g had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and
faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future
mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like
Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed
evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far
from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.

[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed. 1863.]

[Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii. 135.]

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he
passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men
are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice.
The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and
sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and
unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between
men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of
lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those
names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic
glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about
unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children--real children, naive
and inarticulate, like little Fortu--rarely appear in his verse, and
those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like
Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its
child pathos _The Pied Piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but
alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and
unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion,
Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as
work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls;
Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house;
Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual
daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of
"the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself
sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on
her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi
from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in
Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the
City or the State, wh