What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points of special attraction for Browning?  To put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the complexion of its persons.  The joy in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sudden disclosure and transformation,—­all these characteristics have their analogies in Browning’s feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul.  Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning’s men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,—­Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the earlier Saul.  Something of the strange charm of these naively beautiful beings springs from their isolation.  That detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness.  They start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw.  Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness.  Pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of Browning’s mind, but for this loneliness of hers,—­the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene.  Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men.  The little “H.C., six years old,” is “a dewdrop which the morn brings forth,” that

        “at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
      Slips in a moment out of life.”

Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.

But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged Browning’s imagination.  His own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them.  Each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible to the foreigner.  Hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue.  Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case.  “Where you speak straight out,” Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, “I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth.  His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind.  His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in By the Fireside, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it.