ption familiar to me from the beginning." The positive influences
of the scientific age in which he lived upon Browning's work were
chiefly these--first it tended to intellectualise his instincts,
compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it
co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts
of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the
passions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena
of the world of mind.

Being a complete and a sane human creature, Browning could not rest
content with the vicious asceticism of the intellect which calls itself
scientific because it refuses to recognise any facts that are not
material and tangible. Science itself, in the true sense of the word,
exists and progresses by ventures of imaginative faith. And in all
matters which involve good and evil, hopes and fears, in all matters
which determine the conduct of life, no rational person excludes from
his view the postulates of our moral nature or should exclude the final
option of the will. The person whose beliefs are determined by material
facts alone and by the understanding unallied with our other powers is
the irrational and unscientific person. Being a complete and sane human
creature, Browning was assured that the visible order of things is part
of a larger order, the existence of which alone makes human life
intelligible to the reason. The understanding being incapable of
arriving unaided at a decision between rival theories of life, and
neutrality between these being irrational and illegitimate, he rightly
determined the balance with the weight of emotion, and rightly acted
upon that decision with all the energy of his will. His chief
intellectual error was not that he undervalued the results of the
intellect, but that he imagined the existence as a part of sane human
nature, of a wholly irrational intellect which in affairs of religious
belief and conduct is indifferent to the promptings of the emotions and
the moral nature.

Browning's optimism has been erroneously ascribed to his temperament. He
declared that in his personal experience the pain of life outweighed its
pleasure. He remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered
pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral
nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not
find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective