“She comes like the husht beauty of the night,
        But sees too deep for laughter;
      Her touch is a vibration and a light
        From worlds before and after—­”

there is more “profundity” in any of these than in libraries of “Sludge the Medium” literature.  Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. De profundis, indeed, must the poet come:  there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his “volatile essence” to a living rhythmic joy.  In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made.  He may learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen:  the depth of his insight depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage.  If wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul there can be no “far ken” for him.  Here it seems apt to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry.  Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke:  “Keep but ever looking, whether with the body’s eye or the mind’s, and you will soon find something to look on!  Has a man done wondering at women?—­there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at.  Has he done wondering at men?—­there’s God to wonder at:  and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one.”

This wonder is akin to that ‘insanity’ of the poet which is but impassioned sanity.  Plato sums the matter when he says, “He who, having no touch of the Muse’s madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art—­he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted.”

In that same wood beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been made, the germinal motive of “Pippa Passes” flashed upon the poet.  No wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places, and that he lamented its disappearance as fervently as Ruskin bewailed the encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar upon the wooded privacies of Denmark Hill.

Save for a couple of brief visits abroad, Browning spent the years, between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage, in London and the neighbourhood.  Occasionally he took long walks into the country.  One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances and the mood concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space upon his recumbent body.  I have heard him say that his faculty of