An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this admirably.

_The Athenaeum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts, "is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity.

You never are misty, not even in _Sordello_--never vague.

Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form producing obscurity.

But through immense tracts of Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression.