full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing
forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the
irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in
the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring
vindication of its claims.

* * * * *

Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love.
But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the
Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of
artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how
he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his
death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not
choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his
wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly
disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those
problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties;
and the _Pictor Ignotus_ is as far behind the _Andrea del_ _Sarto_ and
_Fra Lippo Lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and
plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always
inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the
anæmia of this anæmic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute
uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest,
of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great
refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness
which they call purity.

The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in
Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows _Abt