Supporting Documents

SD2619.  Alexander Macmillan to Roden Noel

Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 354–355 (in part).

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Dec. 16, 1862.

To Hon. Roden Noel.

I am really sorry if I appear to say what is harsh. …

Shakespeare wrote rapidly, so did Shelley, but they are always clear even when deepest. I suppose they were born with the faculty of human speech in its widest sense. Is that genius? I recognise in Robert Browning a very powerful poetical faculty. But he has not quite acquired human speech in the sense I employ it. Surely Paracelsus is an impossible poem—full of power, I admit, but the power does not strike home. …

Text: Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. George A. Macmillan (Glasgow, 1908), pp. 126–127.

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