Finally, in those poems which represent in vivid colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in a wood to a poet passing by.

I shall be obliged then to touch again and again on this theory of his in discussing Browning as the poet of the arts.

This is a repetition which cannot be helped, but for which I request the pardon of my readers.
The subject of the arts, from the time when Caliban "fell to make something" to the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of them, as an artist.

He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.
Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other arts, their schools or history.

He liked to describe in verse the beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why.