inutest; ay, God said
This head this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so:
But sure that thought and word and deed
All go to swell his love for me,
Me, made because that love had need
Of something irreversibly
Pledged solely its content to be.

As to _A Grammarian's Funeral_, that poem also belongs to the German
rather than to the Italian spirit. The Renaissance in Italy lost its
religion; at the same time, in Germany, it added a reformation of
religion to the New Learning. The Renaissance in Italy desired the
fulness of knowledge in this world, and did not look for its infinities
in the world beyond. In Germany the same desire made men call for the
infinities of knowledge beyond the earth. A few Italians, like
Savonarola, like M. Angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their
world; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of every German who had
gained a religion. In Italy, as the Renaissance rose to its luxury and
trended to its decay, the pull towards personal righteousness made by
belief in an omnipotent goodness who demands the subjection of our will
to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars and cultivated society. A
man's will was his only law. On the other hand, the life of the New
Learning in Germany and England was weighted with a sense of duty to an
eternal Righteousness. The love of knowledge or beauty was modified into
seriousness of life, carried beyond this life in thought, kept clean,
and, though filled with incessant labour on the earth, aspired to reach
its fruition only in the life to come.

This is the spirit and the atmosphere of the _Grammarian's Funeral_, and
Browning's little note at the beginning says that its time "was shortly
after the revival of learning in Europe." I have really no proof that
Browning laid the scene of his poem in Germany, save perhaps the use of
such words as "thorp" and "croft," but there is a clean, pure morning
light playing through the verse, a fresh, health-breathing northern air,
which does not fit in with Italy; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in the
song and march of the students who carry their master with gay strength
up the mountain to the very top, all of them filled with his aspiring
spirit, all of them