Sometimes the sensitive predominated.

He was only the lover of beauty whom everything that touched him urged into song.
"Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!" This, which Browning puts on the lips of another, is not meant, we are told, to describe himself.

But it does describe one side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems.

But now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that--as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men.

He was curiously mistaken.
Indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet grows?
"Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage." In this sharp division, as in his _Epilogue_ to _Pacchiarotto_, he misses the truth.