and the `Comedie Humaine'. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake,
Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable,
Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties:
as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr,
Donizetti, and Bellini.

It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names,
of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense
contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing
as a fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously,
as in that drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent
spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed,
as a great French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time.
It is a matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men
do not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period.
They are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown
of that wave itself. The epoch expends itself in preparation
for these great ones.

If Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life
would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev
who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence,
with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints
as upon the Destinies of Man.

If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that
the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson
were born. The way was prepared for Browning, as it was for Shakespeare:
as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these.