pires after
unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense,"
"inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under
the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and
eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that
Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological
result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined
forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer
impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them
which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is
not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the
"infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for
him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting
bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from
the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a
spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without
"incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank.
Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted
with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_
imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's
imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in
relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives
definite existence to the limitless vague.

II.

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his
predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of
the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of
reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats
and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to
the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with
civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the
types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its
central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its
triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which
undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere
understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the
profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of
the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders