seem too essential to permit of this. That fatal excess of cold
over emotive thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive,
or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his.
It is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due
the miscalled obscurity of much of Browning's work -- miscalled,
because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even,
he is never obscure in his thought. His is that "palace infinite
which darkens with excess of light." But mere excess in itself
is nothing more than symptomatic. Browning has suffered more
from intellectual exploitation than any writer. It is a ruinous process --
for the poet. "He so well repays intelligent study."
That is it, unfortunately. There are many, like the old Scotch lady
who attempted to read Carlyle's `French Revolution',
who think they have become "daft" when they encounter a passage such as,
for example,

"Rivals, who . . .
Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms,
To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with,
`As knops that stud some almug to the pith
Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse
Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse
Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze --
GAD-FLY, that is.'"

The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days,
found "she was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled
a varra dee-fee-cult author." What would even that indomitable student
have said to the above quotation, and to the poem whence it comes?
To many it is not the poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction.