spent three glowing August days of 1848 at Fano, and thrice visited the
painting by Guercino there,--"to drink its beauty to our soul's
content." Mrs Browning wrote of the "divine" picture. Browning entered,
with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own "angel" was with
him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with
the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the
world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of "dear
Guercino's fame," because he "did not work thus earnestly at all times,
and has endured some wrong." With all this, however, the _Guardian
Angel_ is one of the few pieces left by Browning which do not instantly
discover themselves as his. His typical children are well-springs of
spiritual influence, scattering the aerial dew of quickening song upon
a withered world, or taking God's ear with their "little human praise."
The spirituality of this child is of a different temper,--the submissive
"lamblike" temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by
thought.

What is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the
great monologue of _Andrea del Sarto_ an illuminating compassion.
Compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife
than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate.
The situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is
one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. It is a
study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the
rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with
speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their
world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to
be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. Andrea's
spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and
made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to