s
Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of
Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard
de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_
at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the
capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de
force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied
forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A
poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk
always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of
Browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and
through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous
of exploring intellects.

In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind
which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like
his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made,
from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he
lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a
little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he
certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and
muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_.
The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the
talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his
biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist
detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the
poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but
his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was
satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in
vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is
characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his
life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other
moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and
loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only
sphere, did not wish

"the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say."

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist
for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities,
it is plain that this way of en