WHAT’S this, a book? 16mo. Osgood’s page,

Fair, clear, Olympian-typed, and save a scant

Intituled how?—“The Inn Album, Robert Browning, Author.”

Why should he not say, as well,

The Hotel Register?—cis-Atlantic term!

Nay, an he should, the action might purvey

To lower comprehensions: so not he!

Reflect, ’tis Browning! he neglects, prepense,

All forms of form: what he gives must we take,

Sweet, bitter, sour, absinthean, adipose,

Conglomerate, jellied, potted, salt, or dried,

As the mood holds him; ours is not to choose!

Well (here huge sighs be heard), commending us

To Heaven’s high mercy, let us read.

The end is reached; but who begins review,

Forgetful o’ beginning, with the end?

Turn back!—why, here’s a line supplies us with

Curt comment on the whole, though travesty—

“Hail, calm obliquity, lugubrious plot!...”

Yea, since obliquity the straight path is,

And Passion worships as her patron saint

The Holy Vitus, and from Language fall

The rusty chains of rhythm and harmony,

Why not exclaim, “Hail, sham obliquity!”

“Too hard,” you murmur, sweet, submissive minds?

But take a bite o’ the original pie! Set teeth,

’Ware cherry-stones, and if a herring-spine

Stick crosswise i’ the throat, go gulp, shed tears,

But blame us not! So runs the opening:

This bard’s a Browning! there’s no doubt of that;

But, ah, ye gods, the sense! Are we so sure

If sense be sense unto our common-sense,

Low sense to higher, high to low, no sense

All sense to those, all sense no sense to these?

That’s where your poet tells! and you’ve no right

(Insensate sense with sensuous thought being mixed)

To ask analysis! How can else review,

Save in the dialect of his verse, be writ?

So write we: (would we might foresee the end!)

So has he taught us, i’ “The Ring and the Book,”

De gustibus, concerning taste, non est

There’s no—disputing, disputandum (Ha!

’Tis not so difficult)—and we submit.

“Hail, sham obliquity, lugubrious plot!”—

Is well-nigh read; you end the tangle, smash!

Here’s Browning’s recipe: take heaps o’ hate,

Take boundless love, hydraulic-pressed, in bales,

Distilments keen of baseness and of pride,

And innocence and cunning; mix ’em well,

And put a body round ’em! Add the more

O’ this, or that, you have another—stay!

The sex don’t count; make female of the male,

Male female, all the better; let them meet,

Talk, love, hate, cross, till satisfied; then, kill!

So here: lord, finding situation tough

(Between two fires, hate and a horsewhip-threat),

Superb One, having read, takes hand of snob,

Accepts his love till death; then lord comes back.

What did he write? “Refinement every inch,

From brow to boot-end”—’twas a threat to tell

The country curate of his wife’s disgrace—

He, the disgracer! Snob gets wild at that,

Screams, jumps, and clutches ...

One character dead, but how, we don’t quite know.

Then she, Superb One, writes in Album, dies

By force of will (no hint of instrument!),

Leaving the snob alone and much surprised.

Cousin is heard without; but ere the door

Opens, the story closes. Only this remains,

The last conundrum, hardly guessable

By the unbrowninged mind. Since what it means,

If aught the meaning, means some other thing,

And that thing something else, but this not that,

Nor that the other; we adopt the lines

As most expressing what we fail express,

Our solemn verdict, handkerchief and all,

Upon the book.

The meaning, ask you, O ingenuous soul?

Why, were there such for you, what then were left

To puzzle brain with, pump conjecture dry,

And prove you little where the poet’s great?

Great must he be, you therefore little. Go!

The curtain falls, the candles are snuffed out: