He had been attacked as being "misty" and she wrote to him, "You never _are_ misty, not even in 'Sordello'--never vague. Your graver cuts deep, sharp lines, always--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape." But the classic defense of Browning from this point of view may be found in Swinburne's Introduction to Chapman's _Poems_: "The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity, properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim.... The very essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies above all other things the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity--a faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its object by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing." Browning has himself a word to say on this topic. He wrote to a friend: "I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole, I get my deserts, and something over--not a crowd but a few I value more."