Page:Prometheus bound - Browning (1833).djvu/15

Rh nearly equally impossible for the mere imitator to compass either; for if we would stand in the mist, we must stand also on the mountain. His excellences consist chiefly in a vehement imaginativeness, a strong but repressed sensibility, a high tone of morality, a fervency of devotion, and a rolling energetic diction: and as sometimes his fancy rushes in, where his judgment fears to tread, and language, even the most copious and powerful of languages, writhes beneath its impetuosity; an occasional mixing of metaphor, and frequent obscurity of style, are named among his chief defects. He is pompous too, sometimes; but his pomposity has not any modern, any rigid, frigid effect. When he walks, like his actors, on cothurni, we do not say "how stiff he is!" but "how majestic!"

Whether the Prometheus be, or be not, the finest production of its author, it will not, I think, be