ve was well-nigh "quenched by the eclipsing curse of the birth of
man"; and Wordsworth lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains,
meadows, hills and groves, while he kept grave watch o'er man's
mortality, and saw the shades of the prison-house gather round him. From
the life of man they garnered nought but mad indignation, or mellowed
sadness. It was a foolish and furious strife with unknown powers fought
in the dark, from which the poet kept aloof, for he could not see that
God dwelt amidst the chaos. But Browning found "harmony in immortal
souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." He found nature crowned in
man, though man was mean and miserable. At the heart of the most
wretched abortion of wickedness there was the mark of the loving touch
of God. Shelley turned away from man; Wordsworth paid him rare visits,
like those of a being from a strange world, made wise and sad with
looking at him from afar; Browning dwelt with him. He was a comrade in
the fight, and ever in the van of man's endeavour bidding him be of good
cheer. He was a witness for God in the midmost dark, where meet in
deathless struggle the elemental powers of right and wrong. For God is
present for him, not only in the order and beauty of nature, but in the
world of will and thought. Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of
individual action, he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but
"has its way with man, not he with it."

Now this was a new world for poetry to enter into; a new depth to
penetrate with hope; and Browning was the first of modern poets to

"Stoop
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
Strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky."

It is also a new world for religion and morality; and to understand it
demands a deeper insight into the fundamental elements of human life.

To show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as
already hinted, to connect the poet's work, not merely with that of his
English predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive
movement of the thought of Germany since the time of Kant. It would be
necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds
and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit
extended the horizon of man's active and contemplative life, and made
him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of
his race. It proposed to man the g