r unheeded, or as it
seemed unheard, had stored themselves in his mind and borne fruit there.

I think it is Mr. Sharp who has remarked that Mr. Browning combined
impulsiveness of manner with much real reserve. He was habitually
reticent where his deeper feelings were concerned; and the impulsiveness
and the reticence were both equally rooted in his poetic and human
temperament. The one meant the vital force of his emotions, the other
their sensibility. In a smaller or more prosaic nature they must have
modified each other. But the partial secretiveness had also occasionally
its conscious motives, some unselfish, and some self-regarding; and from
this point of view it stood in marked apparent antagonism to the more
expansive quality. He never, however, intentionally withheld from others
such things as it concerned them to know. His intellectual and religious
convictions were open to all who seriously sought them; and if, even
on such points, he did not appear communicative, it was because he took
more interest in any subject of conversation which did not directly
centre in himself.

Setting aside the delicacies which tend to self-concealment, and for
which he had been always more or less conspicuous; excepting also the
pride which would co-operate with them, all his inclinations were in
the direction of truth; there was no quality which he so much loved
and admired. He thought aloud wherever he could trust himself to do so.
Impulse predominated in all the active manifestations of his nature. The
fiery child and the impatient boy had left their traces in the man; and
with them the peculiar childlike quality which the man of genius never
outgrows, and which, in its mingled waywardness and sweetness, was
present in Robert Browning till almost his dying day. There was also a
recurrent touch of hardness, distinct from the comparatively ungenial
mood of his earlier years of widowhood; and this, like his reserve,
seemed to conflict with his general character, but in reality harmonized
with it. It meant, not that feeling was suspended in him, but that it
was compressed. It was his natural response to any opposition which his
reasonings could not shake nor his will overcome, and which, rightly
or not, conveyed to him the sense of being misunderstood. It reacted in
pain for others, but it lay with an aching weight on his own heart, and
was thrown off in an upheaval of the pent-up kindliness and affection,
the moment their true s