athe thro' silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess;
He who writes may write for once, as I do."

Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the
prominence with him of the specifically artist's point of view. He cared
for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of
human life, hints of "the absolute truth of things" which the sensible
world veils and the senses miss. But he cared for them also, and yet
more, as expressions of the artist's own "love of loving, rage of
knowing, seeing, feeling" that absolute truth. And he cared for them
also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple
outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious. His own eye and
ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and
activities. During the last years in Italy his passion for modelling
even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully
lamented that the "poor lost soul" produced only casts, which he broke
on completion, and no more Men and Women. And his own taste in art drew
him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was
palpable,--whether it was a triumphant _tour de force_ like Cellini's
Perseus, in the Loggia--their daily banquet in the early days at
Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the Tuscan's early art,"
like those "Pre-Giotto pictures" which surrounded them in the salon of
Casa Guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning
beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her
husband's.

[Footnote 32: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]

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 g