Almost all Browning’s finest poems of painting belong to these Italian years, and were enshrined in Men and Women. They all illustrate more or less his characteristic preoccupation with the artist’s point of view, and also, what is new, the point of view of particular and historical artists,—­a Guercino, an Andrea del Sarto, a Giotto, a Lippo Lippi.  Even where he seems to write under the peculiar spell of his wife, as in the Guardian Angel, this trait asserts itself.  They had spent three glowing August days of 1848 at Fano, and thrice visited the painting by Guercino there,—­“to drink its beauty to our soul’s content.”  Mrs Browning wrote of the “divine” picture.  Browning entered, with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own “angel” was with him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of “dear Guercino’s fame,” because he “did not work thus earnestly at all times, and has endured some wrong.”  With all this, however, the Guardian Angel is one of the few pieces left by Browning which do not instantly discover themselves as his.  His typical children are well-springs of spiritual influence, scattering the aerial dew of quickening song upon a withered world, or taking God’s ear with their “little human praise.”  The spirituality of this child is of a different temper,—­the submissive “lamblike” temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by thought.

What is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the great monologue of Andrea del Sarto an illuminating compassion.  Compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate.  The situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea’s monologue is one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation.  It is a study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men’s silence with speech and their apathy with song.  Tennyson’s Lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned.  Andrea’s spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to crave.  He is half “incapable of his own distress”; his strongest emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy.  Reproach turns to grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:—­