that despair, when it is deepest, is
ever found to be the shadow of moral failure--the result of going out
into action with a false view of the purpose of human life, and a wrong
conception of man's destiny. At such times, the people have not
understood themselves or their environment, and, in consequence, they
come into collision with their own welfare. There is no experiment so
dangerous to an age or people, as that of relegating to the common
ignorance of unreasoning faith the deep concerns of moral conduct; and
there is no attitude more pitiable than that which leads it to turn a
deaf ear and the lip of contempt towards those philosophers who carry
the spirit of scientific inquiry into these higher regions, and
endeavour to establish for mankind, by the irrefragable processes of
reason, those principles on which rest all the great elements of man's
destiny. We cannot act without a theory of life; and to whom shall we
look for such a theory, except to those who, undaunted by the
difficulties of the task, ask once more, and strive to answer, those
problems which man cannot entirely escape, as long as he continues to
think and act?

CHAPTER III.

BROWNING'S PLACE IN ENGLISH POETRY.

"But there's a great contrast between him and me. He seems
very content with life, and takes much satisfaction in the
world. It's a very strange and curious spectacle to behold
a man in these days so confidently cheerful." (_Carlyle_.)

It has been said of Carlyle, who may for many reasons be considered as
our poet's twin figure, that he laid the foundations of his world of
thought in _Sartor Resartus_, and never enlarged them. His _Orientirung_
was over before he was forty years old--as is, indeed, the case with
most men. After that period there was no fundamental change in his view
of the world; nothing which can be called a new idea disturbed his
outline sketch of the universe. He lived afterwards only to fill it in,
showing with ever greater detail the relations of man to man in history,
and emphasizing with greater grimness the war of good and evil in human
action. There is evidence, it is true, that the formulae from which he
more or less consciously set forth, ultimately proved too narrow for
him, and we find him beating himself in vain against their limitations;
still, on the whole, Carlyle speculated within the range and influence
of principles adopted early in life, and never abandoned for higher or
ri