Out of this root, which shot its first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance.

Out of it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even now arising among the poets of to-day.
In Browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it scarcely appears.

Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic.

He had too much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism.

But one part of its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in Browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work.