Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."[123]

[Footnote 123: _Sordello_, i. 135.]

And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of
a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _Wahrheit_ and
_Dichtung_ of his greatest poem.

Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind,
a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a
factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached
from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his
poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to
his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions
of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a
speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well
disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of
principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition
nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by
which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker
slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the
fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts
an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his
interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest
currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which
in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have
to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated
thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep