"Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth.

His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind.

His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it.
[Footnote 116: _R.B.to E.B.B._, i.

6.] And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye.

"The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in _Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it.