Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/273

247 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING 247 looks the artist who wove them — if he differs from each of the dim decorative figures that brood there, it is because he resembles them all. In Paracelsus alone it is possible to find a match for almost every tint — for Keats's famous blue and the lunar-rainbow lights of Shelley, for the romantic tartan of Sir Walter and Wordsworth's missionary black, and — yes ! — even the cool, delicious dyes of Lotusland itself: — Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes Of labdanum and aloe-balls, Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes From out her hair : such balsam falls Down seaside mountain pedestals. . . . He can stalk Byronically — soar like his Suntreader, come to earth again as true and right as Tennyson. And the biography explains. " You might as well apply to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as ask for any thing human and earthly from me," said Shelley. But " Browning is good at everything," wrote one of his friends. Poetry was but one of his passions : he boxed and he rode, he danced, fenced, fished, and travelled, painted, played, was a pattern man of affairs, had all the sound suburban virtues, lay awake at night if he owed a bill, and as a bank clerk would have been as great a success as his assiduous grandfather. One of his eyes, we are told, was exceptionally long-sighted, the other exceptionally short, and the blend gave him a vision of splendid balance and completeness. It is finely characteristic of the man who differed from other men not because he had one function hyper- developed but because he had all their faculties in noble measure, so that the result wa3 a radiant normality. In no other two volumes of verse on our shelves, accordingly, do we find so much of life, in such right proportions and so prismatically mixed. Both halves of Rome are here. And, roughly, it may be