only difference between the Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet.  The admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.

The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley.  We do not find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by learned ladies and gentlemen.  How indeed would such sympathisers feel if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume called Incondita were noticed to contain the fault of “too much splendour of language and too little wealth of thought”?  They were indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner.  Macready, the actor, wrote of him:  “He looks and speaks more like a young poet than any one I have ever seen.”  A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or apology his admiration for the great philosopher’s works.  Browning at this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of physical charm.  A friend who attended University College with him says:  “He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair falling over his shoulders.”  Every tale that remains of him in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely romantic spirit by which he was then possessed.  He was fond, for example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, “Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!” rang in his ears long enough to express itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the spirit of escape and Bohemianism, The Flight of the Duchess.  Such other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood to look over London by night.  It was when looking down from that suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of Pippa Passes.  At the end of his father’s garden was a laburnum “heavy with its weight of gold,” and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of competition which, I