He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary mind commonly can.

His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate.

All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed further still.

Both draw the knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same source, the bypaths of mediaevalism.

Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's _Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism and speculation.