Something of the strange charm of these naively beautiful beings springs from their isolation.

That detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness.

They start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw.
Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness.

Pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene.

Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men.