Not long ago, a young man
sat by the lamplight, studying a thick volume with evident discomfort.
To the friend who asked what he was doing, he replied, "I'm studying
Browning."
"Why, no, you idiot, that isn't Browning: you are reading the index
of first lines to the works of Wordsworth."
"By Jove! you're right! But it sounds just like Browning."
Browning's place in English literature is not with the great
verse-sculptors, not with the masters of imperishable beauty of form;
he does not belong to the glorious company where reign supreme Milton,
Keats, and Tennyson; his place is rather with the Interpreters of
Life, with the poets who use their art to express the shine and
shade of life's tragicomedy--to whom the base, the trivial, the
frivolous, the grotesque, the absurd seem worth reporting along with
the pure, the noble, and the sublime, since all these elements are
alike human. In this wide field of art, with the exception of
Shakespeare, who is the exception to everything, the first-born and
the last-born of all the great English poets know no equal in the
five centuries that rolled between them.
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