In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish "the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say." Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the