Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats
their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a
mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly,
in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the
dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of
nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit
of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic
shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the
fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of
_The Englishman in Italy_. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth
in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.

[Footnote 115: _Fifine at the Fair_, lxxviii.]


VIII.


What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points
of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same
fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have
watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the
complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in
abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and
sudden disclosure and transformation,--all these characteristics have
their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology,
and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded
labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and
simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long
procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of