There was that in Browning's nature which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet.

And his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with dazzling power in part of _The Ring and the Book_, he was carried away by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever analysis to tyrannise over him--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, _The Inn Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and a number of shorter poems in the volumes which followed.

In these, what Milton meant by passion, simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only as it exists in a prose writer.
This condition was slowly arrived at.

It had not been fully reached when he wrote _The Ring and the Book_.

His poetic powers resisted their enemies for many years, and had the better in the struggle.