Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/476

460 more without suggesting anything better than a little romance or a magazine article; but a great poet one fierce June day (in 1865, as I read) picks it up for a lira, eightpence English just, from among the old and new trash of a stall on a step of the Ricardi Palace in the Square of San Lorenzo, Florence. It thus falls into a heart and mind full of learning and knowledge, thought, insight, genius, intense human sympathy, which all leap to crystallise around it in most living crystallisation; and we have as result this stupendous poem, stupendous far more by quality than by quantity, though numbering over twenty thousand lines; a work destined to rank among the world's masterpieces—"The Ring and the Book."

Mr. Swinburne, in his fine Critical Essay on George Chapman, devotes several pages to the vindication of Browning from the common charge of obscurity; pages not really discursive, for they shed clear light upon the proper main theme. I am loth to mutilate such admirably proportioned eloquence; but as it appears to me no less just than eloquent in its insistence on certain dominant qualities of Browning's genius, I cannot refrain from citing a few of its salient sentences, while commending the whole to the study of the reader; for why put poorly in one's own words what has been already put richly in another's?

"Now, if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with