and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other. On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force -- the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe. On the problem of Death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic temperament never allowed him to dwell. He sentimentalised where Shakespeare thought." Browning's whole attitude to the Hereafter is different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter `faintly', while he strenuously, "trusts the larger hope." To him all credit, that, standing upon the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the Future. "High-hearted surely he; But bolder they who first off-cast Their moorings from the habitable Past." The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more, but a great poet's utterance is never temporal, having that in it which conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of literary ideals. What range, what extent of genius! As Mr. Frederick Wedmore has well said, `Browning is not a book -- he is a literature.' But that he will "stand out gigantic" in MASS of imperishable work, in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit. His poetic shortcomings seem too essential to permit of this. That fatal excess of cold over emotive thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. It is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled obscurity of much of Browning's work -- miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought. His is that "palace infinite which darkens with excess of light." But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic. Browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any writer. It is a ruinous process -- for the poet. "He so well repays intelligent study." That is it, unfortunately. There are many, like the old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle's `French Revolution', who think they have become "daft" when they encounter a passage such as, for example, "Rivals, who . . . Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms, To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with, `As knops that stud some almug to the pith Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze -- GAD-FLY, that is.'"