The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain.
Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "_to_ the Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own.

The white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue.

No English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions.

In his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions.

The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley.