mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his facility, accessibility, and bonhomie, softened but did not by any means disguise the sense of his power."[123] Browning’s discourse with a single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, Mr Gosse declares, “a very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him.”  Then “his talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade.  His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody....  In his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture the visitor in a low arm-chair’s “sofa-lap of leather”, and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."[124]

Mr Henry James in his “Life of Story"[125] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts.  He brings us back, however, to Browning as seen in society.  He speaks of the Italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be “built out,” though this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period.  It was, he says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments.  The man of the world “walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections, did his duty.”  The poet—­an inscrutable personage—­“sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of that sphere to look for suitable company.”  “The poet and the ‘member of society’ were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been....  The wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it.  It contained an invisible door, through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden key—­carrying about the same with him even in the pocket of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none.”  Tennyson, said an acquaintance of Miss Anna Swanwick, “hides himself behind his laurels, Browning behind the man of the world.”  She declares that her experience was more fortunate; that she seldom heard Browning speak without feeling that she was listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to her of his wife[126].  But many witnesses confirm the impression which is so happily put into words by Mr Henry James.  The “member of society” protected the privacy of the poet.  The questions remain whether the poet did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous forces which might