Now to me that passage expresses something immeasurably more difficult of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize across the years which now separate me from those English "garden walks and all the grassy floor" strewn with "blossoms red and white of fallen May and chestnut flowers." If you have never experienced precisely that frame of mind, you cannot, of course, appreciate the literary power, any more than you can appreciate Shelley's all-exquisite The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments-- unless you have pondered the mystery of life and eternity somewhat as he had done. Yes! that must be premised all through. You must have had your own mood of profound world-weariness, before you can appreciate the utter completeness of the cry of Beatrice Cenci:-- "Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world, The wide, gray, lampless, deep unpeopled world!" The highest attainment then of literary power is the "exquisite expression of exquisite--that is to say, rarely intense or subtle--impressions." The language, said Wordsworth, should be the "incarnation of the thought." The highest gift of the writer is to make his words and their combinations not clever, not dazzling, not merely lucid, but to make them, by their meanings, their associations, and their musical effects, exactly reproduce what he thinks and sees and feels, just in the special light in which he thinks and sees and feels it. This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling. Browning indeed may say:-- Perceptions whole, like that he sought To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought As language. But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master of language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and Shakespeare shallower than Browning.