Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/464

448 degrees, which we find supreme in Shakespeare, is to my apprehension equally supreme in Browning; and it embraces the past no less than the present, and, what is even more rare in one so learned, the present no less than the past. For the present, he himself specially notes it in "How it strikes a Contemporary;" and Landor long since noted it in the keen-eyed genial observer:—

For the past, Browning early avowed it in the personal digression in "Sordello":—

And as to the interior life, we have also his own avowal in the letter of dedication prefixed to "Sordello," twenty-five years after the poem was written:—

But we need neither the testimony of others nor his own avowals on these points, so conspicuously illustrated throughout his books. For the past, besides the greatest, from Paracelsus through "The Ring and the Book" to "Aristophanes' Apology," we