express himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, while he
does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn
with a curious externality and detachment. It is in his musicians, his
painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the
poet really live. He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet
of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which
never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. In the
_Transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault
of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he
fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately
illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him
at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book
and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to
deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who

"with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side."

The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it
Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular
misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of
the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the
speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but
unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and
makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We
see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper
and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the
alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who