Social intercourse occupied a large portion of the day. Browning identified himself with the daily life of Venice, and, besides this, English and American acquaintances were frequently in Venice: the poet, his reputation now firmly established and extending, was sought after by innumerable admirers. He was a man of great social charm,--a brilliant talker, full of amusing anecdotes,--his memory for historical incident was only paralleled by his immense literary knowledge, upon which he drew for apt illustration. Yet he was naturally a reticent man, of painfully nervous excitability; "nervous to such a degree," as he said of himself, "that I might fancy I could not enter a drawing-room, did I not know from my experience that I _could_ do it." This very nervousness, however, often induced an almost abnormal vivacity of speech: and Browning was warmly welcomed amongst the notable and even royal folk whose names were included in Mrs. Bronson's circle; they recognised in him, as Frederick Tennyson had done, "a man of infinite learning, jest, and _bonhomie_, and moreover a sterling heart that reveals no hollowness." To women he was specially attracted, and _vice-versâ_; "that golden-hearted Robert," as his wife had termed him, had an intimate understanding of the woman's mind. But towards children, he was, so to speak, almost numb. Devoted though he was to his only son, "the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him:" and the fervour of parental instinct finds practically no expression in his poems. In the course of the day the poet would lose no opportunity of hearing any important concert: an accomplished musician himself, his love for the tone-art amounted to a passion: and in many of his greatest poems, he had voiced the most secret meanings of music, and the yearning aspirations of a composer. We "sit alone in the loft" with the organist, Master Hughes of Saxe-Gotha, and his "huge house of the sounds," to listen and wonder while his fugue "broadens and thickens, greatens and deepens and lengthens," and the intricacy of constructive technique forms, as someone has said, "an interposing web spun by the brain between art and things divine." Or we stand with Abt Vogler in his "palace of music" as it falls to pieces, and the magic of inspiration over-rides the mastery of construction. The void of the silence is filled with "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen," and faith is born of the composer's very impotence to realize the heights of his own ambition--yet one more rendering of that triumphant failure, of which Browning was the prophet: