and E.B.B._, i.

26.] [Footnote 23: "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer."-- Feb.

26, 1845.] III.
"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb.

11, 1845) of the "scenes and song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years before as the _Dramatic Lyrics_.

Yet it is just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success.