Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love. But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties; and the _Pictor Ignotus_ is as far behind the _Andrea del_ _Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the anæmia of this anæmic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest, of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness which they call purity. The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows _Abt Vogler_ and _Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ as the _Pictor_ foreshadows _Lippi_ and _Del Sarto_. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_. These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves. Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours.