at peace, firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle
of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better
than Browning did. It is true this struggle enabled him to have great
variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which
belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his
readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and
in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface
of this mortal life, which was one of Browning's noblest legacies to
that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through
which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.

4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that
in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost
every poem of Browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the
borders of the Land of Weary-men. But he seems to have been aware of
this danger, and to have conquered it. He meets it by the immense
variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he
places them. I do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples,
though he always repeats his theory. And the pleasant result is that we
can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal
application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the
fresh examples alone. And they are likely to charm, at least by variety,
for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases
of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern
them; from many periods of the arts; from most of the countries of
Europe, from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, (rarely from England,) with
their specialised types of race and of landscape; and from almost every
class of educated modern society. Moreover, he had a guard within his
own nature against the danger of this monotony. It was the youthful
freshness with which, even in advanced age, he followed his rapid
impulses to art-creation. No one was a greater child than he in the
quickness with which he received a sudden call to poetry from passing
events or scenes, and in the eagerness with which he seized them as
subjects. He took the big subjects now and then which the world expects
to be taken, and treated them with elaborate thought and steadfast
feeling, but he was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic poem,
whom the transient occurrences and sig