And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment.

The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_.

This might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest.

But his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable Fifines.
The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure" in which imagination played an unusually splendid part.

A succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him.