[Footnote 117: _By the Fireside_.]

The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's
imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of
character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its
mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this
lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of
flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with
inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even _The Ring and the
Book_ itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the
poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork
of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is
a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner
or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to
search and alcoves to importune,"--

"The day wears,
And door succeeds door,
We try the fresh fortune,
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre."

For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct
analysis in _Sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the
instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of
his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic
character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed,
if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an
imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into
integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the
contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears