With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy.  The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the Cavalier Tunes, is true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness.  The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy’s heart at the moment of death in his Emperor’s cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted.  And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy—­the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be—­a brother in religion!  A noble hatred, transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn love—­the passion of country—­in the Italian exile’s record of his escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy.  The examples of abnormal passion are two—­that of the amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in Porphyria’s Lover, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola, whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism.

Browning’s poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser—­Love.  When love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the main stream.  With Browning the passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being.  His dramatic method requires that each single faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance.  And since love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of association, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque.  In