If Wordsworth is the Millet of poetry, Browning is the Holbein or the Denner. He never misses the mole, the wrinkle, the twist of the eyebrow, which makes the face stand out alone, the sudden touch of self-revelation which individualizes the character. Thus we find in Browning’s poetry few types of humanity, but plenty of men. Yet he seldom, if ever, allows us to forget the background of society. His figures are far more individual than Wordsworth’s, but far less solitary. Behind each of them we feel the world out of which they have come and to which they belong. There is a sense of crowded life surging through his poetry. The city, with all that it means, is not often completely out of view. “Shelley’s characters,” says a thoughtful essayist, “are creatures of wave and sky; Wordsworth’s of green English fields; Browning’s move in the house, the palace, the street.”[13] In many of them, even when they are soliloquizing, there is a curious consciousness of opposition, of conflict. They seem to be defending themselves against unseen adversaries, justifying their course against the judgment of absent critics. Thus Bishop Blougram while he talks over the walnuts and the wine to Mr. Gigadibs, the sceptical hack-writer, has a worldful of religious conservatives and radicals in his eye and makes his half-cynical, wholly militant, apology for agnostic orthodoxy to them. The old huntsman, in _The Flight of the Duchess_, is maintaining the honour of his fugitive mistress against the dried-up, stiff, conventional society from which she has eloped with the Gypsies. Andrea del Sarto, looking at the soulless fatal beauty of his Lucrezia, and meditating on the splendid failure of his art, cries out to Rafael and Michelangelo and all his compeers to understand and judge him. Even when Browning writes of romantic love, (one of his two favourite subjects), he almost always heightens its effect by putting it in relief against the ignorance, the indifference, the busyness, or the hostility of the great world. In _Cristina_ and _Evelyn Hope_ half the charm of the passion lies in the feeling that it means everything to the lover though no one else in the world may know of its existence. _Porphyria’s Lover_, in a fit of madness, kills his mistress to keep her from going back to the world which would divide them. The sweet searching melody of _In a Gondola_ plays itself athwart a sullen distant accompaniment of Venetian tyranny and ends with a swift stroke of vengeance from the secret Three. Take, for an example of Browning’s way of enhancing love by contrast, that most exquisite and subtle lyric called _Love Among the Ruins_.