harity, how his fellows were of so little
faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. He would have reversed
the Psalmist's cry. He would have said, "Thou art not cast down, O my
soul; thou art not disquieted within me. Thou hast hoped in God, who is
the light of thy countenance, and thy God."

At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased,
like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that
part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored
his final melody. But of late it has begun, tired of the restless
clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the
majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And at this point
many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and
religious satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then, of the
nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to
themselves, "Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for,
and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. No one cared then for him,
but we care now."

Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did
not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God. He
conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. Hence,
he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time
on these great matters. When _Paracelsus_ was published in 1835 Browning
had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of
God's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him,
to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. It was a theory which was
original, if any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as he
expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly sketched in _Pauline_, fully
rounded in _Paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of
his death. But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God
when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the
last stanzas of _In Memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city
that has foundations. He believed in that city, but he could not always
live in it. He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God
and man, and then grew out of it. He held now this, now that view of
nature, and of man in contact with nature. There was always battle in
his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of
war. Browning was