Hence, while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn with a curious externality and detachment.

It is in his musicians, his painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the poet really live.

He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet.

In the _Transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately illustrates.

The reading public which entertained any opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who "with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side." The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness.