"Truth, truth, that's the gold! And all the good

I find in fancy is, it serves to set

Gold's inmost glint free."

The Two Poets of Croisic.

"What's poetry except a power that makes, And, speaking to one sense, inspires the rest, Pressing them all into its service?"

Balaustion's Adventure.

PREFACE.

THE following chapters are an essay towards a study of the mind and art of Robert Browning. They are critical and expository. Studies of life and thought as presented by the poet, and of the poet's work as tested by these; studies of the poet's art, and expositions of the matter as well as the bearing of his work. This seems the right way to present this poet.

A poet who reads the life and thought of his age has strong claims on its deliberate attention; and if it be too much to say that the best poets of our own time concern most readers more than any other poets, it is the fact that they have much to give no others can give, and that without them we do not know ourselves.

This kind of "criticism" is thought to be the forte and the foible of Browning. His significance in this respect I have tried to show; I trust it has been shown on grounds proper to literature.

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But it will be said that one who serves such a function ought not himself to need explanation. That will depend on other things besides the value of his work. In the present case, anyhow, the need seems to be a fact. The reasons for it I have tried to explain. The great reason lies, however, in the matter and significance of the work. The poet must be read from the inside, and as a whole. To be put in a position to do that is to be put in a position to understand the poet.

One scarcely expects all who read good poetry to read Browning. But I would gladly commend the poet to those readers who have a genial yet serious care for poetry, and who have a serious yet genial care for life. And if one can show the beauty and worth of the poet's work, and place it rightly in the field of life and thought, more of those to whom he really belongs may read Browning.

These studies were at first lectures, read to literary societies and classes during the past six years; some of them to the Bradford Browning Society. Their use and acceptance in that form has been one reason for offering them to a wider public. But this book is not those lectures. Besides new chapters and much new matter, the whole has been worked out afresh

with a view to the design above described, and with a strong sense of the difference between the two forms.

In writing these studies I have used only the poet's works and the careful Bibliography of Dr. Furnivall. But, as I have read at their dates of issue most of the best of the critical essays on Browning, it is quite likely that I owe suggestions and qualifications to some of these, which I would thus acknowledge. All who touch the life and early writings of the poet are indebted to an essay by Mr. E. Gosse. So far as the estimate of ideas goes less has been done, except in a paper by Mrs. Orr in the Contemporary Review, and in some of the papers of the Browning Society.

I hoped when I began this book to have made it a practically complete survey of the poet's work, and especially to have given all the more important of the later poems. Those who know the many volumes of the poet's writings, and the matter they contain, will see why I have had to omit these. And it seemed better, with the space I had at command, to seek completeness within my plan, and up to an important date, than to reduce exposition to analysis, and critical study to illegible condensation, in order to include all the poems intended. I am convinced that a

mastery of the method and ideas of the poet in the poems here dealt with will afford a discipline and a clue for the later poems, while I may be permitted to say that in love for the poet, and with a desire still further to extend the study of his work, I should be glad, if opportunity offer, to include the poems now omitted.