e (not in
themselves more perfect in sympathy, though larger in number, than those
on music) he is simply the first to write of these arts as an artist
might, if an artist could express his soul in words or rhythm. It has
always been a fashion among poets to write about music, though scarcely
anyone but Shakespeare and Milton has done so to much purpose; it is
now, owing to the influence of Rossetti (whose magic, however, was all
his own, and whose mantle went down into the grave with him) a fashion
to write about pictures. But indiscriminate sonneteering about pictures
is one thing: Browning's attitude and insight into the plastic arts
quite another. Poems like _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Pictor
Ignotus_, have a revealing quality which is unique; tragedies or
comedies of art, in a more personal and dramatic way than the musical
poems, they are like these in touching the springs of art itself. They
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 l