BROWNING wrote few essays, and the prose style he illustrates in them is anything but commendable, abounding, as it does, in inversions and parenthetical clauses which compel the reader to hard thinking. But these are the faults of genius,—shortcomings resulting from a lack of the patience necessary to find for an intellect of supreme activity a mode to express itself adequately. If Browning’s sentences are gnarled, they have that which justifies their ruggedness—thought so profound and yet so strong, that language is scarcely fit for the attempt to express it. Browning does express it however. Every sentence, every clause, every word of his prose has in it some suggestion of that deep intellectual and spiritual experience in which he so far transcended ordinary human nature.

  He was born at Camberwell, England, May 7th, 1812, and was educated at London University. In 1846 he married Elizabeth Barrett, who was greatly his superior in the faculty of lyrical expression; but if he wrote nothing as musical as her best lyrics, he greatly surpassed her and every other poet of his generation in depth of thought. Much of his life was spent in Italy, and it was at Venice that he died, December 12th, 1889.