was himself woven of England even more than of Italy. The English
elements in his character and work are more than the Italian. His
intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English
excellences. His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality,
his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of
things, were English. His religion was the excellent English compromise
or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make
for their own life. His bold sense of personal freedom was English. His
constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his
roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

Then his wit, his _esprit_,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the
soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing
inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out
of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the
way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary
self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of
reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to
one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour
of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his
impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its
indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the
fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour,
rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of
beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as
the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty--these were
all old Italian.

Then I do not know whether Browning had any Jewish blood in his body by
descent, but he certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit