emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.  They, too, began to dissect the human heart.  Poets and writers of fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or felt in this or that fashion.  In such analysis they seemed to touch the primal sources of life.  They desired to dig about the tree of humanity and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres—­not much caring whether they withered the tree for a time—­rather than to describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy fruit.  And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of motives—­which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer to keep hidden—­ran through the practice of all the arts.  They became, on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual.  The close marriage between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself.  Some of the parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products, freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was glorified.  They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were nothing better than disagreeable Science.  But this was an extreme deviation of the tendency.  The main line it took was not so detestable.  It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a part, in fact, of the general scientific movement.  The outward forms of things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.  The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life, before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and easier, than any description of their final result in act.  This was borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a comfortable reaction from it has arisen.  In poetry it did not last so long.  Morris carried us out of it.  But long before it began, long before its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual analysis of human nature.  When he began it, no one cared for it; and Paracelsus, Sordello and the soul-dissecting poems in Bells and Pomegranates fell on an unheeding world.  But Browning did not heed the unheeding of the world.  He had the courage of his aims in art, and while he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern