see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet
retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than
tongue can speak," says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_. Browning had
his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold
stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry
of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted
aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different
character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and
ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after
unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense,"
"inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under
the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and
eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that
Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological
result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined
forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer
impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them
which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is
not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the
"infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for
him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting
bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from
the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a
spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without
"incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank.
Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted
with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_
imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's
imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in
relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives