and love and volition do not exhaust the soul; action and thought are not here incorporated one with the other; a deed is not the interpreter of an idea; an idea is first exhibited by the poet and the deed is afterwards set forth as its consequence; the conclusions are too patently didactic or doctrinaire; we suspect that they have been motives determining the action; our scepticism as to the disinterested conduct of the story is aroused by its too plainly deduced moral.  We catch the powers at play which ought to be invisible; we fiddle with the works of the clock till it ceases to strike.  Yet if only a part of Browning’s mind is alive in these early poems, the faculties brought into exercise are the less impeded by one another; the love of beauty is not tripped up by a delight in the grotesque.  And there is a certain pleasure in attending to prophecy which has not learnt to hide itself in casuistry.  The analysis of a state of mind, pursued in Sordello with an effort that is sometimes fatiguing and not always successful, is presently followed by a superb portrait—­like that of Salinguerra—­painted by the artist, not the analyst, and so admirable is it that in our infirmity we are tempted to believe that the process of flaying and dissection alters the person of a man or woman as Swift has said, considerably for the worse.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 15:  The supposition of Mr Sharp and Mr Gosse that Browning visited Italy after having seen St Petersburg is an error.  His first visit to Italy was that of 1838.  I may note here that in a letter to E.B.B. (vol. ii. 443) Browning refers to having been in Holland some ten years since; the date of his letter is August 18, 1846.]

[Footnote 16:  Mrs Bronson; Browning in Venice. Cornhill Magazine, Feb. 1902. pp. 160, 161.]

[Footnote 17:  Mrs Orr’s “Handbook to Browning,” pp. 10, 11.]

Chapter III

The Maker of Plays

The publication of Paracelsus did not gain for Browning a large audience, but it brought him friends and acquaintances who gave his life a delightful expansion in its social relations.  John Forster, the critic, biographer and historian, then unknown to him, reviewed the poem in the Examiner with full recognition of its power and promise.  Browning gratefully commemorated a lifelong friendship with Forster, nearly a score of years later, in the dedication of the 1863 edition of his poetical works.  Mrs Orr recites the names of Carlyle, Talfourd, R. Hengist Horne, Leigh Hunt, Procter, Monckton Milnes, Dickens, Wordsworth, Landor, among those of distinguished persons who became known to Browning at this period.[18] His “simple and enthusiastic manner” is referred to by the actor Macready in his diary; “he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.”  Browning’s face was