Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/279

THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING 253 — though it rarely is — that his fifteen superb married years were, poetically, the most barren of his life, that it was in his years of desirous youth and aching widowerhood that his best work was done. But this is not the occasion to put such questions, to ask whether there may not have been a mis- appropriation of poetic capital. And our dividend — even if we do not count the compensation to be got from the sight of his love-affair, rounded and radiant as a myth — is already high. These limitations made him an incomplete philosopher and an imperfect dramatist, but they made him a model man. They are the lines that frame the picture. Restrained on the one hand from sitting beside Shelley, on the other from a seat by Shakspere, he is left ruler of a midway kingdom, made our chief poet of familiar life. He is the Laureate of life in undress, of life emulous and muscular and mirthful. All the physical satisfactions — of touch, sight, taste, and sound — are rendered here irresistibly. The best drinking-songs in the language are here, and the best riding-songs, and some of our best rhymed tales. All the treasures, fruits, and gems of the world are fingered for us with a satisfying voluptuousness ; the lines are littered with loot, heaped like a pirate's hold ; we prowl in an Aladdin's Cave. And the rich sounds of life echo here too. From bee's kiss to thunderclap he. can race up the full scale, missing never a note, and then come rippling back again through the semi-tones of art, from Abt Vogler's to Galuppi's. Who has painted us better landscapes and seascapes or such curtains of sunset and dawn ? With Swinburne he can rejoice simultaneously in the boom and lash of the living wave and the kiss and lilt of the line that records it. And, unlike the poets of nature, ho sees the country as but a pedestal to the town, as