Supporting Documents

SD2534.  Bryan Waller Procter to John Forster

Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 319 (in part).

32 Weymouth Street

Portland Place

25 Oct. 1861

Browning

I have picked out (also) a list of the smaller poems, which I think likely to serve his popularity—& which indeed I think the best. I will send you my list in a day or two. Any selection from the greater (or longer) poems would be difficult. The object of course is to induce readers of the Selections to read all his works.

What I find in Browning is extreme subtlety & deep sympathy with his personages (great pathos & great characterization—so to speak). Some of the poems do not move me. Perhaps I do not thoroughly understand them. Tennyson is much more polished—but in pathos, dramatic character, & depth of sentiment—much inferior, I think. I wish Browning would take a quarter of the pains which the other does. Yet—I don’t know—one might lose a good deal of gold in the process.

Publication: Richard Willard Armour, Barry Cornwall, a Biography of Bryan Waller Procter (Boston, 1935), p. 274.

Manuscript: Victoria and Albert Museum.

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