Of Robert Browning, considered purely as poet, in a sense at once technical and virtual, it is not here proposed to dispute.

Although he often rhymed as by brute force, wresting the music though he broke the lyre, there is yet in most of his writing that aptness, vigour and finality of language that are the marks of true poetic literature. In passing, it may be remarked that one other great quality of poetry, Vision, was not often enough the instrument and source of his poems. In place of that power, he had thought, insight and a singular grasp of the complexities of mind. In the main, he rationalized emotions, did not create them. He could conjure them up, by felicitous analysis and portrayal, by sudden turns of the text, but only occasionally do they arise immediately, by the power of an unique concept and expression. For instance the line, “The air broke into a mist with bells,” gives a very perfect mental sensation.

It is then, of Browning in relation to the Catholic Church that I consider a theme sufficiently interesting to warrant an analysis. For it is valuable, illuminative, sometimes to discover the small thoughts of large minds ; to trace out, along the thin lines of little, acetose angers, the effects of misinformation, of blindness, or of bias. To discover a great soul in places curiously “shrivelled like a little pea.”