To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be found in the faces in the street.  To him they were all the masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature.  Each one of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes.  Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance.  The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses.  He was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity.  He did not love humanity but men.  His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic.  It would have been to him like playing four hundred beautiful airs at once.  The mixture would not combine all, it would lose all.  Browning believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of God.  Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion.  Of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions.

In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted very little attention.  Duffy was dining with Browning and John Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any the better for that.  Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with some astonishment.  He immediately asked why Forster should suppose him hostile to the Roman Church.  Forster and Duffy replied almost simultaneously, by referring to “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman.  “Certainly,” replied Browning cheerfully, “I intended it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don’t consider it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it.”  This is the real truth which lies at the heart of what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning wrote in later years.  They are not satires or attacks upon their subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them.  They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can be said for the persons with whom they deal.  But very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own characters.  The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away