In Pauline, however, there is little positive beauty. In the next book, Paracelsus (1835), there is a great deal. Here the dramatic form was much more definite, though still not attempting acted or actable drama. The poet's appetite for "soul-dissection" was amply shown in the characters not merely of Paracelsus himself, but of his soberer friends Festus and Michal, and of the Italian poet Aprile, a sort of Euphorion pretty evidently suggested by, though greatly enlarged from, the actual Euphorion of the second part of Faust, then not long finished. The rapid, breathless blank verse, the crowding rush of simile and illustration, and the positive plethora of meaning, more often glanced and hinted at than fully worked out, were as noteworthy as before in kind, and as much more so in degree as in scale. Here too were lyrics, not anticipating the full splendour of the poet's later lyrical verse, but again quite original. Here, in fact, to anybody who chose to pay attention, was a real "new poet" pretty plainly announced.

Very few did choose to pay attention; and Browning's next attempt was not of a kind to conciliate halting or hostile opinion, though it might please the initiated. He wrote for his friend Macready a play intended at least to be of the regular acting kind. This play, Strafford (1837), contains fine things; but the involution and unexpectedness of the poet's thought now and always showed themselves least engagingly when they were even imagined as being spoken not read. After yet another three years Sordello followed, and here the most peculiar but the least estimable side of the author's genius attained a prominence not elsewhere equalled, till in his latest stage he began to parody himself, and scarcely even then. Although this book does not deserve the disgusted contempt which used to be poured on it, though it contains many noble passages, and as the "story of a soul" is perfectly intelligible to moderate intellects, it must have occasioned some doubts and qualms to intelligent admirers of the poet as to whether he would lose himself in the paths on which he was entering. Such doubts must have been soon set at rest by the curious medley issued in parts, under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates, between 1841 and 1846. The plays here, though often striking and showing that the author's disabilities, though never likely to leave, were also not likely to master him, showed also, with the possible exception of the charming nondescript of Pippa Passes, no new or positively unexpected faculty. But certain shorter things, lyrical and other, at last made it clear that Browning could sing as well as say: and from this time, 1846 (which also was the year of his marriage with Miss Elizabeth Barrett), he could claim rank as a great poet. He had been hitherto more or less a wanderer, but with headquarters in England; he now went to Florence, which in turn was his headquarters till his wife's death in 1861. His publications during the time were only two—Christmas Eve and Easter Day in 1850, and Men and Women in 1855. But these were both masterpieces. He never did better work, and, with Bells and Pomegranates and Dramatis Personæ, which appeared in 1864 (when, after Mrs. Browning's death, he had returned to London), they perhaps contain all his very best work.

Up to this time, the thirty-first year from the publication of Pauline, Browning's work, though by no means scanty, could hardly be called voluminous as the result of half a lifetime of absolute leisure. A little before Dramatis Personæ—itself not a long book, though of hardly surpassed quality—the whole of the poems except Pauline had been gathered into three small but thick volumes, which undoubtedly did very much to spread the poet's fame—a spread much helped by their immediate successors. The enormous poem of The Ring and the Book, originally issued in four volumes and containing more than twenty thousand verses, was published in 1869, and, the public being by this time well prepared for it, received a welcome not below its merits. Having at last gained the public ear, Mr. Browning did not fail to improve the occasion, and of the next fifteen years few passed without a volume, while some saw two, from his pen. These, including translations of the Alcestis and the Agamemnon (for the poet was at this time seized with a great fancy for Greek, which he rendered with much fluency and a very singular indulgence in a sort of hybrid and pedantic spelling of proper names), were Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn Album (1875), Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper (1876), La Saisiaz (1878), Dramatic Idylls, two volumes (1879-80), Jocoseria (1883), and Ferishtah's Fancies (1884). The five remaining years of Browning's long life were somewhat less fruitful; but Parleyings with Certain People of Importance came in 1887, and at the end of 1889, almost simultaneously with his death in Italy, Asolando, which some think by far his best volume since Dramatis Personæ, a quarter of a century older. These volumes occasionally contained a few, and Asolando contained several, of the lovely lyrics above referred to. But the great bulk of them consisted of the curious blank verse, now narrative, now ostensibly dramatic monologue, which the poet had always affected, and which he now seemed to affect more and more. In them, too, from The Ring and the Book onwards, there appeared a tendency stronger than ever to an eccentric and almost burlesque phraseology, which at one time threatened to drown all his good qualities, as involution of thought had threatened to drown them in the Sordello period. But this danger also was averted at the last.

Critical estimate of Browning's poetry was for years hampered by, and cannot even yet be said to have been quite cleared from, the violent prepossessions of public opinion respecting him. For more than a generation, in the ordinary sense, he was more or less passionately admired by a few devotees, stupidly or blindly ignored by the public in general, and persistently sneered at, lectured, or simply disliked by the majority of academically educated critics. The sharp revulsion of his later years has been noticed; and it amounted almost to this, that while dislike to him in those who had intelligently, if somewhat narrowly, disapproved of his ways was not much affected, a Browning cultus, almost as blind as the former pooh-poohing or ignoring, set in, and extended from a considerable circle of ardent worshippers to the public at large. A "Browning Society" was founded in 1881, and received from the poet a kind of countenance which would certainly not have been extended to it by most English men of letters. During his later years handbooks solemnly addressed to neophytes in Browningism, as if the cult were a formal science or art, appeared with some frequency; and there has been even a bulky Browning Dictionary, which not only expounds the more recondite (and, it is fair to say, tolerably frequent) allusions of the master, but provides for his disciples something to make up for the ordinary classical and other dictionaries with which, it seemed to be presumed, their previous education would have made them little conversant.

This not very wise adulation in its turn not unnaturally excited a sort of irritation and dislike, to a certain extent renewing the old prejudice in a new form. To those who could discard extraneous considerations and take Browning simply as he was, he must, from a period which only very old men can now remember, have always appeared a very great, though also a very far from perfect poet. His imperfections were always on the surface, though perhaps they were not always confined to it; and only uncritical partisanship could at any time have denied them, while some of them became noticeably worse in the period of rapid composition or publication from 1870 to 1885. A large license of unconventionality, and even of defiance of convention, may be claimed by, and should be allowed to, persons of genius such as Mr. Browning undoubtedly possessed. But it can hardly be denied that he, like his older contemporary Carlyle, whose example may not have been without influence upon him, did set at naught not merely the traditions, but the sound norms and rules of English phrase to a rather unnecessary extent. A beginning of deliberate provocation and challenge, passing into an after-period of more or less involuntary persistence in an exaggeration of the mannerisms at first more or less deliberately adopted, is apt to be shown by persons who set themselves in this way to innovate; and it was shown by Mr. Browning. It is impossible for any intelligent admirer to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hand-gallop, in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly, abused. Sometimes the thing was not worth doing at all—there are at least half a dozen of the books between The Ring and the Book and Asolando from the whole of which a judicious lover of poetry would not care to save more than the bulk of the smallest of them should they be menaced with entire destruction. Even in the best of these what is good could generally, if not always, have been put at the length of the shorter Men and Women with no loss, nay, with great advantage. The obscurity so much talked of was to some extent from the very first, and to the last continued to be, in varying degrees, an excuse, or at least an occasion, for putting at great length thought that was not always so far from commonplace as it looked into expression which was very often not so much original as unkempt. "Less matter with more art" was the demand which might have been made of Mr. Browning from first to last, and with increasing instance as he became more popular.

But though no competent lover of poetry can ever have denied the truth and cogency of these objections, the admission of them can never, in any competent lover of poetry, have obscured or prevented an admiration of Browning none the less intense because not wholly unreserved. Even his longer poems, in which his faults were most apparent, possessed an individuality of the first order, combined the intellectual with no small part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not otherwise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an extraordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The pathos, the power, at times the humour, of the singular soul-studies which he was so fond of projecting with little accessory of background upon his canvas, could not be denied, and have not often been excelled. If he was not exactly what is commonly called orthodox in religion, and if his philosophy was of a distinctly vague order, he was always "on the side of the angels" in theology, in metaphysics, in ethics; and his politics, if exceedingly indistinct and unpractical, were always noble and generous. Further, though he seems to have been utterly destitute of the slightest gift of dramatic construction, he had no mean share of a much rarer gift, that of dramatic character; and in a century of descriptions of nature his, if not the most exquisite, have a freedom and truth, a largeness of outline combined with felicity of colour, not elsewhere to be discovered.

But it is as a lyric poet that Browning ranks highest; and in this highest class it is impossible to refuse him all but the highest rank, in some few cases the very highest. He understood love pretty thoroughly; and when a lyric poet understands love thoroughly there is little doubt of his position. But he understood many other things as well, and could give strange and delightful voice to them. Even his lyrics, still more his short non-lyrical poems, admirable as they often are, and closely as they group with the lyrics proper, are not untouched by his inseparable defect. He cannot be prevented from inserting now and then in the midst of exquisite passages more or fewer of his quirks and cranks of thought and phrase, of his vernacularity or his euphuism, of his outrageous rhymes (which, however, are seldom or never absolutely bad), of those fantastic tricks of his in general which remind one of nothing so much as of dashing a bladder with rattling peas in the reader's face just at the height of the passion or the argument.

Yet the beauty, the charm, the variety, the vigour of these short poems are as wonderful as the number of them. He never lost the secret of them to his latest years. The delicious lines "Never the time and the place, And the loved one all together" are late; and there are half a dozen pieces in Asolando, latest of all, which exhibit to the full the almost bewildering beauty of combined sound, thought, and sight, the clash of castanets and the thrill of flutes, the glow of flower and sunset, the subtle appeal for sympathy in feeling or assent in judgment. The song snatches in Pippa Passes, "Through the Metidja," "The Lost Leader," "In a Gondola," "Earth's Immortalities," "Mesmerism," "Women and Roses," "Love Among the Ruins," "A Toccata of Galuppis," "Prospice," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Porphyria's Lover," "After," with scores of others, and the "Last Ride Together," the poet's most perfect thing, at the head of the list, are such poems as a very few—Shakespeare, Shelley, Burns, Coleridge—may surpass now and then in pure lyrical perfection, as Tennyson may excel in dreamy ecstasy, as some seventeenth century songsters may outgo in quaint and perfect fineness of touch, but such as are nowhere to be surpassed or equalled for a certain volume and variety of appeal, for fulness of life and thought, of action and passion.

Mr. Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was older than himself by six years, and her period of popularity considerably anticipated his. But except one very juvenile book she published nothing of importance till 1838, when Browning, whom she did not then know, had already manifested his idiosyncrasy. Miss Barrett, whose father's original name was Moulton, was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, on 6th March 1806. The change of name was brought on by succession to estates in the West Indies; and the family were wealthy. For the greater part of Miss Barrett's youth they lived in Herefordshire at a place, Hope End, which has left great traces on her early poetry; later her headquarters were in London, with long excursions to Devonshire. These excursions were mainly caused by bad health, from which, as well as from family bereavements, Miss Barrett was a great sufferer. She had read widely; she began to write as a mere child; and her studies extended even to Greek, though in a rather amateurish and desultory fashion. Her Essay on Mind and other poems appeared in 1825; but a considerable interval, as noted above, elapsed before, in The Seraphim and other poems, she gave, if not a truer, a more characteristic note. And two more intervals of exactly the same length gave Poems 1846 and Poems 1850, containing most of her best work. Meanwhile she had met Robert Browning, and had married him, rather against the wish of her family, in 1846. The rest of her life was spent mostly at Florence, where, in 1849, the only child of the marriage was born. Two years later appeared Casa Guidi Windows and the long "sociological" romance of Aurora Leigh. In these, and still more in the Poems before Congress (1860), a not unnatural tendency to echo the peculiar form and spirit of her husband's work is observable, not by any means always or frequently to advantage. She died at Florence on 30th June 1861, and next year a volume of Last Poems was issued. The most interesting document in regard to her since has been her Letters to R. H. Horne, the author of Orion, which were published in 1876.

It has been said that Mrs. Browning's popularity long anticipated her husband's; indeed, years after her death, and on the very eve of the publication of The Ring and the Book, it was possible to meet persons, not uncultivated, who were fairly well acquainted with her verse and entirely ignorant of his. The case has since been altered; but it is believed that Mrs. Browning still retains, and it is probable that she will always retain, no small measure of general favour. It has been usual to speak of her as the chief English poetess, which she certainly is if bulk and character of work as distinguished from perfection of workmanship are considered. Otherwise, she must as certainly give place to Miss Christina Rossetti. But Mrs. Browning no doubt combined, in very unusual and interesting manner, the qualities which appeal to what may be called, with no disdainful intention, the crowd of readers of poetry, and those which appeal to the elect. Even the peculiarities which lent themselves so easily to parody—and some of the happiest parodies ever written were devoted to her in Bon Gaultier and other books—did not serve her badly with the general, for a parody always in a way attracts attention to the original. Although her expression was not always of the very clearest, its general drift was never easily mistakable; and though she was wont to enshrine her emotions in something of a mist of mysticism, they were in the main simple and human enough. It must also be admitted that pathetic sentiment is almost the surest of popular appeals in poetry; and Miss Barrett—partly through physical suffering, partly through the bereavements above referred to, but very mainly it may be suspected by temperament and preference—was much more a visitant of the House of Mourning than of the House of Mirth. She was, yet again, profoundly and sincerely, if a little vaguely, religious: and her sacred poems, of which the famous and beautiful "Cowper's Grace" is the chief example, secured one portion of the public to her as firmly as the humanitarianism of "The Cry of the Children," chiming in with famous things of Hood and Dickens, did another; "Isobel's Child," a pathetic domesticity, a third; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished Romanticism of "The Duchess May" and "The Brown Rosary," a fourth; and the ethical and political "noble sentiments" of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a fifth.