does not hear so much now of the protests against Browning's obscurity, of grievances like those of Gilead Beck in the Golden Butterfly. Sordello may be spoken of without a groan, and Paracelsus can be read at a sitting. Yet the difficulties are there—difficulties which are not the same thing as obscurity. The charge of obscurity has been repelled by Mr. Swinburne in his essay on George Chapman. Obscurity is not the right word. 'He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity.' And later he speaks of the 'faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its central object by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing.'
Obscurity is not the word, but the difficulties remain. Browning recognized this himself, in the revision of Sordello, and the care he took to make the poem more easily intelligible by means of the head-lines, which give a summary of the argument. Why has this key been left out of the recent editions? It is an injustice, and it calls for remedy. The publishers do not reprint The Rose and the Ring without Thackeray's head-lines; why should they have retrenched the commentary on Sordello, the poet's own marginal gloss? The want of it, for one thing, leaves a passage unexplained where the acutest reader may require to be 'edified by the margent':
Now—not this time desert thy cloudy place
To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!
I need not fear this audience, I make free
With them, but then this is no place for thee!
The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown
Up out of memories of Marathon,
Would echo like his own sword's griding screech
Braying a Persian shield the silver speech
