nor did he ever try to gain them, and that was, perhaps, a pity.  But, after all, it would have been of no use had he tried for them.  We cannot impose from without on ourselves that which we have not within; and Browning was, in spirit, a pure romantic, not a classic.  Tennyson never allowed what romanticism he possessed to have its full swing.  It always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to the classic traditions, used the classic forms.  In the Idylls of the King he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the morality, and the conduct of the poem.  The Arthurian poets, Malory himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with indignation, had they read it.  And a great deal of this oddity, this unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions.  Of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem, but that was one, and not the least of them.

Browning had none of these classic traditions.  He had his own matter, quite new stuff it was; and he made his own manner.  He did not go back to the old stories, but, being filled with the romantic spirit, embodied it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took them from ancient, mediaeval, Renaissance, or modern life.  He felt, and truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs, the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to which besets the classic literature.

Browning had the natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most remarkable when such a poet is young.  The faults are the opposites of the classic poet’s excellences:  want of measure, want of proportion, want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop.  And these frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition, huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity, sought-out even desperate strangeness of subject and expression, uncompromising individuality, crude ornament, and fierce colour.  Many examples of these faults are to be found in Sordello and throughout the work of Browning.  They are the extremes into which the Romantic is frequently hurried.