should be wrought to a high technique equally by the shaping brain
and the dexterous hand. Browning is great because of his formative energy:
because, despite the excess of burning and compulsive thought --

"Thoughts swarming thro' the myriad-chambered brain
Like multitudes of bees i' the innumerous cells,
Each staggering 'neath the undelivered freight ----"

he strikes from the FUROR of words an electric flash
so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace
becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature,
but only in the visionary eye of man. Form for the mere beauty of form,
is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance.
If nothing animate it, it may possibly be fair of aspect,
but only as the frozen smile upon a dead face.

We know little of Browning's inner or outer life in 1833 and 1834.
It was a secretive, not a productive period. One by one
certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away.
He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist:
the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. That land
of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures:
what a heritance there for the enfranchised spirits of great dreamers!

In the autumn of 1833 he went forth to his University,
that of the world of men and women. It was ever a favourite answer of his,
when asked if he had been at either Oxford or Cambridge, --
"Italy was my University."

But first he went to Russia, and spent some time in St. Petersburg,