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. The first person to say
this publicly was himself a poet and a devoted student of
Form--Walter Savage Landor. When he said it, people thought it was
mere hyperbole, the stressed language of compliment; but we know now
that Landor's words are as true as they are beautiful:

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,
Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.

Many critics who are now dead, and some that are yet alive, have
predicted the speedy death of Browning's reputation. This prediction
seems to afford a certain class of critics a calm and holy joy. Some
years ago, Mr. James Douglas, of London, solemnly announced the
approaching demise. Browning will die, said he, even as Donne is dead,
and for the same reason. But Donne is not quite dead.