R491228A. Poems (Boston, 1850).
Newark Daily Advertiser, 28 December 1849, p. 2.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16.
The first volume comprises four (quasi) dramas; the second, four more dramas with several dramatic romances and lyrics. The last are by far the best, and some of them are not unknown to our public; as, for example, “Incident of the French Camp,” and “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.” Others are deserving of a still greater popularity.” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is admirable and unsurpassed in its way. Mr. Browning’s forte is a vivid, quick, flashing brightness, darting out of a rather habitual gloom and obscurity. He is very uneven, very elaborate, and at times very obscure. His thoughts seem to lack wholeness and continuity. They are disjected, fragmentary: they startle the mind, but seldom imprison it.
This poet plainly enough sacrifices all things to originality. He keeps his readers’ attention painfully active, and fatigues you at times intolerably. A lazy man, a lover of the dolce far mente, would detest his poems—but those who like pretty severe mental exercise, would delight in his involved, intertwined style, and his difficult-to-be-got-at ideas. Nevertheless he is by no means an affected writer: he does not, like Carlyle, put on a gorgeous garb borrowed from a German Emperor’s wardrobe. But his strange, new, ornate, often cumbrous garments, sit naturally on his figure. The lack of just proportion seems to lie in his own mind, and not in its modes of expression. It is therefore subject for curious consideration. Consequently, I rather affect this quaint Robert Browning, and I am inclined to recommend folk to try and read his poems. They may be compared to buildings whose architecture, though not adapted to every-day use, may be admired for its singular tracery and strange fretwork, which one likes very well to wonder at occasionally.
Yours, P.B.
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850.
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