There is no need now to “lay siege” to the poems of Men and Women; they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the truth is that they are by no means nut-shells into which mottoes meant for the construing of the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich in colour and perfume, a feast for the imagination, the passions, the spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the heart of these.  If a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them—­and that it should do so means that the poet’s total mind has been taken up into his art—­Browning conveys his doctrine not as such but as an enthusiasm of living; his generalized truth saturates a medium of passion and of beauty.  In the Prologue to Fifine at the Fair he compares the joy of poetry to a swimmer’s joy in the sea:  the vigour that such disport in sun and sea communicates is the vigour of joyous play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the constituents of sea-water by a chemical analysis; but the analysis will not convey to us the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine.  One of the blank-verse pieces of Men and Women rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth “stark-naked thought” in poetry.  Why take the harp to his breast “only to speak dry words across the strings”?  Better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot Alpine horn of prose.  Boys may desire the interpretation into bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, and the strength which comes through delight.  Better than the meaning of a rose is the rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfume.  And so the poet for men will resemble that old mage John of Halberstadt: 

He with a ‘look you!’ vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,

* * * * *

Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

Browning in Men and Women is in truth a John of Halberstadt; he enriches life with colour, warmth, music, romance, not dissociated from thought and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed by these.  Not a single poem is “stark-naked thought”; not a single poem is addressed solely to the intellect; even Bishop Blougram is rather a presentation of character than a train of argument or a chain of ideas.

In few of these poems does Browning speak in his own person; the verses addressed to his wife, which present her with “his fifty men and women” and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines, Memorabilia, addressed to one who had seen Shelley, and Old Pictures in Florence, are perhaps the only exceptions to the dramatic character of the contents of the two volumes.  Yet through them all Browning’s mind is clearly discernible;