were never
with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.

Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in
the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet
along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of
Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers
into the torchlight. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ is not less true and vivacious
than the _Andrea_, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic
power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust
temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul
whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But
this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist
eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere
clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went
out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his
own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. There is not much "soul"
in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in
its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies"
men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature."
He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men
instead of imposing one from without:--

"This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

"Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it
is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of
Andrea's soulless wife. Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its
doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and
put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the
incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was
most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn
his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style.

These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of
Browning. But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind,
as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of
Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous
causerie called _Old Pictures in Florence_. There is passion in its
grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters,