In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and whimsical comparisons.  Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and aimless vivacity.  Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of the ballroom.  Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless mirth, for ever revolving on itself:—­

     “Est fuga, volvitur rota;
      On we drift:  where looms the dim port?”

The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent strife of jangling tongues, “affirming, denying, holding, risposting, subjoining,”—­the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light of nature and truth:—­

     “Over our heads truth and nature—­
        Still our life’s zigzags and dodges,
      Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature—­
        God’s gold just shining its last where that lodges,
      Palled beneath man’s usurpature.”

But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play, of these zigzags and dodges,—­of zigzags and dodges of every kind,—­not to feel the irony of the attack upon this “stringing of Nature through cobwebs”; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue’s intricacy grows, “But where’s music, the dickens?” we hear Browning mocking the indignant inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. Master Hugues could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of “God’s gold” and the glimpses of the “earnest eye of heaven,” had also a keen perception and instinctive delight in every filament of the web of human “legislature.”

This double aspect of Browning’s poetic nature is vividly reflected in the memorable essay on Shelley which he wrote at Paris in 1851, as an introduction to a series of letters since shown to have been forged.  The essay—­unfortunately not included in his Works—­is a document of first-rate importance for the mind of Browning in the midst of his greatest time; it is also by far the finest appreciation of Shelley which had yet appeared.  He saw in Shelley one who, visionary and subjective as he was, had solved the problem which confronts every idealist who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality.  To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic grossness and strength.  Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this task altogether,—­building his dream-world of cloud and cavern loveliness remote from anything we know.  It is Browning, the most “actual” of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the “practicality” of Shelley,—­insisted, as it is even now not superfluous to insist, on the fearless and direct