The programme thus laid down was not, like Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.
[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed.

1863.] [Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii.

135.] And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice.
The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme.

The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled.

Children--real children, naive and inarticulate, like little Fortu--rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home.