[Gutenberg 53335] • Pomegranates from an English Garden / A selection from the poems of Robert Browning

Excerpt from Pomegranates From an English Garden: A Selection From the Poems of Robert Browning

The name of Robert Browning has been before the world now for fifty years. For the greater part of the time his work has had so little recognition, that one marvels at his courage in going so steadily on with it. His "Pomegranates" have been produced year after year, decade after decade, in unfailing abundance; and, while critics have kept paring at the rind, and the general public has not even asked if there was anything beneath it, he has laboured on with unremitting energy, calmly awaiting the time when "the heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity," should be at length discovered. It can scarcely be said, even yet, that that time has come; but it is coming fast. Already he is something more than "the poet's poet." Few intelligent people now are content to know one of the master minds of the age simply as the author of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," as if that were the only thing he had written worth reading!

That the form in which the thought of Browning is cast is altogether admirable, is what none but his most undiscriminating admirers will assert. It is often, unquestionably, rough and forbidding. But there is strength even in its ruggedness; and in its entire freedom from conventionality there is a charm such as one enjoys in wild mountain scenery, even though only in little patches it may have any suggestion of the garden or the lawn.