A man of a shallower and more sentimental type would have professed to find the life of dinner-tables and soirees vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and especially to a poet in mourning.

But if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction.

He had the one great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please.

The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial.

To the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries.