naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than
he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty"
for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and
more prosaic meanings. Browning, although in this year 1847 he made a
move towards an appointment as secretary to a mission to the Vatican, at
heart cared little for men in groups or societies; he cared greatly for
individuals, for the growth of individual character. He had faith in a
forward movement of society; but the law of social evolution, as he
conceived it, is not in the hands of political leaders or ministers of
state. He valued liberty chiefly because each man here on earth is in
process of being tested, in process of being formed, and liberty is the
condition of a man's true probation and development. Late in life he was
asked to give his answer to the question: "Why am I a Liberal?" and he
gave it succinctly in a sonnet which he did not reprint in any edition
of his Works, although it received otherwise a wide circulation. It may
be cited here as a fragment of biography:

"Why?" Because all I haply can and do,
All that I am now, all I hope to be,--
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free
Body and soul the purpose to pursue,
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few,
Of prejudice, convention, fall from me,
These shall I bid men--each in his degree
Also God-guided--bear, and gladly too?

But little do or can the best of us:
That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who then dares hold--emancipated thus--
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I
Who live, love, labour freely, nor discuss
A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why."[40]

This is an excellent reason for the faith that was in Browning; he
holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by
that word he understands not only political freedom but also
emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious
convention. But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early
_Strafford_, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere
chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the
abstraction "Liberty." Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or
events except as they throw light upon an individual character. Things
and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his
mind--"Thiers is