aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous; and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish poets.  Moreover, his pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of their colour—­sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx, chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in the crimson of blood, is Jewish.  So also is his love of music, of music especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in God, of music with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases.  It was this Jewish element in Browning, in all its many forms, which caused him to feel with and to write so much about the Jews in his poetry.  The two poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may be in the thought of God and as it ought to be conceived by us, are both in the mouth of Jews, of Rabbi Ben Ezra and Jochanan Hakkadosh.  In Filippo Baldinucci the Jew has the best of the battle; his courtesy, intelligence and physical power are contrasted with the coarseness, feeble brains and body of the Christians.  In Holy-Cross Day, the Jew, forced to listen to a Christian sermon, begins with coarse and angry mockery, but passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase.  No English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock unpitied, has spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till Browning wrote of him.  The Jew lay deep in Browning.  He was a complex creature; and who would understand or rather feel him rightly, must be able to feel something of the nature of all these races in himself.  But Tennyson was not complex.  He was English and only English.

But to return from this digression.  Browning does not stand alone among the poets in the apartness from his own land of which I have written.  Byron is partly with him.  Where Byron differs from him is, first, in this—­that Byron had no poetic love for any special country as Browning had for Italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to Greece.  Keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as I have said, the country of Loveliness.  Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were not exclusively English.  Shelley belonged partly to Italy, but chiefly to that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided patriotisms are absorbed.  Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their early days, were patriots of humanity; they actually for a time abjured their country.  Even in his later days Wordsworth’s sympathies reach far beyond England.  But none of these were so distinctively English as Tennyson, and none of them were so outside of England as Browning.  Interesting as it is, the completeness of this isolation from England was a misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.