“of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment.  If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective in the strictest state must still retain its original value.  For it is with this world, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves; the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and reclaimed.”

Of its critical subtlety—­the more remarkable as by a poet-critic who revered Shelley the poet and loved and believed in Shelley the man—­the best example, perhaps, is in those passages where he alludes to the charge against the poet’s moral nature—­“charges which, if substantiated to their wide breadth, would materially disturb, I do not deny, our reception and enjoyment of his works, however wonderful the artistic qualities of these.  For we are not sufficiently supplied with instances of genius of his order to be able to pronounce certainly how many of its constituent parts have been tasked and strained to the production of a given lie, and how high and pure a mood of the creative mind may be dramatically simulated as the poet’s habitual and exclusive one.”

The large charity, the liberal human sympathy, the keen critical acumen of this essay, make one wish that the author had spared us a “Sludge the Medium” or a “Pacchiarotto,” or even a “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,” and given us more of such honourable work in “the other harmony.”

Glad as the Brownings were to be home again at Casa Guidi, they could not enjoy the midsummer heats of Florence, and so went to the Baths of Lucca.  It was a delight for them to ramble among the chestnut-woods of the high Tuscan forests, and to go among the grape-vines where the sunburnt vintagers were busy.  Once Browning paid a visit to that remote hill-stream and waterfall, high up in a precipitous glen, where, more than three-score years earlier, Shelley had been wont to amuse himself by sitting naked on a rock in the sunlight, reading Herodotus while he cooled, and then plunging into the deep pool beneath him—­to emerge, further up stream, and then climb through the spray of the waterfall till he was like a glittering human wraith in the middle of a dissolving rainbow.

Those Tuscan forests, that high crown of Lucca, must always have special associations for lovers of poetry.  Here Shelley lived, rapt in his beautiful dreams, and translated the Symposium so that his wife might share something of his delight in Plato.  Here, ten years later, Heine sneered, and laughed and wept, and sneered again—­drank tea with “la belle Irlandaise,” flirted with Francesca “la ballerina,” and wrote alternately with a feathered quill from the breast of a nightingale and with a lancet steeped in aquafortis:  and here, a quarter of a century afterward, Robert and Elizabeth Browning also laughed and wept and “joyed i’ the sun,” dreamed many dreams, and touched chords of beauty whose vibration has become incorporated with the larger rhythm of all that is high and enduring in our literature.