r more widely diffused, which were in effect
bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental,
and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in
their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the
present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate
themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of
the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national
life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual
member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling
him.

In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and
memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his
readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and
which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of
the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working
of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and
destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless
variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled
circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed
amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less
subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues
than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy
passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena
appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and
catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with
foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and
the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened
everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron
uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he
everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive
ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a
God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an
all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and
acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God,
Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile
antagonists or antitheses