The excuse has something in it. But, all the same, an artist should have managed it otherwise. Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters, order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests, without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and melodious style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not relieve Browning of the charge. Had he been a greater artist, he would have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a greater pleasurer of the future. Had he taken more pains with his style, but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of posterity. (3) In one thing more--in this matter of form--the beauty of poetry lies. It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. This part of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and style--for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is nothing but pleasant noise--secures also the continuous delight of men and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet. Browning was far too careless of his melody. He frequently sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought. He may have imagined that he strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. He did not, he injured it. He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it, like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his parenthetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two with violent clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets. And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme, in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates melody on the altar of his own cleverness.