Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so admirable that we say to ourselves—­“Give me the picture or the sonnet, not both.  They blot out one another.”  But to describe a picture is not to write about art.  The one place where he does go down to its means and soul is in his little prose masterpiece, Hand and Soul, in which we see the path, the goal, the passion, but not the power of art.  But he never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it.  He does not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of self-forgetfulness.  This story of Rossetti’s was in prose.  In poetry, Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and Browning’s special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.

I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts than poetry.  But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry.  Perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual analysis.  A strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.  It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him out of the window.  These reversions to some far off Browning in the past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life, enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning.  Moreover, he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously.  At least so I read what he means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece of analysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution of the question by passion and imagination.  Nevertheless the charm of this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination; and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and natural truth of youth.  It is the melancholy tendency of some artists, as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal temptation it is.  There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive title, “Transcendentalism:  A Poem in Twelve Books.”

He speaks to a young poet who will give to men “naked thought, good, true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery, without emotion.”