Moreover, these two poets, if I may be permitted to call Carlyle a poet,
taught the same truth. They were both witnesses to the presence of God
in the spirit of man, and looked at this life in the light of another
and a higher; or rather, they penetrated through the husk of time and
saw that eternity is even here, a tranquil element underlying the noisy
antagonisms of man's earthly life. Both of them, like Plato's
philosopher, made their home in the sunlight of ideal truth: they were
not denizens of the cave taking the things of sense for those of
thought, shadows for realities, echoes for the voices of men.

But, while Carlyle fought his way into this region, Browning found
himself in it from the first; while Carlyle bought his freedom with a
great sum, the poet "was free born." Carlyle saw the old world faith
break up around him, and its fragments never ceased to embarrass his
path. He was _at_ the point of transition, present at the collision of
the old and new, and in the midst of the confusion. He, more than any
other English writer, was the instrument of the change from the Deism of
the eighteenth century and the despair which followed it, into the
larger faith of our own. But, for Browning, there was a new heaven and a
new earth, and old things had passed away. This notable contrast between
the two men, arising at once from their disposition and their moral
environment, had far-reaching effects on their lives and their writings.
But their affinity was deeper than the difference, for they are
essentially heirs and exponents of the same movement in English thought.

The main characteristic of that movement is that it is both moral and
religious, a devotion to God and the active service of man, a
recognition at once of the rights of nature and of spirit. It does not,
on the one hand, raise the individual as a natural being to the throne
of the universe, and make all forces social, political, and spiritual