ewish poets. Moreover, his
pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson
and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of
their colour--sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx,
chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in
the crimson of blood, is Jewish. So also is his love of music, of music
especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in God, of music
with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases. It was
this Jewish element in Browning, in all its many forms, which caused him
to feel with and to write so much about the Jews in his poetry. The two
poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may
be in the thought of God and as it ought to be conceived by us, are both
in the mouth of Jews, of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ and _Jochanan Hakkadosh_. In
_Filippo Baldinucci_ the Jew has the best of the battle; his courtesy,
intelligence and physical power are contrasted with the coarseness,
feeble brains and body of the Christians. In _Holy-Cross Day_, the Jew,
forced to listen to a Christian sermon, begins with coarse and angry
mockery, but passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase. No English
poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave
even Shylock unpitied, has spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge
and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in
Browning. He was a complex creature; and who would understand or rather
feel him rightly, must be able to feel something of the nature of all
these races in himself. But Tennyson was not complex. He was English and
only English.

But to return from this digression. Browning does not stand alone among
the poets in the apartness from his own land of which I have written.
Byron is partly with him. Where Byron differs from him is, first, in
this--that Byron had no poetic love for any special country as Browning
had for Italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until
at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to Greece.
Keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as I have said, the
country of Loveliness. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were not
exclusively English. Shelley belonged partly to Italy, but chiefly to
that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided
patriotisms are absorbed. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their early days,
were patriots of huma