[Footnote 113:  Preface to Sordello, ed. 1863.]

[Footnote 114:  Sordello, ii. 135.]

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice.  The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme.  The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled.  Children—­real children, naive and inarticulate, like little Fortu—­rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home.  In its child pathos The Pied Piper—­addressed to a child—­stands all but alone among his works.  His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached.  Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate.  Mildred has no mother, and she falls; Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father’s house; Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of “the secret of the world,” which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents’ calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother’s love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in Browning’s poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice.  Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning.  Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much.  Two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal.  And Browning puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a Jew of the dispersion.  Responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass.  In his defining, isolating