validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human
intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our
moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of
objective evidence. That whole of which our life on earth forms a part
could not be conceived by Browning as rational without also being
conceived as good.

All the parts of Browning's nature were vigorous, and they worked
harmoniously together. His senses were keen and alert; his understanding
was both penetrating and comprehensive; his passions had sudden
explosive force and also steadfastness and persistency; his will
supported his other powers and perhaps it had too large a share in his
later creative work. His feeling for external nature was twofold; he
enjoyed colour and form--but especially colour--as a feast for the eye,
and returned thanks for his meal as the Pope of his poem did for the
bean-feast. This was far removed from that passionate spiritual
contemplation of nature of the Wordsworthian mood. But now and again for
Browning external nature was, not indeed suffused as for Wordsworth, but
pierced and shot through with spiritual fire. His chief interest,
however, was in man. The study of passions in their directness and of
the intellect in its tortuous ways were at various times almost equally
attractive to him. The emotions which he chiefly cared to interpret were
those connected with religion, with art, and with the relations of the
sexes.

In his presentation of character Browning was far from exhibiting either
the universality or the disinterestedness of Shakespeare. His sympathy
with action was defective. The affections arising from hereditary or
traditional relations are but slenderly represented in his poetry; the
passions which elect their own objects are largely represented. Those
graceful gaieties arising from a long-established form of society, which
constitute so large a part of Shakespeare's comedies, are almost wholly
absent from his work. His humour was robust but seldom fine or delicate.
In an age of intellectual and spiritual conflict and trouble, his art
was often deflected from the highest ends by his concern on behalf of
ideas. He could not rest satisfied, it has been observed, with
contemplating the children of his imagination, nor find the fulfilment
of his aim in the fact of having given them existence.[150] It seems
often as if his purpose in creating them was to make them serve