Essays Theological and Literary Author:Richard Holt Hutton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1880 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Theology Literature History / General Religion / Christian Theology / General Religion / Christian Theology / History Religion / Christian Theology / Systematic Religion / Christianity / General Religion / Theology... more » Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: IV. MR. BROWNING/ MR. BROWNING, though commanding a wider intellectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our day, is hardly a poet of European, even if of national celebrity, but rather the favourite of an intellectual sect; and this, not from any sectarian tendency in f1is poetry, -- nothing could be more catholic, -- but from the almost complete absence of that atmosphere of fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordinary men, and but for which mere imaginative power, however great, would scarcely arrest their attention at all. Coleridge once defined poetry -- very badly I conceive -- as " that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." Now Coleridge certainly did not intend to exclude Mr. Browning's works by anticipation from all claim to the title of poems; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, Coleridge's profound, rich, and catholic " The Poetical Works of Robert Browning." 3 vols. Third edition. Chapman and Hall. " The Ring and the Book." 4 vols. Smith and Elder, 1869. imagination...« less