“You choice of jewels, every one,
  Good, better, best, star, moon, and sun,"[A]

[Footnote A:  Shop.]

he still lived elsewhere, and had “stray thoughts and fancies fugitive” not meant for the open market.  The poems in which Browning has spoken without the disguise of another character are very few.  There are hardly more than two or three of much importance which can be considered as directly reflecting his own ideas, namely, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, La Saisiaz, and One Word More—­unless, spite of the poet’s warning, we add Pauline.

But, although the dramatic element in Browning’s poetry renders it difficult to construct his character from his works, while this is comparatively easy in the case of Wordsworth or Byron; and although it throws a shade of uncertainty on every conclusion we might draw as to any specific doctrine held by him, still Browning lives in a certain atmosphere, and looks at his characters through a medium, whose subtle influence makes all his work indisputably his.  The light he throws on his men and women is not the unobtrusive light of day, which reveals objects, but not itself.  Though a true dramatist, he is not objective like Shakespeare and Scott, whose characters seem never to have had an author.  The reader feels, rather, that Browning himself attends him through all the sights and wonders of the world of man; he never escapes the sense of the presence of the poet’s powerful personality, or of the great convictions on which he has based his life.  Browning has, at bottom, only one way of looking at the world, and one way of treating his objects; one point of view, and one artistic method.  Nay, further, he has one supreme interest, which he pursues everywhere with a constancy shown by hardly any other poet; and, in consequence, his works have a unity and a certain originality, which make them in many ways a unique contribution to English literature.

This characteristic, which no critic has missed, and which generally goes by the name of “the metaphysical element” in his poetry, makes it the more imperative to form a clear view of his ruling conceptions.  No poet, least of all a dramatic poet, goes about seeking concrete vehicles for ready-made ideas, or attempts to dress a philosophy in metaphors; and Browning, as an artist, is interested first of all in the object which he renders beautiful for its own sole sake, and not in any abstract idea it illustrates.  Still, it is true in a peculiar sense in his case, that the eye of the poet brings with it what it sees.  He is, as a rule, conscious of no theory, and does not construct a poem for its explication; he rather strikes his ideas out of his material, as the sculptor reveals the breathing life in the stone.  Nevertheless, it may be shown that a theory rules him from behind, and that profound convictions arise in the heart and rush along the blood at the moment of creation, using his soul as an instrument of expression to his age and people.