struggles neither attraction nor repulsion. They scarcely
existed for him--transient elements of the world, merely national, not
universal. Nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him
half so much as the literature and art of Italy. He loved both. Few were
better acquainted with English poetry, or reverenced it more; but he
loved it, not because it was English, but of that world of imagination
which has no special country. He cared also for English art, but he gave
all his personal love to the art of Italy. Nor does he write, as
Tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer, squire,
miller and sailor, and of English sweet-hearting, nor of the English
park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the
work-girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden, and the Arab
riding through the desert, and of the Duchess and her servant flying
through the mountains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at Fano and
Florence, and of the threadbare poet at Valladolid, and of the
peasant-girl who fed the Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who
died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning meant it), and of the
Jews at Rome, and of the girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the
peasant's hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are English. All
his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are
outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these
has the English note which sounds so soft and clear in Tennyson. This is
curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why English people
for a long time would have so little to do with him. All the same, he
was himself woven of England even more than of Italy. The English
elements in his character and work are more than the Italian. His
intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English
excellences. His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality,
his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of
things, were English. His religion was the excellent English compromise
or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make
for their own life. His bold sense of personal freedom was English. His
constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his
roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

Then his wit, his _esprit_,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the
soul of other persons at remote times of