Intellectual play may be without any emotion except its delight in itself.

Then its mere cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased pleasure.

When a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure, imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he produces resembles, but is not, poetry.

And Browning, who had got perilously near to the absence of poetry in _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, succeeded in _Mr.Sludge, the Medium_, in losing poetry altogether.

In _The Ring and the Book_ there are whole books, and long passages in its other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion, no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these qualities into the glow of poetry.