Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/463

Rh qualities or faculties are so pre-eminently rare and valuable, so delightful and informing and suggestive, that an intelligent and athletic student soon willingly surrenders the serenest tranquillity in order to pursue their subtle and multiplex workings, finding this pursuit an intellectual gymnastic of the most exhilarating as well as bracing character. But it must be always remembered that when Browning sets himself to a task of pure and lofty imaginativeness—as in the "Saul," the "Serenade at the Villa," the "Childe Roland," "Any Wife to Any Husband," "One Word More," or on a larger scale in the prevision of the tragedy of "The Ring and the Book," or the Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and Pope sections—his imagination, kindling in the measure of the greatness of its theme, and so (as I have said) kindling and glorifying his style, is as intense, solemn, steadfast, irresistibly dominant, I will dare to assert, as the noblest in all our noble literature.

Heine says in one of his rough jottings, "Shakespeare's big toe contained more poetry than all the Greek poets, with the exception of Aristophanes. The Greeks were great Artists, not Poets; they had more artistic sense than poetry." The same may be fairly said of many modern distinguished writers of verse, if poetry be regarded as the reflection at once intelligent and beautiful of the whole world of nature and human nature; or, lyrically, of the singer's whole inner nature in relation to the outer world, and not merely of certain choice "bits" or dreamy moods. Now, this comprehensiveness, this sleepless intimate interest in the whole world of life around him, both the interior and exterior life, in all their kinds and