conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds
himself at war with it--in revolt against it. He is habitually pitted
against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him
into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. It is
in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a
teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that Browning has created his
masterpieces of poetry.

Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less.
What as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. The thoughts of his
earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. His tales, his songs, his
monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer,
are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these
beliefs. His interest in the world was solely an interest in them. He
saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him
back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its
manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest,
the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which
England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in
doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth,
but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed
from the start. Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as
that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience
of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met
with it in other people. The force of his feelings is so much greater
than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. Out of
the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving
the rest, or not noting it.

There never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. That is the
reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do
not care for Browning. One real glimpse into him gives you the whole of
him. The public which loves him is made up of people who have been
through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. The
public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these
experiences. To some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which
nothing else will replace. To others, who do not need him, he is a
boisterous and eccentric person,--a Heracles in the house of mourning.

Let us remember his main