He was a keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and he had a memory like the British Museum Library.

But the story does, in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type.

If a man had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he could have given an account of the man and an account of his father and his grandfather.

But if a man had asked him what he thought of himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.
This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man.

The same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs.
Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious.