by a restless thirst to know, and ruined by “the lust of his brain.” The poem is not poetically conceived; its central idea is not organic, not the germinating principle of the whole, but rather an abstract proposition logically developed; and, accordingly, the mechanical understanding not the vital imagination is predominant throughout. Besides, though it exercises the brain not unpleasantly, it hardly gives poetic pleasure; and so far from comfortable is the general impression it leaves, that the reader recurs to it only for deep or delicate thoughts and imaginations which are separately beautiful. As a whole, it is not philosophical enough for a treatise, nor beautiful enough for a poem.