The best criticisms of the poets have usually come from other poets, and often in the form of verse. Landor wrote of Browning,
“Since Chaucer was alive and hale
No man hath walked along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.”
This is a thumb-nail sketch of Browning’s personality,—not complete, but very lifelike. And when we add to it Landor’s prose saying that “his is the surest foot since Chaucer’s, that has waked the echoes from the difficult places of poetry and of life” we have a sufficiently plain clew to the unfolding of Browning’s genius. Unwearying activity, intense curiosity, variety of expression, and a predominant interest in the difficult places of poetry and of life,—these were the striking characteristics of his mind. In his heart a native optimism, an unconquerable
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 hopefulness, was the ruling factor. But of that I shall not speak until later, when we come to consider his message. For the present we are looking simply for the mainspring of his immense intellectual energy.
When I say that the clew to Browning’s mind is to be found in his curiosity, I do not mean inquisitiveness, but a very much larger and nobler quality, for which we have no good word in English,—something which corresponds with the German Wissbegier, as distinguished from Neugier: an ardent desire to know things as they are, to penetrate as many as possible of the secrets of actual life. This, it seems to me, is the key to Browning’s intellectual disposition. He puts it into words in his first poem Pauline, where he makes the nameless hero speak of his life as linked to
“a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all—
This is myself; and I should thus have been
Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.”
Paracelsus is only an expansion of this theme in the biography of a soul. In Fra Lippo Lippi the painter says:
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“God made it all!
For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say.
But why not do as well as say, paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works—paint any one and count it crime
To let a truth slip.
... This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”
No poet was ever more interested in life than Browning, and whatever else may be said of his poetry it must be admitted that it is very interesting. He touches all sides of human activity and peers into the secret places of knowledge. He enters into the life of musicians in Abt Vogler, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, A Toccata of Galuppi’s, and Charles Avison; into the life of painters in Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, Fra Lippo Lippi, Old Pictures in Florence, Gerard de Lairesse, Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, and Francis
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 Furini; into the life of scholars in A Grammarian’s Funeral and Fust and his Friends; into the life of politicians in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and George Bubb Dodington; into the life of ecclesiastics in the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church, and The Ring and the Book; and he makes excursions into all kinds of byways and crooked corners of life in such poems as Mr. Sludge, the Medium, Porphyria’s Lover, Mesmerism, Johannes Agricola in Meditation, Pietro of Abano, Ned Bratts, Jochanan Hakkadosh, and so forth.
Merely to read a list of such titles is to have evidence of Browning’s insatiable curiosity. It is evident also that he has a fondness for out-of-the-way places. He wants to know, even more than he wants to enjoy. If Wordsworth is the poet of the common life, Browning is the poet of the uncommon life. Extraordinary situations and eccentric characters attract him. Even when he is looking at some familiar scene, at some commonplace character, his effort is to discover something that shall prove that
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 it is not familiar, not commonplace,—a singular detail, a striking feature, a mark of individuality. This gives him more pleasure than any distant vision of an abstraction or a general law.
“All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
T............