What they really care for is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun.
There are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic about these poems.

And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and imagination.

They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of Browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier poems, which, being more "simple, sensuous and passionate," are nearer to the common love and life of man.

When, then, we apply this test, the difference of rank between him and Tennyson is not great, but it is plain.

Yet comparison, on this point, is difficult.