In conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety.

The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso.

Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia.

His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape.

Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form.