[Footnote 23: "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with
these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild
company any longer."--Feb. 26, 1845.]


III.


"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving
lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote
Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the "scenes and
song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years
before as the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Yet it is just by the intermittent
flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we
have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere
escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the
student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of
life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they
are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer
exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a
feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one
might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the
detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The
loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a Dante,
the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming
hatred of a Heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination.
The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a
handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is
poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside
and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in _My last Duchess_,