The moving drama of Browning's poetry
fascinated him. Some years before he had chanced upon "Pauline" in the
British Museum, and being unable to procure the book, had copied every
line of it. The "high seriousness" which Aristotle claims to be one of the
high virtues of poetry, impressed Rossetti in Browning. What a drama of
the soul universal was revealed in that "fifty men and women"! What art,
what music, coming down the ages, from Italy, from Germany, and what
pictures from dim frescoes, and long-forgotten paintings hid in niche and
cloister, were interpreted in these poems! How one follows "poor brother
Lippo" in his escapade:

"... I could not paint all night--
Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.
There came a hurry of feet and little feet,
A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song,--
_Flower o' the broom,_
_Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!_
_Flower o' the quince,_
_I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?_"

And in "Andrea del Sarto" what passionate pathos of an ideal missed!

"But all the play, the insight and the stretch--
Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!

* * * * *

Had you ... but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
'God and the glory! never care for gain.
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
Rafael is waiting; up to God, all three!'
I might have done it for you...."

And that exquisite idyl of "the love of wedded souls" in "By the
Fire-side." It requires no diviner to discover from whose image he drew
the line,

"My perfect wife, my Leonor."

How Browning's art fused poetic truth and poetic beauty in all these
poems, vital with keen and shrewd observation, deep with significance, and
pervaded by the perpetual recognition of a higher range of achievements
than are realized on earth.

"A man's grasp should exceed his reach,
Or what's a heaven for?"

In all these poems can be traced the magic of Italy and happiness. (Are
the two more than half synonymous?) The perfect sympathy, the delicate
divination and intuitive comprehension with which Browning was surrounded
by his wife, were the supreme source of the stimulus and development of
his powers as a poet.

[Illustration: ANDREA DEL SARTO. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WI