t it
scarcely audible.

* Miss Browning reminds me that loud speaking had become
natural to him through the deafness of several of his
intimate friends: Landor, Kirkup, Barry Cornwall, and
previously his uncle Reuben, whose hearing had been impaired
in early life by a blow from a cricket ball. This fact
necessarily modifies my impression of the case, but does not
quite destroy it.

The mental conditions under which his powers of sympathy were exercised
imposed no limits on his spontaneous human kindness. This characteristic
benevolence, or power of love, is not fully represented in Mr.
Browning's works; it is certainly not prominent in those of the later
period, during which it found the widest scope in his life; but he has
in some sense given its measure in what was intended as an illustration
of the opposite quality. He tells us, in 'Fifine at the Fair', that
while the best strength of women is to be found in their love, the best
product of a man is only yielded to hate. It is the 'indignant wine'
which has been wrung from the grape plant by its external mutilation. He
could depict it dramatically in more malignant forms of emotion; but he
could only think of it personally as the reaction of a nobler feeling
which has been gratuitously outraged or repressed.

He more directly, and still more truly, described himself when he said
at about the same time, 'I have never at any period of my life been deaf
to an appeal made to me in the name of love.' He was referring to an
experience of many years before, in which he had even yielded his better
judgment to such an appeal; and it was love in the larger sense for
which the concession had been claimed.

It was impossible that so genuine a poet, and so real a man, should be
otherwise than sensitive to the varied forms of feminine attraction. He
avowedly preferred the society of women to that of men; they were, as
I have already said, his habitual confidants, and, evidently, his most
frequent correspondents; and though he could have dispensed with woman
friends as he dispensed with many other things--though he most often won
them without knowing it--his frank interest in their sex, and the often
caressing kindness of manner in which it was revealed, might justly
be interpreted by individual women into a conscious appeal to their
sympathy. It was therefore doubly remarkable that on the ground of
benevolence, he scarcely discriminated betwe