tion why once and only
once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most
directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. The volume,
however, as a whole, while Browning's energy never flags, has a larger
proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms "mere grey
argument"; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden
outbursts of imagination and passion, as if these repressed for a time
had carried away the dykes and dams, and went on their career in full
flood. The description of the glory of sunrise in _Bernard de
Mandeville_, the description of the Chapel in _Christopher Smart_, the
praise of a woman's beauty in _Francis Furini_, the amazing succession
of mythological _tours de force_ in _Gerard de Lairesse_, the delightful
picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the
garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of _Charles
Avison_--these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of
Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score
years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget
that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied
grave-mound--"Dance, yellows and whites and reds"--which closes _Gerard
de Lairesse_. Wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company
than Browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet
the starved grass and daisies are more to him than these:

Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows
On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
Dance you, reds and whites and yellows!

Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the _Parleyings_ show no
symptom. But the vigour of Browning's will did a certain wrong to his
other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual
inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was
in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is
laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire
must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one's own
exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that
bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It
would have been a gain if Browning's indomitable steam-engines had
occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a
propitious breeze.

Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (t