He is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story.
Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality.

But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more cautious and sympathetic analysis.

There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.