sses of
the natural world which chiefly delight Browning's imagination, but
the streaming forth of power, and will, and love from the whole face
of the visible universe....

Tennyson considers the chief instruments of human progress to be a
vast increase of knowledge and of political organization. Browning
makes that progress dependent on the production of higher passions,
and aspirations,--hopes, and joys, and sorrows; Tennyson finds the
evidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress in the universal
presence of a self-evolving law. Browning obtains his assurance of
its truth from inward presages and prophecies of the soul, from
anticipations, types, and symbols of a higher greatness in store for
man, which even now reside within him, a creature ever unsatisfied,
ever yearning upward in thought, feeling, and endeavour.

... Hence, it is not obedience, it is not submission to the law
of duty, which points out to us our true path of life, but rather
infinite desire and endless aspiration. Browning's ideal of manhood
in this world always recognizes the fact that it is the ideal of a
creature who never can be perfected on earth, a creature whom other
and higher lives await in an endless hereafter....

The gleams of knowledge which we possess are of chief value because
they "sting with hunger for full light." The goal of knowledge, as of
love, is God himself. Its most precious part is that which is least
positive--those momentary intuitions of things which eye hath not seen
nor ear heard. The needs of the highest parts of our humanity cannot
be supplied by ascertained truth, in which we might rest, or which we
might put to use for definite ends; rather by ventures of faith, which
test the courage of the soul, we ascend from surmise to assurance, and
so again to higher surmise.--Condensed from EDWARD DOWDEN, _Studies
in Literature_.

... Browning has not cared for that poetic form which bestows
perennial charm, or else he was incapable of it. He fails in beauty,
in concentration of interest, in economy of language, in selection of
the best from the common treasure of experience. In those works where
he has been most indifferent, as in the _Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country_, he has been merely whimsical and dull; in those works
where the genius he possessed is most felt, as in _Saul_, _A Toccata
of Galuppi's_, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, _The Bishop
Orders his Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church_, _Herve Riel