experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure,
intense, immaculate spiritual light,--Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the
earlier _Saul_. Something of the strange charm of these naïvely
beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the
bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative
aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start
into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw.
Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet 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