and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, “confessional.”  All three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament finds in itself.  Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.  This kind of self-analysis is always misleading.  For we do not see in ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbours see.  We see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne.  When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass.  Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon.  So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul.

Sordello, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into a jest.  The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning’s saying in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, “I blame no one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since.”  This is indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only the letters and to lose the man.

When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new voice.  His visit to Asolo, “his first love,” as he said, “among Italian cities,” coincided with the stir and transformation in his spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which a man like Byron had lived and died.  In 1841 Pippa Passes appeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world.  He had made the discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man does at last make—­the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Crusoe. Pippa Passes is the greatest poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity.  The phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound.  The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality.  As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full