ns and
villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the
Roman Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the
Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound
forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands,
on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses
and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of
Thebes. But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or
social curiosity. I do not think Browning has ever set himself the task
of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done
it. The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of
the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form
required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the
scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a
portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or
background. The statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal.

The characteristic of which I have been speaking (the persistent care
for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and
general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly
his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary
conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it. The popularity
of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it,
poetry like Tennyson's, for instance, is largely due to the very quality
which Browning's finest characteristic excludes from his. Compare,
altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of Tennyson's with
one of Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the former consists in
the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all. The
perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of
a single moment of passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single
personality, and to that personality only at a single moment. To
appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the
imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is
easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing
it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind
lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. And the difficulty is increased
when we remember another of Browning's characteristics, closely allied
to this, and, indeed