ere's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the
same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and
yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one."

This wonder is akin to that 'insanity' of the poet which is but
impassioned sanity. Plato sums the matter when he says, "He who, having
no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks
he will get into the temple by the help of Art--he, I say, and his
poetry, are not admitted."

In that same wood beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been
made, the germinal motive of "Pippa Passes" flashed upon the poet. No
wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places, and that he
lamented its disappearance as fervently as Ruskin bewailed the
encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar upon the wooded privacies
of Denmark Hill.

Save for a couple of brief visits abroad, Browning spent the years,
between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage, in
London and the neighbourhood. Occasionally he took long walks into the
country. One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in
meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances and the mood
concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely to the life of the
moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes
venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space
upon his recumbent body. I have heard him say that his faculty of
observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a
Seminole or an Iroquois: he saw and watched everything, the bird on the
wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee
adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula,
the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the
spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully
scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind
through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds,
and so forth. These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his
time, when not passed in his room in his father's house, where he wrote
his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily, was spent in
the Library of the British Museum, in an endless curiosity into the more
or less unbeaten tracks of literature. These London experiences were
varied by whole days spent at the National Galle