We all noticed Mr.
Browning's capacity for springing through substances and covering
space without the assistance of time.
My mother says in her little diary of Rome, "I met Mr. Browning; or
rather, he rushed at me from a distance, and seemed to come through a
carriage in his way." It was as if he longed to teach people how to
follow his thoughts in poetry, as they flash electrically from one
spot to another, thinking nothing of leaping to a mountain-top from an
inspection of "callow nestlings," or any other tender fact of smallest
interest. Not one of all the cherubs of the great masters had a
sunnier face, more dancing curls, or a sweeter smile than he. The most
present personality was his; the most distant, even when near, was the
personality he married. I have wondered whether the Faun would have
sprung with such untainted jollity into the sorrows of to-day if Mr.
Browning had not leaped so blithely before my father's eyes.
"Browning's nonsense," he writes, "is of a very genuine and excellent
quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful
mind; and he lets it play 'among his friends with the faith and
simplicity of a child."
I think I must be right in tracing one of the chief enchantments of
the story of Dr. Grimshawe to these months upon the hill of
Bellosguardo. For at Montauto one of the terrors was the cohort of
great spiders. There is no word in the dictionary so large or so
menacing as a large spider of the Dr.
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