aissance, which began
with the midst of the fifteenth century. But he loved its beginnings
even more than its fulness. That was characteristic. I have said that
even when he was eighty years old, his keenest sympathies were with
spring rather than summer, with those times of vital change when fresh
excitements disturbed the world, when its eyes were smiling with hope,
and its feet eager with the joy of pursuit. He rejoiced to analyse and
embody a period which was shaking off the past, living intensely in the
present, and prophesying the future. It charms us, as we read him, to
see his intellect and his soul like two hunting dogs, and with all their
eagerness, questing, roving, quartering, with the greatest joy and in
incessant movement, over a time like this, where so many diverse,
clashing, and productive elements mingled themselves into an enchanting
confusion and glory of life. Out of that pleasure of hunting in a
morning-tide of humanity, was born _Fra Lippo Lippi_; and there is
scarcely an element of the time, except the political elements, which it
does not represent; not dwelt on, but touched for the moment and left;
unconsciously produced as two men of the time would produce them in
conversation. The poem seems as easy as a chat in Pall Mall last night
between some intelligent men, which, read two hundred years hence, would
inform the reader of the trend of thought and feeling in this present
day. But in reality to do this kind of thing well is to do a very
difficult thing. It needs a full knowledge, a full imagination and a
masterly execution. Yet when we read the poem, it seems as natural as
the breaking out of blossoms. This is that divine thing, the ease of
genius.

The scenery of the poem is as usual clear. We are in fifteenth-century
Florence at night. There is no set description, but the slight touches
are enough to make us see the silent lonely streets, the churches, the
high walls of the monastic gardens, the fortress-palaces. The sound of
the fountains is in our ears; the little crowds of revelling men and
girls appear and disappear like ghosts; the surly watch with their
weapons and torches bustle round the corner. Nor does Browning neglect
to paint by slight enlivening touches, introduced into Lippo Lippi's
account of himself as a starving boy, the aspect by day and the
character of the Florence of the fifteenth century. This painting of
his, slight as it is, is more alive than all the elaborate desc