The poem also impresses us by a Gothic richness of detail,* the picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for this very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. Mr. Browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular character had served to conceal; and he was glad to find, some years ago, that 'Sordello' was represented in a collection of descriptive passages which a friend of his was proposing to make. 'There is a great deal of that in it,' he said, 'and it has always been overlooked.' * The term Gothic has been applied to Mr. Browning's work, I believe, by Mr. James Thomson, in writing of 'The Ring and the Book', and I do not like to use it without saying so. But it is one of those which must have spontaneously suggested themselves to many other of Mr. Browning's readers. It was unfortunate that new difficulties of style should have added themselves on this occasion to those of subject and treatment; and the reason of it is not generally known. Mr. John Sterling had made some comments on the wording of 'Paracelsus'; and Miss Caroline Fox, then quite a young woman, repeated them, with additions, to Miss Haworth, who, in her turn, communicated them to Mr. Browning, but without making quite clear to him the source from which they sprang. He took the criticism much more seriously than it deserved, and condensed the language of this his next important publication into what was nearly its present form. In leaving 'Sordello' we emerge from the self-conscious stage of Mr. Browning's imagination, and his work ceases to be autobiographic in the sense in which, perhaps erroneously, we have hitherto felt it to be. 'Festus' and 'Salinguerra' have already given promise of the world of 'Men and Women' into which he will now conduct us. They will be inspired by every variety of conscious motive, but never again by the old (real or imagined) self-centred, self-directing Will. We have, indeed, already lost the sense of disparity between the man and the poet; for the Browning of 'Sordello' was growing older, while the defects of the poem were in many respects those of youth. In 'Pippa Passes', published one year later, the poet and the man show themselves full-grown. Each has entered on the inheritance of the other. Neither the imagination nor the passion of what Mr. Gosse so fitly calls this 'lyrical masque'* gives much scope for tenderness; but the quality of humour is displayed in it for the first time; as also a strongly marked philosophy of life--or more properly, of association--from which its idea and development are derived. In spite, however, of these evidences of general maturity, Mr. Browning was still sometimes boyish in personal intercourse, if we may judge from a letter to Miss Flower written at about the same time.