not in
sweep and expanse, akin to the intuitive leap by which the scientific
explorer lights upon his new hypothesis. We can find no other law for
it, than that sensitiveness to the beauty and truth hidden in facts,
which much reflection on them generates for genius. For these great
minds the "muddy vesture" is worn thin by thought, and they hear the
immortal music.

The poet soon passes his glowing torch into the hands of the
philosopher. After Aeschylus and Sophocles, come Plato and Aristotle.
The intuitive flash grows into a fixed light, which rules the day. The
great idea, when reflected upon, becomes a system. When the light of
such an idea is steadily held on human affairs, it breaks into endless
forms of beauty and truth. The content of the idea is gradually evolved;
hypotheses spring out of it, which are accepted as principles, rule the
mind of an age, and give it its work and its character. In this way,
Hobbes and Locke laid down, or at least defined, the boundaries within
which moved the thought of the eighteenth century; and no one acquainted
with the poetic and philosophic thought of Germany, from Lessing to
Goethe and from Kant to Hegel, can fail to find therein the source and
spring of the constitutive principles of our own intellectual, social,
political, and religious life. The virtues and the vices of the
aristocracy of the world of mind penetrate downwards. The works of the
poets and philosophers, so far from being filled with impracticable
dreams, are repositories of great suggestions which the world adopts for
its guidance. The poets and philosophers lay no railroads and invent no
telephones; but they, nevertheless, bring about that attitude towards
nature, man and God, and generate those moods of the general mind, from
which issue, not only the scientific, but also the social, political and
religious forces of the age.

It is mainly on this account that I cannot treat the supreme utterances
of Browning lightly, or think it an idle task to try to connect them
into a philosophy of life. In his optimism of love, in his supreme
confidence in man's destiny and sense of the infinite height of the
moral horizon of humanity, in his courageous faith in the good, and his
profound conviction of the evanescence of evil, there lies a vital
energy whose inspiring power we are yet destined to feel. Until a spirit
kindred to his own arises, able to push the battle further into the same
region, much of the practi