its weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Pisgah-sights_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time's Revenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Meeting at Night_ and _Parting at Morning_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of the Duchess_, or in the same style as _The Grammarian's Funeral_, or in the same style as _A Star_, or in the same style as that astounding lyric which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun presupposes that you _do_ rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under persecution, that "Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us" does not rhyme to it.