de of submission. These he brought into harmony with each other by
his conception of human life as a period of training for a higher life;
we must make the most vigorous and joyous use of our schooling, and yet
we must press towards what lies beyond it.

From the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century
comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. Under the inspiration of the
Revolutionary movement passion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth
century ideal of balance and moderation. With the transcendental
reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of God to the
universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and
unmeasured aspirations. In his poetic method each writer followed the
leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and
standards; the individualism of the Revolutionary epoch asserted itself
to the full. These several influences helped to determine the character
of Browning's poetry. But meeting in him the ethical and religious
tendencies of English Puritanism they acquired new significances and
assumed new forms. The cry of desire could not turn, as it did with
Byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with
Shelley, in the air or the ether. It must be controlled by the will and
turned to some spiritual uses. The transcendental feeling which
Wordsworth most often attained through an impassioned contemplation of
external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its
sources or abettors all the higher passions of humanity. The
Revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his
methods Browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself
and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular.
As for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part
capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, Browning rejected
it, in the old temper of English Puritanism, on the side of religion;
but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly
entered. The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced
him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant
transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in _Paracelsus_ to
an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of
evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. "All that seems
proved in Darwin's scheme," he wrote to Dr Furnivall in 1881, "was a
conce