ose bond of membership, though less involuntary
than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of
material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion,
or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but
hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi
windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his
imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of
common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a
common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for
Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth
of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the
solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer
multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating
imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling
clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate
and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient
disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the
half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood
but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character
without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds
imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.

Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of
human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too
much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies
was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those
unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,--the personified
abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the
lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this
powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive
and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest
him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had
to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning
intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns
him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no
Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His
Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama;
and both