Robert Browning

Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, whose

and the girl in Love among the Ruins, and the "dear dead women" of Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in Pan and Luna, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all."

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the "old June weather" blue above, and the

under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas—"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse—"coal-black"—careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,—"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]

If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form. By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,—the slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's—in some points the very best critic he ever had—puts one aspect of this admirably. The Athenæum had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts, "is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty, not even in Sordello—never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,—and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things—the white line of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]—"one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,"—the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue." "Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves—all that I love heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields look rough with hoary dew"?[78] In the Easter-Day vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,—such things are the familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects—verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[80]

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's palace is "a maze of corridors,"—"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:—

Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,—the image of the sheath; the image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp tree—a cypress—rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"—in all points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of spikes and wedges and swords runs riot in Browning's work. The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of wave;"[87] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing the flying form of Luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles,—"needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91]

Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but beginning where the finite stopped,—Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not "interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life. The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which Emerson's ideality ignored.

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

he asks in Childe Roland,—altogether an instructive example of the ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon "rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely broke its woof. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."

His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[95] His mountains—so rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth—are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,—they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and "wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and "entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in Sordello:—

When the hoary cripple in Childe Roland laughs, his mouth-edge is "pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but written with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,—as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,—

or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]

This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."

Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for other forms of robust malignity.

And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous chapter of the De Vulgari Eloquio[102] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,—to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the "tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like

Browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. He probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest English master of grotesque. Childe Roland, where the natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in Paracelsus, the "Cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" God tastes a pleasure. Shelley had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of the peculiar poignancy of the Heretic's Tragedy is the eerie blend in it of mocking familiarity and horror.

Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning imagined power. He was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as Byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive with the burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in Saul "beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the hills"; upon the lovers of In a Balcony evening comes "intense with yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106]

Half the romantic spell of Childe Roland lies in the wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.

For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His geology neglects the æons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud "bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic sublimity,—that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of sound, and

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which day dies:—

Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,—the worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the "transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique, language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human powers we may gather from the famous lines of Abt Vogler already quoted:—

VII.

4. JOY IN SOUL.

No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared "incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of "every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own. But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114] The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, presented, as embodiments of those classes and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point, human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,—of a Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,—but even of the fastidious author of The Northern Farmer. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children—real children, naïve and inarticulate, like little Fortù—rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its child pathos The Pied Piper—addressed to a child—stands all but alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls; Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house; Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of "the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.

Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,—the personified abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun. Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of The Englishman in Italy. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.