incitement and appeal; it brought the whole world of art into more vital touch with his imaginative activity.  It would be hard to say that there is any definite change in his view of art, but its problems grow more alluring to him, and its images more readily waylay and capture his passing thought.  The artist as such becomes a more dominant figure in his hierarchy of spiritual workers; while Browning himself betrays a new self-consciousness of his own function as an artist in verse; conceiving, for instance, his consummate address to his wife as an artist’s way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could feel, that of finding unique expression for the unique love.

     “He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
      Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
      Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
      Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
      Fills his lady’s missal-marge with flowerets;
      He who blows thro’ bronze may breathe thro’ silver,
      Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess;
      He who writes may write for once, as I do.”

Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the prominence with him of the specifically artist’s point of view.  He cared for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of human life, hints of “the absolute truth of things” which the sensible world veils and the senses miss.  But he cared for them also, and yet more, as expressions of the artist’s own “love of loving, rage of knowing, seeing, feeling” that absolute truth.  And he cared for them also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious.  His own eye and ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and activities.  During the last years in Italy his passion for modelling even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully lamented that the “poor lost soul” produced only casts, which he broke on completion, and no more Men and Women.  And his own taste in art drew him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was palpable,—­whether it was a triumphant tour de force like Cellini’s Perseus, in the Loggia—­their daily banquet in the early days at Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of “the Tuscan’s early art,” like those “Pre-Giotto pictures” which surrounded them in the salon of Casa Guidi, “quieting” them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her husband’s.

[Footnote 32:  Letters of E.B.B., ii. 199.]