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Dedication

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THE STUDENTS

WHO HAVE STUDIED BROWNING WITH ME

IN OBERLIN AND MIDDLEBURY

You must not mind if I dedicate these Studies to you, for most of them were prepared for you and your interest (may I venture to say enthusiasm ?) in them is responsible for their publication. Peradventure, if your eyes light on this book, its words may bring to your minds the course in Nineteenth Century Poetry, the gray classroom, and those long and forbidding lists of questions for written tests, to be answered without regard to floods of sunshine or of rain outside the windows. I hope this book may also bring keenly to your thoughts the good friends you found among the English Poets of the nineteenth century and, above all, the imperial soul of Robert Browning. You may be sure that working over these lectures, to revise them somewhat and to get them written out so that some one besides myself can understand the abbreviations, has brought you all many times before my mind's eye and has made more plain to me the eager and generous spirit which so many of you showed and has caused me to realize anew how your spirit helped me to put into orderly presentation something of what has come out of the years of my reading of Browning. And so I dedicate to you now these lectures, because, in a very real sense, they already belong to you.

Bahr

10-7-82 26753

PREFACE

THESE Browning Studies were given in Oberlin College, in the Department of English in the course on Nineteenth Century Poetry, in the second semester of the year 190809, and were repeated in the corresponding semester of the year 1909-10. They constituted a course in the Summer Session of Middlebury College in 1913, and were given here again as a part of the study of Nineteenth Century Poetry in the second semester of the year 191314. It should be explained also that the greater part of the study of The Ring and the Book was written before those Oberlin days, and that since those days Bishop Blougram's Apology, A Death in the Desert, and Reverie have been added to the list of poems taken up; also that, besides being used in connection with the college classes mentioned above, several of the lectures have been given in various places.

The interest taken by the students in these studies has suggested their publication. They are now printed as given in the classroom, with some revision. Abbreviations are written out more than in the author's notes, but no attempt has been made to reproduce the extemporaneous elaboration and explanation given in the classroom. Lectures which occupied several classroom hours are here sometimes combined into a single chapter.

These studies do not pretend to be exhaustive. They are simply an introduction to some of Browning's best work. They are intended now, as they were in the classroom, for those who have not read Browning at all before, or very little. The idea which people get, that they cannot

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