This must be accepted with qualification. It is like the other general assertion, that Browning had to live fifty years before he gained recognition -- a statement as ludicrous when examined as it is unjust to the many discreet judges who awarded, publicly and privately, that intelligent sympathy which is the best sunshine for the flower of a poet's genius. If by "before he gained recognition" is meant a general and indiscriminate acclaim, no doubt Browning had, still has indeed, longer to wait than many other eminent writers have had to do: but it is absurd to assert that from the very outset of his poetic career he was met by nothing but neglect, if not scornful derision. None who knows the true artistic temperament will fall into any such mistake. It is quite certain that neither Shakespeare nor Milton ever met with such enthusiastic praise and welcome as Browning encountered on the publication of "Pauline" and "Paracelsus". Shelley, as far above Browning in poetic music as the author of so many parleyings with other people's souls is the superior in psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life not one such review of praiseful welcome as the Rev. W. J. Fox wrote on the publication of "Pauline" (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham's equally kindly but less able review in the `Athenaeum'), or as John Forster wrote in `The Examiner' concerning "Paracelsus", and later in the `New Monthly Magazine', where he had the courage to say of the young and quite unknown poet, "without the slightest hesitation we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth." His plays even (which are commonly said to have "fallen flat") were certainly not failures. There is something effeminate, undignified, and certainly uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not failure in literature. So enthusiastic was the applause he encountered, indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt -- so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one among the high gods of our fathers.