med to be balanced, the poet to be unbalanced.
Shelley, and Poe, and Heine, and Byron, and Burns elucidate this
erroneous hypothesis of the poet. We pass lightly their misrule of
themselves with a tacit assumption of their genius having shaken and
shocked their moral faculties as in some giant perturbation.

I now recur to the initial suggestion, that the great poet is sane.
The poet is yet a man, and man is more than poet. Manhood is the regal
fact to which all else must subordinate itself. Nothing must be
allowed to disfranchise manhood; and he who manumits the poet from
social and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark
mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend who
assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather
than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet's
sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run
their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown
tall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet bear
witness Aeschylus, and Dante, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and
Tennyson, and Browning, in naming whom we are lighting on high summits,
as clouds do, and leaving the main range of mountains untouched.
Shakespeare is absolutely sane. Not Blondin, crossing Niagara on a
thread for a pathway, was so absolute in his balance as Shakespeare.
He saw all the world. Nor is this all; for there are those who see an
entire world, but see it distorted as an anamorphism. There is a
cartoon world, where everybody is apprehended as taking on other shapes
than his own, and is valued in proportion as he is susceptible of
caricature. But plate-glass is better for looking through than is a
prism. What men need is eyes which are neither far-sighted nor
near-sighted, but right-sighted. Shakespeare was that. There is no
hint of exaggeration in his characters. They are people we have met on
journeys, and some of whom we have known intimately. To be a poet it
is not necessary to be a madman--a doctrine wholesome and encouraging.
I lay down, then, as one of the canons for testing a poet's greatness,
this, "Is he sane?" and purpose applying the canon to Robert Browning,
giving results of such application rather than the _modus operandi_ of
such results. I assert that he bears the test. No saner man than
Browning ever walked this world's streets. He was entirely human in
his love of life