of the inner life of men.  And then, when the tendency of which I speak had collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous amazement, found him out.  “Here is a man,” it said, “who has been doing in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety.  We will read him now.”  So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having reached him, he became a favoured poet.

However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into which other writers carried it, Paracelsus is, indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but Sordello combines with a similar history a tale of political and warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while in poems like Pippa Passes and some of the Dramas, emotion and thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a lightning of swift deeds.  Nor are other poems wanting, in which, not long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity.

2.  This second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the objective in art.  The time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had brought to the point of eruption.  Impressionism was born in painting, poetry, sculpture and music.

It was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in the art of poetry, we found that Browning—­who had in long poems done the very opposite of impressionism—­had also, in a number of short poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. Porphyria’s Lover, many a scene in Sordello, My Last Duchess, The Laboratory, Home Thoughts from Abroad, are only a few out of many.  It is pleasant to think of the ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a moment on the sea, only to disappear.  In method, swiftness and colour, but done in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery as in colour.  He did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul.  That is another reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now.  He was impressionist long before Impressionism arrived.  When it arrived he was found out.  And he stood alone, for Tennyson is never impressionist, and never could have been.  Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor Rossetti.