ion, which served his ends
because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque
examples of individual force. In his Hero Worship he gives his
countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the
individual. Browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France and Italy. He glorified what
we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. He was the apostle
to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was
complete. Those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for
the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another.

The second thesis which Browning insists on--the identity of spiritual
suffering with spiritual growth--is the one balm of the world. It is
said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not
develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." If
this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,--if the struggles
and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that
spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or
hereafter,--then the truth-to-feeling of much of Browning's poetry has a
scientific basis. It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly two of
the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded
them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic
disquisition.

It is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of Browning or
the sagacity with which he chose his effects. He gives us the sallow
wife of James Lee, whose soul is known to him, Pippa the silk-spinning
girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or
misunderstood. He searches the world till he finds the man whom
everybody will concur in despising, the mediaeval grammarian, and he
writes to him the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute
ever paid to a man. His culture and his learning are all subdued to what
he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. He mines in
antiquity or drags his net over German philosophy or modern
drawing-rooms,--all to the same end.

In that miracle of power and beauty--The Flight of the Duchess--he has
improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast
which shall cause the soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In
Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism,
because he requires it as a st