may be compared with Abt Vogler.  Poems of the order of The Guardian Angel are more comparable with A Toccata of Galuppi’s, the rendering of the impressions and sensations caused by a particular picture. Old Pictures in Florence is not unsimilar to Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, critical, technical, lovingly learned, sympathetically quizzical.  But Browning’s artistic instinct and knowledge are manifested not only in special poems of this sort, but everywhere throughout his works.  He writes of painters because he has a kinship with them.  “Their pictures are windows through which he sees into their souls.”

It is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a painter should be capable of superb landscape-painting in verse; and we find in Browning this power.  It is further evident that such a poet, a man who has chosen poetry instead of painting, must consider the latter art subordinate to the former, and it is only natural that we should find Browning subordinating the pictorial to the poetic capacity, and this more carefully than most other poets.  His best landscapes are as brief as they are brilliant.  They are like sabre-strokes, swift, sudden, flashing the light from their sweep, and striking straight to the heart.  And they are never pushed into prominence for an effect of idle beauty, nor strewn about in the way of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like roses in a runner’s path.  They are subordinated always to the human interest; blended, fused with it, so that a landscape in a poem of Browning’s is literally a part of the emotion.  All poetry which describes in detail, however magnificent, palls on us when persisted in.  “The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description.  That is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or a phrase paint lasting pictures.  The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most."[10] It is to this, the finest essence of landscape-painting, that most of Browning’s landscapes belong.  Yet he can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit.  Look at the poem of The Englishman in Italy.  The whole piece is one long description, minute, careful and elaborated.  Perhaps it is worth observing that the description is addressed to a child.

In the exercise of his power of placing a character or incident in a sympathetic setting, Browning shows himself, as I have pointed out, singularly skilful.  He never avails himself of the dramatic poet’s licence of vagueness as to surroundings:  he sees them himself with instant and intense clearness, and stamps them as clearly on our brain.  The picture calls up the mood.  Here is the opening of one of his very earliest poems, Porphyria’s Lover:—­

      “The rain set early in to-night,
        The sullen wind was soon awake,
      It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
        And did its worst to vex the lake,
      I listened with heart fit to break. 
        When glided in Porphyria.”