In his early years Browning had always a great liking for walking in the dark.  At Camberwell he was wont to carry this love to the point of losing many a night’s rest.  There was, in particular, a wood near Dulwich, whither he was wont to go.  There he would walk swiftly and eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed, with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances, even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by the alertest sense in the day’s manifold detachments.  At this time, too, he composed much in the open air.  This he rarely, if ever, did in later life.  Not only many portions of “Paracelsus,” but several scenes in “Strafford,” were enacted first in these midnight silences of the Dulwich woodland.  Here, too, as the poet once declared, he came to know the serene beauty of dawn:  for every now and again, after having read late, or written long, he would steal quietly from the house, and walk till the morning twilight graded to the pearl and amber of the new day.

As in childhood the glow of distant London had affected him to a pleasure that was not without pain, perhaps to a pain rather that was a fine delirium, so in his early manhood the neighbourhood of the huge city, felt in those midnight walks of his, and apprehended more by the transmutive shudder of reflected glare thrown fadingly upward against the stars, than by any more direct vision or even far-borne indeterminate hum, dominated his imagination.  At that distance, in those circumstances, humanity became more human.  And with the thought, the consciousness of this imperative kinship, arose the vague desire, the high resolve to be no curious dilettante in novel literary experiments, but to compel an interpretative understanding of this complex human environment.

Those who knew the poet intimately are aware of the loving regard he always had for those nocturnal experiences:  but perhaps few recognise how much we owe to the subtle influences of that congenial isolation he was wont to enjoy on fortunate occasions.

It is not my intention—­it would, obviously, be a futile one, if entertained—­to attempt an analysis or elaborate criticism of the many poems, long and short, produced by Robert Browning.  Not one volume, but several, of this size, would have to be allotted to the adequate performance of that end.  Moreover, if readers are unable or unwilling to be their own expositors, there are several trustworthy hand-books which are easily procurable.  Some one, I believe, has even, with unselfish consideration for the weaker brethren, turned “Sordello” into prose—­a superfluous task, some scoffers may exclaim.  Personally, I cannot but think this craze for the exposition of poetry, this passion for “dissecting a rainbow,” is harmful to the individual as well as humiliating to the high office of Poetry itself, and not infrequently it is ludicrous.