Practically simultaneously with the publication of “Pauline” appeared another small volume, containing the “Palace of Art,” “Oenone,” “Mariana,” etc.  Those early books of Tennyson and Browning have frequently, and somewhat uncritically, been contrasted.  Unquestionably, however, the elder poet showed a consummate and continuous mastery of his art altogether beyond the intermittent expressional power of Browning in his most rhythmic emotion at any time of his life.  To affirm that there is more intellectual fibre, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, in the product of the younger poet, would be beside the mark.  The insistence on the supremacy of Browning over all poets since Shakspere because he has the highest “message” to deliver, because his intellect is the most subtle and comprehensive, because his poems have this or that dynamic effect upon dormant or sluggish or other active minds, is to be seriously and energetically deprecated.  It is with presentment that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself.  If he cannot present poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet, though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer.  Browning’s eminence is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called “the mere handiwork, the furnisher’s business, of the poet.”  It is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent should be wrought to a high technique equally by the shaping brain and the dexterous hand.  Browning is great because of his formative energy:  because, despite the excess of burning and compulsive thought—­

     “Thoughts swarming thro’ the myriad-chambered brain
      Like multitudes of bees i’ the innumerous cells,
      Each staggering ’neath the undelivered freight—­”

he strikes from the furor of words an electric flash so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature, but only in the visionary eye of man.  Form for the mere beauty of form, is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance.  If nothing animate it, it may possibly be fair of aspect, but only as the frozen smile upon a dead face.

We know little of Browning’s inner or outer life in 1833 and 1834.  It was a secretive, not a productive period.  One by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away.  He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist:  the sense of dreams never to be accomplished.  That land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures:  what a heritance there for the enfranchised spirits of great dreamers!

In the autumn of 1833 he went forth to his University, that of the world of men and women.  It was ever a favourite answer of his, when asked if he had been at either Oxford or Cambridge,—­“Italy was my University.”