ome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments."[B]

[Footnote B: _Adonais_.]

"And I have felt," says Wordsworth,

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."[C]

[Footnote C: _Tintern Abbey_.]

Such notes as these could not be struck by Pope, nor be understood by
the age of prose. Still they are only the prelude of the fuller song of
Browning. Whether he be a greater poet than these or not,--a question
whose answer can benefit nothing, for each poet has his own worth, and
reflects by his own facet the universal truth--his poetry contains in it
larger elements, and the promise of a deeper harmony from the harsher
discords of his more stubborn material. Even where their spheres touch,
Browning held by the artistic truth in a different manner. To Shelley,
perhaps the most intensely spiritual of all our poets,

"That light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,"

was an impassioned sentiment, a glorious intoxication; to Browning it
was a conviction, reasoned and willed, possessing the whole man, and
held in the sober moments when the heart is silent. "The heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world" was lightened for
Wordsworth, only when he was far from the haunts of men, and free from
the "dreary intercourse of daily life"; but Browning weaved his song of
hope right amidst the wail and woe of man's sin and wretchedness. For
Wordsworth "sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the
heart, passed into his purer mind with tranquil restoration," and issued
"in a serene and blessed mood"; but Browning's poetry is not merely the
poetry of the emotions however sublimated. He starts with the hard
repellent fact, crushes by sheer force of thought its stubborn rind,
presses into it, and brings forth the truth at its heart. The greatness
of Browning's poetry is in its perceptive grip: and in nothing is he
more original than in the manner in which he takes up his task, and
assumes his artistic function. In his postponement of feeling to thought
we recogniz