Mr. Browning takes up in turn all the various problems and enigmas of life as it presents itself in this latter half of the 19th century, but it is beyond his power to supply any solution
RED COTTON NIGHTCAP COUNTRY; or TURF AND TOWERS. By Robert Browning. Smith, Elder, and Co. London. 1873.
It would not be easy to discover a greater contrast than that presented by the respective methods of our two foremost living poets. While Mr. Tennyson, straying further and further away from the living spirit of his own times, lingers contentedly in his chosen land of the Lotophagi, the realm of Arthurian romance, from which he occasionally sends us a few strains of cloying sweetness, variations on the old well-worn theme, Mr. Browning labours under the opposite defect of being too intensely and fervently contemporaneous.
Normandy shown minute, yet magnified,
In one of those small books the truly great
We never know enough, yet know so well.
How I foresee the cursive diamond dints -
Composite pen that plays the pencil too -
As touch the page, and up the glamour goes,
And filmily o’er grain crop, meadow ground,
O’er orchard, in the pasture, farm a-field,
And hamlet on the road edge, floats and forms
And falls, at lazy last of all, the cap
That crowns the country.
Man and woman when they love their best,
Closest and tenderest,
