Again, many of the poems do not describe a series of events, but only a series of thoughts or reflections. Hence there is nothing or very little to guide us in grasping the connection between the various parts of the poem, and many of the poems have to be read and re-read many times before the meaning begins to dawn on us. In _A Woman's Last Word_ there is not a single difficult phrase. The whole difficulty arises from the fact that it is a scrap, and from the fact that it is a series of thoughts without any action to thread them together and to make them definite. Browning's poems are sometimes difficult to read because the ideas which he is expressing are profound and difficult to grasp; but far more often they are difficult because of his extraordinary way of expressing perfectly simple and easy ideas. For example, here is a perfectly easy and obvious thought--that every day we see men winning money and reputation by mere imitation of some style that has caught the public taste, while the original inventor or discoverer of that style lives in obscurity and neglect. How does Browning express it? Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats, Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup, Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- Both gorge. Who finished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats? The point about the murex in this extract illustrates another difficulty with Browning, his assumption of knowledge on the part of his reader of all sorts of curious and out-of-the-way information. He is full of allusions to technical points in such things as painting, music, medicine, and classical scholarship which are as a rule known to only specialists in these particular subjects. I might mention lastly in this connection a peculiarity of Browning's thought, namely, its tremendous rapidity. Let me illustrate. A beginner works out a problem in mathematics; he feels his way step by step; he puts down everything in order, and in going over the question we can follow easily every detail of the reasoning. A master mathematician confronted with the same problem would see his way from the beginning right through to the end; he would leave out half of the intermediate steps because to him they were quite obvious and not worth putting down, and when we came to look over his work we might completely fail to see how he had reached his conclusion. So with Browning. Browning skips from thought to thought with great rapidity, leaving intermediate steps to be filled in by the intelligence of the reader. As Chesterton says, if Browning had to describe a quarrel between two men which culminated in one calling the other a liar and knocking him downstairs, he would probably do it something like this: What then? You lie--and doormat below stairs Takes bump from back. That is to say, he would be in such a hurry to get his man to the bottom of the stairs that he would leave out half of the intermediate steps.