imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the “still sad music of humanity” escapes.  The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.

Browning’s interest in “soul” was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such.  But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,—­the personified abstractions.  Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of Keats’s “Autumn” and Shelley’s “West Wind,” this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by Browning’s hand.  Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience.  It had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants.  The stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off.  He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empyrean.  His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground.  His Artemis “prologizes” to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer.  Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the “all-seeing” and all-vitalising Sun.  Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration.  He can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; “maid-moon” Luna is far more maid than moon.  The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of The Englishman in Italy.  The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.

[Footnote 115:  Fifine at the Fair, lxxviii.]

VIII.