scords emerged at last a full melody of
steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original
metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches
full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows
of the valley.

These complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into
which society had grown Browning represented from almost the beginning
of his work. When society became conscious of them--there it found him.
And, amazed, it said, "Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the
midst of our present life and wrote about it." They saw the wild, loud
complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly
conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace
where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled.

For Browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of
life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which,
when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound,
he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with
itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and
where they were resolved. And this hope for the individual and the race
was one of the deepest elements in Browning's religion. It was also the
hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed
the uncertainty. Browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part
resolved his discords. Even when he did not resolve them, he firmly
believed that they would be resolved. This, his essential difference
from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his
apartness from the self-ignorance of English society, and the
self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but
also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life. In
the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery,
contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.
Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the
strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the
inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to
the last poem he wrote. While the other poets were tossing on the sea of
unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island
whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling
tolerance of his life-long c