f evolution, say anything wiser about genius than that
"the wind bloweth where it listeth." No doubt the poet's optimism
indicates a native sturdiness of head and heart. He had the invaluable
endowment of a pre-disposition to see the sunny side of life, and a
native tendency to revolt against that subjectivity, which is the root
of our misery in all its forms. He had little respect for the
_Welt-schmerz,_ and can scarcely be civil to the hero of the bleeding
heart.

"Sinning, sorrowing, despairing,
Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked--
Should I give my woes an airing,--
Where's one plague that claims respect?

"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.

* * * * *

"I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."[A]

[Footnote A: _At the Mermaid_.]

Browning was no doubt least of all men inclined to pout at his "plain
bun"; on the contrary, he was awake to the grandeur of his inheritance,
and valued most highly "his life-rent of God's universe with the tasks
it offered and the tools to do them with." But his optimism sent its
roots deeper than any "disposition"; it penetrated beyond mere health
of body and mind, as it did beyond a mere sentiment of God's goodness.
Optimisms resting on these bases are always weak; for the former leaves
man naked and sensitive to the evils that crowd round him when the
powers of body and mind decay, and the latter is, at best, useful only
for the individual who possesses it, and it breaks down under the stress
of criticism and doubt. Browning's optimism is a great element in
English literature, because it opposes with such strength the shocks
that come from both these quarters. His joyousness is the reflection _in
feeling_ of a conviction as to the nature of things, which he had
verified in the darkest details of human life, and established for
himself in the face of the gravest objections that his intellect was
able to call forth. In fact, its value lies, above all, in this,--that
it comes after criticism, after the condemnation which Byron and Carlyle
had passed, each from his own point of view, on the