But the particular character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood.
There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place.

It is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones.

There are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty.

Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation.

If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop.