degrees, which we find supreme in Shakespeare, is to my apprehension equally supreme in Browning; and it embraces the past no less than the present, and, what is even more rare in one so learned, the present no less than the past. For the present, he himself specially notes it in "How it strikes a Contemporary;" and Landor long since noted it in the keen-eyed genial observer:—
No man hath walkt along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse."
For the past, Browning early avowed it in the personal digression in "Sordello":—
Broken-up beauties ever took my taste
Supremely " (p. 101).
And as to the interior life, we have also his own avowal in the letter of dedication prefixed to "Sordello," twenty-five years after the poem was written:—
"The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study."
But we need neither the testimony of others nor his own avowals on these points, so conspicuously illustrated throughout his books. For the past, besides the greatest, from Paracelsus through "The Ring and the Book" to "Aristophanes' Apology," we
