Only, it is not to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet.

For the representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet away from art.

He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes, and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose.

Again and again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under the sway of another, cease to be a poet.

At this point his inferiority to Tennyson as a poet is plain.