One or two other passages of the essay may be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer's modes of thought and feeling: "Everywhere is apparent Shelley's belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident"-- it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than Shelley's, who is applauding optimism.

"Shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere." Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could be tender, but whose tenderness sometimes disappeared in explosions of indignant wrath?
The principle, again, by which he determined an artist's rank is in harmony with Browning's general feeling that men are to be judged less by their actual achievements than by the possibilities that lie unfolded within them, and the ends to which they aspire, even though such ends be unattained: "In the hierarchy of creative minds, it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the rarer endowment though only in the germ." And, last, of the tardy recognition of Shelley's genius as a poet, Browning wrote in words which though, as he himself says, he had always good praisers, no doubt express a thought that helped to sustain him against the indifference of the public to his poetry: "The misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other departments of the great human effort.

The 'E pur si muove' of the astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so like despair." The volume in which Browning's essay appeared was withdrawn from circulation on the discovery of the fraudulent nature of its contents.

He had himself no opportunity of inspecting the forged manuscripts, and no question of authenticity was raised until several copies of the book had passed into circulation.[48] During the nine months spent in Paris, from September 1851 to June 1852, Browning enlarged the circle of his friends and made some new and interesting acquaintances.

Chief among friendships was that with Joseph Milsand of Dijon, whose name is connected with _Sordello_ in the edition of Browning's "Poetical Works" of the year 1863.