But they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast.

He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a Dante, the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a Heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination.
The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in _My last Duchess_, some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed's, some sneaking reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady of _The Laboratory_, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of _The Confessional_, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage.

There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in _Time's Revenges_, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted upon "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of _Instans Tyrannus_.

And he seized the element of sheer physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of Gismond's "back--handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the Good News.
Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first Lyrics and Romances.

Browning had had warm friendships with women, and was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in his dreams.