His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.
While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own.

He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore.
Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry.

To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"-- all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts.

"Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_ at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day.

"A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of Browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects.
In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity.