So much cannot be said of Browning. There is enough and to spare in the great body of his work to leave his position as a poet unassailed, but there is more to prove that, beside the purely poetic impulse, there were other forces working in his nature, which, in so far as they prevail, must tend to rob the result of that faultless music which alone [Illustration: _Hollyer_ ROBERT BROWNING From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. _To face page 201._ ] can give to verse its final right of survival. This is doubtless true also of Wordsworth, but in his case the good and the bad are easily separable, and the good at its best is flawless. But with Browning the conflicting elements of his genius are so closely locked together that the task of selection is not so easy, and the triumph, even when it has to be acknowledged, is not so secure. And yet, for all who then came under his influence, the charm can never quite be broken. He spoke to those of us who first learned to know him in our youth with a quickened authority that nothing can quite destroy. The faults which time now thrusts forward were hardly then matter for pardon. For those who come after they may indeed serve to set his fame in peril, but the message he had for us was so overwhelming in its appeal that we forgot the crabbed hand in which it was transcribed. In one respect, and in one respect only, Browning the poet found an echo in Browning as he was known to his friends. That brave optimism of spirit, with its constant nobility of outlook on the facts of life which so finely distinguishes his writing, was also, I think, characteristic of the man. It was always a spiritual refreshment to meet him. The fact that he was a poet was, indeed, a secret he took some pains to conceal. In this respect, except for rare lapses of noble enthusiasm, he preferred to preserve a kind of austere incognito; but at the same time he contrived to convey even in the simplest converse with the most ordinary people a sense of personal detachment that nevertheless left them free to feel at their ease. And yet, often as I have seen him apparently content with associates who were manifestly his inferiors in intellect, and even in spirit, I cannot recall a time when his own personality ever seemed to suffer by the contact. I suppose no man of his generation responded so readily to the call of hospitality. He was to be met everywhere, and so keen was his zest in the ordinary traffic of social life that he seemed at times to be indifferent to his choice of associates. There was something in his own power of drawing entertainment from an evening passed in the society of friends that no measure of dulness in his surroundings seemed capable of abating.