reputations. The contrast of Guide's two soliloquies, Pompilia's purity, the Pope's placid objectivity—these and a thousand other points betray the master's hand. It has been said that the whole concentrated energy of Vanity Fair finds a vent through Colonel Crawley's knuckles as he stretches the marquis at his wife's feet. So the whole pathos and tragedy of The Ring and the Book finds utterance in Guido's last words:
Abate—Cardinal—Christ—Maria—God, …
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
but the highest order of poet one that controls his faculties instead of being controlled by them—would not have been led astray from such effects as these by over-refinements of intellectual subtlety.
There we reach the last quality of Browning's mind of which we need take explicit notice, and this intellectual subtlety is the disturbing element in his art. He is both too intellectual and too subtle. These are qualities the reverse of poetical. Not that a poet need be a fool or dense. But the things of the intellect must be subordinate to the purposes of his art, not objects of independent interest. The intellect analyses and abstracts, poetry synthesises and concretes. In consequence of Browning's interest in the
