When he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his intellectual and poetic charm.

Just as Carlyle when he wrote away from his natural style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not the great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with Browning.

Were we savage satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of Browning and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style.
We should be quite wrong.

Their style was the exact clothing of their thought.

They wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their thought into other clothing, when they doctored their style, they did not represent what they really thought.