indispensable
lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.

Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals.
Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the
heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into
the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad
because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because
humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain
to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man
the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious
revolutions. He could follow the mediaeval logicians in all their sowing
of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour
which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the
young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of
love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning
doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she
went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true
revolutionist; for does not the very word "revolution" mean a rolling
backward. All true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the
normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an
idiot. For how could a man even wish for something which he had never
heard of? Mrs. Browning's inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient
and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in
her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason, which it is
difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to
mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic
feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction
exist. Men whose lives are mainly based upon friendship sympathise with
the friendships of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other
is a proverb, and like many other proverbs sometimes a nuisance. In
patriotism alone it is considered correct just now to assume that the
sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great
Liberals of Mrs. Browning's time. The Brownings had, so to speak, a
disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England and they loved
Italy; yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitans. They loved the
two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe.
They had hold