Brownings Shorter Poems by Robert Browning - The Original Classic Edition Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: Within the last thirty years of his life he wrote The Ring and the Book-his longest work, one of the longest and, intellectually, one of the greatest, of English poems; translated the Agamemnon of Æschylus and the Alcestis of Euripides; published many shorter poems; kept up the studies which had always been his labor and his pastime; and found leisure also to know a wide circle of men and women. ...To the first he appeared an enigma, a writer hopelessly obscure, perhaps not even clear in his own mind, as to the message he wished to deliver; to the second he appeared a prophet and a philosopher, full of all wisdom and subtlety, too deep for common mortals to fathom with line and plummet,-concealing below green depths of ocean priceless gems of thought and feeling; to the third, a poet full of inequalities in conception and expression, who has done many good things well and has made many grave failures....Some of his work stands out clear from these faults: A Toccata of Galuppis, Love Among the Ruins, the Songs from Pippa Passes, Apparitions, Andrea del Sarto, and a score of others might be cited to show that Browning could write with a sense of form as true, and an ear as delicate, as could any poet of the century, except Tennyson....In those works where he has been most indifferent, as in the Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, he has been merely whimsical and dull; in those works where the genius he possessed is most felt, as in Saul, A Toccata of Galuppis, Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Flight of the Duchess, The Bishop Orders his Tomb in Saint Praxeds Church, Hervé Riel, Cavalier Tunes, Times Revenges, and many more, he achieves beauty, or nobility, or fitness of phrase such as only a poet is capable of. ...When it is urged that for a poet the intellectual energies are too strong in Browning, that for poetry the play of[page xxiii] intellectual interests and activities is too great in his work, and that Browning often and at times ruthlessly sacrifices the requirements and effects of art for the expression of thought, that though he refreshes the heart he tires the brain, we should admit this with regard to a good deal of the work of the third period.