Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_, and Swinburne's early poems are alien to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was _sui generis_ among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the intensity of the poet and the strong social sense of the prose writer. It seems also wise to glance at the outset at a few of the main criticisms that have been made on Browning's poetry, for the result of his marked originality is that no poet of the time has been so greatly praised and blamed. A natural first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure defying analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the difficulties in his poems come less from stylistic defects than from the subject matter. What Mr. Chesterton calls Browning's love for "the holes and corners of history," leads him to the use of much unfamiliar detail. A large part of the difficulty in reading _Sordello_ arises from the fact that all Browning's accumulated knowledge of medieval Italy is there poured forth in an allusive, taken-for-granted manner, till even the practiced reader turns away perplexed and overwhelmed. So, too, "Old Pictures in Florence," "Pictor Ignotus," and "Fra Lippo Lippi" assume on the part of the reader a minute familiarity with early Florentine art. Occasionally the poems demand an exceptional technical knowledge of some sort, as in "Abt Vogler," where only a trained musician can fully understand the terminology. Many even of the minor poems belong to realms of thought and experience so remote that only by distinct effort do we transport ourselves thither. It would, for instance, be absurd to call "Two in the Campagna" difficult in form or phrasing, yet it narrates an experience intelligible only to those who have loved deeply but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of inevitable personal isolation. Sometimes the difficulty arises from the extreme subtlety of the thought. "Evelyn Hope," the simplest of poems in expression, presents novel and elusive ideas. Mr. Chesterton ingeniously ascribes Browning's obscurity to "intellectual humility," to an assumption that his readers were in possession of a native endowment and an acquired intellectual wealth on a par with his own; but the defense seems rather forced. Mrs. Browning gave one of the best brief analyses of Mr. Browning's obscurity.