figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse.  There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of “The Fable of the Bees,” there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville.  This objection does not apply to all the poems.  The parleying With Daniel Bartoli is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero.  We are interested in Francis Furini, “good priest, good man, good painter,” before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution.  And in the case of Christopher Smart, the question 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.