When
_The Ring and the Book_ was published, a thoroughly respectable
British critic wrote, "Music does not exist for him any more than
for the deaf." On the other hand, the accomplished poet, musician,
and critic, Sidney Lanier, remarked:
"Have you seen Browning's _The Ring and the Book_? I am confident
that at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who
showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one--as in the old
tale--crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist i' the
neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a
marvellous tortuous passage. Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words
won't, and can't, come straight. A hitch and a sharp crook in every
sentence bring you up with a shock. But what a shock it is! Did you
ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? In a
thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and
whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is
directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch
him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you.
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