We know that it was thus with Browning.

"From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last.

As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power.

If he later "saw Love as plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye.

His sense of Power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form.