Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/287

 life and work, are not difficult; but the value of his real achievement is more uncertain. Interest centres entirely in his poetry, for his career has been without notable incident, and is told when it is said that he has lived the life of a scholar and man of letters in England and Italy amid the social culture of his time. For the world, his career is the succession of books he has put forth, and this is as he would have it; publicity beyond this he did not seek, but refused with violence and acrimony.

In his earliest poem, youthful in its self-portraiture, its literary touch, and its fragmentary plan, the one striking quality is the flow of language. Here was a writer who would never lack for words; fluent, as if inexhaustible, the merely verbal element in Pauline shows no struggle with the medium of the poet's art. This gift of facility was, as is usual, first to show itself. In Paracelsus the second primary quality of Browning was equally conspicuous,—the power of reasoning in verse. These two traits have for a poet as much weakness as strength, and they lie at the source of Browning's defects as a master of poetic art. His facility allowed him to be diffuse in language, and his