A whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter.

But his very preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul.

No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul.

When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of "We twa hae paidl't in the burn Frae morning sun till dine," belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like Tennyson were far more sensitive than he.

Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_.