There is not much "soul" in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies" men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature." He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men instead of imposing one from without:-- "This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink." "Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of Andrea's soulless wife.

Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was most spiritual in himself.

He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style.
These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of Browning.

But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind, as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous causerie called _Old Pictures in Florence_.

There is passion in its grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters, whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire.
If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in the kindred poetry of music.