for what he is, and rejoice that he has followed a way of his own. His poetry never is dramatic in the absolute sense, of which that of Shakspere is the type; but it is always more or less completely subjective, and given the impression of his own mind. Whatever the voice which speaks, there is to be heard the deep tones of a higher word uttered behind it, and which makes us feel that this character is but the echo of some one greater than himself. After becoming familiar with his poetry, the reader finds that he is always face to face with Browning, and that he is being taught certain great truths through these artistic creations. In time, he may come to so love the teaching that he ceases to care for anything else in Browning's poetry. Whatever his artistic defects, the world is in his debt for some of the most fascinating and remarkable among literary creations, and for thoughts that have a living freshness and power in them.

VI.

THERE can be no doubt that Browning is a great poet, and one who will compel the future to give its admiration freely to his best work. He is not a mere writer of verses or even a great poet in the purely artistic sense; and he is not merely a thinker or an essayist who has adopted a poetical form of expression. He has all the qualities of a poet; imagination soaring and clear-visioned, a strong and rugged power of giving form to his feeling and thought, a subtle and penetrating insight into the meanings of life and nature, and a richly tempered and joyous sympathy with man and the world. He is led through his emotions and sympathies to appreciate all that is beautiful and good; and he is impressed through his feelings and aspirations with the grandeur and the marvel of what life reveals.

Not forgetting that Browning is a poet of lofty wing and far-sweeping sight, he may be more specially characterized as an intellectual poet, as a poet who thinks and philosophizes. He delights in taking up the great problems of life, in suffusing them with the light of his own thought and feeling, and then in giving them an interpretation clear, inspiring, and sublime. He has thought very deeply on all the great problems man has debated through the ages, and he has many fresh suggestions to make in regard to them. The conventional answers to the questions man is ever asking do not suffice with him; he wishes to consult the oracles for himself.

He loves the problems suggested by man and his life here, and he delights to cope with them. The enigma of man's nature and destiny attracts him; he seems to be drawn to it as the moth to the flame. It fascinates him, and yet he looks at it coolly, deals with it in a lofty spirit, probes into it as far as it can be done, and flashes out his wonderful interpretations with the instinctive sureness of genius. He comes to these problems seriously, as one who feels the weight and burden of them, who believes them the most worthy subjects with which a man or a poet can deal.

He looks at these problems with hope; and he is never cast down by them. He has a steady conviction that their meaning is open to man, and that it is worthy- and it alone of his thought and search. If Carlyle, Heine, and Byron despaired of a solution, were overmastered by the problem of man's being, or gave way to despair and gloom, not so Browning. His hope burns calmly on, no despair touches his heart; his faith is ever flame-like and bright, as if it came out of unquenchable fires of knowledge.

No English poet, unless it is Shakspere, will yield so much of thought, for the attentive reader, as Browning. He is full of wisdom, rich with revelations to the moral nature, and a needed spiritual teacher for the latter half of the nineteenth century. Poetry has its word to speak as well as science; and Browning speaks the word of poetry for a scientific age. He has the analytic spirit, he can probe into the facts of life and nature as well as any other, and as deeply; but he reads life without destroying it, and his supreme purpose is constructive and synthetic. He sees through and through the world with the eyes of the poet, and he does not need to dissect it to know it. He is an absolutely independent

thinker, brave, clear-seeing, tolerant, and widesouled. He unites in one nature some of the highest capacities of both the reasoner and the creator; with an eye keen for facts, like Darwin's, he unites a subtle instinct for truth, like Kant's, and Dante's high-soaring imagination. Browning sweeps the horizon with his vision, and he does not forget the sun which shines over his head. He is a daring thinker, robust in thought, and with an instinctive regard for what is real and fact-like. His is one of the most balanced and rounded minds to be found in the history of English literature. He views life on many sides, with faculties healthy and well proportioned one to another. He has a strong imagination, but it is not in excess of his other faculties, and it does not cause him to see the world in the form of any mirage which it creates. He has an analytic faculty, but it is balanced by vigorous spiritual perceptions and an active imagination. He is too speculative and too metaphysical for a poet, and yet how impassioned are his emotions, how radiant his sympathies !

Browning is both a subjective and an objective poet. His literary method is objective; but his philosophy of life, and his interpretation of the