_LATER POEMS_ A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring and the Book_ is a difficult task.

The poems are of various kinds, on widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another.

Many of them must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to possess.

These, when we come across them among their middle-aged companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which they were born.
I will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later poems they must be discarded.
The struggle to which I have drawn attention between the imaginative and intellectual elements in Browning, and which was equally balanced in _The Ring and the Book_, continued after its publication, but with a steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the intellectual elements.

One poem, however, written before the publication of _The Ring and the Book_, does not belong to this struggle.