ified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more
persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of
which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the
recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of
love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained
untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is
significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love
between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though
exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.

VII.

The love-poetry of the _Men and Women_ volumes, as originally published,
was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its
contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition
of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the _Dramatic
Lyrics_, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the _Dramatic
Romances_. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half
were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in
the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood
in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any
part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant
lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them
for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain.
Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song,
such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets:
even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "_to_ the
Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only
through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of
other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own
perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry
brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century,
and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he
habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of
thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely
blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating
scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding
conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the
ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as
t