service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and
dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a
sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every
corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic
occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust
the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic
argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at
the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted
passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome,
"intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic
work.

While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of
existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had
some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse
crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very
glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore.
Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great
poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit
place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and
folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for
ever,"--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable
partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated
by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole
the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed
with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of
steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as
Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of
Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard
de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_