definite existence to the limitless vague.


II.


Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his
predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of
the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of
reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats
and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to
the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with
civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the
types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its
central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its
triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which
undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere
understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the
profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of
the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect,
and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy,
as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words,
which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues
Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian,"
as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he
found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the
interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination
never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency
of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements
of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the