But now and again for Browning external nature was, not indeed suffused as for Wordsworth, but pierced and shot through with spiritual fire.  His chief interest, however, was in man.  The study of passions in their directness and of the intellect in its tortuous ways were at various times almost equally attractive to him.  The emotions which he chiefly cared to interpret were those connected with religion, with art, and with the relations of the sexes.

In his presentation of character Browning was far from exhibiting either the universality or the disinterestedness of Shakespeare.  His sympathy with action was defective.  The affections arising from hereditary or traditional relations are but slenderly represented in his poetry; the passions which elect their own objects are largely represented.  Those graceful gaieties arising from a long-established form of society, which constitute so large a part of Shakespeare’s comedies, are almost wholly absent from his work.  His humour was robust but seldom fine or delicate.  In an age of intellectual and spiritual conflict and trouble, his art was often deflected from the highest ends by his concern on behalf of ideas.  He could not rest satisfied, it has been observed, with contemplating the children of his imagination, nor find the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of having given them existence.[150] It seems often as if his purpose in creating them was to make them serve as questioners, objectors, and answerers in the great debate of conflicting thoughts which proceeds throughout his poems.  His object in transferring his own consciousness into the consciousness of some imagined personage seems often to be that of gaining a new stand-point from which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning which he could not wholly satisfy himself from any single point of view.  He cannot be content to leave his men and women, in Shakespeare’s disinterested manner, to look in various directions according to whatever chanced to suit best the temper and disposition he had imagined for them.  They are placed by him with their eyes turned in very much the same direction, gazing towards the same problems, the same ideas.  And somehow Browning himself seems to be in company with them all the time, learning their different reports of the various aspects which those problems or ideas present to each of them, and choosing between the different reports in order to give credence to that which seems true.  The study of no individual character would seem to him of capital value unless that character contained something which should help to throw light upon matters common to all humanity, upon the inquiries either as to what it is, or as to what are its relations to the things outside humanity.  This is not quite the highest form of dramatic poetry.  There is in it perhaps something of the error of seeking too quick returns of profit, and of drawing “a circle premature,” to use Browning’s own