We have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers.
There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration.

We constantly hear the statement that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true.

_Sordello_, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the second.

He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four.

It was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it.