y's citadel, where sin sits throned amidst the chaos,
but in the placid upper air of poetic imagination. And, in consequence,
Emerson can only convince the converted; and his song is not heard in
the dark, nor does it cheer the wayfarer on the muddy highway, along
which burthened humanity meanly toils.

But Browning's optimism is more earnest and real than any pious hope, or
dogmatic belief, or benevolent theory held by a placid philosopher,
protected against contact with the sins and sorrows of man as by an
invisible garment of contemplative holiness. It is a conviction which
has sustained shocks of criticism and the test of facts; and it
therefore, both for the poet and his readers, fulfils a mission beyond
the reach of any easy trust in a mystic good. Its power will be felt and
its value recognized by those who have themselves confronted the
contradictions of human life and known their depths.

No lover of Browning's poetry can miss the vigorous manliness of the
poet's own bearing, or fail to recognize the strength that flows from
his joyous, fearless personality, and the might of his intellect and
heart. "When British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and Cobbett,
"lay all puking and sprawling in Wertherism, Byronism and other
Sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us two healthy men." And
he breaks out into a eulogy of mere health, of "the just balance of
faculties that radiates a glad light outwards, enlightening and
embellishing all things." But he finds it easy to account for the health
of these men: they had never faced the mystery of existence. Such
healthiness we find in Browning, although he wrote with Carlyle at his
side, and within earshot of the infinite wail of this moral fatalist.
And yet, the word health is inadequate to convey the depth of the joyous
meaning which the poet found in the world. His optimism was not a
constitutional and irreflective hopefulness, to be accounted for on the
ground that "the great mystery of existence was not great to him: did
not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to
be answered or to perish." There are, indeed, certain rash and foolish
persons who pretend to trace Browning's optimism to his mixed descent;
but there is a "pause in the leading and the light" of those wiseacres,
who pretend to trace moral and mental characteristics to physiological
antecedents. They cannot quite catch a great man in the making, nor,
even by the help o