energy with which he strove to root his intuitions in experience.  “His noblest and predominating characteristic,” he urges, to quote these significant words once more, “is his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet’s station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge; proving how, as he says—­

     “’The spirit of the worm beneath the sod
      In love and worship blends itself with God.’”

Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of his own art.  It lay in the peculiar “dramatic” quality of his mind to express himself freely only in situations not his own.  Hence, while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn with a curious externality and detachment.  It is in his musicians, his painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the poet really live.  He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which never had a poet before; but he is not the poets’ poet.  In the Transcendentalism, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately illustrates.  The reading public which entertained any opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, “with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say.”  A few knew that they had to deal, not less, with a “stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,” who

        “with a ‘look you’ vents a brace of rhymes,
      And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
      Over us, under, round us every side.”

The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (How it Strikes a Contemporary), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness.  A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the “Corregidor” flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man.  We see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and “decent cribbage” with his maid, but never at his verse.  We see the alert objective eye of this man with the “scrutinizing hat,” who

        “stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ... 
      If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
      If any cursed a woman, he took note,”—­

and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself.  Browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of popular repute.  Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in Pacchiarotto.  The Popularity stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the obstacles to his own.