mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as
it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it
is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and
imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and
placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.


V.

2. JOY IN FORM.


If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it
altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form.
By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to
it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His
ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in
literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline
and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one
of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with
even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the
slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In
conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious
propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely
with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the
enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of
the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of
adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts
of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which
overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too