et of a kind
of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without
disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would
hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of
Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness
neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and
serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his
lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as
well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a
dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that

"at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."

Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in
earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.

But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which
seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating
self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island
kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely
intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic
monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his
case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we
saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the
white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour
had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously
occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss
the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the
barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked
to explain it.

[Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.]

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character
Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate
play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The
care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in
_Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia
and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed
walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa
than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The
abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque
contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons