He lost himself more completely in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning.  He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in Gerard de Lairesse if he has lost the poetic touch, the poetic spirit, because he writes of the soul, of facts, of things invisible—­not of fancy’s feignings, not of the things perceived by the senses?  “I can do this,” he answers, “if I like, as well as you,” and he paints the landscape of a whole day filled with mythological figures.  The passage is poetry; we see that he has not lost his poetic genius.  But, he calls it “fooling,” and then contrasts the spirit of Greek lore with the spirit of immortal hope and cheer which he possesses, with his faith that there is for man a certainty of Spring.  But that is not the answer to his question.  It only says that the spirit which animates him now is higher than the Greek spirit.  It does not answer the question—­Whether Daniel Bartoli or Charles Avison or any of these Parleyings even approach as poetry Paracelsus, the Dramatic Lyrics, or Men and Women.  They do not.  Nor has their intellectual work the same force, unexpectedness and certainty it had of old.  Nevertheless, these Parleyings, at the close of the poet’s life, and with biographical touches which give them vitality, enshrine Browning’s convictions with regard to some of the greater and lesser problems of human life.  And when his personality is vividly present in them, the argument, being thrilled with passionate feeling, rises, but heavily like a wounded eagle, into an imaginative world.

The sub-consciousness in Browning’s mind to which I have alluded—­that these later productions of his were not as poetical as his earlier work and needed defence—­is the real subject of a remarkable little poem at the end of the second volume of the Dramatic Idyls.  He is thinking of himself as poet, perhaps of that double nature in him which on one side was quick to see and love beauty; and on the other, to see facts and love their strength.  Sometimes the sensitive predominated.  He was only the lover of beauty whom everything that touched him urged into song.

    “Touch him ne’er so lightly, into song he broke: 
      Soil so quick-receptive,—­not one feather-seed,
    Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
      Vitalising virtue:  song would song succeed
      Sudden as spontaneous—­prove a poet-soul!”

This, which Browning puts on the lips of another, is not meant, we are told, to describe himself.  But it does describe one side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems.  But now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that—­as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men.  He was curiously mistaken.