to
sublimity. Browning's satire is equally keen and kindly. It never
condescends to raise laughter at infirmity, or at mere absurdities of
manners; it respects human nature, but it convicts falsity by the
revealing intensity of its illumination. Of cynicism, of the wit that
preys upon carrion, there is less than nothing.

Of all poets Browning is the healthiest and manliest; he is one of
the "substantial men" of whom Landor speaks. His genius is robust with
vigorous blood, and his tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health.
The most subtle of minds, his is the least sickly. The wind that blows
in his pages is no hot and languorous breeze, laden with scents and
sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea. His poetry is a
tonic; it braces and invigorates. "_Il fait vivre ses phrases_:"
his verse lives and throbs with life. He is incomparably plentiful of
vital heat; "so thoroughly and delightfully alive." This is an effect
of art, and a moral impression. It brings us into his own presence, and
stirs us with an answering warmth of life in the breathing pages. The
keynote of his philosophy is:--

"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world!"

He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from
no _man_, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with
stumblings and fallings. I am a man, he might say with the noblest
utterance of antiquity, and I deem nothing alien that is human. His
investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable
optimism. Any one can say "All's right with the world," when he looks at
the smiling face of things, at comfortable prosperity and a decent
morality. But the test of optimism is its sight of evil. Browning has
fathomed it, and he can still hope, for he sees the reflection of the
sun in the depths of every foul puddle. This vivid hope and trust in man
is bound up with a strong and strenuous faith in God. Browning's
Christianity is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally
Christian in that it never sinks into pietism. He is never didactic, but
his faith is the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it.
Yet as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all creeds
with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible to prove him
(as Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in every thing and a
disbeliever in anything.

Such, so far as I can realise my conception of him, is Robert Brow