the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion.  If any one wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element than Browning’s astonishing realism in love poetry.  There is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion.  Thought and the intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows’ incomes called for the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex.  Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers.  But sentiment must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows’ homes, the real corpse, and the real woman.  And therefore Browning’s love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about window-panes and gloves and garden walls.  It does not deal much with abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not speak much about love.  It awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any millionaire to compute.  He expresses the celestial time when a man does not think about heaven, but about a parasol.  And therefore he is, first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic philosopher except Whitman.

The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love.  In that delightful poem “Youth and Art” we have the singing girl saying to her old lover—­

    “No harm!  It was not my fault
      If you never turned your eye’s tail up
    As I shook upon E in alt,
      Or ran the chromatic scale up.”

This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the great poems of the world.  Browning never forgets the little details which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow through the heart.  Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is treated in “A Lover’s Quarrel.”

    “See, how she looks now, dressed
    In a sledging cap and vest! 
        ’Tis a huge fur cloak—­
        Like a reindeer’s yoke
    Falls the lappet along the breast: 
    Sleeves for her arms to rest,
    Or to hang, as my Love likes best.”