ed the romantic cycles.

Again and again, from century to century, this romantic spirit has done
its re-creating work in the development of poetry in France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, and England. And in 1840, and for many years afterwards,
it produced in Browning, and for our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he
called them; his psychological studies, which I may well call
excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats, discoveries of the
soul; for in the soul of man lay, for Browning, the forest of
Broceliande, the wild country of Morgan le Fay, the cliffs and moors of
Lyonnesse. It was there, over that unfooted country, that Childe Roland
rode to the Dark Tower. Nor can anything be more in the temper of old
spiritual romance--though with a strangely modern _mise-en-scene_--than
the great adventure on the dark common with Christ in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_.

Another root of the romantic spirit was the sense of, and naturally the
belief in, a world not to be felt of the senses or analysed by the
understanding; which was within the apparent world as its substance or
soul, or beyond it as the power by which it existed; and this mystic
belief took, among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors and the
common people, a thousand forms, ranging from full-schemed philosophies
to the wildest superstitions. It tended, in its extremes, to make this
world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a real life when it
habitually dwelt in the mystic region mortal eye could not see, whose
voices mortal ear could not receive. Out of this root, which shot its
first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest
savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose
all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance. Out of
it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for
communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst
which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even
now arising among the poets of to-day.

In Browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of
the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it
scarcely appears. Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic. He had too
much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too
clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism. But one part of
its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in
Brown