history; his amazing
inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out
of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the
way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary
self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of
reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to
one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour
of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his
impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its
indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the
fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour,
rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of
beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as
the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty--these were
all old Italian.

Then I do not know whether Browning had any Jewish blood in his body by
descent, but he certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit
and character. His sense of an ever-victorious Righteousness at the
centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled,
was Jewish, but he carried it forward with the New Testament and made
the Righteousness identical with absolute Love. Yet, even in this, the
Old Testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among
Christians. The appearance of Christ as all-conquering love in
_Easter-Day_ and the scenery which surrounds him are such as Ezekiel
might have conceived and written. Then his intellectual subtlety, the
metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis,
the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host
of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of
particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the
craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into
his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of
reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as
Jewish as the Talmud. There was also a Jewish quality in his natural
description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different
aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous;
and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of
all kinds, another remarkable habit of the J